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SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1988 11 (continued from preceding page) economic sabotage nearly equalled the combined losses due to the contra war.

Economic aid from the European and Latin American governments, moreover, has been doled out with an eye-dropper. For them to provide any significant aid and investment will require what they call a "political climate conducive to investment"-and that can only mean further inroads into the conquests of the revolution.

Harsh austerity measures

The Sandinista policy of "national unity," on the other hand, has compelled the government to enact economic policies that make the workers and peasants bear the brunt of the war. Specifically, the government has implemented a series of austerity measures that affect the poor while providing generous subsidies to the rich. And mass discontent is on the rise.

At a "Face the People" in June 1988, union leader Guillermo Delgado told President Daniel Ortega that the workers are becoming increasingly angered by the government's policies: "The major preoccupation, the question all the people have, is why are there no products in the secure [state] channels," Delgado said.

Delgado went on to note that the big farmers sell for a profit to the private markets while refusing to sell to the state. "Yet they are getting juicy subsidies," he continued. "Every time we go to deepen our revolution, the subsidies get bigger, and their [the capitalists'] behavior gets worse. When are we going to put an end to this generosity of subsidizing our enemy?" [quoted in "Economic Crisis Sparks Struggle, Debate," Central American Reporter, September 1988)

Greater numbers of Nicaraguan workers and peasants are demanding the confiscation of properties of capitalists who sabotage and decapitalize.

At the same time, the Nicaraguan masses are beginning to openly challenge the top-down methods of functioning of the Sandinista leadership and the state administrators.

In June 1988, for example, when the Sandinista Workers Federation (CST) leadership attempted to remove a local union leader at the Toña brewery after he had called for a one-day protest strike against management, the workers lined up behind their union president and denounced the "vertical demonstrations of force" of the top CST officials. (quoted in Radio Prisma, Managua)

Demands for workers' democracy In Nicaragua, there is no meaningful participation by the masses in the major decisions affecting their lives. In the factories and farms, instead of workers' control, what exists is a kind of codetermination, with limited worker participation in management decision-making. Final decision-making power rests with the owners and/or the government-appointed administrators—not with the workers.

This is equally true of the society at large. Envío, a journal published by the Central American Historic Institute, a longtime supporter of the revolution, is obliged to recognize in its June 1988 issue that the government's austerity measures were implemented without popular participation in their development.

The edicts, Envío writes, are an "economic package without the people." It went on to note "the current breach that is separating the technocracy that formulates the measures from the people who have to live with them."

A permanent National Assembly (or Council) of representatives of factory and peasant assemblies, of the mass organizations, of union delegates, agricultural cooperatives, artists, soldiers, and inhabitants of the shanty-towns should be organized to formulate the nation's major policy decisions and direct the course of the revolution.

In this manner, however difficult the choices before them, the masses could feel they are full participants of the revolutionary process.

No easy solution Obviously, there is no easy solution to the plight of the tiny Nicaraguan economy and to its legacy of capitalist anarchy and colonial backwardness.

Deepening the revolution by proceeding on a socialist course and instituting a planned economy is a vital necessity for the Nicaraguan Revolution today.

But even if Nicaragua were to break with the capitalist mixed economy, it would still not be able to break out of the straitjacket of underdevelopment imposed on it by the international capitalist system. Nicaragua cannot develop its economy in any meaningful way within the confines of its own borders.

Nicaragua's fate, in the short and long term, is tied to the struggles of revolutionary people throughout the world who seek to replace capitalism with a system of social organization and production rationally planned to meet human needs.

Nicaragua can only find the road to genuine economic and social development through the extension of the revolution to the other nations of Latin America and, ultimately, to the developed capitalist countries.

These interrelated views in support of a planned economy, workers' democracy, and proletarian internationalism are not "pie in the sky." They represent a political program, the program of the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky, whose implementation in Nicaragua is becoming a very practical necessity if the revolution is to survive and move forward.

Tape 1:

Leon Trotsky's speech on the Founding of the Fourth International (12 min.), and Esteban Volkov, Trotsky's grandson's, speech to Socialist Action 50th anniversary rally (23 min). [Trar scripts of speeches included.] Tape 2:

Ernest Mandel's speech to Socialist Action Forum in S.F. on April 13, 1988, on the "Meanir 9 01 the Stock Market Crash." (72 ı nin.

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