SAM MARCY ON
The crucial question
in Nicaragua
Excerpts
from an article in the Workers World of March 8, 1990. Marcy wrote this right
after the Sandinista government lost the election in Nicaragua. Readers will be
struck by the parallels to the recent Yugoslav
election.
Probably
one of the most important questions connected to the election in Nicaragua
concerns the so-called UNO coalition headed by Violeta Chamorro. The U.S.
government has openly boasted about financing the UNO campaign lock, stock and
barrel, without obstruction of any type.
Is
there any historical analogy to this most outlandish, cynical and outright
reactionary form of parliamentarism?
There
have been elections in Western Europe, say, where the U.S. CIA funneled in money
secretly, to what extent no one knows even to this day. But in Nicaragua it has
made no effort to conceal its intervention. The U.S. imperialist government,
which has conducted a most merciless, ruthless and predatory war against the
people since the triumph of the revolution, suddenly decided it would carry on
the same level of warfare by a different method. The object remained the same:
the domination of the country by U.S. finance capital.
Of
course many workers and peasants wanted an end to the war, which like every war
brings devastation, hunger and inflation. All the imperialist-Chamorro coalition
had to do was feed on this.
Can
an election be really and truly representative under such conditions? Has there
ever before been a government so arrogant as to actually carry out a 10-year war
against a small country and then openly finance its collaborators in what is
called an election?
Should
an election be permitted by a revolutionary government at a time when it has
sustained the most barbarous blockade, sabotage, plunder and outright attempts
to starve the population to death? Can that be a fair election?
Would
George Washington have called for an election between the Loyalists and the
Revolutionary Army during the bleak days of Valley Forge?
The
problem lies not so much in having agreed to an election as in characterizing
the election as a free and fair one. This means accepting lock, stock and barrel
the imperialist version of the election. It agrees with imperialism on the role
of bourgeois parliamentarism and subjects the masses to this ideological
banality.
We
now have a new governing group whose leaders proclaim themselves head of the
state. This in turn really raises the crux of the issue that the Sandinista
leadership has to face. What is the state? It is not an academic question.
"An
army is a state on wheels." This superb generalization was made by one of the
truly great military strategists who himself led a revolutionary army--Napoleon
Bonaparte. He knew what the essence of the state is. It is an army. The army
could be on foot or on wheels, but it is the very quintessence of the state.
Napoleon
knew this from experience. He led a revolutionary army composed of basically
peasant masses on behalf of the new bourgeois order, and they defeated the
feudal armies of Eastern Europe. In his day, the heyday of the bourgeoisie, his
army was a people's army.
"An
army is a state on wheels." This is also the basis of Frederick Engels's great
classic, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State." Engels
dwelt in considerable detail on the origin of the state, specifically
emphasizing that it is in essence a body of armed men, the skeletal form of all
class society, and that it arises in social evolution only when class
antagonisms have developed.
Before
the revolution, the ruling group in Nicaragua was the Somoza family. They were
able to rule over the country with blood and iron because this governing family
clique was based on a body of armed men whose essence was the suppression of the
peasants and workers. In turn, it was completely supported by U.S. imperialism.
That
body of armed men, supported not only by wheels but by aircraft and even
missiles, was called the National Guard, but was in reality a military prop
indispensable to state rule at home and supported financially and militarily
from abroad.
How
was the Somoza governing clique overthrown? Was it a peaceful takeover of the
state regime and the National Guard, subjecting them to the orders of the new
revolutionary grouping? Or was the revolution the product of the development of
a people's army, of the armed might of the people, of the mass of the workers
and peasants?
No
parliamentary election could possibly have subjected the hated, brutal National
Guard to the will of the people. That is not what dissolved its reactionary
essence; that is not how a democratic people's army was established.
What
happened was the violent overthrow of the governing clique and the virtual
destruction of the National Guard. As Engels, Marx and later Lenin formulate it,
it was the destruction of the old state apparatus and its replacement by an army
based on the popular masses, the workers and the peasants.
The
driving forces culminating in the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution were a
variation of what the 20th century has been all about--the destruction of the
old, repressive states, based upon exploitation and oppression by
bourgeois-landlord property-owning classes, and the passage of power to the
propertyless.
None
of the great revolutions of this century could possibly have succeeded without
the destruction of the old state apparatus, the military apparatus of the
landlords and the industrialists, especially the foreign-owned transnational
corporations. And none of them could have lasted for longer than a few weeks or
months had they not erected and developed over a period of time a people's armed
force.
The
revolutionary state in Nicaragua is not only the people's army; it is also a
complex of progressive social and political institutions built up under the most
trying circumstances amidst war, ruin and destruction. However brutally it has
been attacked, damaged and in part destroyed, it has survived and is the very
essence of the revolution.
Now
a new governing group, wholly financed by the U.S., militarily supported by the
Pentagon, seeks to lay hands on the greatest achievement of the revolution--not
only the armed forces as such but also the progressive institutions that have
been part and parcel of the people's social and political achievements.
The
question now is, should the revolutionary state allow this mercenary grouping to
take it over and make it conform over a period of time to the new state form? It
is in essence the state of the peasants and workers. Should they allow their
institutions to be liquidated, subverted and destroyed in the interest of greedy
imperialist monopolies?
It
has to be made crystal clear to the masses that UNO is not a legitimate
government. It is propped up, supported, financed and controlled by a foreign
imperialist power. It has no legitimacy, no legality, no constitutional basis
for governing, precisely because it is an entity controlled by foreign finance
capital.
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