Re: Nicaragua

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 25 Apr 1996, James Miller wrote:

>    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.

Louis: I was referring to your organization not you personally. They took
a workerist abstenionist attitude toward Central American solidarity
during the 1980s and bear some responsibility for US imperialism's victory.

>    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.

Louis: You were moving into a new house and off the net when I covered
this subject in elaborate detail. Basically I said that the FSLN adopted a
position that reflected perestroika. The position of your organization
was that Nicaragua should have followed the "Cuban road". That indeed was
the intention of the FSLN when they came to power, although the tempo
would have been a lot slower for a number of reasons. I also explained
that Lenin and Trotsky thought that socialism in the USSR was not
feasible unless revolution was successful in western Europe. Lenin
specifically said the USSR would "perish".

This was a USSR that had achieved peace. This was a USSR with vast
agricultural and mineral resources. This was a USSR that had an
industrial infrastructure, that, while battered by civil war, could
still produce railroad locomotives, battleships and power generators.
This very same USSR Lenin thought would "perish" without help from
a communist Germany or England.

Nicaragua, unlike Cuba, could not rely on a USSR that was rapidly
aligning itself with the US on foreign policy questions. Nicaragua,
unlike Cuba, was not an island and could not be insulated to the same
degree from counter-revolution. The CIA-backed contras had been pushed back
but a new contra force with no ties to the CIA was already re-assembling in
the north. Nicaragua was in a state of total economic collapse and the
population was war-weary. These were the objective conditions: complete
isolation internationally, total economic collapse and a population
exhausted by civil wars for the better part of twenty years. This tiny
nation whose gross national product is less than what the US spends on
blue-jeans each year was supposed to accomplish something that Lenin
thought the USSR *could not*.

Miller, an ultraleftist, ignores the objective conditions and from his
comfortable new house in Seattle declares that the only way forward was
the "Cuban road". Groups like the American SWP and the English SWP are
confident that victory is always possible if the vanguard is resolute
and revolutionary-minded. This is not a Marxist approach, it is
petty-bourgeois idealism. Sometimes objective conditions make further
advances in the class-struggle impossible.

The perestroika course of the FSLN was clearly wrong but it was
understandable. The "forward march, onward to victory" approach
recommended by Miller is not only wrong, it is arrogant. The best that
the FSLN could have accomplished in the late 1980s was a mixed economy
that would remain in a "maintenance" mode until the international
political context was more favorable. This, of course, is what is happening
in Cuba today. Cuba is allowing more and more foreign investment, private
enterprise and other neo-NEP measures. Class divisions are appearing and
prostitution and other social ills are on the increase.

You can not cheat the laws of capitalist accumulation. Revolutionaries
who ignore or belittle objective conditions are what Marxists call
"voluntarists". Miller is a voluntarist.

The defeat of the revolution in Nicaragua was inevitable given the
international framework. If the FSLN had merely confronted domestic
reaction, there is no question that the revolution would have moved
forward on all fronts. The FSLN had nothing in common with the Spanish
Popular Front or Allende's government. The fact that shifted to the right
proves nothing except that the leadership was fallible unlike Miller and
his band of 500 obscure and irrelevant dogmatists.




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