ABSTRACT
The national bourgeoisie took state power in Peru in 1968 to carry out a project in which the country would be transformed into a fully capitalist society and the national bourgeoisie would play the leading role in accumulation. The bourgeois project required the defeat of the traditional ruling classes in Peru and a significant weakening of foreign capital's control over the productive system. The national bourgeoisie sought to achieve more than merely the capitalist development of Peru; it sought a capitalist Peru dominated by national capital, not foreign capital. The alternative, for the bourgeoisie to have fostered a "more optimal use of resources," would have meant surrender to the domination of foreign capital from the outset without a struggle for hegemony or even partnership. In effect, the national bourgeoisie sought to restructure the Peruvian economy, a restructuing which would have shifted the motor of the accumulation process from the external market to the internal market.
