Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 09:09:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Understanding Nicaragua


On Sat, 2 Mar 1996, Hugh Rodwell wrote:

> 
> 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.
> 

Louis:

These are empty abstractions. Nicaragua had the most sweeping land reform 
in Latin American since the Cuban revolution. This very land reform led to 
tensions that boiled up and sparked a contra war, leaving aside outside 
interference from imperialism. Nicaragua had the same kind of contradictions 
between city and countryside that afflicted the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
So to call for an even more sweeping agricultural expropriation is not 
the answer. Nicaragua was not like Spain in the 1930s, when a Popular 
Front government blocked land reform. This is the implication of 
Rodwell's attack on the Sandinistas and it is a slander.

The Sandinista government made subsidized food available to the 
working-class in the city, while the campesinos had to contend with price 
controls. In addition, access to manufactured goods became difficult 
because of the US embargo and wartime disruption to Nicaraguan industry, 
such as it was.

This is the agricultural side of the equation. What about industry? Go 
visit Managua and you get a picture of the possibilites for 
nationalization, 5-year plans, etc. This city, the country's largest, had
no factory employing more than 100 people or so. The downtown had been 
leveled by earthquake and never rebuilt. Donkeys and goats wandered the 
streets.

There is only one building with an elevator, the Intercontinental Hotel, 
where Howard Hughes used to dwell.

There is no heavy industry in Nicaragua. Period. The working-class is not 
a powerful sector of Nicaraguan society, such as it was in Cuba or 
Russia. The people who joined the Sandinista cause were typical of 
Nicaragua: shopkeepers, vendors, peddlers, shoe-shine boys, etc.

These are the objective facts of Nicaraguan society.

Nicaragua was like a number of countries that won their emancipation in 
the 1970s. These countries did not fit into the paradigm of Russia, but 
had their own characteristics. Grenada, Burkina-Faso, Angola and 
Mozambique had revolutions but did not lend themselves easily to a model 
based on the revolution of 1917.

The best way to understand Nicaragua is not in terms of socialist 
revolution, but as an example of radical reform that was feasible for a 
country with its particular socio-economic makeup. The Sandinistas 
effected a series of major reforms involving land-reform, literacy, 
health-care, nutrition, democratic rights, etc. that have been the goal 
of many regimes over the last 50 years. This were the same type of goals 
that Arbenz had in Guatemala.

The difference between Guatemala and Nicaragua is that the Sandinistas 
smashed the old army and police force and replaced it with men and women 
who favored radical reform. Instead of repressing peasants and 
high-schools, they defended them.

The Nicaraguan revolution was stopped in its tracks because of US 
imperialist intervention, not Sandinista "class-collaboration". This 
country whose GNP is less than what the US spends on blue-jeans each year 
was attacked from the north and the south by contra armies backed by the 
most powerful capitalist country in the history of the world.

In addition, their main benefactor, the Soviet Union, turned its back on 
them shortly after Gorbachev took power. High officials from the US and 
the Soviet Union met and worked out the terms of Soviet abandonment of 
the Sandinista cause. When this happened, the Nicaraguan revolution was 
doomed.

No amount of advice from the likes of Hugh Rodwell, who has never led 
anything in his life, would have changed all this. It is entirely 
possible that the era of revolutions in small, weak, agricultural 
countries like Nicaragua is over since the collapse of the USSR. All that 
we can do at this point is come away with the positive lessons of 
Nicaragua. The main positive lesson is that a revolutionary movement must 
grown out of the experiences and traditions of a given country's history. 
"Sandinismo" suggests a political vocabulary that is rooted in the 
Nicaraguan culture.

The problem with Trotskyism is that it simply does not know how to do 
this. It mechanically applies doctrines that are based on the Soviet 
model and relates to mass movements in a sterile, propagandistic manner. 
Most people who have become socialists in recent years have abandoned 
this model. The fact that some people on this list retain an attachment 
to this model simply indicates that the Soviet revolution continues to 
inspire people. However, believing in the Soviet model and believing in 
"Trotskyism" are contradictory. To win revolutions on the Soviet model 
requires, first and foremost, that we dump the undialectical 
understanding of what Lenin and the Bolsheviks accomplished. Hugh Rodwell 
should go back and read Lenin's writings from the period leading up to 
the formation of the Bolshevik current. If he did, he would either come 
to the conclusion that Lenin was all wrong or that he is in the wrong 
organization. In any case, the two things are mutually exclusive.




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