Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A change in the mode of production would be necessary to address climate change seriously. But obviously, that is not the path of capitalism, which seeks ever-greater expansion, reinforcing the very logic that is generating the crisis. 

[rosalux]

 

What is happening outside Iran is deeply concerning. In certain circles that see themselves as progressive or left-wing, the regime is beginning to be viewed almost automatically as a legitimate force simply because it is confronting the United States and Israel. People forget that only a short time ago there was a massacre in which thousands were killed within a matter of days. Now the Supreme Leader and military commanders who were unlawfully assassinated are being praised, while it is overlooked that they themselves were also responsible for killings and repression.

[rosalux]

 

Three million dogs are at risk of being killed in Morocco ahead of the 2030 FIFA World Cup. Now the influencer and animal rights activist Therése Lindgren is reacting. ‘It’s absolutely terrible’, she says.

[Expressen]

 

Nicaraguan feminists and human rights leaders began sounding the alarm decades ago. The 2006 absolute ban on abortion; rollbacks in women’s rights; the Ortegas’ denouncement of feminism and misogynist persecution of their own daughter, Zoilamérica, after she accused her stepfather of sexual abuse; attacks on NGOs (to date, more than 5,000 have been shut down), the closing of feminist media, and persecution of leading figures left no room for doubt that the principles of the revolution had been betrayed. The violent repression of the 2018 pro-democracy uprising in the country that left some 350 dead ushered in a period of even greater repression. Constitutional changes in the constitution in 2025 subordinated all powers to the presidency. With the dismantling of checks and balances, the presidential couple was clearly laying the foundation for a perpetual family dynasty.

[CounterPunch]

The coercion of Ukrainians in the occupied territories to take Russian passports is also significant when it comes to what we refer to in our report as the ‘conscription pipeline’. Children are being systematically prepared for future armed service. By being forced into Russian citizenship, boys also become eligible for conscription as soon as they turn 18.

[The Conversation]

Democratic socialism [sic] often more closely resembles the Nordic model: a capitalist economy in which government takes a larger role in protecting human rights and guaranteeing certain essential goods and services.    Actually, this compromise of preserving the fundamentals of capitalism while trying to achieve the egalitarian goals of socialism is precisely what more committed Marxists don’t like about democratic socialism. They might argue that capitalism is inherently unsustainable, exploitative, and unreformable, relying as it does on never-ending growth and abuse of labor, and that working within it is doomed to only limited successes at best.

[Common Dreams]

Trump Draws a Hard Line at Mount Rushmore: ‘You Cannot Be Both’ a Communist and a Patriot.

[Newsbreak]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Religion and Freedom? (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some expressions are on the face of it contradictory, military intelligence being one. Another possible example would be liberation theology: what can possibly be liberating about belief in a hierarchy of religious leaders and a god that influences events on earth? Nevertheless, so-called liberation theology has had a reasonable amount of influence within the Catholic church, though it has declined in popularity and influence since the 1990s. Its impact has been especially felt in Latin America, home to nearly one third of the world’s Catholics, and where the traditional church was seen by many as part of the social and political establishment. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and other peoples was often justified in terms of missionary endeavour, even if its main aim was plunder.

Liberation theology is of course controversial within Catholicism. It has been described as ‘a social and political movement within the church that attempts to interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ through the lived experiences of oppressed people’ (Kira Dault in uscatholic.org, 14 October 2014). But for another writer, it is a ‘combination of Marxist philosophy with certain biblical motifs’ and involves ‘radical revisions to every traditional Christian doctrine’ (John Frame at thegospelcoalition.org). In the words of Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest, ‘For me, the four Gospels are all equally Communist. I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ and is a revolutionary for the sake of His kingdom.’ Cardenal was at one time the Sandinista Minister of Culture, though he later left the movement, describing it as a dictatorship, and saying that he preferred ‘an authentic capitalism’ to ‘a false Revolution’ (Wikipedia).

Overcoming poverty is a central aspect of liberation theology, with a decent life on Earth seen as at least an alternative to freedom in the afterlife. In one formulation, it ‘advocates orthopraxis (right action) over orthodoxy (right belief)’ (philosopherkings.co.uk). Critics within the church see liberation theology as advocating people gaining salvation through their own efforts, rather than from god, which is for some reason seen as objectionable. Many liberation theology supporters regard Marxism as a set of ideas that can be partially adopted or agreed with, so they do not see Marx’s critique of religion as a problem for them.

Another criticism is as follows: ‘The missing link in liberation theology is the absence of a concrete vision of political economy. It refuses to say how safeguards for human rights, economic development and personal liberties will be instituted after the revolution’ (Michael Novak in nytimes.com, 21 October 1984). But this point can be taken much further, in that liberation theology has little concrete to say about how society should be organised at all. Wanting to do away with poverty is something that few people would disagree with, and the appeal to Marx’s ideas is at best confused and probably better described as being as much of a distortion as Leninism.

And liberation theology is indeed a contradiction in terms. Religion of all stripes teaches reliance on a supreme being of some kind, on prayer, on submission. Catholicism in particular involves the rule of the pope, oppression of women and rigid social policies. Liberation of the ninety-nine-plus percent of the earth’s population must come from their own efforts, to gain control of the planet and its resources, not from the mystification of religion and some confused supposed mix of religion and Marxism.

Paul Bennett

Sting in the Tail: Safety Last (1989)

The Sting in the Tail column from the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Safety Last

James Tyne, Director General of the British Safety Council since 1968 has no illusions about how the Health and Safety at Work Act operates in practice.

Writing in The Independent (7.10.89) under the heading "Safety sacrificed at the altar of profit", he states:

 Regrettably, too many inadequately trained, ignorant and uncaring managers in too many workplaces believe they can beat the cost of unsafe practices and systems and take a chance on the consequences. With a visit from a Government safety inspector likely only once in five years, the safety/cost conflict is all too easily sacrificing safety to the god of profit . . . Is safety being sacrificed for profit? Of course it is — at work, on the road, in the air, at recreation, in the home.

All those reformers who imagine that all that is needed to solve social problems is to pass legislation, should heed Mr. Tyne's expert analysis. As long as profit is the purpose of production safety will always come last.

Unholy Alliance

The coming elections in Nicaragua show just how topsy-turvy reformist politics can be.

An article in The Sunday Correspondent (12 November) tells us that the main opponent of the ruling Sandinistas will be Violet Chamorro, widow of one of Nicaragua's most famous martyrs who was murdered by supporters of the then dictator, Somoza.

She is supported by the US government as well as by God and her deceased husband, both of whom she claims to have consulted.

Meanwhile, the two main Sandinista newspapers are edited by a brother and a son, while a daughter denounces her mother for throwing in her lot with her father's killers.

Confused? The article continues:

  Nor does this exhaust the contradictions. Chamorro's United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO) coalition enjoys the support of the Communist and Socialist parties, who accuse the Sandinistas of an addiction to one-party forms of rule. In any other Latin American country, such a line-up would send the United States Embassy dashing to endorse the other side.

The staggering hypocrisy of the Communists accusing anyone of an addiction to one-party rule should suprise no one. After all these so-called "Communist" and "Socialist" parties are in reality parties that support capitalism; and hypocrisy is their stock-in-trade.

In this ruthless struggle for power we can be sure of one thing — no matter who wins — the working class will lose.

A Poisonous System

The use of various chemicals in food for colouring and preservation has long been known as likely to be injurious to the consumer. Now we learn (The Observer 29 October) that the workers in the food industry are in an even more dangerous position.

The findings have been collected in a series of papers edited by Dr. Charles Clutterbuck, lecturer in trade union education at Blackburn College, who argues that food workers face "double jeopardy" of health risk at their place of work and as consumers.
  . . . About 200,000 tonnes of additives are consumed each year in the UK - 10 lbs. for each adult — and "the ill-health effects range from asthma and allergy, skin complaints and diarrheoa to perhaps cancer", the Clutterbuck papers say.
  . . . Yet more than nine tenths of the 3,700 chemical compounds employed in the food industry are used solely for cosmetic purposes — for instance, to make peas greener or meat redder.
 . . . Scientists were debating whether the small quantity of aspartame eaten by consumers were hazardous. Yet these GMB members were working every day in clouds of aspartame so thick that they could not see across the room.

So there we have it — in order to compete in the market the food manufacturers use dangerous chemicals to make the products look more attractive.

The poor unfortunates who have to work producing this poison are themselves poisoned in the clouds of chemicals.

Does this not provide food for thought? It's time we cleared away the poisonous cloud that is capitalism!

Poles Apart

Mrs. Piasecka Johnson, a Polish-born American multi-millionairess, has bought a controlling interest in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk for sixty million dollars.

She plans to double the yard's production and increase the workforce "but at a profit". The unions have been asked to sign a no-strike agreement.

Mrs. Johnson has also started Poland's first foreign-owned private bank. She aims to attract western European capital to invest in Poland and is urging EC countries to allow income and capital gains from foreign investment to be tax free.

Sounds great for investors, but what's in it for those shipyard workers? Well, they get the privilege of producing the profits for the investors and will even get paid for doing it! Private enterprise is SO different from state capitalism.

Beyond Our Ken

"Useless waffle" was how Ken Livingstone, Labour MP, described his party's new economic policies.

He stated in The Guardian (7 September) that:

 Unless a Labour Government is prepared to redirect overseas investment into our Industry and make far-reaching cuts in defence spending, It will be forced to raise taxes and alienate potential Labour voters.

Livingstone is yet another dreamer who thinks he knows how to run British capitalism in the interests of the workers. True enough, raising taxes will lose Labour votes, but his "far-reaching cuts in defence spending" will hardly thrill all those voters who are employed in the defence industry.

But that's the fate of "socialists" like Livingstone. No matter what way they re-arrange capitalism they will alienate a lot of voters.

Incidentally, if he is still a Labour candidate at the next election and he doesn't get the policy changes he wants, will he be telling his electors that the policy is "useless waffle"?

We'll be watching.

An Open Letter

The Scorpion's Nest 

1st. December 1989

Dear Arunbhai Patel,

Once you were hailed by the media as a model of Thatcherite enterprise.

A penniless refugee from Uganda in 1968, you eventually borrowed £20 million to buy Finlay's newsagent chain and were confident of building a global retailing empire.

Alas, Finlay's has collapsed due to sky-high interest on your borrowing and you will even have to sell your house to pay your debts. Now you tell us "But I'm still a capitalist through and through”.

Sorry, Mr Patel, but your state of mind doesn't make you a capitalist. For that you need a considerable amount of ownership, and getting it (and holding it) is not so easy, as you and many other would-be capitalists have discovered.

Is Nicaragua Socialist? (1987)

From the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the midst of the Irangate scandal in which US President Ronald Reagan and his accomplices do their best to extricate themselves from the web of lies created to cover up their illegal funding of neo-fascist terrorists aiming to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, a seldom-asked question is, Who rules Nicaragua and what are the consequences for the working class? Conventional leftist wisdom is quite clear on the matter: the imperialist government of the USA is at war against the left-wing government of Nicaragua and therefore the Sandinista regime must be defended against all attacks. Of course, it is true that Nicaragua is the current victim of a campaign of destabilisation and outright terrorism by American imperialism but that in itself does not make the Nicaraguan government a regime to be supported. Struggles between rival capitalist governments are common and socialists do not take sides in the conflicts between robber forces.

In fact, the coming into being of the present Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was the product of a process of class struggle between various ruling factions which has gone on since the beginning of this century. In the early 1900s the British Empire controlled the Atlantic coast region and these imperialists were ousted, with US support, by José Santos Zelaya whose party represented the aspirations of local capitalists with interests in small business and farming. Having removed the British imperialists, Zelaya’s liberal capitalist government was put under pressure to act at the behest of US capitalists. When it failed to do so, refusing to remove restrictions on US capital investment or to allow the building of a trade canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the US imperialists responded in the time-honoured fashion: by sending in the Marines and toppling the Zelaya government.

Until 1926 the Marines kept Nicaragua under US imperial control with puppet governments assuring that the national economy served as a satellite of Wall Street. In 1926 the national capitalists, led by Cesar Augusto Sandino, attempted to oust the US imperialists as they had done with the British but national capitalist liberation (which is of no interest to the workers) was not achieved and instead the US established the regime of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a man qualified by virtue of having been a second-hand car salesman in Philadelphia. The Somoza regime ruled as a dictatorship, using the National Guard to keep the wealth producers in their place. It was a corrupt, vicious and dynastic regime: Anastasio Somoza Debayle (the second Somoza leader) personally stole much of the money sent to Nicaragua in 1972 after the tragic earthquake and used extreme force in suppressing any opposition.

Politically the Somoza regime was discredited and, as time went on, it became economically incapable of winning any support: between 1970 and 1974, 35 per cent of all Nicaraguan factories closed down due to falling profits. The resident capitalists wanted change. It was this more than anything which led to the uprising in 1979 which brought down the Somoza regime. The uprising was a popular rebellion involving workers, peasants and local capitalists – it was in no sense a socialist revolution.

The leading political force in what became known as the Sandinista revolution was the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) which was formed in 1961 and originally comprised mainly young pro-Moscow leftists. There is no doubt that after 1979 there were definite improvements both in the economic standard of living and in the degree of political freedom in Nicaragua. Both of these improvements proved to be short-lived and neither amounted to socialism or anything like it (which cannot be established in one country anyway).

The trouble with capitalism is that there are no “nice” ways of running it: capitalist governments can never be “goodies” because it is their job to administer the exploitation of the working class. A government which is loyal to the nation which it serves (and remember, the Sandinistas are nationalists) must ensure that the nation is performing profitably and that entails squeezing as much surplus value as possible out of the wealth-producing majority. That is precisely what has happened since 1979 in Nicaragua.

The FSLN has used its state power to run a form of state capitalism in which the workers are organised as a military force, expected to obey orders from above in the interest of the national economy. “The FSLN has translated its military structures to civil life – more by circumstance than intention – and as such the recently created mass organisations function with a totally hierarchical structure” (Notas Sobre Nicaragua y la Revolution Sandinista in Bicicleta, February 1981, p. 55). The FSLN controls the workforce, despite the pretence of workers’ participation at ranch and factory levels which are no more than a means of incorporating the workers into previously determined state plans.

Under Nicaraguan state capitalism the major features of the economy are under state control. Unlike in Russia and other “socialist economies” the Nicaraguan government does not directly own the means of wealth production and distribution but does monopolise the banks (which control agricultural credit) and all imports and exports, thus effectively appropriating profits from cotton, beef, sugar and coffee which constitute two thirds of the country’s exports. The state also controls the means of processing agricultural commodities, so that although most land used for cotton cultivation is privately owned most of the cotton processing factories are state-owned; although 70 per cent of cattle are owned by peasant farmers 80 per cent of slaughterhouses are state-owned. The state is under an obligation to use its power as a national capitalist to milk as much profit as it can out of the war-weary workers. This profit is needed firstly to pay the interest on the massive debt – in excess of $2.5 bn – which is owed to the big Western banks; secondly, to offset the massive flight of private capital which has taken place since 1979 – Nicaraguan capitalists quite understandably prefer to invest in safer economic regions than one under military attack by US imperialism; and thirdly, to pay for the destabilisation, which has been openly funded by the US Administration to the tune of $130 million in aid to the contras, added to which has been a US trade war against Nicaragua. Given these circumstances and given the imperative need for capital accumulation which is essential to an underdeveloped capitalist economy, the state as capitalist has no option but to act as a ruthless and exploitative boss.

As with the economy, so in national politics the FSLN monopolises power. Technically, power is vested in the Council of State. Epstein and Evans, writing in the radical US paper, In These Times, contend that the Council is “little more than a sounding board for the policies of the nine-man FSLN directorate” (11 January, 1983). The FSLN junta has suppressed opposition parties and newspapers and, as is the usual tendency when a vanguard party monopolises the state, the new bureaucratic elite has established for itself a privileged lifestyle:

  As the FSLN consolidates its hold over the government, its leaders inevitably gain access to the perquisites of power. Commandantes live in the wealthier districts of Managua, occupying mansions previously owned by the leading Somocistas. They are provided with chauffeur-driven cars, servants and bodyguards. Their government offices are air-conditioned, a most exclusive and important status symbol in tropical Managua. (“A Critical Look at the Sandinistas”, Changes, May 1982, p. 14).

One black marketeer quoted in The Toronto Star (12 April 1987) complains that “President Daniel Ortega and the nine commandantes are the only people in the country with money. The rest of us are dying of hunger”. No doubt this quotation is printed by a pro-US Canadian newspaper as part of the ideological war against the Sandinistas but it does probably reflect the resentment which is all too common in the so-called nationally liberated countries such as Cuba, Vietnam or Kampuchea where the beneficiaries of “liberation” are the small class of bureaucrats who control the national state. Of course, Leninist mythology has it that the state is being run by the bureaucrats on behalf of the working class: it is a dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat. So it was that Pedro Ortiz, head of the Sandinista Workers’ Central could tell Nicaraguan agricultural workers that

  For workers to conduct a strike against the state is to conduct a strike against themselves, because the land is now administered by the workers and campesinos (Volya, No. 3, p. 3)

This is similar to the instruction given by Trotsky to the Russian trade unionists after 1917. Indeed, the FSLN’s attitude to East European state capitalism is that of admiration: the FSLN newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, described East Germany as “a model society . . . organised on the basis of jobs for all, peace and justice”. In 1980 when ten million Polish workers resisted their state-capitalist masters and formed Solidarity, the head of the FSLN Propaganda Department, Frederico Lopez, lined up with the most reactionary forces worldwide in condemning such trade unionists as “counter-revolutionary elements which seek to place Poland into the hands of imperialism”. (FSLN memorandum, 23 December 1981, quoted in Nicaragua: Say Hello to the New Bosses, p.31. Published in No Middle Ground).

It is an irony of political history that many of the workers who nominally supported the Sandinista revolution in 1979 then went on to support Solidarity in 1980, only to discover that the FSLN, having established its role as a national capitalist in opposition to the idea of independent trade unions, now opposed the struggle of the Polish workers. In expressing such opposition the FSLN was only being consistent, for it has done its best to ignore or suppress independent unions in Nicaragua. The country’s two largest trade unions, the Sandinista Workers’ Central (CST) and the Association of Rural Workers (ATC) each have about 100,000 members. They are essentially company unions, run by and in the pay of the state bosses. It should be pointed out that Nicaragua is traditionally a badly unionised country: on the eve of the revolution in 1979 only 6 per cent of the workforce was unionised.

There are some unions which are not state-run, but these are either too small to be of significance or discriminated against by the state employer. They range from the very small People’s Action Movement (MAP) which characterises Nicaragua as well as Cuba, China and Russia as “state capitalist” (several of them are now locked in Nicaraguan prisons) to the 65,000-strong Nicaraguan Workers Confederation (CTN) whose manifesto asserts

  . . . the need to guarantee the development of a union movement that is democratic, independent, unified, revolutionary and class-conscious . . . so as to rebuff every effort to impose a single union hierarchy that would be totally subordinate to the party in power.

Despite its Catholic illusions – not dissimilar to those of Poland’s Solidarity – the CTN is the major force in Nicaragua with a chance of threatening the state’s stranglehold over labour.

Without doubt, the US-backed terrorism against Nicaragua is brutal in its disregard for life and hypocritical in its undemocratic tactics in the avowed interest of a perverse notion of democracy. In fact, the US terror is having the reverse effect to that intended: it is uniting Nicaraguans behind the Sandinistas in an act of national defence. Without a US war against it there is a much greater likelihood that Nicaraguan workers would be resisting the state. The US assumption that Nicaragua is “socialist” is utterly mistaken and so probably is the theory that Nicaragua is about to fall under the control of the Russian Empire, taking with it other Central American countries. In fact, it is only the US offensive which could make that feasible, if only as a last resort for a terrorised Sandinista regime.

Needless to say, the Socialist Party is hostile in every way to the contra terrorists and their backers. But the enemy of an enemy is not necessarily a friend (if it was, then socialists in Britain would have had to have defended Hitler in the last world war or the Galtieri junta in the Falklands war). Socialists do not support the state-capitalist government of Nicaragua and to the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign which implores us to do so we respond that our only support is for workers of all lands in their struggle against the capitalists of all lands, be they imperial exploiters or native ones, left or right wing.

Steve Coleman

Dislodging Somozas (1979)

From the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The history of the Central American states is a bloody one, with Nicaragua having more than its fair share of intrigue and assassination in forty-three years of dictatorship. In 1936 Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a used-car salesman who had become a general overnight, installed himself as dictator after ordering the murder of Augusto Sandino, the guerilla leader who had held the American Marines at bay for seven years. The general was assassinated in 1956 but power remained in the hands of his eldest son, Luis. In February 1967 Anastasio Somoza Garcia Jr. came into his inheritance, conservatively estimated at 600 million dollars.

The Somozas were no egalitarians. Prior to the civil war, one-third of the nation’s income went to the top five per cent of the population, who also owned half the arable land. Blindness and brain damage through malnutrition are common in the country’s northern rural areas, and only three people in ten achieve elementary education. More murders per head of the population are committed every year in Nicaragua than anywhere else in the world, and the proportionate numbers of chronic alcoholics exceed those of every other Central American state. The Somozas owned the country’s shipping and airlines, the cement plant, textile factories, sugar mills, the local concession of Mercedes Benz, travel agencies, oil refineries, banks, radio, television, boutiques, and human blood and plasma export businesses. The family also controlled and financed the armed forces.

Armed resistance to the Somoza dynastic rule gained momentum in the mid-seventies, becoming a serious threat to the repressive Guardia Nacional. On 22 August last year, two army lorries pulled up in front of the National Palace in Managua and twenty-six men. who appeared to be a contingent of the army’s infantry school, formed into three squads on the forecourt and marched inside. They were members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) putting into operation a bold plan to occupy the seat of Congress.

American Democracy
The raid on the National Palace was prompted by an upsurge of support for Somoza by the American government, with loans totalling 150 million dollars (a year later the International Monetary Fund would add 33 million). Carter had written a letter to Somoza congratulating him for promises to restore ‘human rights’ in Nicaragua, thirty years of American support for the dictatorship having slipped his mind.

After acceding to the Sandinistas’ demands, repression began in earnest. Guardia units were ordered to move into rebellious towns and dissenters were rounded up by the hundred. The ‘Broad Opposition Front’, a coalition of anti-Somoza parties and labour unions, called a general strike. The Nicaraguan working class has developed very slowly as a result of the country’s backward coffee-planting and cattle-rearing economy; the introduction of the country’s one modern crop, cotton, is only recent, and the sugar refining industry has not yet grown to significant proportions. Resistance to the regime is particularly strong among independent businessmen, and the Federation of Chambers of Commerce lost no time in voting in favour of a lockout to reinforce the strike. The Sandinistas gained the support of sections of the opposition Conservative family, the Chamorros, and many of the younger set of Nicaragua’s capitalist class became linked with guerilla activity.

By June of this year, popular support for the rebels was such that only Israel would supply Somoza with arms. Having abandoned Somoza, the Americans directed their efforts to the search for a ‘moderate’ solution that is, one which would not endanger their interests in the area. The State Department called for a ‘democratic solution’and put pressure on its Latin American allies to urge the provisional government to accept an agreement less radical than one likely to be imposed by a Sandinista victory.

Change of Masters
The FSLN, influenced as it is by the Cuban revolution, have let it be known that on gaining power they will set up an ‘interim' government and start a programme for the redistribution of the country’s wealth. There are, however, no purely nationalist movements in capitalism; nationalist sentiment, mixed with economic factors, is made use of by the class that has an interest to serve by achieving its aims. Life without Somoza means not the emancipation of the exploited section of the population but a mere change of masters.

The capitalist world has reached the stage where, for economic reasons, small countries are driven into one or other of the big economic and military groups. In all important questions they must frame their policies and adapt their industries and trade agreements to the needs of their more powerful neighbours. If in Nicaragua the Somozas are replaced by the Chamorros, the working people might reasonably ask — what’s in a name?

Miles Webb

Hope for Nicaragua (1985)

From the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

For years Nicaragua was run by the Somoza family who, in return for maintaing "order", so that the exploitation of the peasants by US multinationals could continue in relative peace, were allowed to help themselves to some of the pickings of this exploitation. In the end the greed and corruption of this bunch of gangsters became too much even for the rest of the parasite class in Nicaragua, who threw in their lot with the Sandinista guerrilla movement (so called after a Nicaraguan general, Augusto Sandino, who led an anti-American and pro-peasant revolt in the late 1920s and early 1930s):

The enormous fortune of the Somozas had coexisted peacefully with the investments of the country's other businessmen until, following the 1972 earthquake, the Somoza family took over banking and construction, two fields considered as the preserve of the country's well-off class. From then on frictions appeared which ended in a break between the capitalists and General Somoza and in a union of capitalists with the young people who had taken up arms under the banner of the Sandinist National Liberation Front. (Républicain Lorrain, 18 July 1979) 

Within a few years of the overthrow of the Somozas in July 1979 power came to be exercised exclusively by the leaders of the Sandinist movement with most, but by no means all, the private capitalists and their supporters going over to the counter-revolution encourage, financed and armed by the US government.

Even if we assume that the leaders of the Sandinist movement who now occupy the top government and state posts in Nicaragua do not attribute themselves a privileged income compared with the rest of the population (which may be the case, to a certain extent) they are still compelled, by virtue of the fact that they are administering a state in the context of the capitalist world economy, to behave as a capitalist class.

Thus, they are forced to oblige peasants to grow cash crops for export, as a means to get foreign

currency (to buy machinery and arms), rather than allowing them to grow food to feed themselves. Thus, they are forced to brigade the workers into state-controlled "trade unions" and to denounce strikes as counter-revolutionary. In this respect, see the front page we reproduce here of of an official Sandinist newspaper whose headline reads: STRIKES WOULD BE AN EXCUSE FOR A YANKEE INVASION! The subtitle in white on black reads: "The strike is not necessary in Nicaragua because power is in the hands of the workers", exactly the same argument used by the rulers of state capitalist Russia and East Europe. In reality it is precisely the fact that the workers in Nicaragua have to sell their ability to work to an employer, private or state, for a wage or salary that shows both that they don't exercise power and that they need the strike weapon to defend themselves.

So, even without calling into doubt the sincerity of (most of) the Sandinist leaders and of those who support them in Nicaragua — by all accounts they do seem to genuinely wish to improve the lot of the ordinary people living there — the fact remains that there is no hope for the people of the so-called Third World as long as capitalism, in the form of the world market economy, remains the dominant world system. Their standard of living and their freedom will remain restricted either by a government operating openly in the interest of native and foreign private capitalists or, if a revolution occurs to try to free them from this oppression, by the very leaders of this revolution however sincere or well-meaning they might be (for the experience of such revolutions shows that in time leaders evolve, after eliminating any genuinely sincere elements among them, into a self-conscious, cynical and hypocritical ruling and privileged class.)

The only hope for the people of the Third World is a world socialist revolution to replace existing world capitalism. Until this happens capitalism will remain in existence in the Third World, either in the form of private capitalism under some corrupt and authoritarian government or in the form of state capitalism under the dictatorship of a vanguard party. In other words, even if they take up arms against such brutal dictators as Batista, Somoza or Pinochet, the most they can achieve is a new class society of state capitalism, not a classless society without exploitation.

Adam Buick

Do You Remember the Sandinistas?

Latest post from the Socialism or Your Money Back blog.

The Sandinistas are back. Or are they? In any event, Daniel Ortega, who headed the revolutionary junta that took over after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and who was President of Nicaragua till he was voted out in 1990, has just been elected President again.

For those with short memories, in the 1980s the Sandinistas enjoyed the same prestige and support amongst Leftwing romantic revolutionaries as does Chavez today. “In 1979,” read the blurb on the back of Nicaragua: The Sandinist Revolution by Henri Weber that came out in 1981, “Nicaragua’s long-lived Somoza dictatorship fell before a mass insurrection led by the Sandinist movement, which has now established the first anti-capitalist power on the American mainland.”

Weber was then a prominent member of the French equivalent of the old IMG. Later he became a “Socialist” Party senator. Ortega’s political evolution has been in the same direction. While still an anti-yankee nationalist he now emphasises his Christian rather than any “Marxist” (read Leninist) credentials.

The Sandinistas were a guerrilla group inspired by the Cuban revolution (and named after a Nicaraguan nationalist who fought against US domination in the 1920s). At the beginning, in 1979, they shared power with the representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie, who were also against the Somoza dictatorship. But they soon came to monopolise power and attempted to transform Nicaragua into the same sort of state-capitalist regime as existed in Cuba, with the same “Marxist-Leninist” ideology: a minority vanguard would liberate the people through opposition to US imperialism, land redistribution, social reforms and a cultural revolution against capitalist influences which would create a “new man”.

The USA wasn’t having it and financed and armed the “contras” who waged a relentless guerrilla campaign against the Sandinista government, so weakening it that in the end it had to agree to abide by the outcome of internationally-monitored elections. Ortega lost, ironically to one of the representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie would had been a member of the original 1979 junta. Most people in Nicaragua were simply fed up with the civil war and the economic privations it and the failure of the Sandinistas’ economic policies had caused.

For the first time a self-appointed “Marxist-Leninist” vanguard had been voted out of office. In any event, even in the absence of the US-provoked civil war, the Sandinistas would have failed to establish socialism or even improve the position of the working class. Quite apart from the fact that, due to the already world nature of capitalism, socialism cannot be establishment in just one country, and certainly not in an economically backward one like Nicaragua (or Cuba), no minority can impose socialism on a majority that does not want and understand it.

Once in power that minority has no alternative but to work within the context of capitalism, but capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the class of wage and salary workers. Which was why even in their hey-day the Sandinista government was opposing strikes and urging workers to work harder. They had no alternative since, just to survive within world capitalism, they had to keep costs down so as to make a surplus (a profit) to pay for essential imports.

The Sandinistas’ failure was not that of “the first anti-capitalist power on the American mainland” but the failure of an attempt to establish a Leninist state-capitalist regime there.

Adam Buick