Peru: Down with the Fujimorist Regime!

 

The defeat of Fujimori Jn and her fascist-leaning party in July 2021, by Pedro Castillo of Perú Libre, a middle-class electoral movement, part of the right-wing reformist movement, was short lived. Dina Boluarte replaced Castillo as President  on December 7, 2022. She was sworn in as the country's first female president following Congress's impeachment of Castillo, who was arrested after attempting to dissolve the legislature. Boluarte set out to create a Fujimorist regime of the far right that has continuously held power since, in an attempt to prop-up the fiction of parliamentary democracy to prepare the way for a fascist coup. By the end of 2025, the international situation had become pre-revolutionary - the ruling classes must resort to fascism to survive, while the working masses must take state power. Here we reprint two articles from Permanent Revolution, Peru, which documents the impact on Peru over this period of the relative decline of US imperialism and the task for workers of the hemisphere to organize an international revolutionary party for what we call the New American Revolution.  (ILTT)

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Peru: Down with Parliament and Down with Boluarte! 

Boluarte replaces Castillo on 7 December 2022 [ILTT]

Just four days later, the shooting of two young men by police in Andahuaylas became the bloody baptism of Dina Boluarte's government. It didn't take long for her to resemble the successive presidents known for their brutality. While Castillo had strengthened his already neoliberal and repressive government with Aníbal Torres, a Belaunde sympathizer and former collaborator of dictator Fujimori at the University of San Marcos, Boluarte decided to entrust the government to Pedro Angulo, an ultra-neoliberal linked to Kuczynski's extremist circles, whose first task will be to intensify repression through the regional states of emergency declared for this purpose, in collaboration with Alberto Otárola, Humala's former minister. 

The dictatorship sought by Castillo through his failed coup of December 7th would have constituted another stage in this phase. Gassing, beating, arresting, and killing are, for any government that administers a capitalist state for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, an unavoidable necessity. “The government will massacre again, because its true allies are the military and police; the far right will continue to impose the path of a coup d'état, a reactionary coup d'état that will inevitably come about sooner or later, one way or another, if the independent mobilization of workers fails to get rid of Castillo.” (Permanent Revolution, May 24, 2022) And indeed, the attempted coup took place.

A victim of despair, Castillo was unable to confront two enemies more dangerous than the votes of the Congressional majority: the exposure of the corrupt network of family friendships he had fostered and the deteriorating living conditions of the majority of the population. A 9% year-on-year inflation rate, entire sectors with declining indices such as mining, agriculture, and fishing—all the hallmarks of an inexorable slide toward poverty. In these circumstances, Castillo opted for the policies of all his predecessors: in Washington, he reaffirmed his loyalty to transnational magnates, declaring, "We will give them peace of mind ", and praising "support for private enterprise ", while simultaneously submitting to Congress a "consensus" proposal that called for greater police powers and the establishment of a bicameral legislature.

 

Confronted from the outset with popular opposition to his obvious right-wing leanings, Castillo had to make some minor concessions to the working class and regional minorities in order to avoid alienating all sectors. This situation was exploited by the union and political bureaucracy of the pseudo-left to indulge in a cynical Castillism, which constituted a serious subjective and organizational obstacle for a mobilized segment of the masses that rejected the worst reactionary forces represented in Congress but failed to grasp the full reactionary dimension of the government. It took these leaders fifteen months to change course. They did voice some criticism of the executive branch, but they continued to defend it. The threat of a fascist coup served as a pretext to paralyze the workers' and people's movement and condemn it to repeated defeat at the hands of the bourgeoisie and transnational bosses. Luis Villanueva, general secretary of the FTCCP [the construction federation of the CGTP, the majority labor union] and of the so-called Peruvian "Communist " Party, agreed with Oscar Caipo, president of CONFIEP [the employers' organization], to maintain the deplorable situation of workers at CADE [the class collaboration organization]. The PCP and PC-Patria Roja leadership of the CGTP praised the imperialist Organization of American States and its pseudo-democratic charade, placing themselves at its service just as they had during the Fujimori dictatorship. This entire pro-capitalist caste within the movement of the exploited is the standard-bearer of the fallacious "participatory democracy " and the enemy of the proletarian class.

 

Roadblocks, mobilizations, and clashes are currently taking place in many regions against the far-right forces that dominate Congress, seeking to paralyze this organ of capitalist domination in order to force new general elections. But elections in this pseudo-democracy will never bring about the real and historic political defeat of the class enemy, and the workers do not yet have an organ to oppose the bourgeois parliament. This organ must be a People's National Assembly that represents all the oppressed and fights to seize power in the country. People's assemblies, struggle committees, and self-defense committees in every district and province are the means to build this power, without which there will be no present or future with justice and freedom. Let us organize ourselves into a revolutionary party and fight for a new workers' state!

 

An unlimited general strike to seize a government of the workers, peasants and the people!

 

December 12, 2022

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Peru: Re-organising, confronting the Regime and Defeating it!

By October 2025, the working peoples’ vanguard and youth of the country had become exasperated by the Fujimorist regime under Boluarte and her associates, and rose up in protests to bring down the bourgeois regime. Highly discredited by the acute crisis, Congress dismissed Boluarte and handed power to Jeri with the task of suppressing the masses and maintaining the same regime until the change of government on July 28, now under growing pressure of the terminal crisis and Trump’s regime attempts to counter China's inroads in the hemisphere, regaining control of Peru, shutting the backdoor of the Americas to its BRIC rivals. (ILTT) 

From Boluarte to Jerí, the regime that emerged from the Fujimorist coup celebrated its third anniversary by imposing a succession of puppets on the people and extending the state of emergency in the capital for 30 days, as a guarantee against any popular response to its project of widespread impoverishment.

The regime of corporate and political mafias rules a country that has been mired for decades in plunder, corruption, crime, toxic mining, drug trafficking, rampant deforestation, and now extortion and mercenary activities, all at its whim. What concrete responses does it offer to the worsening needs of the working masses? For example, the imminent decree for a " definitive restructuring " of the privatization of Petroperú, dismantled in the 1990s by the dictatorship of Fujimori Sr., the precursor to the current dictatorship. Petroperú was relentlessly sabotaged by the ruling class to justify its privatization. For example, by spending billions of soles on the purchase of vehicles and military equipment, such as aircraft and combat submarines—the latter under a contract with South Korea, a key player in the American imperialist order in Asia. This is something the upper class does not neglect in order to maintain its power-sharing relationship with the corrupt and murderous military establishment.

 

Trump himself sent a proposal to the US Congress to designate Peru as a non-NATO strategic ally, in accordance with agreements the United States has with Mexico, Colombia, Panama, and Chile on security and defense, trade, drug trafficking, and migration. Foreign Ministers Marco Rubio (United States) and Hugo de Zela (Peru) met in Washington earlier this month to declare a “convergence of regional security and defense priorities ” stemming from the new national security strategy approved by the US government. The following week, a US delegation of “security specialists” arrived in Lima with the mission of “advising” the government of Jerí and strengthening strategic cooperation.

 

In short, Trump and his fascist team secured the active support of the Peruvian state for their intense policy aimed at creating a scenario of world war between the Western (NATO) and Eastern (China-Russia) imperialist blocs. " Deepening economic and trade relations " and " promoting new investment opportunities in strategic sectors such as critical minerals and infrastructure " were logically part of this renewed bourgeois subservience, according to the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement, while 2,000 kilometers from its own shores, the US Coast Guard seized ships laden with Venezuelan oil and its air force had already murdered over a hundred ship crew members with the direct complicity of the puppet governments of the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and the imperialist Netherlands through its overseas provinces (Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire).

 

The bourgeoisie and its dominant far-right wing hope to easily boast of the constitutionality of their regime after the elections next April, having resorted to the shameless trick of restoring the bicameral system explicitly rejected in the 2018 referendum. At the same time, they will seek to re-establish a clear majority in Congress, which will continue to include a significant number of direct representatives of its various mafias. But that's not all. The bourgeoisie also still needs an institutional buffer for its reactionary plans, which the various leaderships of the popular trade union bureaucracies and the proletarian and petty-bourgeois political apparatuses provide with considerable opportunism. Immersed, as always, in the electoral carnival, the entire pseudo-liberal left vies with pathetic enjoyment for the attention of an oppressed people whom it has deserted for almost a century, this time under three different neo-liberal guises: neo-Ollantism, Castillism and progressivism.

 

The languishing vestiges of traditional Stalinism, represented in the mass movement by the CGTP's high bureaucracy, bear historical responsibility for the defeat of the uprising in the South and other Central and Northern provinces in 2023. They refused, as they have throughout their history of betrayal, to lead the working class and the exploited toward the overthrow of the existing regime and the establishment of a revolutionary proletarian power that would crush the murderous ruling class. The indifference or rejection they have repeatedly faced from the most conscious and combative sectors of the workforce is once again being expressed, including at the ballot box.

 

Down with the Fujimori dictatorship, lackey of imperialism.

Let us strengthen the mass movement to build genuine organs of class power.

Unitary struggle committees, popular assemblies, defense fronts, self-defense columns… towards a national people's assembly.

Let us forge the revolutionary party of the workers' vanguard.

Workers' and people's government!

 

December 30 2025

 

[Note: The ILTT does not use the term 'people' but rather 'workers' when referring to assemblies, or governments. For us, 'workers' is inclusive of all those who labor for a living, (e.g., domestic workers, the unemployed, peasants etc and, of course, those employed in wage labor.]

https://luchamarxista.blogspot.com/2022/12/

https://luchamarxista.blogspot.com/2025/12/

 

 

 

On the Current World Situation

 

The current world situation is pre-revolutionary. The bourgeoisie cannot govern through democracy and must resort to fascism, and the working class cannot live without world socialist revolution. How we will get there becomes the urgent question of reviving the revolutionary party and the program to end fascism and build socialism. We present our vision of how the conjuncture is caused by a terminal crisis, leading to wars and counter-revolutions, driven by rivalry between the two imperialist blocs for leadership in the distribution of the global economy. Next, we present our program for a new revolutionary international, the only alternative that can resolve the crisis of leadership, paving the way for socialist revolution and restoring the balance between nature and society.

Terminal crisis means that capitalism has reached the limits of its capacity to generate sufficient profits to accumulate capital. Concretely, this means a fall in labor productivity caused by an increase in organic composition (an increase in the capital/value ratio), where constant capital, which does not increase capital, surpasses variable capital, which increases value. Hence the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, the LTRPF. This law is uneven, affecting the most advanced capitals (USA and EU) before those that have recently emerged, such as China and Russia, where the cost/value (C/V) ratio has not yet drastically imposed the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). Therefore, competition between imperialist powers favors those that produce sufficient value to increase profits at the expense of those that can no longer produce sufficient value to prevent the fall in the rate of profit. 

The LTRPF expresses itself as the struggle for total value produced. The winners can increase profits by economically outperforming the losers. The losers (the US and the EU) are forced to resort to war, economically, politically, and militarily. This law has developed and intensified since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, when growing economic and political rivalry inevitably led the US to go to war against “radical Islam” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Furthermore, after 2008, the US began targeting its existential rivals, the emerging powers Russia and China.

The capitalist crisis leads to the destruction of productive forces worldwide and widespread attacks by bourgeois governments against workers. As a result, enormous migratory waves emerge across all continents, working conditions deteriorate, the environment is irreversibly destroyed, the bourgeois democratic regime is in crisis, and fascist groups emerge, attempting to channel mass dissatisfaction. We can see that the terminal crisis forces a zero-sum (potentially nuclear) military confrontation between the declining West and the rising East.

The pursuit of natural resources and commercial and technological monopolies is fueling a new neocolonial race to destroy and disintegrate entire peoples and territories. It is in this context that we understand the genocide in Palestine, the bombings against Venezuela, the wars in Africa sponsored by imperialist powers, the threats against Colombia, etc.

Faced with terminal crises and the destruction of the conditions for the existence of capital, the task falls to the proletariat (all those who need to work to survive, whether urban or rural, manual or intellectual, etc.), the only class with the potential to unite, organize, and defeat dying capitalism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie had already exhausted its historical mission of overthrowing the Ancient Regime when, in Europe in 1848, it joined forces with the remnants of the aristocracy to block the rise of the working class. Since then, the proletariat has been the only class capable of undertaking the historical task of eliminating both reactionary classes with a program of permanent revolution – completing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution as part of the proletarian revolution.

The Bolshevik Revolution was the ultimate test of permanent revolution to date, and yet its example did not lead to other proletarian revolutions. More critically, the failure of the German Revolution was a failure of revolutionary leadership in the absence of a Leninist party and program. This historical defeat was exploited by bourgeois reactionaries to pave the fascist path and destroy what remained of the revolution. We face wars and counter-revolutions in which the failure of revolutionary leadership has allowed the contradiction between nature and society to explode into eco-catastrophe and genocide, which can only end in socialism or barbarism.

Building a new international revolutionary party and program is an urgent task, but it cannot be done overnight without preparing the foundations for both. The party is the democratic organization of the most advanced workers, who debate the program for the revolution and then unite to put it to the test in practice. In the current pre-revolutionary conjuncture, in which there are small Marxist revolutionary groups (mainly, but not necessarily, Trotskyist), it is necessary to seek consensus on the fundamental principles of the program, raising demands that can be put into practice to test their effectiveness, for better or for worse.

What are these basic principles? First, who can join the party? Only the working class has the power to make the revolution. No other class is revolutionary, and the petty bourgeois who choose to join the revolution must prove their worth in practice. Party membership is based on agreement with the democratically defined program, which is then tested in the class struggle and corrected by the same process of democratic debate and majority vote. The method behind the program is transitional; it raises immediate demands to meet the elementary needs of survival, from jobs, wages, health and housing, to united fronts against fascism and wars that end with the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the creation of a socialist workers' state.

We have applied Lenin and Trotsky's program on the war against imperialism. In imperialist countries, the main enemy is at home; we call upon the workers to turn their weapons against the ruling class. In oppressed countries, we are building an international united front against imperialism to crush the Stalinist/Maoist popular front with imperialism. We are forming military blocs without offering political support to the bourgeoisies whose interests align with imperialism, against the socialist revolution. We are fighting to assume leadership in the war to defeat imperialism in both the East and the West and pave the way for national self-determination.

We follow Trotsky, who advocated accepting military aid from rival imperialisms, unless they are engaged in direct inter-imperialist war over oppressed countries, in  which case we apply revolutionary defeatism.

None of these demands for a permanent revolution can be met by capitalism in terminal crisis, while fascism seeks to destroy the proletariat. It labels workers as national enemies and starves, imprisons, and murders them. The fascist reaction has put workers' tactics to the test. For example, fascists cannot be defeated by votes or pacifist protests. Workers must be armed and organized to defeat state forces and their paramilitary groups. In this process, workers' demands will escalate, moving from basic defense to strikes, armed pickets, militias, and political strikes. Only when the fascists are defeated and the workers have power in the streets can the socialist goal of destroying the bourgeois state be achieved and replaced by a workers' government and a workers' state.

In this situation, we revolutionaries have an obligation to undertake efforts to build an Anti-Imperialist Front on a global level; to create international committees of struggle that can support the struggle of oppressed peoples against neocolonialism from a revolutionary and socialist perspective; to build a permanent support network for the struggle of the working class in an active internationalism; to conduct joint campaigns against the Imperialist War; and to create the conditions for overcoming the crisis of revolutionary leadership through concrete units in the class struggle.

• Revolutionary Workers Group - GTR
• Revolutionary Workers' Alliance - ART
• International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency - TLTI

The Tishreen Uprising and the Revolutionary Potential of Iraq's Working Class

 

Six Years On: Why Iraq's 2019 Youth Revolt Still Matters

In October 2019, Iraq's streets erupted. What began on October 1st in Baghdad as scattered protests against unemployment and corruption rapidly transformed into something unprecedented: a nationwide uprising that united students, unemployed graduates, street vendors, and young professionals under a single cry—"nureed watan," we want a homeland.

Six years later, the Tishreen uprising (the Arabic word for October) stands as a watershed moment in Iraqi history, the first serious challenge to the sectarian order imposed after the 2003 U.S. invasion. But it also reveals an uncomfortable truth: spontaneous courage alone cannot overthrow an entrenched system.

The Tishreenis: Iraq's Youth Take to the Streets

Within days of that first protest in Tahrir (Liberation) Square, the movement spread like wildfire. By October 3rd, thousands occupied streets and public squares in Nasiriyah, Basra, Amarah, and across the southern provinces. By mid-October, Baghdad itself was engulfed, with hundreds of thousands—including many from the capital's impoverished “Sadr City” -- rightly called Revolution City after the revolution of 1958—flooding into Tahrir Square and seizing control of bridges and central districts.

Social media amplified their demands: jobs, services, an end to corruption, national sovereignty. The protesters were overwhelmingly young—university graduates facing a collapsed economy, informal workers scraping by as day laborers and street vendors, students watching their education system decay, junior civil servants trapped in a web of nepotism.

What made Tishreen different was its composition. These weren't factional militias or religious movements. They were Iraq's precariat, bound together by shared class interests even if they didn't use that language: access to employment, functioning public services, dignity, political representation.

And remarkably for a country torn apart by sectarian violence, they were resolutely anti-sectarian. Their slogans rejected the Muhasasa system—the post-2003 framework that divides government positions and resources along ethno-religious lines, creating what activists describe as a license for wholesale theft of state coffers.

The uprising also shattered social conventions. Women participated in unprecedented numbers. Street theater, poetry, and art transformed protest camps into spaces of cultural expression and critique of conservative norms.

Any serious Marxist analysis of the 2019 Tishreen uprising must begin with the basic fact that Iraq never possessed, and does not possess today, a national bourgeoisie capable of carrying out even the most elementary tasks of democratic or economic development. Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution is not an abstract formula here — it is the only theoretical framework that actually explains Iraq’s modern trajectory.

From the dissolution of the Ba’athist state in 2003, Iraq’s bourgeois strata — fragmented, comprador, and organically dependent on foreign capital and regional patrons — proved utterly incapable of reconstructing the nation, let alone leading any project of industrialisation, democratic reform, or national independence. Instead of a national programme, Iraq inherited:

●   A parasitic bourgeois layer fused with the new political parties, living off state contracts, customs rents, and plundered oil revenues;

●  Islamist factions armed and financed by rival regional powers, reproducing the logic of sectarian patronage rather than national development;

●  NGO-linked liberal middle layers, politically timid, tied to Western donor networks, and structurally incapable of mobilising the masses;

●   an oil-dependent capitalist order completely subordinated to global markets and imperialist institutions.

In this landscape, the tasks of national reconstruction, democratic rights, social equality, and sovereignty cannot be completed by the bourgeoisie. They can only be carried out by the working class in alliance with the urban poor and rural labourers — precisely as Trotsky argued for countries of belated capitalist development.

This is why the post-2003 system stagnated into a grotesque hybrid: the muhasasa order — sectarian, corrupt, and utterly incapable of offering even basic services. It was not a deviation from bourgeois democracy; it was its logical outcome in a country where the bourgeoisie exists only as an appendage of imperialism.

By 2019, the system had exhausted whatever legitimacy it once claimed. The youth who rose up in October did not enter history as students of Marxism, but the class realities they confronted reflected Marxist truths with brutal clarity:

●   A state that cannot provide jobs.

●   Parties that cannot govern without militias.

●   A ruling class that cannot rule without plundering.

●   A society rich in oil yet poor in every human measure.

It was in this crucible that the Tishreen movement emerged — not as a mere protest wave, but as a profound explosion of accumulated contradictions.

Tishreen was not a socialist movement. It did not organise around a working-class programme. It was often confused, idealistic, and politically heterogeneous. But it represented something new and unmistakable: a mass rupture with the ruling class in its entirety — Shia Islamists, Kurdish oligarchs, Sunni elites, foreign patrons, and the entire post-2003 state-building project.

And because Iraq’s bourgeoisie is incapable of reform, this rupture could only move in one of two directions:

1. Revolutionary transformation, led by the working class — the path of permanent revolution;

2.   Repression and absorption, led by the ruling elites — the path Iraq’s existing parties desperately pursued.

The tragedy of 2019 is that the latter path prevailed, not because the movement was weak, but because the working class lacked a revolutionary party capable of giving the uprising a clear programme, strategy, and class direction.

The vacuum was filled by NGOs, liberals, and atomised youth — while the compromised forces of the official Iraqi Communist Party played a disgraceful role that deserves thorough exposure.

The stage was set for betrayal — not because Tishreen failed, but because Iraq’s left had already abandoned its historic responsibility.

The State Strikes Back

The response was brutal and coordinated. By late October, militias and security forces unleashed live ammunition, tear gas, and targeted assassinations against protesters. Snipers picked off demonstrators. Activists disappeared from their homes in the night.

By December 2019, estimates suggest over 600 protesters had been killed and thousands wounded nationwide. Major sit-ins, particularly in Baghdad's Tahrir Square, were violently dismantled by state forces and Islamist militias, though local protests continued into 2020.

The movement had no means to defend itself. Largely unorganized, decentralized, and unarmed, Tishreen could symbolically challenge the sectarian state but couldn't resist coordinated military repression. Without defensive structures or military organization, the uprising was systematically crushed.

The Roots of Revolt: Iraq's Failed State

To understand why Iraq's youth revolted requires understanding what the U.S. invasion left behind. The 2003 occupation didn't just topple Saddam Hussein's regime—it destroyed Iraq's state institutions entirely, replacing them with a sectarian patronage system that carved up ministries and resources along religious and ethnic lines.

Iraq's national bourgeoisie—the business and political class that might have rebuilt the country—proved utterly parasitic. Rather than consolidating capital for development, they enriched themselves through corruption, contracts, and foreign loans while infrastructure, industry, and services collapsed.

For young Iraqis, this translated into chronic unemployment despite oil wealth, decaying schools and hospitals, unreliable electricity and water, and a political system that excluded them entirely. Street mobilization became the only outlet for social frustration, the only way to be heard.

The violence by militias, the impunity of elites, the sheer dysfunction of government—all of it delegitimized the state in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, especially the young.
Bourgeois Development and Bourgeois Democracy requires:

●   a unified nation-state

●   independent civic institutions

●   rule of law

          ●   broad political rights

●   social stability

The Iraqi bourgeoisie cannot deliver these because:

●   Sectarian division is their survival mechanism.

●   Militias are their armed wing.

●   Foreign patrons preserve their power.

●   Corruption is their economic model.

●   Unemployment keeps the masses disorganized.

A democratic Iraq would end their rule.
Thus, they block democracy at every turn.

The theory of Permanent Revolution explains that in countries of delayed capitalist development:

Only the working class can carry out the tasks of the democratic revolution, and it can do so only by taking power itself.

This applies to Iraq with surgical precision.

The working class is:

●   the only class interested in ending sectarianism

●   the only class that suffers from the militia economy

●   the only class that needs a unified, sovereign state

●   the only class capable of running industry

●   the only class with a stake in national independence

●   the only class that gains nothing from corruption

Thus, even democratic demands—jobs, services, sovereignty, civil equality—point inexorably toward workers’ power.

There is no “bourgeois-democratic stage” that Iraq must pass through.
There is no national bourgeoisie willing or able to develop the country.
There is no clerical “progressive ally.”

The revolution can only be:

●   a revolution of the working class,

●   for working-class power,

● carrying out democratic and socialist tasks in a single uninterrupted process.

This is not a theoretical abstraction. It is the direct lesson of the Tishreen uprising. 

Baathists Circling: the Reactionaries tried to Hijack Tishreen

A spontaneous uprising attracts opportunists. Almost immediately, external and internal forces attempted to manipulate or redirect the movement for their own purposes.

The Gulf monarchies watched warily. While sympathetic to anything that might weaken Iranian influence in Iraq, they were careful not to meaningfully support a movement that might inspire their own populations to revolt. Their engagement remained superficial—media encouragement, some NGO involvement—enough to apply indirect pressure on Iran without empowering Iraqi workers.

More insidious was the infiltration by former Baathists. Despite the fall of Saddam's regime, Baathist networks retained organizational structures, clandestine cells, and financial resources. Their goal wasn't to empower Tishreen but to destabilize the post-2003 order and pave the way for nationalist-authoritarian restoration.

They worked to penetrate local councils, student groups, and online organizing spaces, pushing anti-Iranian, technocratic, and nationalist narratives. While ultimately unsuccessful, their presence revealed the dangerous vacuum created by the absence of genuine revolutionary leadership. Even now, Baathist organizational and propaganda resources dwarf those of the Iraqi left. And that deserves some study.

The Left's Betrayal

The leadership vacuum within Tishreen should have been filled by Iraq's traditional left, particularly the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). Instead, Tishreen exposed the ICP's complete bankruptcy.

Once an anti-imperialist force, the ICP had degenerated into a collaborator with sectarian elites. In 2003 it largely stood aside when the US invaded, looking for a space for it to play the loyal opposition within a bourgeois state, akin to the UK Labour Party and other similar parties of the Second International. Since then, they haven't improved much. Its tactical alliance with Muqtada al-Sadr was another disaster, and tied it to the very corrupt structures Tishreen opposed. The Sadrists alternated between encouraging Tishreen and shooting them – sometimes within the same  24 hours. The Iraqi Communist Party’s capitulation to Sadr and its reformist paralysis flowed directly from its rejection of Permanent Revolution:

●   It believes in a two-stage strategy: first “democracy,” then “socialism.”

●   It treats clerical petty-bourgeois forces as “national allies.”

●   It views parliamentary blocs as the engines of change.

●   It waits for a bourgeois-democratic opening that will never come.

This Menshevik framework ensured that the ICP stood politically disarmed before the greatest mass uprising in Iraq in decades.

While youth shed blood demanding the fall of the sectarian order, the ICP pleaded for reforms. While militias assassinated activists, the ICP maintained alliance with a cleric whose followers suppressed sit-ins. While the masses demanded a new Iraq, the ICP defended the logic of the old one.

Their collapse is not accidental.
It is the inevitable result of abandoning the Permanent Revolution.

 

The Flaw: No Revolutionary Leadership, no Program

"Nureed watan"—we want a homeland. The slogan captured the movement's moral power and its fundamental limitation. Tishreen expressed popular frustration brilliantly but avoided class politics entirely. Nureed Watan  is a cry for bourgeois development and bourgeois rights. We have seen why the bourgeoisie is incapable of delivering either.

The uprising embodied civic nationalism and spontaneous democracy—morally powerful but politically insufficient. Protesters distrusted political organizations, placed hope in technocrats and NGOs, and looked to the United Nations for salvation. These illusions, while understandable given Iraq's history, limited the movement's capacity to translate street energy into systemic change.

The question that haunts Iraqi activists: could Tishreen have won?

The answer is uncomfortable. Without organization, without a program linking immediate demands to long-term transformation, without means of self-defense, spontaneity alone could never overcome a state willing to kill hundreds to maintain power. Mass protests can challenge legitimacy; they cannot, by themselves, dismantle oppressive structures.

The tragedy—and promise—of the 2019 uprising is that its democratic demands collide directly with Iraq’s class structure:

●   Ending corruption → requires expropriating the corrupt class

●   Ending sectarianism → requires destroying the sectarian bourgeoisie

●   Ending militia rule → requires dismantling militia capitalism

●   True sovereignty → requires breaking with U.S., Iranian, Gulf, and Turkish domination

●   Jobs and services → require socialist planning of oil revenues

●   A “homeland” → requires workers’ power

There is no democratic future within the existing order.
And there is no bourgeoisie capable of creating a new one.

This is the central truth that the Permanent Revolution brings into focus, and it is the foundation for any revolutionary strategy in Iraq.

 

What Could Have Been: A Transitional Program for Iraq

This is where revolutionary theory meets practical necessity. A transitional program would have provided a roadmap for turning Tishreen's energy into lasting transformation—a bridge between immediate demands and fundamental change.

Popular committees and dual power: Establish local councils of workers, youth, and community representatives to manage services, coordinate protests, and defend communities. Begin constructing dual power—alternative structures of authority that could eventually replace the sectarian state.

Disband militias; workers' self-defense: Demobilize sectarian militias and replace them with independent self-defense units accountable to popular committees, protecting the movement from state violence.

Expropriation of oil and natural resources: Nationalize oil, gas, and strategic industries, placing them under workers' control to ensure wealth benefits society rather than foreign corporations or domestic kleptocrats.

Reconstruction corps and full employment: Create state-run projects to rebuild infrastructure and services, employing the unemployed with guaranteed living wages under workers' oversight.

Nationalize banks and monopolies: Seize financial institutions and large corporations concentrated in post-2003 elite hands, preventing their use as tools for corruption or foreign domination.

Accountability and justice: Establish investigative tribunals to track and recover stolen public wealth since 2003, bringing former politicians and collaborators to transparent public accountability, reclaiming funds for reconstruction.

Abolish the sectarian constitution: Replace the Muhasasa system with a democratic, secular framework through a revolutionary constituent assembly that drafts a workers' and peoples' constitution.

Democratic rights and secularism: Guarantee freedom of assembly, speech, press, and women's rights while dismantling religious interference in government.

Working-class unity and Kurdish self-determination: Build solidarity across sectarian and ethnic divisions while supporting democratic rights and local self-determination in Kurdistan under a federal socialist framework.

Break with imperialism: End foreign influence over Iraq's economy, security, and politics, joining with other oppressed nations in voluntary socialist federations based on equality and anti-imperialism.

Build a revolutionary working-class party: Organize the working class politically to lead all progressive demands, guard against infiltration and co-optation, and provide the class-conscious leadership necessary for lasting transformation.

Why Only a Workers' Party Can Complete the Revolution

Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution provides the framework for understanding why organization is essential. In countries like Iraq, where the national bourgeoisie cannot or will not lead development, democratic tasks and socialist transformation become inseparable.

Iraq's post-2003 bourgeoisie has proven utterly incapable of meaningful reform, let alone defending majority rights. Any attempt to rely on this class for democracy or economic development is doomed from the start.

Tishreen demonstrated courage, creativity, and anti-sectarian sentiment, but it lacked a class program. Spontaneous uprisings cannot expropriate wealth, dismantle militias, or establish popular councils without organization. Without leadership, movements remain vulnerable to infiltration by Baathists, Islamists, NGOs, or foreign powers.

A revolutionary party acts as the conscious organizer of the working class, linking local struggles to national strategy. It transforms immediate demands—jobs, services, justice, secular rights—into a program capable of dismantling the sectarian state and building workers' power. It ensures that expropriated wealth flows to social programs and reconstruction rather than factional or personal enrichment.

Iraq's political landscape is littered with parties that abandoned revolutionary principles for alliances with sectarian elites. Only a class-based, independent party can prevent a repeat of the ICP's betrayal and the moral bankruptcy of opportunist forces.

The Tishreenis' fight isn't merely for reforms. It's a struggle against a state incapable of national development and a society divided by sectarianism. Permanent revolution requires the working class to simultaneously fight for democratic, anti-sectarian rights and socialist transformation, connecting immediate demands to long-term structural change.

From Spontaneity to Revolution

Six years after Tishreen, Iraq remains trapped. The sectarian system persists. Youth unemployment remains catastrophic. Services barely function. The same elites who ordered the killing of protesters still hold power.

But Tishreen proved something crucial: Iraq's youth and workers can challenge the ruling elite. They can overcome sectarian divisions. They can envision a different future.

What they lacked—what they still lack—is organization. The movement cannot achieve systemic change without a party capable of turning a spontaneous revolt into a structured, nationwide struggle for workers' power in a workers’ and poor farmers’ Government!

Only through organization, program, and class-conscious leadership can Iraq's working class complete the revolution that Tishreen began. Only then can they establish the justice, equality, and truly democratic Iraq that hundreds died demanding in the streets of Baghdad, Basra, and Nasiriyah.

The question isn't whether Iraq needs a revolution. Tishreen already answered that. The question is whether Iraq's workers and youth will build the organization necessary to win it.

Comrade Zaid

November 23, 2025