Peter Waterman writes:

"A Letter from Lima:
Is the World Still Broad and Alien?"
Peter Waterman

It occurs to me that I have been coming to Peru, on some kind of internationalist pilgrimage, for 20 years or so.

The first time was in 1986 when I was doing research on ‘international labour information’ in Peru (Waterman and Arellano 1986). There seemed at that time to be plenty of the old labour and socialist internationalism in Peru, received and transmitted by maybe a dozen different newspapers or magazines, of an equal number of different organisations or socialist tendencies. (For one tragic/pathetic Peruvian experience of Trotskyist internationalism, see the disenchanted Martínez 1997, reviewed Rénique 199?).But I was looking for a new kind, associated with the shopfloor or grassroots labour internationalisms, apparently developing elsewhere worldwide. (These had a spurt of growth internationally, but aftersight suggests the movement was cut short by the wave of neo-liberalism). What I was particularly concerned with was the need for a new communications model to create such a new labour internationalism (Waterman 1988).

I arrived one day after a massacre of fundamentalist Marxists, of the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), by the populist government of Alan García. An uprising had been planned by Sendero in the Lurigancho prison, Lima, timed to coincide with that dubious politician’s hosting of a congress of the Socialist International. Neither the celebration nor the massacre suggested Peru was going to see the kind of breakthrough I had been hoping would develop. And it did not. There followed, rather, a turning in as the left reeled from one awful internal Peruvian crisis to another. (As did the left internationally from the collapse of Communism, the disappearance of the Non-Alligned and related movements, the emptying out of Social Democracy).

One major reason for the internal crises was, as suggested, the forward march of what came to be called globalisation and neo-liberalism. In so far as the ragged remnants of what was once a significant left in Peru sought international solidarity, this came in the form of a one-way, north-to-south flow of ‘development cooperation funding’. This may have had the effect of 1) cushioning progressive forces within the country from the force of neo-liberalism, of 2) nudging them in certain donor-approved developmental directions (compare Waterman 2000) and even of curtaining them off from such other international solidarity projects and notions as might have been developing elsewhere. But local defeats and disorientations possibly provide sufficient explanation.

My second pilgrimage began in 1995 (and continued annually till 2003). It was my good fortune to be going to see my Peruvian compañera, Gina Vargas, who had just been appointed – against the United Nation’s nominee and under pressure from below – to be Coordinator of the regional women’s NGOs for the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing. Gina was and is a prominent feminist activist and writer in Peru. Her NGO, the Flora Tristán women’s centre had become the coordinating office for these efforts, and Gina had been anyway active for some years in the regular Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters (further, Encuentros). I did make the first of my annual pilgrimages to a major labour support centre in Lima, http://www.plades.org.pe/, but since I was neither identified with any institutionalised labour international - nor bearing funds? - I received little more than polite disinterest. Given the virtual absence of any labour or socialist internationalism in Lima at that time, I turned my attention to that of the women and the feminists.

Lima was, in 2005, a hive of regional feminist activity, and the energy visible there was carried to Beijing. Within a year or so, however, the Encuentro was itself in crisis, and within one or two more feminist academic Sonia Alvarez (1998), was writing about the ongización (NGOisation) of the women’s movement in Latin America. Late-2002, the Ninth Encuentro formally highlighted the issue of globalisation (‘Resistencia activa frente a la globalización neoliberal’). But it did not address itself to the second World Social Forum, directly opposing this, to take place in the same continent a couple of months later! Gina, who had been since 2001 an International Council member of the World Social Forum, appeared to be somewhat in front of her Latin American and Peruvian sisters in her commitment to a process that had already created a surely privileged site for the common articulation of the new global solidarity movement

In 2005, I came to Lima again, but this time at the invitation of the Programme of Studies on Democratisation and Global Transformation, run in Lima by Teivo Teivainen, the Finnish specialist on Peru, a leading figure in the Helsinki-based Network Institute for Global Democratisation (NIGD), another writer on the World Social Forum procress, another member of its International Council (Teivainen 2002, 2004).

The lecture series to which I was committed, at Peru’s San Marcos University, was on ‘Internationalisms from Mariátegui to the Movements of Global Solidarity’. In practice they ran the other way round, starting with ‘The New Internationalisms’, then dealing with ‘Communicating Global Solidarity’, and ending with ‘Rediscovering and Rethinking Mariátegui in the 21st Century’.

It is time to tell those who do not know that Jose Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) was ‘the Peruvian Gramsci’, a self-educated literary figure, journalist/publisher, cosmopolitan, Marxist thinker and Communist political and labour organiser http://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/. As someone who largely invented his own Marxism, and who died before Stalinism put an end to such Communist thinking, Mariátegui also wrote a remarkable essay on internationalism, which evidently inspired my lectures.

I had discovered Mariátegui’s essay on a Lima friend’s bookshelf already in 1986, paraphrasing his original and brilliant insight that ‘Communications are the nervous system of this internationalised and solidary humanity’. In so far as this is an awkward literal translation, and that ‘solidary’ is not in the English dictionary, my free re-wording of this was ‘Communications are the nervous system of internationalism and solidarity’. I was the first English translator/publisher of this piece (Mariátegui 1986). But the essay does not appear on the relevant websites in either Spanish or English, http://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/index.htm, http://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/index.htm. (On my return to The Hague, I scanned my 1986 translation and am seeking to ensure its availability on the web.

What were here described as conversatorios turned out to be sessions in which my lectures (in a still embarassingly-limited Spanish) were followed by invited commentators and open discussion. The discussants included, amongst others, Gina and Teivo, feminist academic Narda Henriquez, members of the Raiz libertarian-socialist network here, such as student Johnattan Rupire, Raphael Hoetmer, a Dutch PhD student of the WSF process and Aníbal Quijano, a veteran Peruvian left academic, himself engaged with the WSF. For the rest we had a small and changing audience of students and academics, with a few hardy participants who turned up for the series as a whole.

The Programme (henceforth the Global Democracy Programme or GDP) has its own website at http://democraciaglobal.org. Along with a notice of the lecture series, this has also published a draft collection of my essays in Spanish, under the title 'Los nuevos tejidos nerviosos del internacionalismo y la solidaridad' http://democraciaglobal.org/?fp_verpub=true&idpub= 22. To these have been added – for the first time on the web in Spanish - the relevant essay of Mariátegui http://democraciaglobal.org/?fp_verpub=true&idpub= 35. We are hoping to get this collection more widely circulated, on the web and/or paper.

The impact of this modest academic activity on social movements and civil society in Peru is likely to be fairly marginal. There has been, during this month, an overlapping wave of such movements – apparently bent on demonstrating the meaning of the term ‘social-movement society’ (Meyer and Tarrow 1997)! The newspapers and TV record at least weekly protests against the criminalisation of coca production, the tax on public transport (mostly minibuses), the corruption and impunity of the political class, on wages and conditions - including a strike by administrative staff at San Marcos itself. These tend, however, to be often disconnected from similar ones, from other mobilisations of different kinds, and hardly add up to the kind of ‘anti-neoliberal’ or ‘global solidarity and justice’ movements we are familiar with from even neighbouring Bolivia. Whilst capable of effective local, regional or even national disruption, they are a long way away from having the kind of national-level impact of similar waves of protest in Ecuador, Argentina or Bolivia.

Such concepts as ‘internationalism’ and ‘solidarity’, moreover, appear still at the margin of consciousness of such social movements, or within Peruvian civil society more generally. These organisations or networks still seem to think of the international, in terms of the North-South relationship and a North-to-South flow of development funding. Much of what pass for social movements or civil society in Peru remains dependent on such funding.

There are, nonetheless, a few new straws in the wind.

One is the impact locally of the World Social Forums, held more-or-less annually in neighbouring Brazil, even if these may imply either a $1,000 airticket or a gruelling 5-day bus journey. We have, further, seen in Peru a reproduction of the problem of the 2004 European Social Forum in London, with its tensions between ‘verticals’ and ‘horizontals’ (Böhm, Sullivan and Reyes 2005). An explicit claim has been made on the Peruvian organisation or coordination in such forums by a well-funded coordinating body of ‘social development’ NGOs, Conades www.conades.org.pe. Other bodies, usually smaller, newer and less developmentalist, insist that such control is contrary to the spirit of the Forums. An attempt to organise a Peruvian Social Forum has, for this or other reasons, therefore been so far unsuccessful.

Another might be the activities of an NGO of Catholic origin or inspiration called Forum Solidaridad Peru http://www.psf.org.pe/. Created by foreign missionaries inspired by the ‘option for the poor’, this is increasingly interesting itself in internationalism more generally. The FSP happened to be organising a seminar in Lima entitled ‘Towards International Solidarity Strategies for Political Impact’, this involving 30-40 participants involved in various local NGOs. I was invited to present a concluding presentation, which I did under the title ‘Five Theses on the New Global Solidarity’. But I also sat in on part of the seminar and was impressed by both the pertinence of the introductory lectures and the commitment of the participants. Once again, however, I noted that ‘international’ meant north-to-south, and that the orientation of the event was more toward lobbying and otherwise pressurising existing institutions or processes. It was not concerned with international solidarity more generally (or even more locally/regionally), nor was it proposing other global institutions (nor another possible world!). However, the small staff of the Forum, all women, and of both Peruvian and foreign nationalities, seemed motivated and qualified to both expand and deepen their pioneering work.

Now in its third year, the earlier-mentioned Global Democracy Programme has mounted a number of innovative events. One was a Week of Global Action, in 2005, which included a session on whether or not ‘Another World is Possible in Peru?’. Participants included, again, Gina Vargas, but also academics from the Social Science Faculty at San Marcos, and representatives of CONACAMI (a network of indigenous Andean communities affected by mining), of young feminists, of the earlier-mentioned Movimiento Raíz, of gays and lesbians, and the Feminist Movement of Uruguay. The GDP has also hosted visits of such leading foreign radical academics as Immanuel Wallerstein from the USA and Edgardo Lander from the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez.

Should the considerable contribution of non-Peruvians be taken to suggest its local underdevelopment or as both natural and functional to its development? I am reminded here again of of Mariátegui:

'Communications are the nervous system of...internationalism and human solidarity. One of the characteristics of our epoch is the rapidity, the velocity, with which ideas spread, with which currents of thought and culture are transmitted. A new idea that blossoms in Britain is not a British idea except for the time that it takes for it to be printed. Once launched into space by the press, this idea, if it expresses some universal truth, can also be instantaneously transformed into an internationalist idea.' (Mariátegui 1986)

Internationalist ideas once blossomed in Lima, and the life and writings of Mariátegui are witness to this (1). It should therefore not matter from whence come the new internationalist ideas. I remain, however, sceptical about the ‘instantaneous transformation’. As also about the extent to which such ideas might take local root. In the case of Peru, it would seem to me, three quite energetic initiatives are necessary. The first would be empirical research work, registering in some detail the ‘international relations’ of social movements and civil society in Peru. The second would be conceptual and analytical work, enabling the evaluation of kind, depth, extent and direction of such relations (compare Waterman 1998/2001: 52-68, 230-40). The third would, of course, be the holding of national, regional or local social forums in Peru, on the model of those elsewhere. Given the nature of the overall task, these are likely to be carried out in tandem, and hopefully in dialogue.

And my paper sub-title above? It is that of the prize-winning book of Ciro Alegria (1941) about the isolation, occupation and eventual destruction of a Peruvian Andean community, 'Broad and Alien is the World'. This ends, if I correctly recall the English translation, with the words ‘closer, ever closer, came the crack of the Mausers’. This would seem a somewhat starker reminder of the necessity of developing solidarity relations across borders – even for defensive reasons - than the biblical writing on the wall. Almost as grimly are we warned by Portuguese theorist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, that humankind is, under globalisation, condemned to solidarity. I prefer to see the development of a new global solidarity as the adventure of the epoch, and I would expect it to attract significant numbers of Peruvians during the rest of the decade. For further reports on the matter, watch both this space and the others indicated…

Peter Waterman
Lima-The Hague
02-08.08.05

(1) It should not be concluded that there has been no Peruvian left internationalism between Maríategui and Martínez! It is rather a matter of this not having been subject to investigation under this rubric. One would need to investigate the intensive international contacts and activities of Peruvian Communists and Apristas (the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, of Mariátegui’s opposite number, Haya de la Torre), as well as the translations and travels of the Peruvian ‘New Left’ in the 1960s-70s (e.g. Hugo Blanco, Héctor Béjar and Aníbal Quijano). Much of the English-language work appeared in the US left magazine and publishing house, Monthly Review. One would also have to investigate Peruvian involvement in or with the Mexican, Central American and Cuban revolutions, the Spanish Civil War (Martínez Riaza 2004) as well as with the Unidad Popular regime of Allende in Chile. Given that the Peruvian priest and theologiant, Gustavo Gutiérrez, was the author of the key text on the ‘theology of liberation’, one might also explore the international solidarity relations implied by the ‘option for the poor’. Finally, of course, one would need to consider international solidarity with Peru, particularly the ‘First-World Third-Worldism’ or ‘Solidarity Committees’ of the 1970s. The latter overlapped on the one hand with the state-funded ‘development cooperation’ that still continues, and on the other hand with Northern support for the Maoist or Guevarist guerilla movements, Sendero and MRTA, of the 1970s-90s. A tragic bearer of solidarity with the latter is the US Central America solidarity activist, Lori Berenson, http://www.freelori.org/index.html.

References and Resources

Alegria, Ciro. 1942. Broad and Alien is the World. London: Nicholson and Watson.

Alvarez, Sonia. 1998. ‘Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO "Boom"’, Department of Politics, University of California at Santa Cruz. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/latam/schomburgmoren o/alvarez.html

Böhm, Steffan, Sian Sullivan and Oscar Reyes (eds). 2005. ‘The Organisation and Politics of Social Forums’, Ephemera, Vol. 5, No. 2. http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/index.htm.

Martínez, Maruja. 1997 Entre el amor y la furia. Crónicas y testimonio. Lima: SUR Casa de Estudios del Socialismo.

Mariátegui, Jose Carlos. 1986. ‘Internationalism and Nationalism’, Newsletter of International Labour Studies, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, No. 30-31, pp. 3-8.

Martínez Riaza. 2004. ¡Por la Republica! La apuesta política y cultural del peruano César Falcón en España, 1919-1939, Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Pp. 198.

Meyer, David and Sidney Tarrow (eds). 1997. The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Rénique, José Luis. 199?. ‘El Perú de Maruja Martínez: Reflexiones en torno a un libro excepcional’.Ciberayllu. file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Windows%20XP /Mijn%20documenten/maruja%20martinez%20book%20revi ewed.htm.

Sen, Jai et.al. 2004. World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. New Delhi: Viveka. 402pp.

Teivainen, Teivo. 2002. "The World Social Forum and Global Democratization: Learning from Porto Alegre", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 607-620.

Teivainen, Teivo. 2004. ‘The WSF: Arena or Actor?’, in Jai Sen et. al. (eds). World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. New Delhi: Viveka. Pp. 122-9.

Waterman, Peter and Nebiur Arellano. 1986. `The Nervous System of Internationalism and Solidarity: Transmission and Reception of International Labour Information in Peru', Working Papers, No. 32. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. 58 pp.
Waterman, Peter. 1988. `Needed: A New Communications Model for a New Working-Class Internationalism', in Southall, Roger (ed), Trade Unions and the New Industrialisation of the Third World. London: Zed: pp. 351 378.

Waterman, Peter. 1998/2001. Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms. London/New York: Mansell/Cassel.

Waterman, Peter. 2000. ‘Exports and Imports: Civil Society and Globalisation’ (Review of Kees Biekart, ‘The Politics of Civil Society Building: European Private Aid Agencies and Democratic Transitions in Central America’), Biblio: A New Delhi Review of Books, May-June, pp. 22-3."