Throughout our history, peasant mobilizations in Peru have had one fundamental objective-land. That is still the case. This is why the revolutionary slogan "Land or Death!" sank into the marrow of the vanguard peasants.
The most recent mobilizations do not contradict this rule. In Cospán and Huancaya, the objective is clear-they are fighting to recover the land. In the case of Huanta, we know that underlying the student and democratic issues was the big problem-land. For years the peasants have seen their lands usurped by the boss ranchers of the area. Since the authorities were totally on the side of these ranchers, the demands of the peasants resulted in onslaughts of "legal" repression. The Ayacucho events, related to the student problem, were the straw that broke the camel's back. The peasantry exploded.
The previous agrarian reform law, associated with "popular cooperation," succeeded in braking the thrust of the peasants and in sowing illusions among them. But they were soon disillusioned and a new awakening began.
Now this reformist junta has decreed a new law, a law more advanced than the preceding one but which in essence is still a law involving buying and selling land.
It is possible that an attempt will actually be made to enforce this law because it is aimed not just at taking the steam out of the peasant movement. Reflecting the interests of the development-oriented bourgeois sectors, both national and foreign, this law seeks to create an internal market of small landowners, who would be consumers of industrial products, and likewise raise funds for capitalist industrial development. I repeat, because of the bourgeois interests involved, the government may try to implement this law.
But the junta's wishes are not enough to assure enforcement of the law. The boss ranchers have always blocked enforcement of any law curbing their absolute domination by buying off the officials. The bureaucracy, or the au- 904
thorities and officials, are just as corrupt as they ever were. Bribes are on the order of the day.
The big industrial farming estates on the coast are one thing. They are a strong bulwark of the old oligarchy. And from these strongholds, as from a feudal castle, the oligarchy will fight to the death against any attempts to bring about capitalist development. Here the junta had a political interest in smashing this group as a reactionary sector and incorporating it into the development-oriented bourgeoisie (and in the process eliminating the influence among the workers in the area of the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana - American People's Revolutionary Alliance- an old revolutionary nationalist party turned reactionaryl).
The isolated ranchers in the mountains, however, are a different matter. They are boss in their localities; but on the national scale their weight is less than that of the sugar and cotton producers.
These ranchers will hardly oppose the law forcibly, still less resort to armed resistance.
They will do what they have always done- bribe the authorities and functionaries to delay and divert the application of even this bourgeois law.
And the bureaucracy is the bureaucracy. That is, besides fulfilling its function of serving the exploiters- in this case, the development-oriented bourgeois sectors-it watches out for its own interests most of all. Thus, it will hardly turn down the bribes.
Moreover, the peasantry itself will oppose implementation of the law in many cases. It will almost always oppose the way in which it is implemented
The most likely result of all these contradictions is that the law will be applied in an uneven, distorted, protracted, and quite bureaucratic way in the interior of the country.
Throughout this process there will be friction and bloody clashes. But make no mistake about it. The conflicts between the junta and the ranchers will not go beyond friction. Bloody clashes will not occur between them. A rancher would have to be pretty crazy not to give way in the end.
The struggles will be the same as they have always been. On the one side, the peasants will fight for their rights, for the land, against the abuses of the ranchers, and against the bias of the authorities. On the other, the repressive forces will fight for the exploiters, either the local ranchers or the exploiters as a whole, who are represented by the junta.
Up to this point, I have discussed the "spontaneous" tendencies. But there is another factor. There is the political vanguard, the revolutionists who go where the masses are, enter their "spontaneous" organizations, feel the pulse of their immediate and "spontaneous" aspirations, and participate in their "spontaneous" struggles.
From there, from the very center of the real, existing peasant movement and— with the heart of Túpac Amaru* in our breasts and the blood of our martyrs flowing in our veins — we must orient the struggle, organize it, and direct it toward an agrarian revolution that will be part of a socialist revolution led by the proletariat.
FIR's [Frente de la Izquierda Revolucionaria - Revolutionary Left Front] fundamental slogans for the countryside remain the same- Organize, Broaden, and Consolidate the Peasant Movement.
As for the law itself, our principled position is firm. This law which treats the land as a commodity to be bought and sold and which is turned over to the bureaucrats for enforcement is not what the FIR proposes. The Trotskyists have advocated and continue to advocate "Land Yes, Payment No!"
Committees elected by the peasants must carry out the agrarian reform.
That is what we advocated and practiced in La Convención.
Nonetheless, we have always respected and deferred to the will of the workers. If there are sectors of the peas- ¡antry that want to apply this bourgeois law, we will fight shoulder to shoulder with them for its enforcement, watching out to see that all the positive provisions are implemented, combating the negative aspects, and always stressing that only by mobilizing can the peasants guarantee enforcement of even this limited bourgeois law. We will always stress organizing, extending, and consolidating the peasant movement. We will always stress direct participation by the peasants in enforcing the law.
In La Convención our active and militant position is clear- "Not a penny to the enemy! The land is ours; we won it by our struggle, by the blood of our martyrs, by the torture and prison terms our leaders have suffered!"
The land is already in our hands. The peasants have already carried out their land reform. What must be done is to defend it and extend it, not independently but in conjunction with the struggle of all the peasants and of the people in general.
There is another important aspect. Great expanses of land throughout Peru have been illegally seized from the peasant communities, even by bourgeois standards. The boss ranchers are trying to use the Agrarian Reform Law to avoid restoring these lands to their rightful owners. They are trying to get these lands "expropriated" so that they can collect "compensation" for them. In these cases, we must fight for pure and simple return of these lands.
Regarding the form of organizing the masses, we must be very flexible. We have always preferred peasant unions as the form of mass organization of the peasants. This form, up to now, has proved the most suited to the struggle. However, we must not make a fetish of peasant unions. If the peasants continue to respect their village communal organization and use it for their struggle, there is no reason why we should insist on their organizing themselves into a union. The struggle of village commune members in the central part of the country indicates such a case. In Ongoy, on the other hand, the combative force was a peasant association in opposition to the ossified communal organization.
Finally on the question of the "cooperatives"
proposed by the law: if the peasants are organized democratically in unions, village communes, etc., we will fight to get these cooperatives into the hands of their organizations. Even if such organizations do not exist, we will fight to create them because their objectives are far-reaching, and running cooperatives is only one of them. But if the peasants have already gone on a mass scale into the cooperatives proposed by the government and have recognized them as their own organizations, we will fight within them to make them profoundly democratic and to extend their field of activity.
In short, the details and specific operating procedure can only be worked out through direct contact with reality. Any pretense of drawing up a detailed plan of work a priori is empty talk. The revolutionists who go into the countryside and join the peasant movement will, in the last analysis, be the ones to determine what is to be done. The form of struggle is dictated by the reality, and the reality of the countryside is in the countryside. This redundant remark is necessary because many imagine that this reality is behind a desk.
The latest agrarian reform law is easing the tension in the countryside, deferring for the time being the possibility for armed struggle. However, the contradictions have not disappeared and new ones are emerging. The development of these conflicts into armed struggle depends on the revolutionists getting into the center of the peasant movement.
The more rapidly the revolutionists incorporate themselves into the present movement, on the basis of its present organizations, its present level of consciousness, its present needs, and its concrete, immediate and acutely felt demands, the more they identify with them and share them, the more quickly they can raise this struggle consciously from this low level to armed struggle.
Even more so in armed struggle than in other aspects of the fight-since it represents a higher stage— only contact with reality can provide specific indications as to how this armed struggle is to be developed, what its organizational forms should be, etc. In the meantime, peasant defense brigades developing out of the peasant struggle itself, as we have outlined it, remain the perspective. More concrete details, a priori
"plans" purporting to map out the road to victory, can be expected from the armchair revolutionists.
We Trotskyists must listen to the revolutionists who speak to us from the countryside, from within the peasant movement. It is their advice we will most respect. And this is all the more so because there is a plethora of armedstruggle quacks around, who are not even familiar with the countryside.
We know that the peasants will fight arms in hand for the revolution. But in Peru today the proletariat, the vanguard par excellence of the socialist revolution, is acquiring greater importance every day.
We have seen such important manifestations of the class struggle in the cities that we cannot even say flatly that the revolution in Peru will come from the countryside.
Each day the workers inspire more respect; and it may be that they will decide to assume from the beginning the vanguard role that history has assigned them.
Students to the countryside. My position is as follows on the debate in the universities over whether or not passage of the agrarian reform act is an occasion for the students going in a massive way to the countryside:
I repeat my appeal to the students to make a mass turn toward the countryside. We must keep up our criticism of the agrarian reform but not stay in the cities to discuss it. He is a better revolutionist who goes into the countryside and promotes this reform, sincerely believing in it, than the one who stays on the campus and combats it from a "doctrinaire" revolutionary position.
The revolutionary position on the agrarian reform must be defended in action.
The position of the FIR is clear in this regard. Students to the Countryside, Directed by Their Own Organizations!
On the party. It is in the course of all this work, precisely in its course, that the party organization must be built in the countryside with the best elements that come to the fore in the class struggle. This was what was left out in La Convención; it was the basic deficiency from which everything else followed.
The "syndicalism" over which we criticized ourselves in regard to
Chaupimayo did not consist in failing to raise the economic aspirations of the masses to a political level. This was done in a generally correct way. Our "syndicalism" consisted of not concretizing this political advance of the masses, and especially of the vanguard, in a political organization with Bolshevik discipline which would have best been able to consolidate this vanleft will likewise be achieved in and through this work, as well as through work in the cities, principally among the proletariat. This work likewise must start from the present struggles of the workers. Thus, through a program of transitional demands, we will arrive at socialist revolution.
Land or Death! We Will Win!
off from the PSI and formation of the "United" Socialist party).
The gulf between the social tensions, simmering problems, and demands of the masses on the one hand, and the ability of the political and institutional system to respond to these pressures is widening continually.
What, then, is the significance of the formation of a new Rumor government?
Notes
* The descendant of the Incas who led a rebellion against the Spanish rulers in the late eighteenth century. - IP.