agrarian reform. This is the crucible on which the character of social changes undertaken, and the level of popular participation in such change can beassessed. Thereason is obvious. For several centuries, supplying agricultural products to the market of Europe and later North America has shaped Nicaraguan society: Agriculture accounts for more than 80% of the material product and of the valud of exports, and it engages more than halt the cconomically active population.
In Nicaragua, also, this quite typical pattern was based on a particularly low level of devclopment of both material and human forces of production: a small oligarchy making big
Sandinista soldier Land reform and
the relations of production in the countryside, though while the threat of direct US intervention escalates the FSLN's options are narrowing. protits out of extremely inctficient production, by means of keeping the vast majority short of even bare necessities. As a result, when the revolution triumphed in 1979, Nicaragua had a less developed industrial sector and a lower level of agricultural productivity than even its Central American neighbours: 5.7 quintals of coffee per hectare, for example, compared with 9 in El Salvador, 10.3 in Guatemala, and 14 in Costa Rica These figures were reflected in other ways. Illiteracy in the countryside was much higher than the national average of 56% (tor women it was in effect total); infant mortality was 130 per thousand; electricity reached less than 30% of the population and only 700,000 people had access to drinkable running water; 25
Miguel Obando basic foodstuffs for home consumption were always in short supply. This history also had important consequences, as we shall sce, for the class structure of the Nicaraguan countryside.
It is not surprising, then, that after the immensely successful literacy campaign of the revolution's first years, accompanied by estensive health and welfare programmes, it should be agrarian reform that became the centrepiece of Sandinista efforts to reorganise the priorities of Nicaraguan commodity markets. Inevitably, the character of agrarian sockety and restructure its abject dependency on world reform was affected by the concrete features of the historical legacy. In an important summary of Sandinista economic strategy, the Minister of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform and member of the FLN National Leadership, Jaime Wheelock, has said that these material features made it impossible cither to undertake a classic agrarian reform, or to begin an immediate transition to socialism; instead, they meant looking for the factors which would guide us towards appropriate social transformation, one both objective and in line with the revolution's interests'.!
But, as Wheelock also points out, the character of the agrarian relorm programme was determined by another, political factor, as well: the breadth of the anti-imperialist (or anti dictatorial) united front which had cnabled the Sandinistas to take pover in the first place. Wheelock notes that the organised, industrial workers —- who were few in number and principal actors in overthrowing not highly concentrated — than the peasants, the urban poor andthe student youth. The balance of forces within this alliance has gone through successive changes. Between the murder of liberal opposition leader, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, in January 1978 and the aftermath of the first insurrection in September the opposition movement from the anti-Somoza bourgeoisic. With same year, the BsEN decisively wrested leadership of the the collapse of the National Guard in July 1979, the same bourgeoisic found itself bereftof any remaining cocrcive power. The bourgeoisie walk out By the time the Council of State was sworn in, in 1980, the two bourgeois ministers on it had concluded that being in the government didn't actually bestow on them any political power, so they walked out. The Sandinistas have always been at pains, howeverto ensure that responsibility for cach rupture lies with the bourgeoisic. They have judged that any unilaterial break by themselves from the framework of the anti-dictatorial united front would be used to further isolate the revolution internationally and provide pretexts for direct US invasion.
Since the withdrawal of their Istoric representatives into overt or covert political support for the armed counter-revolution, this 'arrangement' with the bourgeoisie has survived only in teans of the so-called 'mixed cconomy' strategy. Again it is Jaime Wheelock who describes its principles most clearly: the
basic condition for capital's reproduction during this period of
reconstruction is, 'that the bourgeoisie only producc, without
power, that it be able to limit itself as a class to a productive role;
that it limit itselt to exploiting its means of production and using
these means of production to five, not as instruments of power,
of domination.'?
To many Marxists this scems a novel idea: a class which
owns but does not rule. Whatever the theoretical validity of 26 such a concept, however, it refers to the central dilemma facing
Bridge destroyed by guerrillas in El Salvador. the Nicaraguan revolution: how to deal with a substantial private sector — the often cited figure of 64% in agriculture is statistically correct (or was at the end of 1984), but misleading since it lumps together completely different kinds of private property — a private sector which is at least partly responsible forthe country's deteriorating economic situation (aggravating the effects of the war), but which nonetheless is regarded as a
'agrarian reform became the
centrepiece of Sandinista efforts to
reorganise the priorities of Nicaraguan society' reservoir of skills and resources unavailable elsewhere, and as a guarantee that essential foreign markets and credit lines remain open, thereby helping to safeguard the very existence of evolutionary power itselt. This is not merely an interesting point for armchair analysis; it carries with it the whole chain of complicated choices facing new revolutions in small, backward countries like Nicaragua. There is no better place to look at how these contradictions have The example of Masaya unfolded than in the region of Masaya. It was here that in June
A successful revolution in El Salvador is key to the survival of the Nicaraguan revolution.
last ycar the sIN finally gave in to the demands of a disgruntled poor peasantry announcing that 7,457 manzanas of land would be handed over to 1,300 peasant families, including 2,032 manzanas expropriated trom SAlMsA, a cotton-export enterprise owned by Enrique Bolanos, the president of Nicaragua's main bosses association, the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP). It was the first big move in a major re-orientation of the
'the co-operatives have proved most
dynamic, contributing to a continuous
increase in overall agricultural production' agrarian programme, designed to benefit landless peasants and increase the weight of individual small-holdings producing basic foodstufts at the expense of large-scale agribusiness producing export crops, a move that was formalized with a revision of the Agrarian Reform Law in January this year. For the American Embassy overjoyed with outrage - here was living proof that the Sandinistas would certainly break any promises made to the private sector, that the whole business of a 'mixed economy' was just a tactic on the road to total state control, and that the ISIN were Marxist-leninists' taking their orders from Moscow. The truth is more subtle, of course.
4
The land in northern Masaya is good quality. The fact that it is close to urban markets and export outlets means its value is high, and so is the population density: 0.6 manzanas per head (the same as tiny El Salvador), compared with 7.5 manzanas per head for Nicaragua as a whole. It also means that the class structure has been more polarized than in most of the Nicaraguan countryside. More land has been concentrated in the hands of a few large cotton, coffee and cattle farmers, whilst in 1978 75% of the economically active population were proletarian or semi-proletarian (that is, they cither had no land or didn't have enough to live off, and therefore had to try and sell their labour for at least part of the year), compared with a figure of 66% for Nicaragua generally. In short, there was intense objective pressure for land reform.
Masayan peasants had played a militant role in the overthrow of Somoza. Many had been won over to sympathy for the ISLN years before by Carlos Fonseca's promise, In Nicaragua, no peasant will be without land, nor land without people working it'. In 1979, Masaya had been liberated several weeks betore the July 19 triumph, and many Masayan peasants took part in a small socialist republic' of peasant co-ops formed to keep up the flow of food to those still fighting. Their independent peasant identity remained very strong, however, and people would equally turn out in droves for their patron saint or some reactionary bishop. Indeed, by 1985 this latter aspect appeared to be eclipsing sympathy for the FLN. People 27
were not participating in the National Peasant Union (UNAC.) or
ISLN political ceremonies and response to the Patriotic Military Service was poor, where in 1982 and 1983 Masaya had had the highest participation of any department in voluntary military service. Finally, the results for Masaya in November 1984's elections must have rung alarm bells among the Sandinista leadership. The ESLN got only 55% of the valid votes cast (admittedly high compared with most bourgeois clections, but well below their national average), and in villages where less than tenth of the population had received land under the agrarian reform, the opposition parties received a notably higher share of the vote than they did nationally. How had it come to this?
The Sandinistas' agrarian reform has gone through three reflected the contours of the anti-Somoza united front. Without The first phase, immediately introducing a full-blown agrarian reform law, a series of specific legislative measures expropriated only lands belonging to the relatively highly capitalized, agro-export establishments. Paradoxically, this first phase was also the most collectivist. Confiscated Somozaist land was turned into state farms, going to make up the new Area of People's Property (APP).
Jaime Wheelock has said that this did not necessarily reflect a burning desire on the part of the Sandinistas to proletarianize the peasantry; it was simply not possible to split up large sugar tarms complete with processing plants and so forth. Nonetheless, an element of Sandinista hostility to the idea of individual peasant small-holdings also played its part.
The poor peasants of Masaya were not too happy with this new arrangement (even if their overall support for the ISIN
enthusiastic). At the beginning of 1980 their co-operatives were dismantled; the land belonging to 'nonSomozistas', they were obliged to return to the owners, and the rest was turned into state farms where they were invited to sign up as labourers. Against this, they argued that production on individual peasant plots would be more efficient and they were probably right, given that the state sector in Masaya was very little specialised, and looking at subsequent productivity figures for the various private and public sectors). Their discontent helped feed a march by thousands of peasants to the ministry of Agriculture in Managua in February 1980 with a series of
lemands for aid to poor peasants. The government met all thei
conomic demands (to do with credit, rent controls and so on but ignored their central demand for individual plots of land.
A similar pattern was repeated over and over again during
the next five years. For example, the National Food Programme (PAN), begun in 1981: the Sandinista agrarian programme had
always intended a shift away from agro-exports towards the
production of basic foodstuffs, but although peasant small-
holdings had always been the best producers of such goods, PAN
concentrated on state-sector projects co-funded with castern
bloc countries. The results were not spectacular.
The second stage of agrarian reform
The second stage of agrarian reform, inaugurated with the
Agrarian Reform Law of 1981, represented a new incursion
beyond the boundaries of the original anti-Somoza alliance.,
Any large property (over 500 manzanas on the Pacific coast, or
over 1000 manzanas elsewhere) would be subject to expropria-
tion in the case of being insufficiently or improperly utilized. In
remaining large landholders were still regarded as 'patriotic, Masaya, the poor peasants were not impressed. The few
whilst the majority of properties were less than 500 manzanas.
As they put it, 'In Masaya the law passes through the clouds, it
doesn't touch anybody'. Two further demonstrations followed,
including one at the end of 1982 that demanded expropriation of
some of Bolanos' SAIMSA lands. The government, anxious to
maintain 'national unity' in order to block the newly aggressive
threat from the US and encourage the emerging Contadora peace
initiative, retused. Instead they responded with co-operatives.
Throughout 1983 and 1984 the Agrarian Reform Law was
used to turn idle or under-used land over to some 33,000
Nicaraguan peasant families, 22% of the total. Here was a new 28 model of collective ownership to meet the needs of landless
peasants, the Sandinista Farming Co-operatives (CAS), backed up by the even more numerous Credit and Service Co-operatives (CCS). It marked an important break with the Sandinistas' previous concern to assure an abundant supply of labour for the large-scale agro-export sector, but it continued to reflect their antipathy towards increased ownership of land by individua! peasants. It also involved a perhaps idealistic belief that such co-operatives would find an echo in the collective memory of pre-colonial forms of communal ownership. Either way, this
Nicaragua: changes in land ownership 1978-1985 (in % of total area) 1978 1985 PRIVATE SECTOR 100 64 Tarms over 500 Mzs (2) 36 13 200 to 500 Mzs 50 to 200 M/s 10 to 50 Mzs 16 30 16 13 30 7 O to 10 Mzs CO-OPERATIE 0 17 SECTOR Credit & Service Co-ops 10 (CCS) STATE SECTOR 0 19 Area of People's 19 Property (APP) 1 Corresponds to the first quarter of 19%5 2 1 M/ (Manzamal = 9.7 beetines NOTI. Ahhough there are tanations arcording 10 arts, sep etc 414 rough guide it can be said da: arms over 200 Mrs - large & medium tapiralist producers, emplosing at least some stage labour: 50 to 200 Me - Independens peasantry reling on their on n lanel and family labour: 0 to 50 Mzs = Poor peasantey and seni-proletanas, nueding i sell their labour for part of the roar, co-operative sector has proved most dynamic, performing more efficiently than either the large private farms or the Arca of People's Property, and contributing largely to perhaps the
single most remarkable achievement of Nicaragua's agrarian
reform, a continuous increase in overall agricultural production
(where every other agrarian reform in Latin America has seen
production fall by between 20% and 50% in the first five years)
However, the co-operatives still didn't cater for the entrenche‹
"peasant mentality' of those who wanted to own and work their
own land.
So why did the Sandinistas change their minds about
peasant smallholdings last year? Obviously there were objective
factors: the increased pressure for land from peasants displaced
the contra war; the need to stem the exodus from the
by
countryside to the cities, and to improve the supply of basic
foodstuffs from the former to the latter; the dimishing returns
from big cotton farms like Bolanos' SAIMSA, and the shortage of
public money to keep adequately servicing more co-operatives.
But there were more important political factors. Like any
serious revolutionaries, the Sandinistas have been learning from
their mistakes. By 1985, it had become obvious that the disaffection of
sections of the peasantry made them potential prey to the
contras and their civilian arm in the Catholic church hierarchy.
In Masava, for example, it was ISLN militants in the
communities who first began to respond to the peasants'
concerns at a grass-roots level, and then argued with the
national leadership for the need to change course. Daniel
Nunc., the President of the National Peasants Union (UNAG),
recalls the mistakes of that carlier period: 'we began to abuse the
word "bourgeois" , and to use it for any small peasant with ten
cows or 200 sacks of coffee, without realising the struggle it had
been to get them... This made many peasants feel set apart from
the revolution? He cites the case of middle peasants in the
northern mountains, seen by UNAG as a priority for organising,
in order to undermine the social base of COSEP and the
counter-revolution in one of the main areas of 'contra' activity:
'they used to call the Agrarian Reform officials "cave-dwell-
ers", because they spent all their time in their offices, cut off
from reality. We explained this to the ISLN national leadership,
and that's why they made changes ... We need to strengthen
INTERNATIONAL. No. 6. October/November 1986
ourselves internally in order to defcat the counter-revolution at
home and abroad.'
A new cardinal
There was also an immediate tactical reason for the Sandinistas
changing course when they did. Following the failure ot
Reagan's first attempt to get contra and voted through Congress,
the other command centre of impenalism's counter-ottensive,
the Vatican, had pointedly promoted its local field officer,
Archbishop Obando y Bravo, to become Contral America's
first ever cardinal. The new cardinal celebrated his first mass on
Miami, before a select congregation of contra leaders: he promised to make a triumphal return to Nicaragua, to make war on the government and the Patriotic Military Service, in favour of negotiations between government and contras and against the Retorm. Some 150,000 people were in the strects to welcome him when he arrived, not a few Masayan peasants amongst them. Perhaps many did not fully grasp the political significance of their archibishop's promotion. The ISEN could hardly
It has long been a principle of revolutionary Marxist strategy, especally in poor countries where the proletarian is often a small minority of society, that the revolutionars classes (the urban and rural working classes, and their immediate periphery) must win the support of the vacillating middle layers, the 'pout-bourgeoise', particularly the peasantry, otherwise these will be won over by the other side.
Although the Sandinistas do not come out of this tradition, and do not speak in its terms, the new direction of the agrarian retorm clearly corresponds to this continuing cruption of class struggle within the boundaries of the original anti-dictatorial alliance. Along with other, so far less successful measures to curb speculation and promote production in the towns, it is a further move towards defending and strengthening the alliance between workers, peasants and artisans, against the counter alliance between big capitalists and small owners that is certainly being sought by the Us 'low intensity'
By 1985, the revolution had already transformed property relations in Nicaragua. The "revolutionary bloc' state scetor (APP), small individual and co-operative production arcady provided three quarters of the country's total output. (This is politically a much more significant figure than that showing 64% of agriculture still in private hands.) The new measures will obviously increase the contribution of small individual producers.
It may seem odd to describe measures which strengthen small-scale private property as incipiently socialist'. Margaret Thatcher, for one, would have a tit. Be that as it mav, one thing is clear. The new course runs directly counter to the interests of large capital, both at home and abroad, in the agro-exportsector that has traditionally dominated Nicaraguan socicty and imprisoned the majority of its people at the most wretched levels of subsistence. It does not signal a brenk with the so called 'mixed economy path, but it does mark a readjustment of the FSEN's 'arrangement' with what is left of the and Somoza bourgeoisic, similar in kind to that which accompanied the walk-out of bourgeois ministers from the Govermment of National Reconstruction in 1980, but several miles further along the road to popular sovercignty over the private scutor.
How much further along this road will the revolution proceed, and how quickly? Will we soon see a decisive rupture with the bourgeoisic, wholesale expropriations and the consolidation of a planned economy? The future of the revolution Detailed evaluation of the possibilities is beyond the scope of this article. (ne would necd to look at the more worrving developments in the urban cconomy, where a rampant intormal sector accounts for over a quarter of cop, fuelling inflation and speculation, driving down the incomes of especially blue collar workers, and causing an actual shrinkage of the urban proletariat, with workers quitting their jobs for more lucrative lumpen activities. How long can the support of this vital base of the revolution be assured, solely on the basis of its political INTERNA NA DO obNover 12s
commend and the admittedly very great social benefits gained in the carly pears of the revolution?
Most crucially of all, we would have to look closely at the possibilities for mass participation in formulating, ratifying and applying the policies needed to confront intensity mortare. The example of agrarian reform has given some indication of the dynamic interaction between the grass roots and the sEN leadership, with the mediating role of mass organisations like UNAri. It is understandable that in a sitation of undeclared war, the arming of the people in popular militias shouk! tond to displace the role of civilian mass organisations like the Sandinista Detence Committees, and become the backbond of mass mobilization and participation. Nometheless, it should be clear that this does not offer any sort ol long tenn solution to the questions of proletarian democret, independent organs of popular power, workers control and so torh. Nevertheless, it cortainly is truc that the immense success of the multi-party clections in 1984, and the current, very open. public debate about the now draft constitution serve as in mportant check on any possible crosion of democratic rights, andshow the Nicaraguan experience as a real 'exampleto humanity, breaking further with the burcaucratic, authoritarian or pateralistic examples available than any other revolution in the last 60 years.
In general, however, the Nicaraguan revolution only has three options, and the Sandinistas' freedom to choose between them is limited. First, they can try and hold things where they are, in an efor to use the splits in the international bourgeois camp asa shickd against US invasion. They might adapt to their van domestic situation what the veteran British counter-insurgener specialist, Su Robert Thompson, said to his American hosts at Fort MeNir in January: 'where stable peace is unobtainable, a state of stable war is better than defeat'.
Secondle, they can decisively break with the private sector, probably lose their Latin American and European 'defenders' and suppliers, and rely on the Soviet bloc to plug the gap and frighten off the marines. The problem being that it is far from clear that the Sovict Union would be prepared to pick up the tab, and if they did, what would they want in return? In this situation, despite the Sandinistas' intentions, the pressure towards bureaucratic degeneration would be very great.t
The third option is to bank on an extension of the revolution to other countries of the region. In a sense this is the only revolutionar solution problem. El Salvador remainsthe most likely candidate, and this will be the subject of an article in a future International. But such a development is notonthe immediate agenda, and the amount of direct influcnee halt-choices, and given their consummate pragmatic skills, the Nicaraguans slight. Faced with these Sandinistas will probably continue to opt for an evolving blend of all three. After all, the over-riding priority in the short term is that the revolution survives.
Footnotes
! time Wheelock, Pore la crisis d la agresion. La Reforma
Agaria Sandinist, Managua. 1984. Extracts reprinted in
Trend language Inprecor, No. 186, 17/12/84.
- Maime Wheclock. 1:l Cran Desatio, Managua 1983. Reprinted
in English in The Sandinista Revolution, Pathfinder, 1985, and
cited bo Carlos M. Vilas in a very usctul study, "Nicaragua: the
hitth rear transtormations and tensions in the economy", in
Capital 8 Class No. 28, Spring 1986. Vilas is an Argentiman
social scientist working for the Nicaraguan government. His
constructive but critical remarks, like the debate on "market
mechanisms" opened in P'ensamieno Propio No. 31 indicates
the scope of the debate about such issues that is going on both
within the Sandinist state apparatus and in Nicaraguan society
ur large.
31). Vunes. Interview in Pensamiento Propio No. 30,
Jan leb. 'S6.
+ for an example of this, see Salah Jaber's article on South
Yemen in International Marxist Review, Vol 2, No 2
(tortherming).
29
That Peter