The primary purpose of the following theses is to clarify (1) the class character of the Nicaraguan government today, and (2) why the Nicaraguan revolution and the evolution of the Sandinista National liberation Front are central to our strategic task of building the world party of socialist revolution necessary to lead the toilers in the overthrow of world capitalism.
These theses are in agreement with the campaign for Nicaragua aid work adopted by the 1979 world congress of the Fourth International as part of the tasks report on the World Political Resolution
* * *
1. Between late May and July 19, 1979, deepgoing popular insurrections in the main cities of Nicaragua—prepared by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and coordinated with an FSLN military offensive—toppled the United States-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. The victory was the culmination of two months of general strikes and armed uprisings in the cities by the workers, semi-proletarian masses, youth, and sectors of the petty bourgeoisie; land occupations and other mobilizations by the poor peasants and agricultural laborers in the rural districts; and stepped-up guerrilla operations and a concerted military drive by the FSLN.
These were the motor forces of the climactic stage in the struggle against the dictatorship and U.S. imperialism. They gave the revolution a powerful anticapitalist impulse.
The final year of the revolutionary struggle was marked by widespread organization of the masses in neighborhood committees and self-defense units, as weU as by increased organization in workplaces and the countryside. This occurred both on the initiative of the FSLN and spontaneously in response to the worsening living conditions and brutal repression under Somoza. In addition, as the final struggle gathered momentum the ranks of the FSLN's military units were swelled by thousands of young workers, poor peasants, students, the unemployed, and radicalized petty-bourgeois forces. This included many Latin Americans from other countries who joined the fight against Somozaism and Yankee imperialism.
As one city after another was liberated from Somoza's National Guard under the combined blows of FSLN units and popular insurrections, Civil Defense Committees (CDC) and militias organized military defense and took over such vital tasks in the neighborhoods as food distribution, health care, sanitation, and the dispensation of justice to Somozaist torturers. Sandinista Workers Defense Committees (CDTS) arose in some factories and workplaces, the nuclei of what was to become the Sandinista Workers Federation (CST). Other mass organizations—the women's group AMPRONAC (later to become the Association of Nicaraguan Women), the Rural Workers Association (ATC), the July 19 Sandinista Youth, the teachers union (ANDEN)—also got their start in the period before and during the insurrection.
Alongside this intervention of the toiling masses and development of proletarian forms of organization, the bourgeois forces opposed to Somoza underwent a process of disintegration. Most desperately sought a compromise with the dictatorship while some belatedly threw in their lot with the insurrection. This sharp shift in the relationship of class forces is a key factor in explaining the dynamics of the socialist revolution now unfolding in Nicaragua.
2. Following Somoza's flight on July 17, the disintegration of the National Guard accelerated. His stand-in Francisco Urcuyo had promised to transfer power to a five-person junta of the Government of National Reconstruction (GRN). This was supposed to pave the way for the integration of some National Guard units into the new army and the appointment of a bourgeois-dominated Council of State. The formation of this junta and its responsibilities had been announced July 9 in Costa Rica as part of the post-Somoza governmental program agreed to by the FSLN and some of the bourgeois opposition forces.
With United States support, however, Urcuyo attempted to hold on to state power, and demanded the FSLN lay down its arms. This provoked the final FSLN push on Managua and a popular mass uprising there in which Somoza's "bunker" was captured and tens of thousands of weapons were seized and distributed. The GRN program had stated that the new army would incorporate "soldiers and officers who demonstrated honest and patriotic conduct" and were not guilty of "corruption, repression, [and] crimes against the people." But the section of Somoza's National Guard that did not escape to Honduras scattered under the impact of the mass insurrection.
The revolutionary triumph over Somocismo was thus a sweeping one, in which large sections of the previous state apparatus—in particular the entire repressive apparatus—were dismantled and replaced, resolving the situation of dual power that had developed in Nicaragua in the final weeks prior to Somoza's fall. As a result, the effort to establish a well-trained professional Sandinista army is being entirely built around a cadre of FSLN guerrillas and militia fighters.
The triumph in Managua, following that in other main cities, achieved with organized mass participation and by revolutionary means, established both the FSLN's leadership authority among the masses and its decisive political decision making power. The contrast during the drive to victory between the courage and dedication of the Sandinistas and the hesitations and maneuvers of the bourgeois opposition did not go unnoticed in the working-class neighborhoods or in the countryside. It had a profound impact on the consciousness of FSLN militants and leaders, and on the political course they have followed.
3. It soon became obvious that the new governing power—the way in which important decisions of state were actually being made and implemented—was qualitatively different from the bourgeois coalition government projected in the July 9 GRN program and the Fundamental Statute decreed July 20.
The five-person junta that replaced Somoza took the form of a coalition of three FSLN leaders with two figures from the bourgeois opposition. This is also the form taken by the junta's cabinet of ministries: several are headed by FSLN leaders (e.g., Interior, Agrarian Reform, and Social Welfare), while others—including the Central Bank—are headed by bourgeois figures, often with FSLN vice-ministers.
But this is not the totality of the actual government. In fact, the key elements of the new state structure fall outside the framework promised in the July 9 program of the GRN.
The government itself includes the FSLN leadership, the Sandinista armed forces, as well as INRA (Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform) and to some extent the mass organizations led by the FSLN.
The GRN program stipulated the appointment of a Council of State. This body was to "share legislative powers" with the junta, draw up drafts of a new constitution and electoral law, appoint the judiciary, and have the power to veto, with a two-thirds vote, decisions taken by the junta.
By agreement prior to the Managua insurrection, the Council of State was to be composed of thirty-three representatives from the bourgeois opposition parties, the chambers of commerce and industry and other capitalist organs, the Catholic Church hierarchy, the FSLN, trade unions, and other groups. Its proposed composition guaranteed bourgeois domination. For its part the FSLN was to have had somewhere in the range of six members. The Nicaraguan capitalists and imperialism counted on the council to serve as a brake on the social and economic measures instituted following Somoza's downfall and to be the institution that exercises sovereignty. It was to draft a bourgeois constitution according to which a bourgeois judicial system, headed by a Supreme Court, would block "unconstitutional" inroads on property and other "normal" bourgeois prerogatives.
In the first weeks following July 19, it was widely assumed that the Council of State would be rapidly installed. A tentative convocation date of September 15 was even announced. But that date came and went, and amid growing agitation by bourgeois forces for the convocation of the Council of State, the junta announced October 22 that convocation of the council was being postponed until May 4, 1980. In the intervening months it was to be "re structured" to provide representation above all to the new mass organizations—the CDSs, CST, ATC, women's association, Sandinista youth, etc. These organizations, with FSLN backing, have launched a campaign demanding the Council of State be a council of toilers dominated by CDS representation and that of other mass organizations.
The postponement and proposed restructuring of the Council of State represents one of the major results on the governmental level so far of the dramatic shift in the relationship of class forces as the revolutionary process has deepened in Nicaragua.
Nothing has been done to begin drafting a bourgeois constitution to provide legitimacy to capitalist rule. Instead, in late August the junta decreed a "Statute on the Rights of Nicaraguans" that not only guarantees basic political freedoms such as speech, press, and assembly, but also women's equality and the priority of the social and economic rights of the toilers over the property and prerogatives of the capitalists.
Furthermore, the entire judicial system was purged, and while a Supreme Court has been appointed, as described in the GRN program, its functions are limited to matters such as divorce cases.
In addition, some important ministries headed by bourgeois figures have no fundamental decision-making authority. The most striking example of this is the Ministry of Defense, nominally headed by ex-National Guard Col. Bernard ino Larios (who led a coup attempt against Somoza in 1978 and later fled to Panama). Larios has no authority whatsoever over the Sandinista People's Army (ESP), which is firmly under the command of the Sandinista Front. The commander-in-chief of the army, FSLN leader Humberto Ortega, was named not by Larios or by the GRN junta, but rather by the FSLN Joint National Directorate. (The decision was later ratified by the junta.) The Sandinista police, constructed from the bottom up out of young Sandinista fighters, fall under the Department of Interior, headed by FSLN Comandante Tomás Borge. Almost immediately after July 19, Minister of Defense Larios was sent on an extended journey to Europe and North Africa to seek aid. As of November 1 he had issued no statements, held no news conferences, and had not even appeared once at a public event.
The minister of agricultural development, a landowner, is in a position similar to that of Larios. Major decisions and statements on agricultural policy are ail made and implemented by the Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), which has branches in every province of the country and is headed by FSLN Comandante Jaime Wheelock. Modeled after Cuba's INRA, this agency was not mentioned in the GRN's July 9 program or the Fundamental Statute. Wheelock was named agrarian reform minister immediately after July 19, displacing "Group of 12" member Ricardo Coronel Kautz.
The FSLN's National Directorate functions as a source and wielder of governing power outside the terms of the GRN accord. This was politically codified on September 1, 1979, when, during a military parade and rally to spur construction of the EPS, the nine members of the National Directorate were proclaimed "Comandantes de la Revolución," that is, of the entire process and not simply of the army or the formal government. During this initial stage of the revolution, it is the Comandantes of the Revolution—not the bourgeoisie operating through the Council of State as they had planned—who have played the decisive role governing together with the Sandinista-dominated junta.
The rising importance of new mass organizations and especially of the CDSs (none of which were contemplated in the GRN program) is among the most outstanding of the post liberation developments. It is on the expansion and consolidation of the CDSs, the unions of workers and peasants, the other mass organizations, and the Sandinista Army, that the authority of the FSLN is largely based. To varying degrees, all of these are already taking on decision-making and administrative functions at the workplace, farm, neighborhood, and muncipal levels. Province-wide and national coordination of the CDS structure is projected and is already under way.
So the government that was consolidated soon after Somoza's fall is not that projected by the GRN program.
4. The accumulation of progressive social and economic measures in the first months of the revolution demonstrates that the Nicaraguan toilers, under FSLN leadership, have set off down a promising road oriented toward expropriation of the bourgeoisie:
• The new government immediately nationalized the entire Somoza and Somozaist assets in agriculture, real estate, banking, industry, commerce, transport, fishing fleets, shipyard and port equipment, and communications media property.
• It nationalized all domestic banking and imposed strict controls on foreign banks. This is a necessary first step toward channeling resources, directing them to expanding such needs as education, housing, and hospitals, and initiating measures of economic planning.
• It launched an extensive agrarian reform on Somozaist land, bringing under state control some 60 percent of the big landholdings currently under cultivation. In collaboration with the ATC, INRA is transforming these haciendas into state farms on which the agricultural laborers will participate in administrative tasks. Peasant cooperatives are being encouraged on the smaller nationalized holdings, and some land redistribution has taken place in response to the demands of peasants with tiny plots. Debt foreclosure on the farms of small proprietors has been abolished.
• The government took control over all export trade of agricultural cash commodities such as cotton, coffee, sugar, beef, and fish. A state monopoly (ENABAS) has been established for the purchase and sale of all grains and agrichemical products. Similar state monopolies have been set up for the purchase and sale of all other major crops (coffee, cotton, sugar, etc.).
• While pledging to renegotiate and honor Nicaragua's legitimate foreign debt, the government immediately cancelled Somoza's arms debts to the Israeli and Argentine governments. It then announced it would study carefully all other debts contracted by the dictatorship to determine which ones were illegitmate—that is, had been arranged through corrupt dealings or had simply wound up in private Somocista bank accounts abroad. Meanwhile, given the virtually empty treasury left by Somoza, the new government has declared a de facto moratorium on interest and repayment.
• It nationalized the essential means of land, sea, and air transport. The television system and several of the radio networks have been expropriated and are being used by the FSLN to present its views to the population. The Sandinista daily Barricada is produced in the plant that previously printed the Somozaist newspaper, Novedades.
• It launched programs to reorganize and upgrade education, health care, social security, and other social services.
• The government issued a radical currency reform measure that—under the slogan "Let's take back from Somocismo the money that belongs to the people"—stopped Somozaists or other businessmen abroad from ex changing their cordobas for dollars held inside Nicaragua. All 500 and 1000 cordoba notes were withdrawn and investigations were begun into many large holdings. This measure helped slow the devaluation of the cordoba, and combat capitalist economic sabotage. Deposits under 3,000 cordobas were returned within a few days of the measure; at the end of October, following registration of the bank notes, the government began redeem ing the certificates of deposit issued to hold ers of the notes inside Nicaragua.
• It has adopted an outspoken anti-imperialist stance on vital world political questions such as Indochina, the Mid east, southern Africa, and Carter's war moves against Cuba, the Caribbean, and Central America. The outpouring of more than 30,000 in Managua to greet Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong, one of the largest mass demonstrations since the revolutionary victory, was a big blow to the imperialist campaign to isolate Vietnam as an international pariah. U.S. imperialism was condemned for its aggression during the "Soviet brigade" crisis.
Following the October military coup in El Salvador, Moscow was quick to approve the new Washington-backed regime, sign all ing to the imperialists its willingness to help preserve capitalist stability in the area. The Nicaragua government, along with the Cuban, refused to do so.
• The new government has continued its efforts to construct a centralized professional army to defend the revolutionary conquests against imperialism, the Somozaist forces and other class enemies both inside Nicaragua and beyond its borders.
• Having integrated most of the militia fighters into the EPS and Sandinista police, FSLN leaders have announced their intention to strengthen and reorganize a volunteer national militia on the basis of regular training in the workplace and in high schools and universities. Weapons are to be kept in the factories and controlled by the milicianos.
• After decades of tyrannical rule under which even the most elementary bourgeois-democratic liberties were ground into the dust, there has been an enormous expansion of democratic rights, including institutions of workers democracy, fostered by the new government. The CDSs and other popular bodies operate on the basis of democratic elections. The Bill of Rights guarantees not only basic freedoms such as speech, press, and assembly, but also the right to unionize and strike and to "organize political parties or groups, or to belong to them." The FSLN has strengthened the Sandinista-led CST trade-union federation in political competition with the old union federations led by the Stalinists, Christian Democrats and bourgeois business-unionists closely linked to the U.S. AFL-CIO bureaucracy. Workers have held democratic assemblies to choose their leaders and decide which federation to affiliate with; this has often resulted in unions previously part of one of the old federations joining the CST.
• The agrarian reform has also included "interventions" (that is, takeovers short of outright nationalization) of some lands owned by members of the bourgeois anti-Somoza opposition. Since there is a top priority on raising crops for food and vital foreign exchange, this most often targets landlords who refuse to cultivate their land.
• There have been further nationalizations and interventions; again including pro per ties of "anti-Somozaist" capitalists. These have been carried out on the basis of economic need or because of illegitimate or antilabor operations by the owners. All insurance companies were nationalized in mid-October. This complements the nationalizations of the banks by giving the government further control over the flow of capital and lays the foundation for future economic planning.
• The FSLN is campaigning to organize peasants and rural laborers into the ATC and workers into the CST. In addition, the Sandinistas are taking steps to prepare and extend workers control over production in the nationalized sectors.
• At the beginning of November, the first major imperialist property was nationalized—the mines. (Domestic holdings in the mining sector were also taken over.) This further strengthens the government control over the country's natural resources and lays the basis for improving the wretched and extremely dangerous conditions under which Nicaragua's miners were forced to work.
• Housing reconstruction aid in the devastated popular neighborhoods has been initiated by the government. State control has been applied in housing developments built or operating in violation of real estate and tax laws. The first major public works projects have been initiated in this sector.
• A big increase in pensions and other social benefits to the aged and indigent has been decreed.
• Price controls have been established on basic food items. The government has authorized the CDSs to operate as price committees to enforce these controls, and the CDSs in the big open-air markets of Managua have taken the lead in this task.
• An enormous nationwide drive has been launched to wipe out illiteracy, a problem that is prevalent throughout Nicaragua but especially widespread among the rural population. All students above the sixth-grade level are to be mobilized in this "crusade for literacy"; and the country's schools are to be shut down for four months so that these students and all teachers can fully participate. Material, technical, and personnel aid is coming from Cuba for this campaign, which is being explicitly modeled on the way that country wiped out illiteracy in the early 1960s. As that experience showed, such a literacy drive is an important aid to firmly winning the poor peasantry to the side of the revolution, and defending it against counterrevolution.
5. The FSLN-led government, based on Nicaragua's proletarian, semi-proletarian, peasant, and radicalized petty-bourgeois masses, has initiated deepgoing inroads against capitalist property in agriculture, industry, and finance. It has launched an ambitious program of social and cultural betterment for the Nicaraguan toilers. It has begun to construct a new armed power through the EPS and Sandinista police. Its radical policies have helped the FSLN spur the development of proletarian organizations through the CDSs, the trade unions, and other mass organizations. It has continued to foster mass mobilizations. The latest—a November 7 demonstration to honor FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca Amador—brought over 100,000 people into the streets of Managua. It was the largest outpouring since Somoza's fall.
The structures and direction of development established through all these measures indicate that this new regime has not only broken the armed might of the bourgeoisie. It has displaced the political power of the capitalists, taken decisive steps to block the establishment of a bourgeois government and refused to subordinate the interests of the exploited to the bourgeoisie's needs either nationally or internationally.
AU this points to the conclusion that the Sandinista-led regime in Nicaragua is neither definitively bourgeois nor proletarian at this time. It is a workers and peasants government, of the kind described in the Transitional Program as "a government independent of the bourgeoisie" and at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International as a government that is "born out of the struggle of the masses, is supported by workers' bodies that are capable of fighting, bodies created by the most oppressed sections of the working masses."
By recognizing the new government in Nicaragua as a workers and peasants government, we signify:
a. its origin in an anti-dictatorial and anti-imperialist movement with a radical political program;
b. its coming to power as the result of a popular mass struggle, culminating in a civil war and tumultuous urban insurrections;
c. its resoluteness in combating and disarming the counterrevolution;
d. its tendency to respond by practical measures to popular demands for action against the urban and rural exploiters and against imperialism;
e. the capacity of its leading force, the FSLN, with whatever hesitations and political limitations, to undertake measures against bourgeois political and economic power and prerogatives. The exact stage in the development of these measures is not decisive in determining the class character of the regime; the decisive factor is the capacity and tendency of the leadership to move in this direction.
Combined with these factors is the FSLN's explicit identification of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua with the Cuban workers state, and with the anti-imperialist internationalism of the Castro leadership. Cuba's accomplishments under its social system are repeatedly held up as a model—in speeches, in Barricada, and over radio and television.
The Nicaraguan workers and peasants government, despite its many unique features, is similar to the regimes described by the Fourth International that arose and governed in Cuba from mid-1959 to late 1960 (when the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the consolidation of the workers state was completed); and in Algeria from late 1963 to mid-1965 (when Boumedienne ousted Ben Bella and restored a stable capitalist regime). The appearance of governments of this type was foreseen in the "Theses on Tactics" adopted by the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, and pointed to by Trotsky in the Transitional Program as a possible forerunner of the establishment of a workers state.
While the Nicaraguan workers and peasants government is politically independent of the bourgeoisie, the latter's economic and social power have so far only been weakened. Remnants of the old state structure remain intact. Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois figures hold governmental posts. Capitalist ownership and control over major sectors of industry, commerce, and agriculture have not been broken, which means the class character of the state remains bourgeois.
If this contradiction between workers and peasants government and bourgeois state is not resolved by a thoroughgoing expropriation of the big imperialist and domestic bourgeoisie and repudiation of the foreign debt, the capitalists—backed up by Washington, international finance organizations, and capitalist regimes in Central and South America—will use their economic positions and growing economic hardships to erode the power of the new government, sabotage economic reconstruction, foster division among the toilers, reconstruct their own political and military power, and reverse the revolutionary process initiated by the Nicaraguan masses led by the FSLN.
6. Although the revolutionary process now under way in Nicaragua bears many resemblances to those which occurred under the workers and peasants governments established in Cuba and Algeria, each of these cases has its own particular characteristics.
In Nicaragua, the establishment of a workers and peasants government after the fall of the dictatorship was not preceded by a period of rule by an unstable bourgeois coalition regime. In Cuba and Algeria, on the other hand, the political power and influence of bourgeois governmental figures at the outset of the revolution were greater than in Nicaragua. As a result, in Cuba and Algeria these bourgeois figures felt more confident in openly resisting or balking at purges of the old state apparatus, in opposing the acceleration of mass mobilizations and the accumulation of radical measures aimed at carrying out the programs of the Cuban July 26 Movement and the Algerian FLN. Thus the transition from a bourgeois coalition government to a workers and peasants government in both Cuba and Algeria was marked by changes in the composition of the government as well as by radical measures and mass mobilizations in support of them. In Cuba Os val do Dorticos replaced Manuel Urrutia as President. Che Guevara replaced Felipe Pazos as head of the National Bank, and Cuba's ambassador to Washington, Miró Cardona, defect ed. In Algeria Mohammed Khider, Ferhat Abbas, and other bourgeois leaders were successively ousted.
In Nicaragua, the initial impact of the deepening revolutionary situation was expressed, on the governmental level, in the decisions taken by the FSLN. In light of the class relationship of forces established by the massive urban insurrections, they decided to postpone and re structure the class composition of the Council of State. They created a governmental setup in which all decisive decision-making power from the outset clearly rested in the FSLN's hands, although bourgeois figures participated. This was different from the very first stages of either the Cuban or Algerian post liberation regimes.
In both the latter countries however, as in Nicaragua, bourgeois figures were still in major government posts at the time that the workers and peasants governments came into being. In Cuba, some were not purged until the early 1960s; in Algeria some were never purged.
The acceleration of mass mobilizations and the steady accumulation of an anticapitalist measures has certainly met with resistance from the greatly weakened bourgeoisie in Nicaragua. But most Nicaraguan capitalists still fear that an open provocation or head-on confrontation at this time would redound to their detriment. Within the government, bourgeois figures try to use de facto veto—as the relationship of class forces allows—over the most radical measures. At some stage this will pass over into denunciatory resignations or recalcitrant obstructionism which will force the FSLN to remove them.
The more consistently radical course of the new Nicaraguan government from its first day (compared to the bourgeois coalition regimes in either Cuba or Algeria) reflects its different nature. Bourgeois figures in those governments carried out antilabor measures and openly attempted to block progressive ones. The bourgeois Supreme Court, basing itself on the 1940 constitution, resisted the Castro leadership's land reform. There were attempts from inside the government to re-establish a bourgeois army. Such moves by the bourgeoisie spurred the class confrontations in Cuba that led to the workers and peasants government.
The greater speed of events in Nicaragua is accounted for primarily by the broadly insurrectional character of the victory there. It accelerated the development of mass organizations of the urban and rural toilers on a scale unmatched in Cuba. Because of the dramatic shift in the relationship of class forces created by this massive upsurge, the FSLN took the opportunity, which it had not previously expected, to conduct a preemptive purge of capitalist political power and set off along a course that radically diverged from its earlier agreements with bourgeois forces in the anti-Somoza opposition.
In Algeria, in a number of big ways, the revolutionary process was much less advanced during the workers and farmers government there than in Nicaragua today. For example, mineral, banking, and insurance sectors remained in private hands and the FLN government did not implement radical currency or trade controls of the type already imposed by the FSLN-led government in Nicaragua.
In Cuba, the conflict between the workers and peasants government consolidated by late 1959 and the bourgeois state was resolved by August-October 1960 with the establishment of a state foreign-trade monopoly, further agrarian expropriations, and the nationalization of virtually all U.S. and Cuban industry. Despite the absence of a Leninist party, the anticapitalist measures carried out by the revolutionary Castro leadership, relying on mass workers mobilizations, could not have been rolled back short of a full-scale civil war backed to the hilt by the massive intervention of Yankee imperialism. A workers state had thereby been established.
In Algeria, on the other hand, the revolutionary process initiated in 1963 with the emergence of a workers and peasants government under Ahmed Ben Bella was cut short. Unlike the Castro leadership, Ben Bella responded to pressure from the right and accommodated to the demands of French imperialism. The regime turned away from mass mobilizations and from creating a militia and attempted to slow the tempo of change. The foundations of the workers and peasants government began rotting away. When army commander Houari Boumediene took advantage of the vacillating leadership and declining mobilizations to stage a coup in June 1965, the Algerian government changed direction and reversed many of the earlier progressive measures. A capitalist government was put in the saddle. The capitalist state was preserved and subsequently reinforced.
In Nicaragua, the outcome of this fundamental contradiction between the class character of the workers and peasants government and the capitalist state still hangs in the balance. The designation of Nicaragua today as a workers and peasants government in no way implies that a workers state will automatically be the outcome of the process under way. The big class conflicts that will settle that question still lie ahead. As the workers and peasants press forward to win their demands, the imperialists and Nicaraguan bourgeoisie will strike blows. They will have to be met with counter blows. Each new encroachment against capitalist property and prerogatives will meet stiffening resistance by the reaction. Open breaks will occur within the government and all other Nicaraguan institutions.
A workers and peasants government is by its very nature an unstable and transitory formation: It must either move forward to the establishment of a workers state, or—failing to decisively break the economic power of the bourgeoisie—fall back and open the way to a reassertion of capitalist political power and reinforcement of the bourgeois state. How this unstable situation will be resolved in Nicaragua depends in large part on how well the FSLN responds to the initiatives of the masses and succeeds in educating, organizing, and mobilizing them. They will have to defeat the counterrevolutionary threats. And they must be prepared to face the eventuality of direct U.S. military intervention aimed at preventing the triumph of a second workers state in the Western Hemisphere.
7. The FSLN was formed at the beginning of the 1960s under the impact of the socialist revolution in Cuba. It was able to tap the popular tradition of radical anti-imperialist struggle symbolized by Augusto César Sandino's rebel peasant and worker army in the 1920s and early 1930s.
From its origins, the FSLN was shaped by its strong identification with the experience and Marxist evolution of the Castro-Guevara team, and the Cuban revolution. While of similar social composition to the July 26 Movement, it started out with an advantage—the ability to learn from the example of the Cuban workers state and from the further political evolution, experiences, and false starts of the Castro leadership team. In addition, many FSLN cadres were recruit ed out of the worldwide youth radicalization of the 1960s and early 1970s and gave more serious consideration to Marxist ideas, including those of Lenin and Trotsky, than the early cadres of the July 26 Movement.
Under the impact of the defeats its guerrilla units suffered in the 1960s and the dramatic growth of the urban proletarian and semi-proletarian population in the 1960s and the early 1970s, a discussion developed in the FSLN over an assessment of its guerrilla strategy. This led in 1975 to a division into three tendencies that later became three separate public factions. Their differences reflected debates over the relation of armed struggle and mass mobilizations, the respective roles of the urban and rural toilers, the relation between military and political struggle, and the purpose and acceptable limits of pacts with the opposition bourgeoisie.
In the final analysis, these differences boiled down to contending points of view around a decisive question: How to topple Somoza and throw off imperialist domination of Nicaragua. The answer was to be given in practice before the decade was over.
The political content of these debates reflected the ripening objective conditions for the overthrow of Somoza and contributed to the overall political education and development of all three tendencies. Challenged to meet the responsibilities posed by accelerating revolutionary developments, the tendencies reached agreement on unity in action in June 1978 and reunified in December of that year. Their leadership bodies fused and old divisions in the ranks broke down, as the tasks posed by the rising class struggle resolved in life many previously disputed questions.
The FSLN leadership was profoundly ' affected by the largely unanticipated scope and power of the 1978-79 urban mobilizations and by the spread of popular committees and militias—sometimes at the initiative of the FSLN, often through spontaneous mass emulation. The revolutionary process gave a powerful thrust toward by passing the bourgeois coalition government that the FSLN had, on the eve of the insurrection, considered inevitable.
The actual course of the insurrection caused the FSLN to move in an increasingly anticapitalist direction. This course has demonstrated the FSLN's will and capacity to learn from and respond to the actions and aspirations of the workers and peasants. Relying on the organization and mobilization of the masses, the FSLN has led the process that has brought a workers and peasants government into being. This is consistent with its efforts to learn from the Cuban experience.
By learning from the example of the Cuban revolution and Castro leadership, the FSLN by passed Stalinism and Social Democracy and has been able to carry out an intransigent and victorious struggle against Somoza and his imperialist backers, opening the door to the fight for the second workers state in the Americas.
The advances already registered under the leadership of the FSLN, like the July 26 Movement victory in Cuba twenty years ago, constitute a blow to world Stalinism. The central founder of the FSLN, Carlos Fonseca Am ad or, broke from the Partido Socialista Nicaragüense (PSN), the Nicaraguan Stalinist party, and the FSLN was built in opposition to the PSN. By by passing the Stalinists in action, the FSLN further de flat ed the Stalinists' claim to be the only current ever to stand at the head of revolutionary mass upsurges. And by unyielding struggle at the head of the insurrectionary proletarian and plebian masses, the Sandinistas provided in practice a living alternative to the Stalinist line of "two-stage" revolution in which the interests of the toilers are subordinated to the interests of the bourgeoisie. Thus, the FSLN-led revolution in Nicaragua has strengthened the revolutionary current within the workers movement internationally and has shifted the relationship of forces against the Stalinist camp.
Despite its expressed desire to establish workers and peasants power in Nicaragua, the FSLN leadership has thus far not organized a mass Leninist party that would best insure the positive resolution of the class contradiction between the government and state.
But the direction of the FSLN shows that it would be a grave error to think that any a priori limits exist on how far its leadership and cadres can develop and how fast they can act as the class struggle deepens in Nicaragua.
The FSLN has announced its intention to launch a vanguard party rooted in the masses. The construction of a revolutionary socialist proletarian party within which the political vanguard of the Nicaraguan working class can democratically debate and decide the important questions facing the revolution would be a major step in advancing and consolidating the gains of the toilers and expropriating the remaining bourgeoisie.
8. Yankee imperialism failed in its efforts first to salvage Somoza and then, in the final weeks, to establish Somozaism without Somoza. Washington's attempts through the governments of Costa Rica, Venezuela, Panama, and other Latin American ruling classes to insure installation of a bourgeois-dominated government were no more successful than its proposal for a joint military intervention sponsored by the Organization of American States, or its attempt to base troop-carrying attack helicopters in northern Costa Rica on the eve of Somoza's fall. Dashing the hopes of the U.S. rulers, the government that was consolidated not only included the FSLN, but was one in which the Sandinistas held decisive political power.
The fall of Somoza and rapid consolidation of a workers and peasants government in Nicaragua has had a profound impact in Central America—most dramatically in El Salvador—and the Caribbean. This was a giant blow to imperialism's efforts to isolate the Cuban revolution and bolster capitalist rule south of its borders. Today Washington faces increasing isolation in Central and South America and in the Caribbean.
Washington's incapacity so far to directly intervene militarily in Nicaragua fundamentally reflects two factors: (1) the deep solidarity of the Latin American toilers with the Nicaraguan struggle and consequent political cost for any government too openly identified with U.S. imperialism's counterrevolutionary policies; and (2) the constraints on the direct use of U.S. military might as a result of the post-Vietnam antiwar attitudes and suspicion of U.S. foreign policy goals among American workers.
Despite these initial reversals, however, it is precluded that Washington will passively look on while "another Cuba" is established in its own backyard. It is acutely aware that the deepening of the revolution in Nicaragua has already had profound ramifications in Grenada and El Salvador, and will have further repercussions throughout the Caribbean and Central America.
Imperialism's goal is to contain, stall, disrupt, and, at the right moment, crush the Nicaraguan revolution. Along with the economic cudgels wielded by world imperialism, its two strongest weapons in achieving these goals are: (1) the desire of the Kremlin bureaucracy to avoid any disruption of its diplomatic relations with Washington, the fruit of its overall class collaborationist-policy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism; and (2) Washington's own massive military power.
The U.S. rulers initially adopted an openly aggressive stance toward the revolution. They warned the new government against radical measures and against any close association with Cuba. In this way, the imperialists sought to strengthen the hand of what they had hoped would be a politically viable bourgeois wing in the government. When it became clear that the FSLN was in political control of the government, beginning in late August, big business media, especially in the United States, made a noticeable shift in its treatment of the Nicaraguan events. This reflected imperialism's tactical judgment that use of open force, or the overt threat of open force, could politically backfire in the short run.
News from Nicaragua virtually dropped from the papers and news broadcasts. And editors toned down their earlier dire warnings about the dangers of an FSLN-led government.
Imperialism's tactics up until now have revolved around maintaining an outward appearance of fairness and friendliness toward the new government, while exploiting the economic devastation to arrest and prepare to reverse the revolutionary process. Somoza inflicted massive destruction on the country during his final year in power. More than 35,000 people were killed in the last year alone, and 100,000 wounded. Damage to schools, hospitals, and social services amounted to $80 million. Agricultural production was severely disrupted and 40 percent of the population goes without adequate food. More than half the active population is unemployed, and a quarter of industrial plants were damaged by Somoza's bombs.
All this was superimposed on the growing misery caused by the 1972 earthquake damage (Somoza stole millions of dollars in international reconstruction aid to expand his personal financial empire), by other consequences of the dictator's grand-scale corruption, and by the blows of the world capitalist economic crisis. These economic problems will be exacerbated as an inevitable food crop shortage develops during the early months of 1980.
Taking advantage of this social and economic dislocation, Washington is seeking to limit the flow of aid into Nicaragua to intensify the pressures bearing down on the FSLN-led government and on the morale of the Nicaraguan masses. The Carter administration promises credits, both loans and aid. But aside from some initially limited food aid, they have not given a single penny. At the same time, a certain amount of the aid from its imperialist allies, is funneled not to the government but to projects directly strengthening imperialist links with the private sector,' thus reinforcing the remaining points of support for the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie. The policy as a whole revolves around buying time for the Nicaraguan capitalists. Washington is counting on the coming economic pressures to alienate the petty bourgeoisie and parts of the toilers and hopes this will gradually demobilize the masses and divide the FSLN itself.
The imperialists are organizing these pressures on Nicaragua through their international financial institutions; their domination of trade and distribution in the world capitalist market; the Latin American bourgeoisies, who desperately fear a new Cuba; and the international apparatus of the Social Democracy, which acts as a political tool of world capitalism, especially for the Western European powers.
By avoiding a public propaganda campaign against the Sandinista revolution, Washington at the same time aims to erode international solidarity with Nicaragua. It wants to project the image that adequate aid is being sent and that there is no danger of imperialist-orchestrated military intervention. It even hopes to foster the knee-jerk sectarian reaction among some radicals that if Washington isn't openly yelping, then the Nicaraguan government must be betraying the masses. Unfortunately, the petty-bourgeois left has largely taken the bait in the United States, the country whose government poses the greatest threat to Nicaragua. Those sectarians that are not already advocating the overthrow of the new government and denouncing the FSLN, are mimicking the low-key coverage of the bourgeois press and abstaining from solidarity efforts.
Meanwhile, Nicaragua's aid needs are not close to being met. And there is a real danger of military intervention connected to the coming conflicts with the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie or explosions over the extension of the Nicaraguan revolution.
The U.S. and Honduran governments are aiding and intimately collaborating with the remnants of the Somocista National Guard. Moreover, Washington has launched an aggressive military buildup in the Caribbean and renewed calls for a Latin American "regional military peace keeping force." By mid-November 1979, Somocista National Guard units, some integrated into the Honduran army, began incursions into Nicaragua to engage the FSLN in battle. The Honduran air force began illegal overflights of Nicaragua. Nicaraguan diplomats faced intense harassment—including arrests and beatings—in the Honduran capital, to such a degree that all personnel but one chargé d'affairs were withdrawn from the Tegucigalpa embassy by the Nicaraguan junta. Washington's silence in the face of the attacks on Managua's emissaries in Honduras stands in sharp contrast to its hue and cry over the events in Tehran in the same period.
9. Washington launched a new series of threats against Cuba in September on the pretext that a Soviet "combat brigade" was stationed there. This was linked both with their attempts to discredit Cuba's leadership of the non-aligned conference and with the squeeze on Nicaragua. The Cuban government has responded with enthusiastic solidarity and material assistance to Nicaragua. It has issued an embarrassing challenge to the U.S. government for an emulation competition to see who can provide the most aid to reconstruct Nicaragua. Moreover, Washington knows that Cuba is aiding the new government on the island of Grenada and liberation groups throughout Central America. In a September 30 interview presented for nationwide broadcast over CBS television's "60 Minutes" show in the United States, Castro was questioned about Cuban aid to the opponents of the dictatorship in El Salvador. Castro said: "I neither confirm it nor deny it. I proclaim it as a right; furthermore, as a duty."
Above all, the U.S. rulers know that Cuban aid to Nicaragua helps counteract imperialist pressure and thereby strengthens the ability of the FSLN-led government to reconstruct Nicaragua along socialist lines. They know that the FSLN looks to the Cuban workers state as a model for social and economic development.
Furthermore, in light of Cuba's role in Africa, the imperialists are convinced that Cuba will come to the aid of Nicaragua in the event of a direct U.S. or U.S.-engineered attack, posing a confrontation of international proportions
Carter's moves in the Caribbean are also a warning to the Soviet Union. Washington is telling the Kremlin that it won't tolerate any substantial Soviet aid to Nicaragua. And it is pressuring Moscow to put the squeeze on Cuba to abandon its internationalist policies, including its aid to Nicaragua.
Cuba has made clear that it won't be intimidated, however. It responded to Carter's moves by asserting that "Cuba's dignity and sovereignty, its right to defend itself by any means it regards as appropriate, as well as its internationalist policy, will remain unshakeable." Castro pointedly included "our sister socialist nations" in his call for an emulation contest to aid Nicaragua.
In contrast to the anti-imperialist policies of the Castro leadership, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin seeks to gain trade and diplomatic concessions from imperialism in return for using its power and influence to sabotage revolutionary struggles. So far, Moscow has heed ed Washington's warning to withhold major assistance from Nicaragua. And following Moscow's lead, Stalinist parties around the world have given little coverage to the Nicaraguan revolution in their press and have not used their full influence to mount solidarity campaigns.
The aggressive maneuvers by the Carter administration over the past several months, together with Moscow's refusal to provide adequate aid to Nicaragua and its demonstrative support to the new military regime in El Salvador, show that defending Cuba against imperialist pressure and fighting to lift the economic blockade are intertwined with defense of the Nicaraguan revolution.
10. As yet, the Sandinistas still lack the mass democratic-centralist proletarian party that would best enable them to meet the challenges and opportunities they face. Moreover, the FSLN faces huge obstacles: economic dislocation,which will produce great hardships—and class conflicts—in the early months of the 1980s; a shortage of political cadres; the inexperience of the new mass organizations; cultural deprivation imposed by imperialist subjugation; and maneuvers by imperialism and the indigenous capitalists.
Yet the FSLN's course up to now, together with the growing militancy and political class consciousness of the workers, gives no cause for pessimism.
Faced with the threat of imperialist intervention and counterrevolutionary subversion, the Sandinistas have moved rapidly to build a professional revolutionary army, as well as a new police force under FSLN control. It has also announced plans to construct a large workplace-based militia, and draw the CDSs into the fight against rightist terror.
But direct military threats are not the only danger to the revolution. The economy's fundamental economic laws foster capital accumulation and expanding capitalist economic power on the basis of the large remaining blocs of private property in the means of production.
The economic chaos caused by Somoza is the biggest factor operating to the benefit of the exploiters inside and outside Nicaragua. Despite the measures that the government has already taken in health, education, and other are as of social welfare, an austerity situation has been imposed on the country.
As the government has correctly taken steps to revive a minimum of industrial and agricultural production, in the private as well as the public sector, the economic power of the bourgeoisie and the inevitable dangers associated with that power have become more obvious. The capitalists insist on credit and currency concessions, alleviation of trade controls, and assurances that wage demands resulting from the growing unionization of workers will not undercut profitability. A confrontation is looming over these issues.
The bourgeoisie retain their Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which are supported by their counterparts elsewhere in Central America and by international financial institutions. While the bourgeois political parties—the Social Democrats, Social Christians, Democratic Conservatives, and others—presently have a very narrow popular appeal, they nonetheless serve as a vehicle for organizing propaganda campaigns against the government and mass organizations. The Catholic Church hierarchy retains some credibility among the Nicaraguan masses. Sections of it are another potential support for rebuilding bourgeois political power.
The most important bourgeois propaganda instrument in this regard is the country's largest daily, La Prensa, though even this is limited by the necessity, given conditions in Nicaragua, for La Prensa to open its pages every day to FSLN leaders, laying out the Sandinista perspective or responding to criticisms of policies of the government or FSLN.
The presence of bourgeois figures in the junta and cabinet is not a mere decoration. It is an expression of the fact that the contradiction between the class character of the workers and peasants government and the bourgeois state has yet to be resolved. As the government is buffeted by conflicting class pressures, by the initiatives and counter-initiatives of the toilers and the exploiters, movement toward or away from establishment of a workers state will find its reflection in alterations in personnel in the junta, the ministries, and the central bank.
It would be a blunder to conclude from this, however, that progress toward a progressive resolution of this contradiction can be further ed by agitation around the slogan, "Bourgeois ministers out of the government!" Such a schema ignores the real location of military and political power, the deepgoing character of the break in continuity with the old regime, the progression of radical measures by the new workers and peasants government, and the real process through which the masses will advance their consciousness to drive the revolution forward. It would be infantile leftism to deliberately provoke a premature confrontation with the bourgeoisie over the composition of the junta and cabinet. The decisive conflicts will grow out of the intensification of the class struggle, which will be reflected in the government; as the bourgeois forces in the government make themselves known by their deeds, it will then become timely to fight for their ouster.
The Nicaraguan capitalists face the growing power of the Sandinista army and police, the CDSs, the CST, the ATC, the women's and youth organizations. The FSLN has sought ways to organize their power, including taking more governmental prerogatives. It encourages the democratic organization of these committees on a neighborhood and district level, and has projected the next stage as consolidation on a municipal level. National gatherings of CDS and ATC activists have already been held, and a provisional National Council of the CDSs has been set up. Congresses of CDS and CST delegates are scheduled to beheld in early 1980.
The Nicaraguan bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is virulently opposed to attributing any governmental authority to these organizations, insisting that they are merely FSLN bodies. This dispute has become a public debate.
The coordination and centralization of these mass organizations on a municipal, regional, and national level—together with the extension of workers control over ail are as of production and economic activity, both privately owned and nationalized—would further weaken the social and economic power of the capitalists and sharpen the class confrontation. Such steps would prepare the way for the establishment of a workers state based on these mass organizations and generalized workers control evolving toward workers management as democratic participation by the toilers in national economic and social planning is established.
Prospects for development toward institutionalized workers democracy along these lines show the sectarian error of placing the demand on the Nicaraguan government to organize the election of a constituent assembly. Those in the radical movement who advance this slogan seek to promote the false idea that the government is a bourgeois coalition regime, or that the FSLN is depriving the masses of their democratic rights in order to reconsolidate capitalist power. However, it is these sectarians themselves who actually counterpose an unfounded schema to the process by which the Nicaraguan toilers have already begun to assert their own power against that of the class enemy. It's no accident that variations on the same theme are one of the complaints hurled by the bourgeoisie against the Sandinistas.
The FSLN's stated intention to develop the mass organizations as the basis for popular power in Nicaragua opens up the most positive framework, as Barricada has explained, for the masses to create "their own means of resolving their political, social, and economic problems," "to defend themselves against their enemies, and to consolidate the revolution." It is this dynamic of the revolution that the capitalists will oppose most strongly, demanding that the junta take steps to regulate and hold back the extension of the power of the mass organizations.
11. The success of the FSLN, and the revolutionary workers who join them, in building a mass-based vanguard party will be an extremely important factor in increasing the chances that the workers and peasants government will culminate in the establishment of a workers state that can effectively fight to defend and extend the revolution. No single element is more important to the consolidation of the gains of the revolution than forging a party of the Nicaraguan working class that takes the political leadership in building a centralized system of democratic workers and peasants councils to assume governmental power.
Combating capitalist sabotage and reconstructing Nicaragua will require an ever-wider exchange of view points within the camp of the toilers over how best to move forward to solve their problems. The greatest possible democracy and the cultivation of an atmosphere encouraging the free expression of ideas can only strengthen the revolution and the commitment of the masses to it. It is the only means to tap the full talents of the workers and peasants, who must be drawn into the revolutionary movement in increasing numbers and become the overwhelming bulk of its cadres and leaders.
It is natural that different currents of thought will emerge, even among the most advanced workers collaborating to build their vanguard party. Various tendencies or parties will arise, reflecting the uneven development of class consciousness among the workers. The Sandinistas know from their own experience that tendencies and political differences, even sharp ones, can develop among revolutionists.
Impatience with the serious political errors and often provocative behavior of some sectarian organizations, however, led the FSLN in September and October to publicly lump these groups together with the Somocistas. During the campaign against right-wing terror launched under the slogan "Control Somocismo—defend the revolution," the "ultralefts" were mentioned in speeches, on the radio, and in Barricada as being among the counterrevolutionary forces that had to be smashed. Detentions and other administrative measures were taken against members of some of these organizations, without presentation of proof of any likely or actual crimes that would justify such measures.
By November a modification in the FSLN's approach to the sectarian-led organizations was becoming evident. FSLN leaders announced that evidence now showed that bank robberies previously attributed to MILPAS* had been committed by Somocistas posing as radicals. Speeches by some FSLN leaders, while containing contradictory statements, included offers to open a "dialogue" with the sectarian groups. In addition, all of those detained were released.
Nonetheless, there has still been no definitive public political clarification on this important matter by FSLN leaders.
The pro-Moscow Stalinists in Nicaragua, who had always attacked the FSLN itself for being "ultraleft," will continue to push in the direction of stifling workers democracy. Their attacks are in reality aimed at the toiling masses and at all revolutionists—above all the FSLN—since their objective is to arrest the revolution at the "bourgeois democratic stage." Any policy of repression within the workers movement would play into their hands.
Equating Somozaism and counterrevolution with those under the influence of petty-bourgeois pressures and ideas could also lead to an underestimation of the dangers posed by the real class enemy—both among the capitalists who backed Somoza, those who opposed him for whatever reason, and their powerful allies centered in the United States. As the class polarization deepens, it will be the forces of the bourgeoisie that spearhead the counterrevolution.
The revolutionary leadership must be able to distinguish between those in the radical movement who operate within the framework of the revolution and those who—and there will be some—desert to the camp of the class enemy and carry out crimes against the revolution.
The problems the Nicaraguan revolution faces and must immediately cope with are real and cannot be waved aside. It is sometimes necessary to make tactical concessions to the capitalists to avert economic rev ers es and premature confrontations.
The sectarian groups are wrong in their tendency to view such necessary concessions as incorrect in principle or betrayals of the revolution. They are a vital necessity in Nicaragua. At the same time, however, these organizations can sometimes reflect in a distorted way moods of sections of the masses. In order to effectively lead the masses, the revolutionary vanguard should openly explain its considerations to the workers and peasants when it believes concessions are necessary.
An important part of this process of interaction between the masses and their vanguard is politically confronting the ultraleft sectarians and explaining what is wrong with their infantile proposals. Repression cuts across this political clarification, and makes it more difficult to win these cadres to a genuinely revolutionary course.
Furthermore, the workers and peasants will take initiatives that go beyond the leadership's immediate plans. This is one of the keys to all revolutionary uprisings and victories. The leadership's capacity to respond positively to such initiatives to drive the process forward will be a prime element in the consummation of the objectives of the revolution.
The FSLN's contradictory moves this fall toward repression of its opponents on the left stand as an exception to their generally revolutionary course toward the development of mass popular organizations and respect for democratic rights. If this overall tendency prevails, the direction of the Nicaraguan revolution in this important respect will represent a significant advance over revolutionary Cuba. It could also stimulate motion toward the development of democratic forms of proletarian power based on workers and peasants councils in Cuba.
12. Given the desperate economic situation in Nicaragua, a pressing objective of the government has been to restore a minimal level of production in the privately owned industries and on the big and medium-sized farms still in the hands of their owners. It has appealed for aid from all countries to obtain credits and food.
As the example of Cuba has proven, however, the needs of the masses cannot be met if private ownership is maintained in the basic means of production. The laws of capitalist accumulation will distort the country's economy, subordinating real economic development and social betterment to the quest for profits and to imperialist exploitation. This would be the inevitable outcome of the maintenance of a "mixed economy" such as that described in the July 9 GRN program.
Thus the reconstruction of Nicaragua in the interests of the workers and poor peasants makes it necessary to extend workers control of production;shift the tax burden to the exploiters; repulse attempts by the imperialist financial institutions to use foreign debt as a means of pressure; nationalize the remaining privately owned large landholdings, industries, and big firms; develop the CDSs and unions, and widen the scope of their authority; expropriate the imperialist banks and enterprises; establish a monopoly on foreign trade; and thus lay the foundation for real economic and social planning.
It is along this road that the system of capitalist accumulation and labor exploitation can be destroyed. Once the qualitative turning point has been passed, and a workers state established, capitalist property relations could be restored only through an all-out civil war, requiring ruthless and massive military intervention by imperialism.
These measures, of course, would mark the final showdown with the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie and its backers in Washington and on Wall Street. The FSLN has correctly acted on the recognition that steps in this direction go hand in hand with, and must be preceded by raising the consciousness and organization of the toilers. The class struggle must be taken into the countryside. The CDSs, CST, ATC, Sandinista army, and the new youth and women's organizations must all be expanded and strengthened. The new militias must be established and trained. The new party must be built. AH this requires time, and premature confrontations can set back rather than advance the process.
While it would be adventuristic to try to force the rhythm of the class struggle, it is also true that the pace of polarization and confrontation cannot be controlled by preconceived plans. The tempo will by dictated by the blows and counter blows between the masses and FSLN on one side, and the exploiters on the other. With each new encroachment against the property and prerogatives of the landlords and business interests, the likelihood grows that some section of the bourgeoisie will throw down the gauntlet. In addition to radical measures by the government, the workers and peasants-suffering under economic burdens, capitalist sabotage, and social dislocation-will themselves take initiatives on the land, in their factories, and in the barrios. This is the historic record of the Russian, Cuban, and every other socialist revolution; there is an accelerating dialectical interplay between the leadership and the initiatives and responses by the masses, often unforeseen by the leadership.
In revolutionary situations above all, history confirms Frederick Engels' observation that when controlled forces are put in motion, uncontrolled forces are inevitably put in motion as well. No amount of political preparation can annul this consequence of the class struggle. Instead, the aim of such preparation must be to increase the self-confidence and readiness of the masses to respond to new turns by defending their conquests and prop el ling their struggle forward. That is where their consciousness, organization, and mobilization will prove decisive. It is correct to make concessions to the class enemy when the relationship of forces leaves no alternative. But the masses must be told the class truth about such concessions, so that they can be better prepared to ward off the concomitant dangers.
All this highlights the need for a revolutionary-Marxist proletarian party to unify and lead the workers and their allies in accomplishing these tasks and defeating their class enemy. Forging the initial cadres of such a party out of the leadership and ranks of the FSLN would not only facilitate the socialist reconstruction of Nicaragua, but would mark an advance for the entire international workers movement in the fight to resolve the historic crisis of proletarian leadership.
13. The revolution in Nicaragua and the political evolution of the FSLN present an enormous opportunity and responsibility for the Fourth International. These developments pose new tests for us as we strive to measure up to our historic task of solving the leadership crisis of the world working class and constructing an international party of socialist revolution. The cadres of the world Trotskyist movement are the irreplaceable nucleus of that world proletarian party. We carry forward the Leninist program and transitional method indispensable to the victory of the toilers over the economic and social catastrophe and nuclear annihilation that will otherwise be brought down on humanity by imperialism.
Due to the crimes and obstructions of the Social-Democracy and Stalinism, however, the construction of a mass revolutionary workers international is a task that is still only at its beginning stage. The development of revolutionary currents that bypass Stalinism such as those in Cuba, and now in Nicaragua, are thus of the greatest importance to the Fourth International and to the further development of our prospects and our revolutionary program.
As Trotsky explained, in the death agony of capitalism revolutionists of action will continually emerge out of the class battles provoked by the exploiters' ruthless drive for profits. These fighters will arise not only out of the anti-imperialist struggle, but within the labor movement and other organizations of the oppressed in the imperialist countries. History will judge the Fourth International by our capacity to link up with these currents, integrate ourselves in them, learn from them, and help steel them politically in the program of Leninism, and in that process build the world proletarian party that can take on the imperialists in battle and defeat them.
Along this strategic line of march, we recognize in the leadership of the FSLN fellow revolutionists who have already demonstrated their internationalism, their desire to move forward to a socialist Nicaragua, and their intention to build a vanguard party. On that basis, the Fourth International seeks political collaboration with them on all the big questions facing the workers of Nicaragua and of the entire world.
This course runs directly counter to that taken by several organizations that consider themselves Trotskyist—by the Bolshevik Faction, by the Socialist Workers Organization of Costa Rica (OST) and its Nicaraguan sister organization, Revolutionary Socialist Group (GRS), and by the Revolutionary Marxist League (LMR) in Nicaragua. Boiled down to its essentials, the political line of all three of the above has been opposition to the new Nicaraguan government as a bourgeois government and the construction of political parties in opposition to that projected by the FSLN.
The Simón Bolívar Brigade (BSB) established under the direction of the Bolshevik Faction, carried this sectarian line to the point of criminal adventure—sending to Nicaragua and maintaining there an armed unit outside the discipline of the new revolutionary army or the people's militia. The BSB falsely portrayed itself as an FSLN unit in order to win popular sympathy. As a result, the FSLN leadership—after attempting to persuade the BSB to take its place among the forces striving to advance the revolution and respecting revolutionary legality—expelled the Brigade's non-Nicaraguan members.
Having been called to order by leading bodies of the Fourth International for its utterly undisciplined and disloyal course, which was not conceived to advance the interests of the workers and peasants of Nicaragua, the Bolshevik Faction organized a split on the eve of the International's World Congress. It has been joined in this walkout by the leadership of the Nicaraguan LMR and the Costa Rican OST, and is now attempting to organize a rump "world conference" with other sectarian groups internationally that call themselves Trotskyist and who share a sectarian disdain for and lack of comprehension of the Nicaraguan revolution.
The Fourth International condemns and repudiates the activities of the Simón Bolívar Brigade and rejects the political views on the Nicaraguan Revolution of the Bolshevik Faction, the LMR, and the OST. The Fourth International has no organized forces in Nicaragua—the activities of the latter groups have been organized outside the guidance of, or collaboration with, the elected leadership bodies of the Fourth International. As mentioned earlier, these groups have now split from the Fourth International. The policies of these groups are diametrically opposed to those of the Fourth International and can only harm the opportunities to win a hearing for Trotskyist ideas in Nicaragua and advance our international party-building perspective.
Partisans of the Fourth International present their ideas as loyal and hard working militants in the framework of the organization that led the overthrow of Somoza and is today guiding the revolution forward.
By advancing our program and perspectives, the Fourth International places itself firmly on the side of the FSLN's battle to promote and achieve the victory of the socialist revolution in Nicaragua. Our main contributions in this regard acre.
• Active participation inside and outside Nicaragua in efforts to reconstruct the country and defend the revolution from all its enemies, above all U.S. imperialism
• Advancing the development of the unions, of mass organizations and of democratic workers and peasants councils to bring the masses into decision-making and strengthen the revolution; and
• Loyal participation in the FSLN's efforts to construct a revolutionary proletarian party, putting forward the fundamental program of Leninism in order to advance toward the mass world party of socialist revolution whose construction will be decisive in the defeat of exploitation and oppression on an international scale.
14. Outside Nicaragua, the Fourth International and its sections will mobilize all their forces to build broad, united solidarity and aid campaigns with the Nicaraguan revolution and help defend it against the threat of imperialist-orchestrated counterrevolution. Part of this will be a campaign against the blockade and other hostile acts against revolutionary Cuba. We will energetically work with others to involve the labor movement, farmers organizations, organizations of oppressed national minorities, women's groups, youth organizations, and others in a vast effort to publicize the truth about what's happening in Nicaragua and mobilize solidarity and aid with the Nicaraguan people.
This is an especially important responsibility for members of the Fourth International in Latin America, where the direct impact of the Nicaraguan revolution is the greatest, and in the United States, which not only installed and maintained the Somoza tyranny in power but today represents the most powerful enemy of the revolution. In placing ourselves in the front ranks of such a solidarity and aid campaign, the Fourth International will help revive the example of proletarian internationalism demonstrated by the worldwide movement against the imperialist war in Vietnam.
We will demand that the imperialist governments provide whatever economic, agricultural, and medical aid is asked for by the Nicaraguan government-channeled through the official government and mass organizations and with no strings attached. We will back up Command ante Daniel Ortega's proposal before the United Nations that Nicaragua's burdensome debt should be assumed "by the developed countries, by the economically powerful countries, and especially those that fed Somozaism with financing." That means demanding that the imperialist governments and all imperialist financial institutions cancel all of Nicaragua's debts.
The Fourth international calls on the mass workers and farmers organizations throughout the world to make resources available to aid their Nicaraguan brothers and sisters.
We know that political and material solidarity can be decisive to the outcome of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua. The FSLN's steps to encourage the development of such an international campaign show that it too recognizes this fact.
The Fourth International also understands that the socialist revolution that has begun in Nicaragua is an important breakthrough in combatting the isolation of Cuba and has ten ing revolutionary prospects throughout Central and South America and in the Caribbean.
Finally, we know that the establishment of the second workers state in the Western Hemisphere would further weaken world imperialism, inspire and educate the oppressed and exploited around the world, and buy precious time for the workers in the advanced capitalist countries to take political power out of the hands of the warmakers and exploiters and open the road to a peaceful and prosperous socialist future for all humanity.
15. The outcome of the deepening confrontation of class forces in Nicaragua will profoundly affect the Cuban workers and peasants and the outlook of their leadership. The future of the two revolutions are now inextricably linked.
The establishment of a workers state in Nicaragua would make possible another huge step forward in the struggle to resolve the crisis of leadership of the world proletariat. It would have an immediate, positive impact inside Cuba, and its weight would be felt throughout the Caribbean and Central America. It would spur the development of revolutionary forces, and strengthen them in their conflict with Stalinist and Social Democratic betray ers, and centrist vacillators.
As a result, the door would be opened further to a process that could lead the Castroist leadership, the FSLN, and other revolutionists linking up with the Fourth International in steps toward building a mass world party of socialist revolution.
The Fourth International must prepare for the showdown that is approaching in a matter of months. Decisive moves towards the establishment of a workers state in Nicaragua will entail a head on confrontation with the Central American bourgeoisies and the power of Yankee imperialism. The leadership of the Cuban revolution will face one of its biggest tests since the missile crisis of 1962. Every current claiming to be revolutionary will be tested to the end.
Today it is the heroic workers and peasants of Nicaragua who are on the front lines of the advancing world socialist revolution. We will be tested by our capacity to respond with courage and decisiveness, to throw our forces into the struggle without hesitation or delay, to mobilize and lead all those we influence. Only along that road can we advance the construction of the world party of socialist revolution.
Notes
* The Frente Obrero (Workers Front), the trade-union arm of a centrist group with Maoist origins that earlier had split from the FSLN, was the main target of the anti ultraleft campaign. It had an armed wing during the insurrection called the Militias Popular es Antisomocistas (MILPAS—Anti-Somoza People's Militias).