It was during the national holidays (July 28 and 29) in 1974, that a group of young militants founded our party, the Socialist Workers Party (PST) in Peru. Now we want to commemorate the founding of the party by giving a brief history and a offering a balance sheet to take stock of the objectives that we proposed for the party, and highlighting the tasks of the present. We offer our open assessement and history as a message to the vanguard of the working class and to the men and women who today fight and dream of a new socialist world.
By Simón Lazara – Socialist Workers Party (Peru)
The PST was founded with a program to make the socialist revolution in Peru, as part of the struggle for world revolution, through the conquest of a workers’ government. Five decades later, even though we are still a group, the profound social degradation experienced by the workers and the poor while the bourgeoisie enriches itself as never before, has shown that this need is not only still valid but has become even more urgenti in order to save ourselves from capitalist barbarism.
In 50 years, we have made countless mistakes and we have had -and we continue to have- so many other weaknesses that explain the fact that today, we are a small militant group. This is not a justification, but it is enough to remember that we carry on our backs a historical task, to which only the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin and Trotsky has managed to respond correctly and successfully.
In this sense we can say that, in an era where unfortunately entire generations have been lost and are being lost for the revolution, with little glory and much honor, we have preserved for the Peruvian working class the struggle to set up a true revolutionary party. That is why today the PST today is a present reality and a tool of struggle for power for the new generations of workers, women, and the poor of our country.
Our origins
The PST was founded in 1974, but its history and its roots were planted deeply and solidly a long time before. As many know, we are part of the historical current that continues the legacy of the Bolshevik Party that made the Russian Revolution of 1917 and founded the Third International and that were degenerated by Stalinism, and of the current of the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky that even today continues to be the only revolutionary promise for humanity.
Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism began in 1925 and culminated with his vile assassination by Stalin’s hired assassins in 1940, as soon as the Fourth International was founded. Located at the antipodes of the world class struggle, Marxism appeared in Peru with José Carlos Mariátegui, at the end of the 1920s, and the first Peruvians to embrace Trotskyism were intellectuals who traveled to Europe in those years. Mariátegui died prematurely in 1930 and the Socialist Party he founded was also degenerated by Stalinism and converted (against the position that Mariátegui himself had expressly maintained) into the Peruvian Communist Party. Thus, in those years, the mere mention of Trotsky and Trotskyism signaled one out as counterrevolutionary who was liable to be assassinated.
It is in this context that in 1944, a group of textile workers, militants of the Communist Party, who were leading a strike in the textile union, broke with that party because it had ordered them to betray the strike to support the bourgeois and oligarchic government of Manuel Prado, who, at the time, was described as the “Peruvian Stalin”, for his position in the Second World War. After their rupture, these militants would go on to form the Grupo Obrero Revolucionario (GOR), which would eventually embrace Trotskyism and the Fourth International, thus initiating in Peru the battle for the continuity of authentic revolutionary Marxism.
In 1948, the GOR would become the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) and would be part of the formation of the Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism (SLATO), the first outline of continental revolutionary leadership where the Argentine leader Nahuel Moreno, who would eventually become the most important figure of Latin American Trotskyism, would stand out .
At the beginning of the 1960s and under the leadership of SLATO, still a group, the POR went on to form the Revolutionary Left Front (FIR) adding other small groupings. It did so with a bold and determined plan: to carry out the agrarian revolution in Peru, as part of its strategy towards the socialist revolution. The continent was shaken by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and many sought to follow its example. Peru was then a predominantly agrarian society with land ownership concentrated in a handful of landowners who exploited millions of peasants with extremely expolitative forms of labor. The IRF, with Hugo Blanco at its head, would make their plan a reality by unleashing in the countryside a process of massive unionization with land seizures, strikes and confrontations with landowners and police, and even armed self-defense. The movement was eventually placated by a bloody repression that ended with Blanco himself, the peasant leaders, and almost all the militancy of the IRF in jail.
They made an authentic revolution, which was filled with glory that put our political current and the figure of Hugo Blanco himself on the international scene. Its triumph would be consecrated in 1969, when the military government of Velasco Alvarado, of a nationalist tendency, promulgated the Law of Agrarian Reform that put an end to the haciendas and gave the land to the peasants. But the party would be destroyed, not only by repression, but also by the co-optation of numerous militants by that bourgeois government.
The foundation of the PST and the 70s and 80s
Those who years later founded the PST would be a handful of cadres and militants coming from that process; most of them were young, but their roots were already large and deep. The situation itself was already very different.
The country was living a new reality marked by the failure of the developmentalist and import substitution model of the military government of Velasco, and that would start another revolutionary process, which was the longest and most intense in which workers’ were the protagonists in national history. Against the adjustments and repression, strikes, stoppages and confrontations took place, which reached their peak on July 19, 1977, with a general strike with semi-insurrectionary characteristics, which succeeded in putting an end to the military dictatorship, forcing it to call elections to a Constituent Assembly.
It was in this period and already nourished by a new militant force that the PST achieved one of its best successes: together with other organizations (among them the Partido Obrero Marxista Revolucionario – POMR of Ricardo Napurí, which was a stronger organization and adhered to another international current), formed the Frente de Obreros, Campesinos y Estudiantes del Perú (FOCEP), as an independent and class option to participate in the elections to the Constituent Assembly called for mid-1978. In that election the FOCEP would obtain close to 30% of the national vote, win 12 seats in the assembly and Hugo Blanco would be the third most voted: it was a spectacular triumph, considering that we came from nothing compared to the enormous apparatuses of the Stalinist, Maoist and centrist left.
This success, however, was short-lived. We paid dearly the cost of being small organizations under a mountain of votes, in the midst of the leadership crisis of the Fourth International that deprived us of the possibility of taking advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to set up an authentic revolutionary party that would lead the process towards revolution. As a consequence of this, Hugo Blanco broke with the PST and the FOCEP, and began a drift towards centrism. The “return to democracy”, which corrupted the whole of the Stalinist and reformist left, put pressure on our organization which, in response, built the electoral Front “Workers to Power” together with the POMR and Hugo Blanco himself, but already in a regressive dynamic.
The space left by the FOCEP was filled by Stalinism and centrism which together, with sectors of the bourgeoisie and with the backing of an immense apparatus, formed Izquierda Unida ( IU), a typical “popular front”. Thus the IU occupied the left electoral space for a decade, becoming a mass phenomenon, pushing the PST to marginality, in spite of the fusion with the sector of the POMR led by Ricardo Napurí, expelled by the international current to which they adhered after a deep crisis.
This phenomenon, in particular the emergence of the popular front occupying the immense space of the left in a revolutionary situation, would have a profound impact on the class struggle. The IU slowed down the revolutionary impulse of the masses and pigeonholed it within bourgeois parliamentarism and thus created illusions in the recently reestablished democratic regime, while its agenda was occupying positions in the State and assuming the government of the country. Meanwhile, the most radicalized sectors of the vanguard, above all coming from the student body, were attracted by the “armed struggle” initiated by Sendero Luminoso, outside and against the mass organizations, accepting a messianic leadership of Maoist style. Thus, under the grip of the immense apparatus of the IU which conciliated with the bourgeoisie and the subversion of SL with car bombs, there was a sense of enormous confusion in which many saw no way out. As a result, broad sectors of the masses elected Alberto Fujimori in 1990.
Thus the long revolutionary stage came to an end. The only positive solution was the triumph of the socialist revolution in the countryside, a sentiment clearly manifested in the massive vote for Hugo Blanco and the Trotskyist organizations that embodied this program. The loss of the immense opportunity that the FOCEP meant due to the crisis of leadership of the Fourth International, also represented the loss of that possibility, leaving the road open for a new historic betrayal of the Stalinist and centrist apparatuses, and the SL.
A new stage
Fujimori opened an historical stage of the opposite sign, which was dictatorial and neo-liberal. It brought about a historic defeat of the vanguard of the proletariat born in the heat of the struggle against the military dictatorship, and of the revolutionary organizations, which would last for a decade.
As a result of a democratic insurgency, the new century opened with the fall of the Fujimori dictatorship, which was responsible for multiple genocides, corruption and the surrender of the country to foreign capital. The democratic parliamentary system was restored. The new regime configured by the 1993 Constitution was a neocolonial and neoliberal democracy, that is, a country whose economy remains tied to imperialist domination and under an authoritarian regime; a regime where the State maintains the racist remnants of the aristocratic and colonial republic combined with the new neoliberal ideology of the ruling class.
It was under this regime, with governments of the right (Alan García, PPK) and the “left” (Ollanta Humala, Pedro Castillo) that the continuity of the model was maintained for more than two decades, protected by a repressive system that targets all resistance and struggle, especially those directed against the mining corporations that have become the new owners of Peru. This regime showed all its reactionary essence and character on multiple occasions: in the pandemic, when it pushed half a million workers and poor people to death without the minimum medical protection and security; in the generalized corruption shown by the bourgeoisie, its parties and the State; in the reaction unleashed against the election and the government with indigenous and popular support of Pedro Castillo, and, above all, in the genocidal repression unleashed against the rebellion in the southern Andes, which causrf more than fifty victims by bullet wounds and hundreds of seriously wounded. All of this occurred in order to preserve a regime that shows itself everyday to be more corrupt and more inept, as sinks the majorities deeper into poverty, while the corporations do not stop profiting.
In two decades of this “bourgeois democracy” the struggles have been numerous and radical, like this last one that exploded openly against the regime and does not accept a hint of reform. But they did not succeed for only one reason: the systematic betrayal of all the left apparatuses and of the trade union center they control. And this is because, rather than capitulating to the regime, that “left” in all its variants joined it pretending to humanize it from within by occupying positions in the State and aspiring to participate in government. That is why their agenda has not been the struggles but has been and continues to be electoral.
Our Party and the working class
Throughout this period our small party has fought to set up an alternative leadership; but with the spaces more closed and with a much smaller force than in the past, and it had serious difficulties in achieving this objective.
One of the characteristics of the new neoliberal model is that it also produced the emergence of a new and numerous proletariat, but in its enormous majority informal, very precarious and extraordinarily fragmented, and therefore with immense obstacles to forge its unity and develop its class organizations and that only manifest themselves in situations of social explosion. The workers’ sector that appeared more concentrated in the new industrial and mining activities, did show a dynamic activity between 2005 and 2020, and unleashed a wave of unionization and fragmentary struggles, many times heroic, that wrested small conquests, established small combative unions and gave rise to a vanguard of fighters.
Several of those anti-bureaucratic fighters approached us and we carried out extraordinary experiences building independent spaces that played leading roles in decisive struggles such as the one that managed to defeat the Pulpín Law (which aimed to make working conditions more precarious) and the struggle against collective dismissals. But those fighters did not advance to join our party, so we could not make the leap to build ourselves as an alternative pole of leadership that would guarantee their advance. In the end, this process was defeated amidst the blows inflicted by the bosses and the bureaucracy itself, and with it the working class and our party suffered setbacks.
So clear was this advance towards the possibility of setting up an alternative leadership that the CGTP bureaucracy issued a resolution in a National Assembly in 2015, where it declared the PST as “enemy”, with the vote and complicity of the majority of the self-styled left groupings. In its defense, the PST would be left alone with the support of the workers’ fighters, but without the possibility of being able to challenge the bureaucracy and its threats.
The defeat of the South Andean rebellion at the beginning of the year 2023, is consummated in particular by its isolation from the urban working class, now under the iron control of that same bureaucracy and without any important reference that could give it a fight from within. Thus was woven the new reactionary mantle that these days covers the country.
The new situation
Thus, the continuity of the crisis of revolutionary leadership has given birth to an unprecedented situation in the country. While the social crisis deepens, in which all the poverty indexes grow and blows are inflicted on the working class, we endure the most hated regime in our history and yesterday’s assassins and their most reactionary spokesmen walk free with a festive air, without a new uprising taking place. Those same treacherous leaderships are now managing to channel this gigantic discontent towards the electoral exit of 2026, shoring up their own candidacies, but playing into the hands of the plans of reaction that are preparing to impose themselves on them in order to extend their party.
What is clear and definitive for us and the most conscious sectors is that there will be no way out for the workers and the poor majorities by this route: the only thing left to do is to fight by retaking the road that began the uprising in the southern Andean region. Even in the midst of the difficulties that envelop us, the struggles have not disappeared for a minute. For example, we have gone out to fight against the offensive of the mining bosses who want to implement projects that the population rejects, such as Tia Maria. These are defensive struggles, in a context where weariness, economic anguish and distrust in the leadership still dominate, and on which now the usual traitors are once again sowing the usual electoral illusions.
Even going through the electoral road the struggles will return with more force because there was not and there will not be a solution from within the regime and the system, which must be defeated with a revolution. For this to take place and above all to triumph, a determined and courageous struggle is not enough, but a new leadership is needed, a revolutionary leadership like the one built by the PST, linked to and dragging along the militant sectors of the industrial working class. For that reason, all our energy will continue to be dedicated to building ourselves in those segments of the working class, and in each of those struggles that take place, striving to convince and win the best activists that emerge in them to join our ranks. This will let us create a new direction for the revolution.
Looking to the future
50 years later, the SWP is still firm and more than ever doing the same task. It is typical of revolutionaries to fall back and fall down, but we always get up to continue our path. Nobody had it easy, neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Rosa Luxemburg nor Trotsky, who are our example in every sense. That is why we are and forge cadres committed to this revolutionary task to which we dedicate our lives.
From a more critical angle we can say that we made mistakes that have impeded or slowed down our development. Surely: our long road is strewn with errors of various kinds and we are not ashamed to accept them, because we are revolutionaries in that too. But essentially we recognize that we are too weak for the immense task we have placed on our shoulders.
Nevertheless, if we must emphasize something to explain our perseverance and faith in our revolutionary project, there have been two fundamental reasons: our location in the working class and our struggle for the International. Our program is for the working class to carry it out and that is why we never detached ourselves from it, neither the PST nor our predecessors. We have been with it despite all its limitations and our own limitations, in good times and in bad, and that has given us coherence and stability, although it has made and makes the road longer.
On the other hand, we were born and formed as internationalist militants, and that is also what we have always persevered in. Above all, the construction of the International has always been and will always be our priority, concentrating our main efforts and resources, because above all the class struggle is global and there is no way to make the socialist revolution in a country without that international leadership and organization. For this reason, 50 years later, we celebrate being part of the International Workers League, IWL, the revolutionary current that in Latin America inherits the battle that we began with the SLATO.
The IWL today groups together parties and militants from various countries of the world, and militants and cadres of an exemplary revolutionary trajectory that places it as an authentic alternative of international revolutionary leadership.
However, it must also be recognized that none of this made us invulnerable and the problems of the construction of our party and of our own International have been permanent. These problems brought us crises, ruptures and distancing of many comrades; even today. It is always a question of discussions around the analysis and answers we give to reality, of updating our policies, theories and program before the changes in the class struggle. These changes have been considerable in the last 40 years, after the fall of the former USSR and the so-called socialist camp, and that brought permanent discussions within us. That is why for the PST, in order to understand and orient ourselves correctly for our purpose of building ourselves as an alternative of revolutionary leadership, we must continue to take part in all these discussions and battles, by contributing our own grain of sand.
What do we contribute or can we contribute in all this? In the rupture that affected our international and our party in 1992, we defended the party and the international from all factionalist attacks and its preservation as democratic and centralized revolutionary organizations. Because of that principled battle we are still in force, while the factionalists have almost disappeared.
Likewise, in the neoliberal epoch of “anything goes” that normalized the moral degeneration of cadres and leaders, the PST responded by striving to be loyal to the best revolutionary tradition by severely punishing the moral faults of our militants and above all of our leaders, even at the cost of their estrangements; because we are convinced that there is no way to mock or deceive our program and principles without paying its high price. That is why we are still here.
After 50 years we can say then, with much honor, that in the midst of great world changes, when large sectors of the left have adapted and adapt to the capitalist order exerting immense pressures of different kinds on our ranks, we have preserved our organization by taking part in the struggles, mainly of the working class, to build ourselves as an alternative leadership, at the same time that we have given and give battle for the construction of our International, the IWL, as an alternative of world revolutionary leadership, preserving the essential of our revolutionary trajectory and the example of our masters, of whom we feel deeply proud.
In memoriam
For this reason, as we celebrate 50 years of our existence, we cannot fail to remember the comrades who forged our roots. Especially Nahuel Moreno, who had an active and direct presence in the construction of our party and inspired the plan for the Peruvian revolution, and who continues to be the fundamental referent of our struggle. To Hugo Blanco, who lived his most glorious period as a revolutionary leader, in the ranks of our current and in that of our party. And to Felix “Mocho” Zevallos, the textile leader who founded workers’ Trotskyism in Peru and was a member of the SLATO.
At this hour, we also pay homage to the comrades who left their lives militating in our ranks: the mining leader Santos Dávila Bravo , also a leader of our party; the lifelong worker militant Lucio La Torre; the leader of the struggle of the Amazonian peoples José Sicchar Valdéz. And especially to our comrade Noemí Benito Di Lorenzo, Argentinean example of internationalist militant, recently deceased.
And we want to thank and extend an affectionate embrace to former comrades and now friends who are retired for reasons of age, such as Ricardo Napurí, an enormous personality who contributed and gave much brilliance to our party during an era and who was key to the continuity of the PST; and to the figure of Magda Benavides, exemplary union leader, fighter for women’s rights and former figure of our party.
With this immense inheritance of men and women who dedicated their efforts and lives building our party, and facing the new stage we have to live, the militancy and cadres of the PST, on reaching 50 years of ongoing combat, we reaffirm before the working class and the fighters with our fists raised high, our commitment to continue the battle for the construction of the party, closely linked to our International, to make possible the triumph of the socialist revolution in our country.
Long live the PST! Long live the LIT-CI! Hasta el socialismo, always!
