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(continued from preceding page, bans' views and for their own reasons, consciously reject the Cuban road. Instead, they seek to straddle the conflicting class interests in Nicaraguan society. The history of this policy can be traced from the formation in 1979 of the Junta of the Government of National Reconstruction (which included leading capitalist representatives), to the Sandinista government's most recent decision to return land to the pre-1979 capitalist Owners.

The very measures taken by the government to preserve the prerogatives of capital and private profit have inevitably led to the restricted and distorted development of Nicaragua's trade unions and mass organizations. At the workplace, for example, the limitations of the FSLN conception of "participation" have alienated broad layers of the working class and peasantry. Workers, either discouraged from or prevented from striking against profit-gouging capitalists, are implored to produce more and ask for less, while peasants are denied the essential loans and infrastructure to produce effectively.

Hard-learned lessons of the past This book will undoubtedly disturb many of those whose concept of advancing the struggle for socialism consists in uncritically supporting, if not justifying, whatever measures are undertaken by the Sandinista leadership. Such a stance does a disservice to the struggle for socialism.

The hard-learned lessons of the class strug gle and revolutionary politics are discarded in deference to those who have "made the revolution." In time, pragmatism posing as Marxism will give way to cynicism and demoralization when life itself passes judgment on faulty policies.

There is no doubt that isolated Nicaragua, a tiny and terribly underdeveloped nation of 3 million people, cannot by itself overcome both the obstacle of its own history as a semi-colony and the combined hostility of world imperialism and Stalinism. This is not to say, however, that Nicaragua's situation is hopeless, that the Sandinistas must stoically await their own demise, either at the hands of imperialist invaders or by the domestic capitalists they have encouraged.

Another course is available to the Nicaraguan people-the establishment of an extensive system of workers' control of the economy based on mass democratic decision-making institutions akin to the "soviets" (or councils) formed in the Soviet Union in 1917 under the revolutionary leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

The establishment of workers' control and the distribution of land to the peasantry would transfer the fundamental economic levers of society to the great majority of the Nicaraguan people. It would link their destinies to the revolution's success, as opposed