The reactionary, revisionist, and rightist opponents of the New Labor Press and similar organizations wail on and on about “Gonzaloites”, “outside agitators”, “antifa”, “Stalinists”, “sectarians”, and other red boogeymen in the labor movement. This red-baiting and fear-mongering is a plain admission, an act of demarcation, by these groups that they have zero interest in principled class struggle, theoretical consistency, or overthrowing the bourgeoisie permanently. It is an open declaration of war against the most advanced and consistently class-conscious workers. Red-baiting aside, though, this does raise a legitimate question. Even some of our friends might be perplexed by the importance we place on studying international developments and social movements in countries like Turkey, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and especially Peru. The importance of the Soviet Union, and Lenin and Stalin in the main, is easy to understand: it was the first workers’ and peasants’ state in the world, so logically the workers and peasants ought to study its practice and internal developments. China, too, was led by workers and peasants, and they successfully repulsed internal capitalist offensives for years until the Deng clique’s coup. But why Peru?

The United States is by far the most advanced country in the world considered from the standpoint of global political-economic influence. Its military, intelligence agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and its finance capital are nigh-unchallengeable on the world stage. Billions of people are persecuted in the name of American capital and even the European powers, highly developed in their own right, frequently subordinate their own imperialist machinations to the whims of the United States government. Peru, on the other hand, has a population that barely exceeds Texas, and its gross domestic product is actually less. It has had a series of sell-out comprador governments and is no stranger to military juntas. Globally, Peru’s influence is limited to tourism, the export of copper, etc. We live in the foremost imperialist power, whereas the Peruvians are stuck at the bottom of the imperialist ladder.

But it does not follow from these facts that the United States would have the most advanced labor movement in the world. If one accepts that the interests of capital and labor are antagonistic, and one also accepts that the government of the United States represents the interests of American capital, the only logical conclusion is that the US state is the premier enemy of the labor movement, domestically and internationally. And, since it has more resources at its disposal than any other state, the only logical deduction is that the labor movement in America would be among the most repressed, compromised, and backwards in the world. And this is precisely the situation we find ourselves in–why should we expect it to be any other way?

Was Peru chosen at random? It is true there are many poor countries containing billions of people. Bolivia is similar to Peru in a number of ways, it is even smaller population and GDP-wise. Venezuela, Colombia, Burkina Faso, one could cite a whole host of impoverished and oppressed states. But outside of the Soviet Union, China, and the states they directly worked to foment revolution in, not a single nation has seen the workers and peasants advance nearly as far as the workers and peasants of Peru did under the leadership of a Communist Party. The Communist Party of Peru (PCP) succeeded not only in wiping out the influence of the bourgeois state in vast areas–something which can be accomplished by anyone with enough firepower–but was able to reorganize production under the governance of the workers and peasants. In areas they controlled, the people ascended to power and the whole of society was revolutionized. In the areas the PCP fully controlled, people went from having nothing to determining everything. Meanwhile, in the framework of the official labor movement in the US, the workers cannot even decide what demands will be put forward to the capitalists, much less seize political power.

In 1976, the Communist Party of Peru formed a national labor organization, the “Movimiento de Obreros y Trabajadores Clasistas” (MOTC), to organize workers and build revolutionary class consciousness among them. The MOTC organized workers from all sectors, but autoworkers, teachers, textile workers, nurses, miners, and other industrial and lower middle-class workers made up the majority of the organization. Not unlike the state unions of the US, the establishment state and business unions in Peru are and were filled with class traitors who sell out the interests of the working class to that of the bourgeoisie. The PCP called out the class collaborationist union bureaucracy and used the MOTC as an alternative to it. In stark contrast to the sell-out union bureaucracy, the PCP would sustain strikes until their demands were met, agree to shorter contracts that benefited workers, and would launch work stoppages whenever these contracts were broken.

As part of their strategic plan to surround the city from the countryside, the PCP focused on key industries along the central highway which connected Peru’s capital Lima to the rest of the country. In 1988, during the period of the first conference of the Communist Party of Peru, the “Comité de Lucha de Obreros y Trabajadores Clasistas de la Carretera Central (CLOTCCC)” was formed as part of the MOTC to further develop the work to creating alternative organizations to the business unions along the central highway. The PCP, through the MOTC, was able to establish a presence in almost all the major industries along the highway. The organization of workers enabled the party to shut down much of the transportation of goods to Lima. Such as the central highway strike of April 1991, where following the death of a worker in a shop the party was organized at, a two-day general strike occurred across the central highway.

As the people’s war progressed, the party developed and employed the tactic of armed strikes, which combined mass general strikes with guerrilla actions to paralyze sections of the country for brief periods. In May of 1989, an armed strike was called which saw one million workers across Peru’s mining and farming heartland refuse to work for three days. During this period, red flags would be raised across the country and the People’s Guerrilla Army would conduct a barrage of different guerrilla actions. Between 1988 and 1992, nine armed strikes were organized in Lima and two strikes in areas near the city (Central Highway and Argentina Avenue). These armed strikes were not only effective, but were real demonstrations of the workers’ will to control their workplaces and the absolutely critical work the PCP did to link the struggles of the workers and peasants to the seizure of political power.

The state unions, of course, deny the backwardness of the American labor movement and are resolutely opposed to any consistent application of principle or revolutionary theory. The defenders of the American state unions on the so-called “Left”, for their part, go on and on about American material conditions, the need to apply “Marxism” or “Leninism” or “Maoism” to the particular situation in the US, and whine about the alleged importation of irrelevant formulas from other countries. Consciously or not, this is an attempt to reduce the scope of American workers. Is the problem that American workers are too internationalist, they are too willing to emulate their foreign counterparts when it comes to political struggle? Or, rather, is the problem that the American workers are ideologically and politically cut off from their foreign counterparts, and realizing that international unity spells their doom, a bunch of pseudointellectuals and renegades have taken up the line of American exceptionalism under the guise of “adapting to material conditions”?

And the fact that our foreign comrades have already nailed down the issue–the line of state unionism led to the creation of Brazil’s Workers’ League all the way back in 1995–does this not make the work of the pseudointellectuals and renegades a hundred times more urgent and desperate? Does this not explain why they are suddenly realizing that the “old guard” such as Sean O’Brien in the IBT and Shawn Fain in the UAW are actually “militant” “rank-and-file” “democratic” “reformers”?

Let us simplify things. America is the foremost imperialist power, and consequently, the default state of its labor movement is extreme backwardness. Without a vast army of workers trained to fight against the slightest deviation towards opportunism, led by a Communist Party, capitalist domination of the labor movement is unavoidable. This is primarily reflected in the unions, even the spontaneously arising “independent” unions, trading basic labor union work for state bureaucratic work. At the same time, there are various imperialized countries, with wildly varying degrees of political development among the workers. The degree to which they have developed varies according to the greater or lesser degree to which the workers have correctly grasped their situation, the ideology of their class, and implemented a correct program. The greatest victories were achieved in Peru, owing to the uniqueness of Peruvian conditions and the correctness of their political line, which took Maoist ideology as its basis. The basic thesis of the NLP is that the backwardness of the American labor can be overcome only through the workers, and their leading organizations, correctly elaborating and applying revolutionary theory to the conditions and practice of the proletariat and its allied classes in the workplace/at the point of production.

This is why, while the NLP does not shy away from its enemies, polemics are not and cannot be the majority of its content. Our goal is to unify labor behind correct ideas. To paraphrase Daniel de Leon, an obscure veteran of the earliest battles of organized labor in the US, truth alone unites. Consequently, the bulk of the NLP’s content is educational, and takes the form of guides and informational articles concerning the real state of affairs in the labor movement and what should be done. This is also why the NLP has an obligation to promote the study of Maoism. There is only one objective reality for our class, the proletariat, so there can only be one class truth and one class ideology. But the truth has different degrees of specificity, there is perceptual knowledge and there is conceptual knowledge, or as Mao called it, rational knowledge. So while the bulk of workers are not necessarily wrong, they are absolutely less right insofar as their knowledge has not reached the rational or conceptual level. Maoism is the highest development of rational knowledge produced by the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie so far. It is not at all an accident that its origin was in the revolutionary struggles of China and Peru, where the chain of imperialism was weak.

While the do-nothings of the labor movement cry about importing foreign dogmas, on the contrary, we see ourselves as catching up to the latest scientific developments and applying them to our own circumstances. That is also why we reject the various schemes dug up from the sordid past of American opportunism and revisionism masquerading as “Communism”, especially the educational group and union caucus models. There is trade-union work, and there is not-trade-union work. The state unions and the various groups in their orbit are simply not doing trade-union work, and we believe it is important to expose this fact and also provide workers with the theoretical leadership and practical tools and support to do this work themselves. But even legitimate trade-union work will ultimately be pointless, if not counterproductive, if it is not lead by organizations guided by Maoism with the aim of seizing power for the workers and establishing their power globally through the violent overthrow of imperialism.