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SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1991 15

Nicaragua

Dear editors, Though I agree with the bulk of your article on the Sandinista congress in the September issue, I think you avoid fully addressing the point Victor Tirado made in the speech you quoted.

He said at the end: "But revolutions of this kind cannot sustain themselves all alone; now there is nobody to subsidize them."

You answer: "In reality, Nicaragua never received the aid it needed from the misnamed 'Socialist Camp. "" It may seem to you that you are trying to refute what Tirado says, but you simply affirm his point. You say Nicaragua "needed" their aid and didn't get it. • Then you say: "The aim of the token aid extended by the Soviet Union to Nicaragua was not to promote the advance of genuine socialism, but to increase the bargaining power for the Soviet bureaucracy as it sought an accommodation with world imperialism."

Are you trying to say that Nicaragua should refuse this aid because of the motivations or "aims" of the Soviet bureaucracy in giving it? That really makes no sense.

Cuba has received Soviet aid— and also aid from minor imperialist countries. Has that wrecked their revolution? So, how would aid from the Soviet Union have undermined the Sandinista revolution?

The fact is that the lack of aid from the Soviet bloc did hurt the revolution and contributed to its degeneration. I think this fact is not lost on the FMLN, the Angolan and Mozambique governments, Vietnam, Kampuchea. Condemning the aims of the Soviet bureaucracy in no way addresses what national liberation movements in small Third World countries should now do. The book by Alan Benjamin on Nicaragua also does not address this question.

I think you should present some feasible alternative between fighting to the death or caving in to imperialism, but having read what you have written on Nicaragua over the years, those are the only two "choices" I see: win the revolution and die from economic strangulation, constant war, and lack of foreign aid; or win the revolution and compromise it until you surrender.

I would like to see you spell out your program for revolutions in countries like Nicaragua. It does not seem to me that your program is very much different from the Sandinistas today: you simply differ on the choice of suicide. (See response on page 14.)

Stansfield Smith, San Monica, Calif.

Dear editors, Anytime I turn on the boob-tube, I am assaulted by the pernicious image of Black on Black violence. From South Africa to "gang-banging" in L.A., a lie is being spread. The lie is that Africans, wherever they live, are murderous savages.

I have the good fortune of knowing a man working hard to shatter this myth. Dr. Kambon, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, and a Panther Party member, is out to show that African youth are capable of more, much more.

Dr. Kambon has encouraged some 30 young gang members and exgang members to stay in school and finish. The incentive is the reward of a back-packing trip through Africa.

While recognizing the damage imperialism has wrought on Africa, Dr. Kambon feels the trip will provide the youth a history they have been denied. The pilgrimage will raise their consciousness, much as Malcolm's was in his trip to Africa.

Di. Kambon is calling for contributions from the people. "We can beg the people, but we will not beg the imperialists." Please send all donations to Akimsanya Kambon, 2240 Atlantic Ave., Long Beach, CA 90806.

D.T., Long Beach, Calif Visual Arts Dear editors, In her criticism of my article, "Do the Visual Arts Have a Future?" (August 1991 Socialist Action), Samia Halaby makes the point that "art does not have the potential to create revolutionary change." "Only the working class," she says, "has the potential to cause such change." Of course, she is right. Art by itself does not have this potential.

However, I take issue with Halaby on some of her other statements. For example, she refers to the "Soviet" contructivists and suprematists as "intellectuals moved by the great revolution." In fact, Gabo, Pevsner, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and other constructivists and suprematists were bourgeois artists who operated in total isolation from the revolution.

One of the directives of their "Realist Manifesto," which they were then peddling on the streets of Moscow, stressed that constructivists should "construct art," noting that constructivism is "an art that struggles for essences." They dismissed Soviet-sponsored art as "propaganda," using the term in its pejorative sense.

Lenin was quick to oppose their Manifesto. On Oct. 8, 1920, he wrote: "All educational work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, in the field of political education in general and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat. ... All attempts to invent one's own particular brand of culture, to remain isolated in Boston P.O. Box 1046 GMF Boston, MA 02205 (617) 497-0230 Chicago P.O. Box 578428 Chicago, IL 60657 (312) 327-5752 Cincinnati P.O. Box 20109 Cincinnati, OH 452 (513) 751-1597

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SociAlist Action

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