Review of: Jan Lust (2019) Capitalism, Class and Revolution in Peru, 1980-2016

Abstract

Capitalism, Class and Revolution in Peru is a book that has not been sufficiently discussed within the Peruvian and Latin American social sciences despite its theoretical and empirical contribution to the analysis of social classes, their link with the development of capitalism and the party politics of the (socialist) left. Unlike other research on social classes centred on the works of Bourdieu and Weber or prioritising occupations and levels of economic income, Lust proposes a Marxist approach, recovering the relational quality of this concept and focusing on the relations of production. The puzzle posed by the author begins with a crucial premise: the weakness of the socialist left is not the result of the strength of the right; the right's strength is the result of the defect of the left itself. By recovering the "agency of the left parties", the book shows that the socialist left in Peru could not interpret and understand in depth the neo-liberal capitalist development of the last thirty years and its impact on the transformation of the social class structure. Although the failure of the Peruvian left has been studied in terms of its strategicelectoral decisions, the consequences of the internal armed conflict and the impact of the neoliberal reforms, which weaken its traditional social bases, the author argues that the equation is incomplete if we do not consider how these parties acted in the face of the transformation of the class structure. In this sense, the absence of a creative political praxis to analyse, study and understand in-depth capitalist development has prevented the recovery of their social bases, which were diminished after the economic crisis at the end of the 1980s and the introduction of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s.Through interviews with former members of leftist parties and the analysis of their official documents and strategic plans, the author shows that (1) although the socialist parties saw the changes undergone by the class structure in the country, (2) their analysis of this process was partial and superficial, preventing (3) a political practice under the new specificities of capitalist development in the country. The theoretical corpus behind this argumentative logic recovers the Marxist concept of class consciousness. Lust argues that the material conditions of the class structure do not determine class consciousness. Thus, class consciousness does not emerge automatically if it is not constructed by the political and intellectual work of political parties and workers' organisations. Therefore, the author calls attention to the fact that the absence of social bases that support socialist left programmes is not only the fault of the political crisis, structural reforms and the growth of the informal sector, but of the renunciation of political praxis to build this class consciousness in a changing class structure. In that sense, it is in the interaction between material conditions and political praxis where class consciousness(es) emerge as collectivities.The book has a do...