Jaguar Smile, is read it! It is a short, well written, easy-to-read book, light reading but not light weight. Salman Rushdie takes you with him on his short journey around Nicaragua, from near the Honduran frontier, to Managua, to the Caribbean coast, giving you all the spicy flavourings on the way. The strength of the book is the background that the author comes from, the angle from which the readers sees Nicaragua.
Salman Rushdie comes from both India and Britain and gives you the benefit of both. He is not a naive Londoner laying eyes on the confusion and poverty of the third world for the first time. With his India-trained eyes, he knows that the scene at the market is not a portrait of real grinding poverty, while being in no doubt about the very real hardship faced by the population of Managua. Rushdie's British political concerns are easy to follow, and so you feel in familiar hands as he takes you on his short and poetic guide through Nicaragua. He is no follower of 'the old bastard Marx', nor an economist, so there is no attempt to reveal the major contradictions of the extremely confusing Nicaraguan economy. This is a valuable tour of the superstructure which is penetrating and above all colourful.
So what's the social life like down at President Daniel Ortega's pad then? Daniel himself is portrayed as bookworm who has been doing body building exercises; the mild mannered intellectual who got tired of having sand kicked in his face and so decided to take on the responsibilities of history and leadership. Daniel's party sounded quite fun; listening to revolutionaries sitting in arm International No 9 March/April 1987
chairs putting the world's problems to rights, discussing the next blow planned against L'S imperialism. A lively argument about poetry raged throughout the party as some of Latin America's greatest poets grappled with the problem of promoting poetry in war-torn Nicaragua, encouraging ordinary people like the police to write and discuss poetry.
Debate figures prominantly in Rushdie's portrait of Nicaragua, giving a strong impression of the very openness of the country. Criticism abounded in many forms. Revolution? 'I've got no time for that junk' says one woman unperturbed by the proximity of several officers of the state. In the market the government came in for a lot of stick. The shoppers knew that not all the shortages could be blamed on the war. Recently 20,000 pounds of beef went bad in the government's meat packing company because it was stored without refrigeration. The debate and discussion with and between officials was open and relaxed.
Rushdie vigorously disagrees with the policy of closing the opposition newspaper La Prensa with or without CIA funding. He tends to dismiss the arguments he came across as 'giving the line' rather than tackling the thorny question himself of when censorship is justifiable. Throughout the book he manifests a certain scepticism towards the Sandinistas which seems to come from a healthy distrust of Stalinism and a liberal's distaste
intornational REVIEWS VYA for revolutionary parties. He is won over though, struggling and kicking to supporting the FSL.1. He realizes with surprise, that for the first time in his life. he has come across a goverment that he could support. This he finds disorientating.
He characterises the FSL.V as revolutionary nationalist. The fact that revolutionary nationalism needs an input of Marxism in it to be successful, is something that he seems to ignore or accept without discussion. His view of Marxism comes over as childishly simple: you sum up how much influence Marxism has by the quantity of portraits and quotes of Marx and Lenin on public display, and concludes that 'the Reds in Nicaragua were keeping a pretty low profile'. He does concede though that some of the Sandinistas 'probably were "communists", even "Marxist-Leninists"'. His account of a discussion with a leading representative of the bourgeoisie is far less ambiguous. He leaves you in no doubt about the moral and political superiority of the Sandinistas.
Rushdie's endorsement of the FSI.\ comes from his impression of the superstructure and the closeness that is apparant between the Sandinistas and the people: what Gramsci would call hegemony - but in this case of a very different kind from that exercised in Europe. When Jaime Wheelock addresses 5,000 campasinos, 'it was impossible not to notice that the emotional
distance between the audience and the orator was very small. I could not think of a Western politician who could have spoken so intimately to such a crowd.' When Rushdie talks to another complaining Nicaraguan, this time of wealthy middle class extraction who is no fan of the Sandinistas, he asks her his well worn question: 'What do you think the government should do? Should it try to make peace with the Americans?' The answer comes with force. 'No, they can't give in. The war must go on. It's difficult to know what to do. The revolution exists. It has to exist, or there's no hope. But what problems! What difficulties! What grief!'
Rushdie's internal disputes go on though, culminating in a bad dream in which he is chased by the jaguar smile from the limerick. He found it necessary to vote for the preferred interpretation of the limerick. The young girl could be the revolution, seven years old, idealistic and youthful with the jaguar as geopolitics or the United States. Alternatively the young girl could be Nicaragua itself, and the jaguar the revolution. Some readers of this journal might find a young girl and a jaguar to be unlikely partners, about as stable as Nicaragua's mixed economy. They will want to know who will end up in whose stomach. What this book gets across is that Nicaragua is a warm and sensitive place, but it ain't no easy meal. 39
Trotsky notebooks CHRIS ARTHUR Philip Pomper (editor) Trotsky's Notebooks 1933-35, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986, 175pp., US$25. Hardback. THERE IS less than forty pages of Trotsky here. But we get it twice, in Russian and in English. The rest of the book is editorial annotations and commentary. Researching the Trotsky archives at Harvard, Pomper discovered these notes in folders for Trotsky's projected biography of Lenin - of which only the first part was written, and published as The Young Lenin. They were compiled during Trotsky's exile in France from July 1933 to May 1935. Besides the material on Lenin there is material on the dialectic intended as background for Trotsky's assessment of Lenin's dialectic.
The occasion for the latter arose from a quarrel with Max Eastman. In his book Marx and Lenin: the science of revolution Eastman makes fun of dialectic and says Lenin just used it as an excuse for flexibility in the face of fixed ideas. The comedy here is that it is precisely Lenin's studyof dialectic which allowed him to achieve the flexibility of thought so admired by Eastman.
Trotsky intended to reply to
Eastman in an appendix to his own Lenin book. Since Eastman
was his own translator and agent he had to put up with him personally. Eastman notes smugly: 'he was almost hysterical
- was actually gasping for breath
- when he found himself unable
to overpower me with the usual
clichés with which the idea of
dialectic evolution is defended'.
Poor Trotsky - having to cope
with the idiocies of an Eastman!
In fact Trotsky never finished
either the book on Lenin or the
project on dialectics. Indeed, it
has to be said that these notes are
very fragmentary and of no use at
all to a beginning student. But
those with an insatiable appetite
for anything on Lenin, Trotsky or
the dialectic, are given some
intriguing new material. The
editor situates it in two essays of
his own, the first covering
Trotsky's relation to Lenin and
the second Trotsky's philosophical
development. He claims the
reflections on dialectic here have
been overlooked by Trotsky 40 scholars such as Deutscher.
As far as the material on Lenin is concerned there are three points of particular interest. First about Lenin's leadership team, Trotsky notes: 'Undoubtedly, the period of Iskra and Zaria was the time when Lenin was with a most highly qualified group of exceptionally gifted people, educated citizens of the civilized world...a warm atmosphere of elevated ideas surrounded this group of six people. Lenin did not have the fortune ever again in the future to work in such a milieu. He himself became greater, but his collaborators were of significantly lesser dimensions.' (p 81)
The 'six' were Lenin, Plekhanov, Martov, Zasulich, Axelrod, and...Trotsky. The second point of interest is Trotsky's judgement on Lenin's politics: 'Lenin's dialectic had a massive character...Lenin's thought operated with living classes as the basic factors of society and thus revealed all its power in those periods when the great masses entered the scene, that is, in periods of profound upheavels, wars and revolutions. The Leninist dialectic was a dialectic for the large scale.? (p94-95)
In this light Lenin's mistakes can be situated: 'Lenin's political mistakes were always to the left of the line of development, thus the farther along the line of development, the rarer they became, the smaller the angle of deviation, the sooner they were recognised and corrected; by virtue of which the relationship between strategy and tactics achieved a higher and
more perfect correspondence.
(p96)
Finally, out of nowhere,
Trotsky suddenly jots down:
'Lenin created the apparatus. The
apparatus created Stalin.' (p86)
But the rest of the page is
blank, as if he did not know what
to make of this thought and meant to come back to it.
In Trotsky's notes on dialectic,
he turns first, like Lenin twenty
years before, to Hegel's Logic; but
unlike Lenin he didn't finish it!
As far as the principles of
dialectic are concerned he gives
pride of place to that transition of
quantity into quality. (pp 87-88)
But is is important to point out
that, while in the hands of a
reformist this could give rise to a
philosophy of gradualism, Trotsky gives it a catastrophist interpretation. It is in this light that one must read his praise of Darwin's theory of evolution, for example. The difference between a dialectical approach to history and vulgar evolutionism is brought out particularly well in Trotsky's 1939 article on the petty-bourgeois opposition in the SIP; he says: 'One must not forget the concept of 'evolution' itself has been completely corrupted...by ...liberal writers to mean peaceful 'progress'. Whoever has come to understand that evolution proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that a siow accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and brings about a catastrophe, revolution: whoever has learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself, he is a dialectician. as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists.' (In Defense of Marxism, New York, Pioneer, p.54) The