The gut question arising from the recent elections in Nicaragua concerns the legitimacy of the new National Assembly, in which a majority of the legislators will be from the counterrevolutionary UNO grouping, as a governing group for the Nicaraguan people.In our earlier articles we pointed out that this bourgeois coalition grouped around Violeta Chamorro was funded by the U.S., notably the National Endowment for Democracy. The facts are uncontested. The NED is called a nongovernmental group but is wholly funded by the U.S. Congress.
In fiscal years 1989 and 1990, Congress appropriated $12.5 million for the NED to use in the Nicaraguan electoral process, according to a report in Covert Action (No. 33, Winter 1990) by two very responsible writers, William Robinson and David MacMichael. The former is author of "David and Goliath: the U.S. War Against Nicaragua" and the latter is a former CIA analyst and outspoken critic of U.S. intervention who researches and writes on U.S. foreign policy.
In this report, written before the election, the writers estimated that the money funneled to the counterrevolution by the NED averaged out to about $10 per Nicaraguan voter, and is "the equivalent of a foreign power injecting $2 billion into a U.S. electoral campaign."
Totally lacking in legitimacy
Does not this odious example of bribery and corruption alone disqualify the new National Assembly from asserting any kind of legitimacy? Would any sovereign government willingly tolerate it, a government which had the authority and support of its workers and peasants?
For the revolutionary government to participate in this forum would be to lend legitimacy to that which is fraudulent and corrupt and the product of a howling miscalculation.
What can be done?
There is a ready-made instrument of the revolution which can in part counteract this bought-and-paid-for legislature. The revolution for over ten years has created a complex of mass political, social and economic institutions. These organizations were born and bred in the cauldron of civil war and intervention and have grown to maturity. Leaving aside incidental desertion or erosion here and there, which could be expected in any such situation, these mass organizations constitute the most formidable pillar of the revolution.
Who are they? They are the Sandinista Workers Confederation (CST), the Association of Agricultural Workers (ATC), the Nicaraguan Students Union (UNEN), the Secondary Students Federation (FES), the Federation of Health Workers (FETSALUD),the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Nicaraguan Women's Movement(AMNLAE), the National Confederation of Professionals (CONAPRO) and the National Teachers Union (ANDEN).
Moreover, the social composition of the rank and file of the People's Army is drawn from the same classes, the workers and peasants. It was very encouraging that, at a huge demonstration in Managua on International Women's Day, the leadership gave many assurances that the social gains and the infrastructure of their organizations, including the army and the security forces, would remain intact. Similar speeches have been made before the trade unions and the agricultural workers.
But there is something conspicuously absent that strikes even an observer from afar as of the greatest and most critical importance. Which is that to date, since the unfortunate development of the election, there has been no combined assembly of these mass organizations.
Need for a popular assembly
That would mean a giant leap forward. It would symbolize the fact that here lies the real legislative body of the revolution. Here is the authentic body grown and nurtured by the revolution which is representative of the people and has both the legal and the de facto power to initiate and carry out legislation introduced by the governing revolutionary leadership.
The body which will formally take office on April 25 is a bogus, deceitful instrument of imperialist domination, which is the result of a miscalculation and an unwarranted concession to bourgeois parliamentarism.
Let us again cite the Covert Action article as a reminder of what really happened in the election. "There are four `core' groups [in the U.S.] which receive most of their funding from NED and which are tied to different facets of the U.S. political and foreign policy structure. These groups are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and its Republican counterpart, the National Republican Institute (NRI) (the international affairs department of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively), the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI) (the operational part of the American Institute for Free Labor Development [AIFLD], whose ties to the CIA are well documented and which acts to generate moderate, pro-U.S. labor movements in Latin America), and [surprise, surprise] the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center on International Private Enterprise (CIPE)." They worked as "major conduits" for funding of the Nicaraguan opposition.
How in the world could an election held under such circumstances be even remotely regarded as valid?
Two centers of power based on opposing classes
The mass organizations are the legitimate national assembly. These two centers of power are really based on two different class compositions, and this is probably clearer in Nicaragua than in previous analogous situations.
This question as to which legislature should exercise state power concerns not only Nicaragua. It is a world question, because some of the most fundamental problems concerning revolutionary working class strategy are common to all revolutions in the modern era, and are likely to be repeated again and again.
Lenin in his pamphlet "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" wrote that the Russian Revolution had international significance, and explained this to mean that there was the historical inevitability of the repetition of certain of its fundamental features on an international scale.
It is precisely this question, the inevitability of the repetition of basic features of the Russian Revolution elsewhere in the world historic struggle of the oppressed peoples and the working class, that concerns us. In particular, we will examine the question of the relation of bourgeois parliamentarism to the nature of the state.
At this juncture, the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie and UNO, its political expression led by Chamorro (which is just an extension of the imperialist bourgeoisie), are attempting in every way possible to legitimatize the National Assembly as the sovereign power of the state. They are trying to ensure that the National Assembly and the presidency shall have the right to govern and to subordinate the above-mentioned mass organizations and the People's Army to their will.
It is absolutely necessary to put this situation into a historical perspective of the broadest character. This may appear to be a diversion, but in reality it retains the greatest relevance to the condition of dual power that exists between the de jure Chamorro governing group and the de facto state of the workers and peasants as reflected in the mass organizations and the People's Army.
The situation is analogous to the best-known experience of the Russian Revolution, down even to some of the details. But let us begin with the most authoritative and eminent theoretician of the Second International, Karl Kautsky (1854-1938).
Karl Kautsky and the Soviets
Kautsky showed a keen interest in the political struggles of the working class in Russia and of the Social-Democratic movement there far exceeding other foreign observers. For instance, in 1902, he wrote an article for Iskra, the Russian Social-Democratic paper, about the Russian revolution, in which he said:
"At the present time ... it may be assumed that not only have the Slavs entered the ranks of the revolutionary peoples, but that the center of gravity of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action is moving farther and farther to the Slavs. The revolutionary center is moving from the West to the East. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this center was in France, and for some time in England. In 1848, Germany entered the ranks of revolutionary nations. The new century is being ushered in by such events as induce us to think that we are confronted by a further removal of the revolutionary center, namely, to Russia. Russia, which has imbibed so much revolutionary initiative from the West, is now perhaps itself ready to serve as a source of revolutionary energy. The Russian revolutionary movement, which is now bursting into flame, will, perhaps, become the strongest means for the extermination of the senile philistinism and sedate politics which is beginning to spread in our ranks, and will again rekindle the militant spirit and the passionate devotion to our great ideals."
You'll excuse us for quoting at such length, but it is so true and so correct. As Lenin said, how well Kautsky wrote back then!
But Kautsky was opposed to the seizure of power by the Soviets, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks. And because of that, it is commonly believed he was opposed to the Soviets in general. This is not so.
What were the Soviets? They were the councils of the workers, peasants and soldiers that arose with the revolution and included representatives of many mass organizations of the oppressed, especially the urban and rural poor. The times have changed, but the mass organizations in Nicaragua today are fundamentally the same in class composition and in the spontaneous manner in which they arose out of the insurrection and grew stronger in the years of war and devastation.
Was Kautsky opposed to the Soviets? No. He even wrote about how in the earlier revolution in 1905, the Soviets created "the most all-embracing form of proletarian organization, for it embraced all the wage workers." (Quoted by Lenin in "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.") Isn't this true of the trade union movement in Nicaragua?
Thus we see that within the Social-Democratic movement, both the Bolsheviks (majority) and the Mensheviks (minority) with whom Kautsky was affiliated were all in agreement on the Soviet form of organization. It already had a great and glorious history.
The old methods of economic and political struggle by the working class, Kautsky continued, cannot be discarded and are still indispensable, "but from time to time tasks arise which they cannot fulfill, tasks that can be successfully fulfilled only by a combination of all the political and economic instruments of force of the working class."
Kautsky is saying here that trade union economism is not sufficient; that tasks arise which require the workers to set up political organizations, to put "politics in command," as Mao Zedong said. Here there was almost solid agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
Should the Soviets take the power?
Yet in 1917 a tremendous difference arose between them on the new role of the Soviets--and it is critical to the current situation in Nicaragua. What was this difference?
The Bolsheviks raised the slogan, "All power to the Soviets!" The Mensheviks, whose theoretical mentor was Kautsky, said no.
What did the Mensheviks want? They wanted the Soviets to be regarded as the principal organization of the working class. But as for state power, that should rest in the Constituent Assembly, the bourgeois parliamentary organization. And this when the Soviets in fact had spontaneously become the state power, since they were splendidly organized and armed.
The similarities to Nicaragua are obvious. The mass organizations and the People's Army (the Soviets) have the legal authority and must retain it as against the National Assembly (the Constituent Assembly). The overwhelming element of foreign intervention in the creation and funding of UNO makes the legitimacy of the revolutionary government in Nicaragua even clearer.
`Do the Soviets dare become the state?'
Of course, anyone could pour out praise for the Soviets, and most did. But the question was, should the Soviets, the complex of mass organizations and the People's Army, declare themselves to be the state power? As Lenin put it, "Do the Soviets dare become state organizations?<170
This point, which seemed obscure, turned out to be of the greatest world historic significance for the working class movement.
The question was how to characterize the Constituent Assembly. The bourgeoisie on a world scale praised it as a "democratically constituted organization based on universal suffrage, expressing the will of the people, etc." But, notwithstanding all the palaver about the will of the people, universal suffrage, etc., was it not in reality expressing the will of the landlords and the bourgeoisie?
And does not the incoming National Assembly in Nicaragua--chosen by universal suffrage in free elections embodying the will of the majority, with poll watchers and international observers, etc.--represent the aspirations of the imperialist bourgeoisie?
Are we to put the question on the basis of pure formal democracy, or are we to put it on the basis of the existence of antagonistic classes, and decide which class created, supported and promoted the pro-imperialist clique of Chamorro and Co.? Is this not a class question of the greatest significance?
Bourgeois democracy vs. socialist democracy
Formal bourgeois democracy had its progressive side in the struggle against feudal absolutism, but it has an entirely different social and class content in the context of the present situation in Nicaragua. The struggle is not between the old landlordism and rising, nascent capitalism. It is between a capitalist democracy and a proletarian socialist democracy. The class composition of each will elucidate their political difference.
After months of struggle over whether they should assert their authority over that of the Constituent Assembly, the Soviets under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party finally decided in October to seize the power (which was in their hands anyway). They then dispersed the bourgeois parliament, the Constituent Assembly, as being the repository of the material interests of the landlords, the industrialists and the imperialist powers, who already were poised to attack the Soviet power. Lenin read a declaration declaring the Soviets to be the state power and sent the bourgeois legislators home.
In Nicaragua, it may not be necessary to do that. What is initially necessary is that the mass organizations, meeting in convention as a legislative body, invalidate any and all acts passed by the incoming bourgeois National Assembly. This first step lays the basis for reclaiming the legitimacy of both the state and the revolution.
Of course, what is happening in Nicaragua represents a retreat by the revolutionary forces from what previously had been attained. Their concession to a bourgeois election constructed and carried out in accordance with bourgeois norms resulted in a capitalist-controlled National Assembly. Yet it is all shadow and no substance, since the actual power still rests with the People's Army and the complex of mass organizations.
Should they be subordinated to this bourgeois, artificially constructed organ, whose origin and development are almost entirely the result of foreign imperialist intervention? Or should the revolutionary government, the de facto government as of now, reassert its authority, the authority of the revolution, which was won by the construction of the People's Army based on the peasants, the workers, and the multitude of organizations of the popular masses?
Should they not do what experience and logic demand of them, do what was done in 1917 and boldly assert their political authority, won as the result of the revolution, and dismiss this bogus parliament, this artificial construction of the imperialist bourgeoisie?
That indeed would be throwing down the gauntlet to the imperialist masters abroad. Indeed, it seemed dangerous for the Bolsheviks to do that very thing. The soldiers were weary, facing death and destruction, the economy had been wrecked by the czarist autocracy. The bourgeoisie in the meantime thrived, as a result of inflation and economic havoc, and the masses were weary and had gone through incalculable suffering and untold casualties as a result of the war. What they wanted was peace, land and bread, which the Bolsheviks had promised.
In the eyes of the Mensheviks, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks threatened the peace. They feared more than anything else the combination of domestic counterrevolutionary reaction and foreign intervention. But the Bolsheviks felt there was no alternative to the seizure of power by the authentic masses of workers, soldiers and peasants except capitulation and surrender.
Of course, there are differences between the situation in Nicaragua today and what took place in October 1917. Who can deny that? But aren't the similarities more fundamental, more germane, more relevant? Aren't the choices just as stark?
Still time
And now, look what is happening. According to the New York Times (March 13), President Daniel Ortega said, after a meeting in Chile with Dan Quayle, that the "transfer of power was going to take place with the utmost normality" and would "go forward with or without the contras."
In the meantime, the imperialist bourgeoisie is strengthening its position. It is uttering sweet words of conciliation to the revolutionary government in Nicaragua, but at the same time it is strengthening the Chamorro clique. It has also imparted a new boldness to the counterrevolutionary riff-raff of mercenaries who are regarded by the Chamorro clique as the "heroes of the revolution," that is, the counterrevolution.
Time is still on the side of the revolution. The options are admittedly narrow, but the course for saving the revolution is made clearer every day by the machinations of the imperialist bourgeoisie, which maintains a fraudulent conciliatory stance while at the same time strengthening wherever possible the counterrevolution headed by the Chamorro clique and supported by Washington, Wall Street and the Pentagon.