development remained too limited to absorb the mass of displaced people; they were therefore condemned to a miserable life of underemployment, surviving day to day in the shantytowns.
According to Orlando Nunez, one of the leading theoreticians of the Sandinista 'masses letarians who are not organically integrated into the centres of productive capital, and consequently their meagre pittance in the margins of the sphere of circulation' are found in these shantytowns.? Contradictions The combined character of capitalist development in had the result gravating the social contradictions in the cities as well as in the countryside, leading to the formation of an explosive mass of poor unemployed (or underemployed), opof which the industrial oresscul working was minority.
To this it is obviously necessary to add the 'gangster capitalism' Somoza and his band, marked by corruption, nepotism and violence, well as the traditional political and military dominance of the country by US imperialism.
Important SCULUIS Nicaraguan bourgeoisie but without the least intention of setting off a popular insurrection against the National Guard, or of struggling against hegemony.
It is probably in comparison with its Cuban predecessor that the particular dynamics of revolution in Nicaragua can best be illustrated. First, we note that the Sanexpecte reproduced number of familiar cuban revoranon. 1) une rormanon of a radical anti-imperialist movement under the banner of a legendary Jacobin revolutionary revolutionary socialist unequal has carried of agdemocratic measures, - landless, small SniD supported by (Batista, of the old state as repressive organs economic, the the opposed Locional American foreign capital, to the Jass camp motifs of the Nicaraguan leader (Marti, THE revolution in Nicaragua is full of theoretical implications. The revolution itself posed crucia.
questions of the relations between the FSLN, a organisation, political currents. Since it came to power the FLN through a more radical than in any Sandino); 2) a movement (the July 26 UDEL Movement and the FSLN) which led the struggle against a brutal dictatorUS imperialism Somoza); 3) by a combination of rural and urban insurrections, the "sterile avalalus welc completely 'Maoist destroyed; 4) a new revolutionary army was organised based on the unity of guerrilla and popular militias, but government remained a coalition with the representatives of the anbourgeoisie (Urrutia in Cuba, Robelo in Nicaragua); 5) as the did not masses are mobilised and armed and the revolution takes more and more radical measures (beginning with attacks against the rural oligarchy and the coalition disintegrates and the bourgeois torces counterrevolutionary Like their Cuban co-thinkers, the Stalinists the notably Nicaraguan Socialist Party (PSN) - schools participated very little in the revolution. The PSN participated in the opposition of the bourgeois coalition, other of the Nicaraguan other (Democratic Liberation), stressing that the revolution against Somoza had a uniquely democratic nonsocialist character. They objected to strategy of the FSLN as 'ultraleft', as adventurism' marked and almost Trotskyist . Even after the launching of fluences the 1978 insurrection, they still considered it as 'premature insurrec tional act of well-intentioned young patriots placeu primacy on the armed struggle that correspond to the concrete reality of the country.
The social composition of the movement resembled revoluolary that of the Cuban process: The Sandinista base as well as its popular support was made up especially of poor peasants, workers, the urban poor of of students and of intellectuals. The students secondary were perhaps the most of the popular much that the muchacho (young man) became other country of Latin America apart from Cuba. Yet these democratic political tasks were carried through by political power passing into the hands working class.
MICHAEL LOWY, author of a notable book on Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, looks at the lessons of Nicaragua.
for quasi-synonymous during the years 1978-79. When they attacked certai neighbourhoods, Somoza's National the Guard automatically considered the whole population between twelve and twenty-five years old to be suspect of in- Sandinism.
It is, however, important to note several ditterence revolutions. The FSLN, for example was from its origin in 1961 endowed with a clearer tion, more to the left than the July 26 Movement at a comparable stage in its development (between 1954 and 1959). The two founders of the Sandinista Front, Carlos Fonseca (killed Tomas Borge current minister of the Somoza's troops in interior) were Marxists who had quit the Stalinist Nicaraguan Socialist Party in protest of its retormist orienta lion FSLN strategical document published in Cuba that: 'Our goal is the socialist word revolution, a revolution that aims to defeat Yankee imperialism Defence anti-Somoza the Sandinista In this article with Sandinista countries, equipped, perialism following the two OCLWCCIl religious programmatic detini- ficers paramilitary tional In 1969 Fonseca wrote in a kej and its dismantled in effecting changes going in the direction of socialism, that it was possible to put into practice even the "minimum programme" of The first element of this 'transgression' is therefore political: the Sandinista revolution destroyed the bourgeois apparatus established a new revolutionary state, popular militia (worker and peasant), Sandinista unions , and local popular (CDS Sandinista Committees). Though the bourgeoisie still participated in the government for a year or two, real power was in the hands of insurrectional forces from July 1979.