Nicaragua, hog farms

[James Miller <jamiller@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

NICARAGUA

   When I was talking about the tasks of a bourgeois revolution,
I forgot to mention the class forces. This gave Louis the right
to point out (in response to my comments):

>Louis: No class analysis here at all. Once upon a time when the SWP put
>Trotsky on a pedestal rather than Lenin, they could muster a class
>analysis. All we have here is a description of the *tasks* of the
>bourgeois-democratic revolution and not a whisper of the class forces
>driving it in Nicaragua, Iran or South Africa.

   I don't think I have to mention everything I know in
every post I make to the Marxism List. But it might have
been better had I mentioned the alliance of the working
class and the peasantry in the bourgeois revolution.

   After I pointed to the degeneration of the FSLN, Louis
answered:

>Louis: Who are you to sit in judgement on the FSLN? They were driven from
>power by the most powerful capitalist nation in history with the
>collaboration of a USSR in transition to capitalism. That's something the
>SWP will never have to worry about: being driven from power. The SWP
>shrank from over 2000 members in the mid 1970s to a husk of an
>organization (under 500?) all on its own. The implication in Miller's
>post is that the real communists are the Cuban Communist Party and the
>SWP. Isn't that so, comrade Miller?

   I think it's useful to have a discussion on the politics
of the FSLN from the 1960s to the 1990s. There is no need to
put any restrictions on the right of anyone to give their
opinions, regardless of their affiliations. So I think the
question: "who are you to sit in judgment?" is inappropriate.
I was involved in Nicaragua solidarity work in the 1980s, as
were many other people. But having done this work is not a
criterion for participation in a discussion on Nicaragua.
Anyone can participate and give their views, regardless of
their history of activism or non-activism.
   Certainly there's some truth to Louis's statement that
the Sandinistas were "driven from power." But that statement
only indicates that the Sandinistas were under heavy pressure
>from imperialism and from the domestic captitalists and
landlords (and the Stalinists played a role as well, as Louis
mentions). It says nothing about the political course adopted
by the FSLN in the late 1980s in response to these pressures.
  The Sandinistas were and are responsible for their own course
of action and their policy decisions. The fact that they were
under heavy pressure from imperialism doesn't take away from
the fact that they shifted away from their former revolutionary
politics in the late 1980s, and that this course became
increasingly detrimental to the survival of the workers and
farmers government.
   In the early 1980s, the FSLN pursued a course of mobilizing
and educating the workers and farmers of Nicaragua, encouraging
their forward motion on a course that pointed to the overthrow
of capitalism and the establishment of a workers state. The
logical development of the revolution was to fight for
socialism, and this logic was recognized in the Historic
Program of the FSLN. But the political trajectory of the
FSLN changed after the strategic defeat of the Contras in
1986. At this point the Sandinistas began to retreat toward
the goal of establishing a stable capitalist regime. Along
this line, they undercut the independence of the mass
organizations, stopped the land reform, turned away from
the politics of womens' emancipation and put increasing
restrictions on the trade unions. Along this line of
retreat, they tended more and more to rely on administrative
measures to control the activities of the masses, and less
and less on political persuasion and education. This course
ended in the electoral defeat of 1990.

   On March 16 of this year, Louis posted a lengthy message
on Nicaragua. He made a number of good points there. He
ended with this paragraph:

>In my next and final post, I want to take up the question of why the
>FSLN's type of Marxism succeeded in making a powerful revolution
>but did not bear lasting fruit. Most blame must be put at imperialism's
>doorstep, but the Sandinistas themselves made important mistakes.

   Unfortunately, I missed the next post. I would be curious
to see how Louis deals with the mistakes of the Sandinistas.
Perhaps there are some points on which he and I would agree.

CORPORATE HOG FARMS

   Jon Flanders was responding to a statement by Matt D. when
he said:

>  I beg to differ. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, inherently progressive
>about the huge corporate hog farms, dairy farms etc., that are driving the
>small farmer off the land. These enterprises pollute on a massive scale, and
>promote the worst kind of practices in animal husbandry involving BST, and
>other drugs. We need to keep up the level of pus in our milk  you know!

>  Far from solving a problem, these monstrosities are another toxic cleanup
>that will have to be done after a socialist transformation.

  It seems to me that Jon has touched upon the main points here, the
dispossession of small farmers and the toxic mess. But we should
separate out the question of the gains made in the productivity of
agricultural labor by concentrating and rationalizing the means of
production, and consider this aspect of the process independently.
  It is true that productivity gains are made at the expense of the
producers--whether wage workers or small farmers--and at the expense
of the environment (which affects all who inhabit the earth). But
this is true under capitalism and will not be true after socialist
society is established.
   Regarding the big hog farms: economies of scale are achieved that
should be recognized as historically progressive. It is along this
course of technological progress that agriculture has now reached
a stage of development in which one farmer feeds 80 people, when
at the turn of the century one farmer could only feed 20 people.
We should not give an inch to the reactionary anti-technology bias
of the Greens. It is only the improvement of the productivity of
labor under capitalism--both in industry and in agriculture--that
lays the foundation for socialism.
   The working class should embrace the problems of the small
farmers as their own. These struggling producers on the land are
strangled by the rents and mortgages system. The working-class
vanguard should call for nationalization of the land to end the
drain on agricultural production caused by rent paid to landowners
and banks. We should favor cheap credit to allow farmers to
produce as efficiently as possible. The transition to more and
more collective farming methods under the dictatorship of the
proletariat should be made rationally and voluntarily by the
working farmers and farm workers. On this score, we have much
to learn from the experience of the Cuban revolution.

   I fully support the following comments by Jon:

>  The Cuban revolution has been a real laboratory for agriculture. Currently
>they are turning many former state farms into co-operatives. They still have a
>large population of small farmers, who are supporters of the revolutionary
>process. Cuba never went in for the kind of forced collectivisation that
>Stalin carried out in the Soviet Union.

>  The small farmer is part of a middle-class layer that can be won to the
>workers corner. Practically every major union struggle I have been part of in
>the last few years has had the active support of some small farmers. It will
>never happen if you write them off from the start.

Jim Miller
Seattle



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