The Shining Path: Ultraleftism and Commandism in Peruvian Revolutionary Politics

The Shining Path began as a fringe Maoist sect but, through the charismatic leadership of its Chairman, Abimael “Gonzalo” Guzman, its refusal to engage with electoral politics and its willingness to engage in brutal acts of violence, eventually became the leader of a decades long violent struggle for state power against the Peruvian government. Despite their dedication and domination of the milieu of revolutionary politics, The Shining Path ultimately failed in its effort to seize state power through a combination of military and political failures that stemmed from their inability to accurately determine and meet the needs of the peasant masses they aspired to lead into communism.

Before delving into the many failures of the Shining Path, both in military and political, one must understand the successes they made early on that allowed them to dominate the revolutionary scene and thus universalize, in Peru, their mistakes in waging revolution. The primary success that underlaid the Shining Path’s domination of revolutionary politics was that, as Stern says, “it granted top priority to preparing to wage a “popular war” at all costs. Shining Path was a deadly precipitate purified out of a more complex leftist solution.” (Stern 19) This meant that the Shining path was able to avoid the compromises, broken promises and demobilizations that come with participating in legal politics and coalition building. This was paired with an ability by Guzman to maintain internal organizational discipline as well as earn the respect of anti-government forces regardless of party. (Stern 68) The combination of a complete dedication to guerilla warfare and organizational unity meant that, as Hinojosa says,

“At the beginning of the 1990S, to speak of the radical Peruvian Left was to refer to Shining Path. In effect, Shining Path had taken over the political space of Marxist organizations that had, until a short time before, proposed armed struggle as the effective path to power, distrusted representative democracy as an end in itself, and affirmed the necessity of destroying the state and the armed forces in order to construct socialism.” (Stern 61)

In addition to general organizational unity and domination of the revolutionary political space the Shining Path was also revolutionary in its revolutionary strategy, this allowed it to focus its political unity and domination of revolutionary action into a strategy that was able to effectively attack the system. Starn says of the Shining Path strategy that,

“Perhaps most importantly, and in the face of massive urbanisation in Peru, Guzman was willing to break from classic Maoism by waging war in metropolitan Lima as well as the Andean countryside. Bombs already rocked the capital in the early I98os, and party organisers fanned into the shantytowns on the central highway. In brief, these Peruvian revolutionaries copied, yet also recoded, the Maoist tradition they claimed to embody.” (Starn 410)

This extension of Maoist violence to the cities even in the lower stage of struggle allowed the Shining Path the possibility to capitalize on discontent of both the urban and rural classes. On top of their modified Maoist strategy of urban and rural guerilla warfare, they also made key political decisions regarding the recruitment of vanguard elements to grow their organization and lead the “people’s war” now in the cities and the rural hinterlands. First in their recruitment a population largely criticized in revolutionary circles in Peru; the intelligentsia. Cadena repeats the criticism made by earlier Peruvian Communist Martinez de la Torre who,

“criticized the intellectuals, calling them “petty bourgeois professionals who seek to contribute their ‘intelligence’ [sic] to the movement, their labor therein being precisely negative.” He called for the “active intelligence” of the political militants to oppose the “inert intelligence” of the academics.” (Stern 41)

The Shining Path saw the failure of previous movements to effectively recruit the educated and, specifically the lower strata of the intelligentsia in secondary schools and universities who were privileged in their access to education but did not see a chance for upward mobility. Their lack of upward mobility meant for this lower strata of the intelligentsia that the Shining Path and its people’s war could be their means of social mobility. (Stern 130) The Shining Path also used the downwardly mobile youth who formed the core of the party to insert themselves into the societies of the peasants through their influence that these youths had over their parents and the community. (Stern 131) They combined this early advantage of kinship ties with a strategy whereby they would insert themselves as a new “patron” of the rural peasant communities through a combination of terror and supplantation of the “generally incompetent and abusive authorities.” (Stern 131)

These key initial political and military decisions that would allow the Shining Path to act as the early stage vanguard revolutionary element in Peru would quickly be overshadowed by their numerous failures both militarily and politically. While the Shining Path did address the historical utilization of the intelligentsia they moved to a degree of overcorrection to where Degregori says, “When the war began in May I980, Shining Path was a party consisting mainly of teachers and university professors and students with little influence among the regional peasantry.” (Stern 128) This overreliance on the intelligentsia who lacked significant connection to and influence in peasant communities and their rabid dogmatism would combine to form a situation where the Shining Path saw themselves above the masses and that the masses were something to be overcome rather than joined with and organized.

On the level of military strategy and organization, this dictatorship of the dogmatic intelligentsia would manifest negatively across the board. In the general military strategy of the Shining Path, formed without the consultation of the peasants, the Shining Path would strangle the cities by monopolizing the agrarian output of the countryside. Because they had not thought to consult the peasants this strategy meant the disruption of economically and socially important peasant fairs and markets that were essential to peasant life and more so reflected connections between various rural communities rather than their connection to the cities, who, in fact, were not directly supplied by their rural hinterlands and experienced little asphyxiation from the Shining Path’s peasant repression. (Stern 133) This unpopular and ineffective strategy that served only to disrupt the lives of peasants and was imagined by intellectuals who lacked understanding and relations to the peasants was in turn enforced by party appointed authorities that disrespected and ignored communal hierarchies and communal organizations which made the Shining Path disruptive and unpopular. (Stern 134) Where the intellectual area leaders of the Shining Path could recruit outside their intellectual bands it was generally among youth of the middle or rich peasants, rather than the most impoverished of the peasants as Mao instructed. (Stern 133–134) This separation from and alienation of the majority of the peasantry, alignment with the middle and rich peasants, and their strict dogmatism meant that the party and its dictates became unpopular and had to be enforced through brutal punishments, whether they were individual punishments like whipping, forced cutting of hair, dismemberment or collective punishments in the form of massacres that often killed dozens. (Stern 134) These brutal policies of punishment served to further remove the Shining Path from the masses of peasants and consolidate their minority position as an isolated, violent, and dogmatic intelligentsia more concerned with enforcing party discipline and party dictates than effectively organizing the peasants and bringing them to the side of the party. Stern describes the effect of failed Shining Path policy and its brutal enforcement on the peasants as such,

“the profound alienation of peasants from Sendero’s politics crystallized as organized resistance, facilitated by a certain rapprochement between the military and peasants. The rural resistance to Sendero, along with gains in military-police intelligence, had rendered Sendero vulnerable even as it appeared to approach the threshold of a decisive victory.” (Stern 4)

The Shining Path’s dogmatism and brutal treatment of the peasants created a base for counter-revolution rather than revolution and spelled the end of the Shining Path when peasant cooperation led to the capture of Guzman and the gradual capitulation of the Shining Path. This turn was aided by the fact that despite the Shining Path initially attempting to become new patrons of the Peasants that in line with dogmatic Maoist thinking they would abandon the peasants to the mercy of military advancement. To the peasants, this eventually made the military the lesser evil and eventually a more powerful and reliable patron than the Shining Path. (Stern 141) These ignorant, violent and commandist military errors were rooted in the ideological errors of the Shining Path which exalted the party above all else, ignored the history and needs of the peasants. exalted violence as the transformative historical force and ultimately reproduced racist and even colonial dynamics between the party and the masses.

The defining ideological failure of the Shining Path, from which its violent and authoritarian terrors emerged, was that ultimately, they saw themselves above the peasants and that the peasant masses were a political force to be controlled by an all-knowing intelligentsia led party. This is best manifested in the party’s poorly conceived and often contradictory positions towards race which was clearly informed by the fact that a majority of the central committee was white. (Starn 416) While on the surface level embracing the historically resonant ideas of Indigenismo, a form of Indigenous Socialism which was the defining trait of the Peruvian left starting in the 1920s, at every turn the party and its leader Guzman, himself white, rejected the complexities of Peruvian and Peasant society and instead chose a “race blind” and class exclusive approach. This included relegating race to the realm of “false consciousness” or saying that the real divide among peasants wasn’t racialized but in fact simply a divide between “poor peasants, middle peasants and rich peasants.” (Stern 53) The only use of race that the Shining Path would accept was using race to essentialize and justify repression against “the evils” of “rich peasants” and “informers” who were “dangerous and deformed” and needed to be annihilated to defend the “Andean culture-race”. (Stern 52) As Starn explains the pseudo-racial language , “[provided] the ideological framework for the murder of hundreds of trade unionists, peasant activists and neighborhood leaders from other political parties as well as policemen.” (Starn 409) Because Guzman and the Shining Path did not see the complexities of indigenous life and could only understand them by attempting to fit them into preconceived Maoist notions of classes they saw anything outside of their narrow view, whether it be indigenous culture and practice or race, as another obstacle to revolution, “one more insect to be squashed.” (Stern 116) This meant that the peasants and their traditions were as much enemies to Guzman and the Shining Path’s revolution as the bourgeoisie and military; and when the tool of social transformation was violence, this meant the Shining Path would fight the poor peasants as viscously as it would fight the army. The Shining Path also openly wore their dogmatism on their sleeve, with party members showing their dedication by reciting Maoist slogans in their original mandarin, the party presenting its ideological lineage of “through Marx, Lenin, and Mao, not Tupac Amaru II, Juan Santos Atahualpa, Manco Inca, or any of the other Indian rebels in Peruvian history” and Gonzalo literally wearing his dogmatic ideology on his sleeve by dressing as a learned professor rather than a member of the peasant communities he hoped to lead. (Starn 407–410) This base antagonism to the peasants and their way of life rooted in a tacit racism, open dogmatism, and rejection of the unique condition of Peru in exchange for Maoist dogma would define the ideological and military failures of the Shining Path as they would repress and massacre the peasants, their supposed partners in revolution, to a point where they would break and the army would crush the Shining Path.

The Shining Path in their embrace of tacitly racist and openly anti-peasant ideas enforced through a regime of violence by a disconnected class of intellectuals would negate the early political and military decisions that brought them to a place of prominence and result in their defeat. Despite their justification of their ideas and actions by appealing to Marxism- Leninism- Maoism they fail to adhere to many essential ideas from Engels and Mao on peasant wars. The primary departure from both Mao and Engels is the Shining Path’s rejection of a united front through their choice to be a small party of militant intellectuals rather than a party connected to the masses alienated by imperialism and semi-feudalism, save a party connected to the masses able to form a strategic united front with small and medium holding peasants against imperialists, large landlords and capitalists. Beyond the general political need to be connected to the party and form a united front among the progressive forces in society, Mao, in “Why Red Political Power can Exist in China” explains the need not just for red guard local militias, but a Red Army that represents the masses and is fully capable of challenging the standing armies of the state. The Shining Path again failed to listen to the dictates of Mao and rather than forming a people’s army to wage a people’s war they formed guerilla bands of militant intellectuals who spent a great deal of time fighting the peasants under the guise of waging a war on behalf of the people. While ignoring Mao they also fail to heed the dictates of Engels, proudly turning their cadres into a caricature of the anti-social lumpen elements that Engels criticizes so heavily in “The Peasant War in Germany”. Engels specifically mentions how the lumpen elements antagonize the peasants as the delicate social relation of the peasantry are alien to them and demoralize the peasant forces because of their tendency to “go as they please.” (Engels 9 and 51) This clearly echoed in the Shining Path’s purposeful disruption of the peasant’s social and economic practices in the name of perfecting the peasantry and thus preparing them for revolutionary struggle and the tendency of the Shining Path to avoid conflict with the Army and thus leaving peasants open to army occupation and abuse, both clearly demoralizing factors counter to the goal of revolution. The Shining Path also ignore Engel’s demand that peasant revolutions must strike quickly and utilize their immediate access to large numbers to overwhelm their enemy, nominally in favor of Maoist guerilla tactics, but neither do they effectively utilize the numbers of the peasants or make a decisive push for power as Engels would suggest nor do they effectively build a people’s army as Mao suggests, instead electing to split their time terrorizing the peasants and attacking government forces without making a decisive grab for state power.

Ultimately the Shining Path, despite key early military and political successes failed because of their crypto-racism and their ultimate alienation from and hatred of the peasantry all of which they justified using a nominal adherence to Maoist dogma that they didn’t fully understand. Had the Shining Path properly understood the dictates of Engels and Mao rather than simply reciting their most sensational phrases void they may have been able to find the tools to craft a program and practice that could actually connect with the peasant masses and bring about revolution in Peru instead of simply enacting terror without making a decisive thrust for state power.

Bibliography

Engels, Frederick. The Peasant War In Germany. International Publishers, 2012.

Starn, Orin. “Maoism in the Andes: The Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path and the Refusal of History.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, 1995, pp. 399–421. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/158120. Accessed 7 May 2021.

Stern, Steve J. Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995. 1 ed. Duke University Press, 1998. Project MUSE muse-jhu-edu.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/book/69145.

Tse-Tung, Mao. WHY IS IT THAT RED POLITICAL POWER CAN EXIST IN CHINA? October 5,1928, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_3.htm.