Is the path shining or not?

 Today I am reviewing a book I read a few months ago, "The Shining Path: Love, Madness and Revolution in the Andes" by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna. The book covers the infamous Peruvian Maoist group "The Shining Path," which was active in the second half of the 20th century. The group was led by Abimael Guzman, who has been referred to as the "fourth helmsman of Marxism" -- the other three being Lenin, Stalin and Mao. 

I was interested in this book following the interest I have developed in Latin American Marxism. While I was an undergraduate student at Yale, I was floored by the inequality that existed within the city of New Haven, where Yale's opulent dining halls sat one or two blocks away from neighborhoods that were deep in the depths of poverty. The dining halls always had more food than any person could possibly eat, but elsewhere in New Haven I would come across individuals digging through garbage cans looking for food or clothes. The Marxist tradition spoke most clearly to the inequalities I witnessed in New Haven in those years, and this led me to be interested in figures such as Marx, Lenin, as well as movements in Latin America that have taken up the mantle of Marxism. While I lived briefly in Santa Fe, NM, I read Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara, which I found very interesting (actually, I was inspired to read that book after listening to Noah Kulwin and Brendan James' podcast Blowback, which has an excellent season covering the Cuban revolution and the U.S. intent to stymie it). 

Anyway, reading this book was part of my continued interest in Latin American Marxism. From Che Guevara to Salvador Allende, Latin America has a very rich Marxist tradition, generally far surpassing what the Berniecrats and AOC-stans have managed to muster here in the U.S. 

Overall, I found this book super fascinating and captivating, even though the authors have a very obvious anti-Marxist bias that was a little frustrating at times. One of the most interesting scenes in the book features the Sendero Luminoso, headed by Guzman, deciding to bomb voting sites throughout Peru. Lenin (someplace, somewhere) coined the term "bourgeois democracy" to describe the super-flimsy democratic structures that exist throughout the capitalist West. Yes, there are elections every few years, and voters do have a certain amount of say in those outcomes, but the system is 98% controlled by capitalist forces. This has been borne out very recently in the U.S., where rampant collusion and corruption kept Bernie Sanders from obtaining the democratic party nomination in 2016, or more recently, where the Democrats decided there would be no primary process to determine Joe Biden's successor. Candidates such as Marianne Williamson are offered no opportunity to debate the Democrats' hand-chosen sucessor, K*mala, and Green Party challengers face enormous legal and financial barriers to getting onto the ballot. (And then, after every single play in the book is utilized to keep alternative candidates from having a real shot of participating in a primary, candidates such as Jill Stein are accused of playing a spoiler role and risking handing the election to Trump, as if they were even given a shot of challenging the Democrats within the system).

Anyway, Lenin's characterization of "bourgois democracy" seems as apt now as ever. But in terms of actually bombing voting sites? Well, it's an interesting decision for sure. I guess if their revolution had succeeded maybe it would be another thing. Generally, the Sendero Luminoso is looked upon my many as a very unpopular that is blamed for the death of many Peruvians. Guzman is also somewhat notorious for allegedly playing a cult-hero role, not bothering to have anything in the way of democratic processes within his own group, and for being extremely violent. Probably this book and history is an example of how not to organize as Marxists, but this book is written with a very anti-Marxist bent, and that might be skewing my own judgement. 

I think both authors of this book are professors at Duke, and their association with Western academia definitely shows. They seem to be very much students of Francis Fukuyama, who predicted the infamous "end of history" coinciding with the fall of the Berlin wall, after which everyone would "supposedly" learn to live in peace and put all this sectarian, religious-based, ethnic, Marxist hate behind them. I would invite Fukuyama, or any of his followers, to visit the Gaza strip, a homeless encampment, or workers out on a picket line, and see if this rosy end of history has in fact arrived. From my perspective, the capitalist mode of plundering the non-white world for resources to turn into profit for the capitalists is very much alive and well.

But, despite the authors' irritating Fukuyamist bent, the book is still a captivating read and a very valuable inventory of the historical period that they study. I think my takeaway at the end of this book is: if you're going to bomb voting sites, at least win the goddam revolution (the sendero very much did not). And also, if you are going to be one man, calling all the shots yourself, and very casual about civilian loss of life, once again, at least win the goddam revolution.