Opinion: What would happen if Karl Marx analyzed Castillo’s Peru?

By Pablo Díaz de Brito

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) A diagnosis of events in Peru, where Pedro Castillo became president last June, serves to analyze the more general phenomenon of the advance of the populist or extreme left but normally referred to in new-speech as ‘progressive left’ in Latin America.

This sector, called progressive or populist, works with categories that are contrary to those that belong to the left. In essence, these are the theoretical tools created by Karl Marx.

Pedro Castillo was elected with the support of the poorest areas, while his opponent Keiko Fujimori and other candidates in the first round received the votes of the regions that have grown the most with the economic model introduced in the 1990s by Alberto Fujimori and respected by the democratic presidents after him.

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Castillo came to change that. For more than 25 years, this model has transformed Lima and the El Callao region, among others, but the rural hinterland has remained excluded from the process.

Castillo is committed to a better distribution of the “pie” of wealth, as he proclaims. This vision must be critically analyzed from a historical and conceptual perspective.

THE KEYS AND HYPOTHESES OF A HORROR SAGA

One could easily refer to Max Weber and his “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” but it is more difficult to do so with Marx, the leading theorist of the left, which includes Castillo and his Peru Libre party, also composed of Shining Path adherents, and, in general, the so-called Latin American “progressives.”

Almost all of them leave the strong impression that they know Marx poorly or not at all.

The subjugation of India was extremely violent, but the British produced “the only social revolution” that this millennial culture has ever known, according to Marx.

In 1853, Marx published two newspaper articles on India and British imperialism. The only social revolution India has experienced in its millennia of history is the one brought about by the British Empire with the creation of a modern administration, structural changes in the economy, and the introduction of the railroad and telegraph, he sharply criticized, not sparing any criticism.

Through these developments, the British Empire made possible India’s national unity, its emergence as a true nation. Previously, it had been a myriad of feudal petty states. In turn, the traditional Indian social unit, the self-sufficient rural village led by an upper-caste man, was swept away by the British, as Marx reports.

This model of society was backward and immobile and based on the caste system, says the greatest economist and philosopher of history the left has ever produced. For this reason, “England has a double mission to fulfill in India, destructive on the one hand and regenerative on the other. It must destroy the old Asiatic society and create in Asia the material foundations of Western society,” Marx diagnosed.

To continue with Marx, it is interesting to review his conception of society and historical-economic phases, which he masterfully summarized in his contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1857/9, Prologue). “… in the social production of their lives men establish certain relations of production which are necessary and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a certain stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure is built, and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life conditions the process of political and spiritual social life in general.”

It can be said that this theoretical outline of Marx clashes with the assumption that the economy is “immaterially” determined by what individuals carry “in their heads” as economic culture. But Marx says exactly the same thing when he speaks of “the (social) relations of production” that form “the economic structure of society, the real basis.”

Peruvian President Pedro Castillo takes an anti-modernist view of the economy. He and the Perú Libre party ignore Marx’s historicizing and dialectical analysis.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx emphasizes the subjective role assigned to production in the political economy of Adam Smith and Ricardo. In the chapter Private Property and Labor, he states, “The subjective essence of private property, of private property as an activity for itself, as subject, as person, is labor.”

And he continues, “It is clear that only the Political Economy which recognized labor as its principle – Adam Smith – which no longer saw in private property only a situation external to man, is to be considered as the product of both the real energy and the movements of private property (…), Political Economy has accelerated and glorified the energy and the development of this industry, and made of it a power of consciousness. Before this enlightened Political Economy, which has discovered the subjective essence of wealth – in private property – appear as idolaters, as Catholics, the followers of the money and mercantilism system, who see private property only as the objective essence of man.”

It is clear, then, that social relations are not “material” but culture, relations structured by social life and language, as became scientifically known after Marx with the development of linguistics. Economic production is preceded by social relations that are constituted and brought together by language and the totality of behavioral patterns and values that constitute social life and culture.

The British Empire introduced into Indian society an economic culture and “relations of production” completely different from those that had existed for millennia. It changed the “real base” of India through a forced cultural change that was imposed by force of arms but was beneficial.

Today, colonialist imperialism is being replaced – in the progressive sense of Marx – by the free-market culture of globalization, the Internet and its enormous possibilities of instantaneous knowledge transfer, and the investments of multinational companies whose management and production methods and economic culture are much more advanced than those of local companies in emerging countries.

In short, defending the ancestral peasant culture of the Andes is as retrograde as claiming that the agrarian caste society of India was overcome by British imperialism. Marx would have made the same diagnosis for Peru today as he did for India in 1853.

The small Andean community with its authorities and traditions must be replaced by modern economic culture. Innovative ideas and technologies must replace outdated knowledge, respectable but clearly obsolete.

But maybe Castillo doesn’t know this, or simply doesn’t care. For him, it seems it is all about sharing the prosperity pie.