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The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution (New International, No 9)

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The 1979 rise of Nicaraguan workers and peasants inspired freedom-loving people around the world. The FSLN led a massive mobilization that uprooted the long-standing Somoza system of repression and subservience to U.S. capitalism. The armed people began a road of social justice and genuine sovereignty. Led by the Sandinistas, they defeated the invasion of counterrevolutionary contras -- armed and commanded by Washington. Yet the FSLN, at the moment of its greatest victories, turned away from the road of leading the workers and peasants forward to the overturn of capitalism. Instead, they reversed course and abandoned land reform, workers rights, and sought to become an inoffensive bourgeois political party. Even that modest ambition was thwarted, and they lost power in 1990.

The fall of the Nicaraguan revolution was neither inevitable, nor caused by the lack of political consciousness of the workers and farmers who had made that revolution, neither was it caused by those same workers "voting with their stomachs" in 1989. No, it was the leadership of the Sandinista National Liberation Front ( FSLN ) and its policy of " concertación", of catering to the domestic capitalists of the city and the countryside that demoralized the working people, without gaining a single concession from Yanqui ( U.S. ) imperialism as the FSLN leadership had promised ! The working people I met in Nicaragua in 1986 during the war against the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary terrorists were ready to make whatever sacrifice necessary ( and they were doing so ) in defense of THEIR workers and farmers government that then was in power, under the leadership of the Sandinista Front, that was still a revolutionary leadership then. The Nicaraguan people were betrayed by their leaders, who had and have to this day more faith in capitalism then confidence in the workers. The lessons of the degeneration of the FSLN and the defeat of the workers and farmers government that is treated in this book are based on the experience of of a revolutionary workers party in the U.S. defending that revolution here and opposing the U.S. dirty war, and on the socialist journalism of its permanent bureau in Managua during the ten years of the revolution. These lessons are just as important as the lessons of the victorious Cuban revolution , also covered in thumbnail sketches here .We workers and farmers here in the U.S. can still learn much from the FSLN during its revolutionary period, as we can learn from the works of comandante Carlos Fonseca, founder of the FSLN, on the road to power, referred to throughout this valuable book.

This book is the most complete political analysis of the Nicaragua's Sandinista Revolution, not for academics, but for working revolutionists, for workers, peasant and youth who want to change the world. It contains resolutions on Nicaragua adopted by the Socialist Workers Party starting in 1979, the historic Program of the Sandinistas by the FSLN's historic founder Carlos Fonseca, and several important articles and speeches by SWP leaders. Most unique are the fifty-page introduction by SWP leader Steve Clark and the articles by Larry Seigle, a leader of The Militant's bureau in Managua during the revolution. They document that the revolution failed, not because it was anticapitalist, but because it failed to go on to end capitalism.

The July 1979 triumph of the Nicaraguan revolution showed the way forward for fighting workers and farmers throughout the Americas and the world. It transformed the possibilities for revolutionary struggles in Central America and the Carribean...attracted a new generation of fighters in the United States to communism...interwined with the rising freedom fight in South Africa...and gave impetus to new advances by the socialist revolution in Cuba.

"Only the workers will go all the way" - that battle cry of Augusto César Sandino, leader of the war against the U.S. marines' occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s and '30s, once again became a line of march for millions.

This special issue of New International, based on ten years of working-class journalism from inside Nicaragua, traces the lessons fighters everywhere can learn from the rise and fall of the workers and farmers government in Nicaragua.

Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba "are three giants rising up to defend their independence, sovereignty, and justice, on the very threshold of imperialism...One must have a sense of history to know what these revolutions mean." Cuban president Fidel Castro March 1980 (from the back cover)