Date: Sat, 2 Mar 1996 18:51:35 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Nicaragua, socialism vs nationalism


Louis P gets the wrong end of the stick entirely when he claims that MAS
was a 'Nicaraguan left group that wanted to oust the Sandinistas'.

The MAS I was referring to, and I assumed too much familiarity with Latin
American politics here by not specifying further, is the Argentine party.
The Nicaraguan party affiliating to the international tendency within which
the MAS was the biggest party, was indeed interested in ousting the
Sandinistas from power - as any Marxist socialist party would be that
didn't think a petty-bourgeois nationalist leadership such as the FSLN
capable of leading a revolution in a semi-colonial country to victory. The
process leading to a revolutionary socialist leadership in place of the
Sandinistas would not involve coups or putsches but organization,
explanation and better leadership of the struggles the people of Nicaragua
were involved in. The FSLN, however, were more interested in maintaining
their own grip on power and hobnobbing with the 'national bourgeoisie' than
mobilizing the people in Nicaragua and Central America against imperialism.


The defeat in Nicaragua was an expensive lesson in the inadequacy of
nationalist, class-collaborationist politics in semi-colonial countries.
For those who claim more revolutionary approaches would have been
adventurism, I would remind them that in spite of strategically hopeless
leadership, and in spite of apparently overwhelming odds against them (such
as US military might), the Nicaraguan revolution remained in the balance
for a decade or so. This indicates the power of a people in revolution to
shape their own lives in the teeth of imperialist opposition and in the
teeth of demobilizing 'support' from the likes of the Castro regime (not to
be confused with the Cuban workers' state).

The defeat in Nicaragua was also yet another vindication of the necessity
of the strategy of Permanent Revolution if semi-colonial countries are to
create the political conditions for forming a state capable of defending
even basic popular democratic conquests from imperialist attack. In other
words, expropriation of the means of production (agriculture and other) and
a regime of socialist democracy in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Only
a socialist revolution will be capable of carrying out the tasks of the
democratic revolution.

This is a brief statement of position. More detailed arguments some other time.

Cheers,

Hugh

PS You could have checked the MAS reference before accusing Carlos and
myself of 'arrogance', couldn't you? But the accusation was too good to be
passed up, wasn't it?







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