Program of the Peruvian Socialist Party

José Carlos Mariátegui

Drafted October 1928

Approved by the Central Committee early 1929

Source: José Carlos Mariátegui, “The Organization of the Proletariat,” Political Commission of the Central Committee of the Peruvian Communist Party (eds.). Lima: Red Flag [Bandera Roja] Editions, 1967.

The program should be a doctrinal statement that affirms:

1. The international character of the contemporary economy which does not allow any country to evade the currents of transformation arising from the present conditions of production.

2. The international character of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. The socialist Party adapts its praxis to the concrete circumstances of the country, but it obeys a broad class vision, and the same national circumstances are subordinated to the rhythm of world history. The independence revolution more than a century ago was a solidarity movement of all the peoples subjugated by Spain; the socialist revolution is a united movement of all the peoples oppressed by capitalism. If the liberal revolution, nationalist in its principles, could not be carried out without a close union among the South American countries, it is easy to understand the historical law that, in a more accentuated epoch of interdependence and connection of nations, imposes that the social revolution, internationalist in its principles, is carried out with a much more disciplined and intense coordination of the proletarian parties. The manifesto of Marx and Engels condensed the first principle of the proletarian revolution in the historic phrase: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”

3. The sharpening of the contradictions of the capitalist economy. Capitalism develops in a semi-feudal people like ours; in moments in which, having reached the stage of monopolies and imperialism, all the liberal ideology, corresponding to the stage of free competition, has ceased to be valid. Imperialism does not allow any of these semi-colonial peoples, which it exploits as markets for its capital and merchandise and as deposits of raw materials, an economic program of nationalization and industrialism; it forces them to specialization, to monoculture (oil, copper, sugar, cotton, in Peru), suffering a permanent crisis of manufactured articles, a crisis that derives from this rigid determination of national production, by factors of the capitalist world market.

4. Capitalism is in its imperialist stage. It is the capitalism of monopolies, of finance capital, of imperialist wars for the monopolization of markets and sources of raw materials. The praxis of Marxist socialism in this period is that of Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism is the revolutionary method of the stage of imperialism, and of the monopolies. The Socialist Party of Peru adopts it as a method of struggle.

5. The pre-capitalist economy of republican Peru which, due to the absence of a vigorous bourgeois class and the national and international conditions that have determined the slow progress of the country along the capitalist road, cannot free itself under the bourgeois regime, beholden to capitalist interests, colluded with the gamonalist and clerical feudalism, from the defects and remnants of colonial feudalism. The colonial destiny of the country resumes its process. The emancipation of the country’s economy is possible only through the action of the proletarian masses, in solidarity with the world anti-imperialist struggle. Only proletarian action can first stimulate and then carry out the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution that the bourgeois regime is incompetent to develop and fulfill.

6. Socialism finds, in the subsistence of the communities as well as in the large agricultural enterprises, the elements of a socialist solution to the agrarian question, a solution that will tolerate in part the exploitation of the land by small farmers, where the yanaconazgo¹ or small property recommend leaving to individual management, while advancing in the collective management of agriculture, the areas where this type of exploitation prevails. But this, as well as the stimulus given to the free resurgence of the indigenous people, to the creative manifestation of their forces and native spirit, does not mean at all a romantic and anti-historical tendency of construction or resurrection of Inca socialism, which corresponded to historical conditions completely overcome and of which only the habits of cooperation and socialism of the indigenous peasants remain as a usable factor within a perfectly scientific technique of production. Socialism presupposes technique, science, and the capitalist stage, and cannot imply the slightest backward step in the acquisition of the conquests of modern civilization, but, on the contrary, the maximum and methodical acceleration of the incorporation of these conquests into national life.

7. Only socialism can solve the problem of an effectively democratic and egalitarian education, by virtue of which each member of society receives all the instruction to which his capacity entitles him. The socialist educational system is the only one that can fully and systematically apply the principles of the single school, of the school of work, of the school communities and, in general, of all the ideals of contemporary revolutionary pedagogy, incompatible with the privileges of the capitalist school, which condemns the poor classes to cultural inferiority and makes higher education the monopoly of wealth.

8. Having completed its bourgeois-democratic stage, the revolution becomes, in its objectives and doctrine, proletarian revolution. The party of the proletariat, qualified by the struggle for the exercise of power and the development of its own program, carries out the tasks of the organization and defense of the socialist order in this stage.

9. The Socialist Party of Peru is the vanguard of the proletariat, the political force that assumes the task of its orientation and leadership in the struggle for the realization of its class ideals.

Annexed to the program will be published draft theses on the indigenous question, the economic situation, the anti-imperialist struggle, which, after the debate of the sections and the amendments introduced in its text by the Central Committee, will be definitively formulated at the First Congress of the Party.

From the manifesto, the Party will address an appeal to all its adherents, to the working masses, to work for the following immediate demands:

• Broad recognition of workers’ freedom of association, assembly, and press.

• Recognition of the right to strike for all workers. Abolition of road conscription.²

• Substitution of the law of vagrancy for the articles that specifically considered the question of vagrancy in the preliminary draft of the Penal Code put into effect by the State, with the sole exception of those articles incompatible with the spirit and penal criteria of the special law.

• Establishment of the Social Insurances and the Social Assistance of the State.

• Fulfillment of the laws of work accidents, of protection of the work of women and minors, of the eight-hour workday in agricultural work.

• Assimilation of malaria in the coastal valleys to the condition of professional disease with the consequent responsibilities of assistance for the landlord.

• Establishment of a seven-hour workday in the mines and in 105 unhealthy, dangerous, and harmful jobs for the health of the workers.

• Obligation of mining and oil companies to recognize their workers permanently and effectively, all the rights guaranteed by the laws of the country.

• Increase of wages in industry, agriculture, mines, maritime and land transport, and the guano islands, in proportion to the cost of living and the workers’ right to a higher standard of living.

• Effective abolition of all forced or free labor, and abolition or punishment of the semi-slavery regime in the mountains.

• Endowment to the communities of latifundia lands for distribution among its members in sufficient proportion to their needs.

• Expropriation, without compensation, in favor of the communities, of all the estates of the convents and religious congregations.

• The right of the yanaconas, tenants, etc., who work a piece of land for more than three consecutive years, to obtain the definitive adjudication of the use of their plots, by means of annuities no greater than 60% of the current rental fee.

• A reduction of at least 50% of the fee for all those who continue as sharecroppers or tenants.

• Allotment to cooperatives and poor peasants of land made available for cultivation by agricultural irrigation works.

• Maintenance, everywhere, of the rights recognized to employees by the respective law.

• Regulation, by a joint commission, of retirement rights in a manner that does not imply the least impairment of those established by law.

• Establishment of the minimum wage and salary.

• Ratification of freedom of worship and religious education at least in the terms of the constitutional article and consequent repeal of the last decree against non-Catholic churches. Free education at all levels.

These are the main demands for which the Socialist Party will fight immediately. All of them respond to peremptory demands of the material and intellectual emancipation of the masses. All of them must be actively supported by the proletariat and by the conscious elements of the middle class.

The freedom of the Party to act publicly, under the protection of the constitution and the guarantees that it grants to citizens to create and disseminate its press without restrictions, to hold its congresses and debates, is a right claimed by the very act of the public foundation of this grouping.

The closely linked groups that today address the people by means of this manifesto, resolutely assume, with the consciousness of a historical duty and responsibility, the mission to defend and propagate its principles and to maintain and increase its Organization, at the cost of any sacrifice. And the working masses of the city, the countryside and the mines and the indigenous peasantry, whose interests and aspirations we represent in the political struggle, will know how to appropriate these demands and this doctrine, to fight perseveringly and strenuously for them and to find, through this struggle, the road that leads to the final victory of socialism.