Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 15:29:03 -0500
From: Charlotte Kates <ckates-AT-mosquito.com>
Subject: Re: Understanding Nicaragua


On Mon, 4 Mar 1996, Hugh Rodwell wrote:

> 
> But Louis, the NEP was a tactical retreat on the basis of a non-capitalist
> society, a workers' state, a dictatorship of the proletariat. The
> Sandinistas were retreating before they'd even won any ground, as far as
> the real capitalist-socialist struggle for territory is concerned. They
> refused to take social and economic power as a matter of strategy and were
> backed in this by Cuba and the Soviet Union. It was a strategy for defeat -
> in spite of the power of the mobilized Nicaraguan people - and it duly led
> to defeat.
        
        I would disagree here. The Sandinistas were really a sort of popular
front revolutionary government, kind of like Spain in the Thirties, more
like Bulgaria in 1944-46 or so. However, they were taking the socialist road
of development, and rejecting the capitalist form. Perhaps they moved too
slowly, perhaps they made too many concessions. Hindsight, however, is
always 20/20, and the Sandinistas were real revolutionaries and real
socialists. It is also always important to remember that they were
constantly under imperialist attack. 
 
       In regard to Cuba and the Soviet Union, Cuba, in fact, encouraged the
FSLN to take a socialist line of development, to reject concessions and to
reject the 1990 elections. On the other hand, the USSR's record was more
mixed, especially following 1987. While when the USSR was led by Brezhnev,
Andropov and Chernenko, a militantly anticapitalist line was encouraged.
However, as Gorbachev's "universal human values" and non-class ideology, as
well as his weak support for national liberation movements and his penchant
for originally market socialism and later all-outr capitalism became the
Soviet line, the USSR's record in Nicaragua declined. The USSR, which, by
that time, had become a junior partner to imperialism, supported the 1990
elections and a bourgeois notion of non-class "democracy." (What a change a
few short years can make!) 
               
        Overall, i believe the Sandinistas' record was very positive and
that the FSLN should be supported by the left. That kind of solidarity,
quite in evidence in the 80's, can make a difference in one's own country's
policy. If the FSLN was not constantly under a major imperialist threat,
they would have been much freer to build a fully socialist society. Charlotte 
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