"Peru's Shining Path: Evolution of a Stalinist Sect" by Martin
Koppel is a pamphlet published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). I
have a previous edition, entitled "Peru's Shining Path: Anatomy of a
Reactionary Sect". It's not clear in what way the two editions differ. The
early edition calls Sendero "reactionary" and "radically reactionary"
in the contents section and the back matter, while the later edition calls it
"Stalinist" and "petty-bourgeois". However, the articles in
both editions seem to be the same.
Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso or the "Communist Party of Peru" was a notorious Maoist guerrilla group, waging a brutal war against several Peruvian governments and the Peruvian army. Their leader, Abimael Guzman a.k.a. Chairman Gonzalo, was captured in 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The SWP opposed both the Peruvian government and the Maoist guerrillas. In this pamphlet, Martin Koppel explains way.
He points out that Sendero's war was to a large extent directed against working people. The Senderistas were assassinating labour union leaders, killing members of competing left-wing groups, threatening and attacking workers who didn't participate in the "armed strikes" called by the guerrilla, etc. Sometimes, they blew up plants owned by foreign-born employers, leaving the workers to fend for themselves. More bizarrely, Sendero Luminoso also bombed the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and Nicaraguan embassies, in the name of fighting "revisionism". (Guzman didn't consider these nations to be truly Communist or revolutionary.)
However, Koppel admits that Sendero did have a certain amount of popular support among the most downtrodden and least organized layers of the Peruvian population, including peasants in the poorest districts, and slum dwellers in Lima. The "law and order" imposed by the guerrillas in remote regions of Peru sometimes appealed to the local population, since the guerrillas executed thieves, wife beaters and drug users. The Maoists also defended coca growers against both the government and drug traffickers. Presumably, drug traffickers want coca growers to sell the coca as cheaply as possible. Sendero made it possible for these peasants to get higher prices for their produce!
In the end, however, Koppel draws the conclusion that Marxists cannot support the Senderistas. While calling them Stalinists, he somehow believes that they are even worse than "regular" Stalinists, who at least created "deformed workers' state" in Yugoslavia, China and Vietnam. Koppel believes that these states in some distorted fashion nevertheless represented a gain for workers and peasants. The Senderistas, by contrast, are more similar to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who massacred a million people while reducing a large part of the population to virtual slavery. Thus, Pol Pot's Cambodia didn't embody even "deformed" gains for the working classes. If Sendero would take power in Peru, the result would be a reign of sheer terror more akin to that of Pol Pot than the situation in Vietnam or even Mao's China.
Koppel compares Sendero Luminoso to Mikhail Bakunin and the Bakuninist networks exposed by Marx and Engels in the First International. The comparison is apt, at least if Koppel refers to Bakunin's worst period, when he was under the spell of the cultic sociopath Sergey Nechayev. For some reason, however, Koppel never calls the Senderistas "fascist", reserving that term for movements financed by big business to smash the labour movement on its behalf. This definition, surely, is too narrow - why can't a fascist movement decide to rule in its own name? Why cannot Nechayev or Pol Pot be called "fascist"?
Once again, this review is based on the 1993 edition. There may be some subtle differences with the 1994 edition, depicted on this product page.
Of course, Koppel's own alternative to Sendero Luminoso's cultic reign of terror is Fidel Castro's Cuba, and the pamphlet promotes several works by Che Guevara. If forced to choose between Castro and Gonzalo, I'd take my chances with Fidel anytime. Still, the failure of Cuba as a model for economic growth (or the "workers' democracy" craved by the author), shows that the SWP really has no workable alternative model to offer Peru.
But that's another show.
For those who want to read a Marxist criticism of the ostensibly Marxist Shining Path in Peru, Koppel's small work might be of some interest.
"This definition, surely, is too narrow - why can't a fascist movement decide to rule in its own name?"
ReplyDeleteHow do YOU then define fascism? Are all murderous and totalitarian movement fascists? If that is the case even Stalin was a fascist, and then you can skip the term "Stalinist" and end upp by calling all terrible movements "fascist"? Maybe even Attila was a fascist?
Well why not indeed? Koppel is a Marxist dogmatic - why can´t a fascist mass movement smash the traditional bourgeoisie and set up a "third system"? Is Strasserismn impossible in principle? And yes, the similarities between Strasserism and Stalinism are striking! You mentioned Attila ironically, but I think its precisely in situations where the old system is degenerating/collapsing that a fascist movement could "rule in its own name" - maybe it was impossible in Germany in 1933 (or in the US today), but what about an unstable situation similar to the fall of Rome? In the "third world", such unstability is already very common, hence we will see many such cases there...
ReplyDeleteDefinitions could almost by definition never be wrong. for example if you define a chair in a way that most people define a table none can prove your wrong, just claim that the definition is a little bot unpractical. Well, my analysis of fascism IS mainly inspired by Trotsky´s.... I see now reason to replace it with such at cath-all definition that will include Atilla, Pol Pot, ond Sendero Luminoso I see fascism as a social reactionary movement with a petty bourgeois mass base that attacks the workers movement and the left, while demagogically use anti-capitalist slogans. When it comes to power it transforms itself after a while to a bourgeois police state, and smash the active petty bourgeois militias. I admit that I would have had some problems if a Strasser succeeds in nationalizing the monopoly capital altogether. then I may have said that this very movement has transformed itself to something else than classical fascism, an that we need a new term for ti.
ReplyDeleteI think there in the left are an unfortunate tendency to use fascism as an epithet, that is, the more terrible a regime is the more fascist it is. I don't agree. Pol Pot was mote terrible against his own ethnic group than any fascist movement I know of. (Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews, but didnt treat ethnical Germans as bad as Pol Pot treaded Cambodians).
I don´t hink IS is fascist, but I would. have preferred to live under the fascist Mussolini than under the non-fascist IS. Etc.
The term fascist was after all first created by Mussolini and his gang. I think the term should be reserved to movements with structural and ideological traits that are relatively close to that original movement.
PS. In a general sense of course Hitler WAS worse than Pol Pot because he tried to exterminate a whole ethnic group not only in Germany but in a world scale. Pol Pot exterminated Vietnamese in Cambodia but he had no plans to invade other contrite in ordet to liquidate the vietnamese ethnic group as such.
DeleteBit if you compare Pol Pot to a fascist like Mussolini or a semifascist like Franco it is clear that there are groups that and non-fascist in my definition that are worse than many that are fascist in my definition.
But I still wait for your definition of fascism. Are all dictatorial regimes that murder people fascist, or?
Interesting. It means we both react to leftist dogmatism (or perhaps a certain kind of leftist sloppiness), but from opposite sides, so to speak. I think a kind of "left fascism" is possible - in fact, Khomeini could be an example of "Strasserism" in power. I agree that Pol Pot looked different from classical European fascism, but his mass mobilizations of the peasantry did have a reactionary character, and so on. I agree that IS is too far away from both "right" and "left" fascism - they seem to lack any social program whatsoever, rely on a kind of warlordism or mobsterism rather than mass mobilizations, and it´s not even clear whether they are a political phenomenon at all ("political" sensu strictu) rather than a kind of bandit gang taking the form of a fundamentalist cult. (I suppose Attila would come close to this - but being a Goth ally of the Huns was probably still much better than being a vassal of the almost nihilistic IS!)
DeleteWe seem to have been "cross-posting" in a strange manner, LOL. OK, my definition of fascism is actually close to your own (I think), namely a right-wing nationalist hierarchic movement with a populist mass appeal that mobilizes the "common man", etc etc. The fact that fascism has pseudo-socialist traits is a function of its populism. Yes, when fascism comes to power it usually transforms itself into a form of ultra-conservatism, but I think Hitler was a partial exception. I think Hitler *might* have created a kind of third system, neither capitalist nor socialist, in the event of a world Nazi victory. It would have been even worse than capitalism and Stalinism, and that´s the objective basis for supporting the Allies (including fascist allies such as Badoglio). I came up with this analysis already during my most left-wing phase - it´s really AG´s analysis, of course, perhaps somewhat amplified. Also, I believe that fascism under certain conditions can "take power in its own name", and that this might have happened, for instance in Khomeini´s Iran. This too is inspired by AG. Hush, don´t tell anyone...
Delete"Khomeini could be an example of "Strasserism" in power." I don't know enough about Iranian economy to have an opinion if there was "strasserite" elements in the economy after 1979. Maybe it was, I don't know. But the Khomeini movement did not start 1978 as a movement to attack the left, it was from the beginning attacking the monarchy and USA, often together with the left. It was after coning to power (maybe a half year later) that harsh attacks on the left became an essential part of Khomeinis OPEN agenda. in the period before that Khomeini in some ways used the left in the battle against the shah. And many in the left the left thought that they in the end could handle Khomeini in the way the Bolsheviks handled Kerenski, but unfortunately it turned out to be the other way around.
DeleteBesides, the Tudeh Party and the past of the United Secretariat that supported American SWP still had illusion in Khomeini until 1982-83. In 1983 the regime finally attacked the Tudeh Party and their leader was put in a Moscow-like trial where he "confessed" different things. But as far as I know he was not executed, but converted to Islam after the confessions and then began writing books on Islamic history.
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