On July 19, 1983, the Nicaraguan revolution celebrated the fourth anniversary of the fall of the dictator Somoza. At that very moment, and throughout the summer, imperialism was stepping up its support to the reactionaries throughout Central America and was moving ahead in its methodical preparations for a confrontation aimed at crushing the insurgent peoples of El Salvador and Guatemala, and at overthrowing the revolutionary government in power in Managua.
More than 6,000 U.S. soldiers are now stationed in Honduras. Their job is not limited to training Honduran soldiers to handle the most sophisticated weapons during the socalled "joint maneuvers." In reality they are one element of a powerful military deployment aimed at encircling the Nicaraguan revolution.
The number one priority of the Sandinista leaders now is defense of the revolution and its gains: "They will not cross the border! All arms to the people! One single army!" These were the main slogans for the mass assemblies organized July 19.
Of necessity, the political and military defense of a threatened revolution brings into play very broad social processes. All the efforts to extend and rationalize Nicaragua's military defense bring with them growing polarization in society. Every day, the sheer gravity of the imperialist aggression focuses a spotlight showing who defends the revolution and who is fighting it.
Increasing the revolution's military effectiveness is inseparable from deepening the revolutionary course, which in turn is a key factor in increasing the mobilization of the revolution's social base. "We must prepare to fight and to win with the entire formidable strength of the organized people.. All arms to the people to defend the land, to defend the gains of the revolution," Daniel Ortega stated in announcing the establishment of the new Patri-
American proletariat? None.
otic Military Service, through which "students, workers, and peasants, as fundamental forces of society, will be able to defend, weapons in hand, the rights they have won against the inevitable counterattack by internal and external reactionary forces."
The Sandinista leadership's response to this new test, to this new challenge by imperialism and the bourgeoisie is unambiguous: new advances in the revolution, new advances toward the "construction of a society without exploiters or exploited" (declaration by FSLN National Directorate, April 16, 1982).
"Our working people know what direction we are going in, and that is why I ask the workers and peasants of our country, what are we going toward?" asked Tomás Borge at a May 1, 1982, mass rally. The response: "Socialism."
This concrete response in practice most convincingly illustrates that for the Sandinista leaders the struggle did not stop with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, that it is also a struggle for socialism. They have taken up Ernesto "Che" Guevara's formula: "Either socialist revolution or caricature of revolution."
This practical, concrete response is in keeping with the whole four years of Sandinista power. It ought to lead the Lutte Ouvrière comrades to ask themselves: is this the response of a leadership that "has set up a bourgeois state in Nicaragua that protects a system where the exploitation of the workers is still the rule, a state that defends and preserves in that country the present and especially the interests of the Nicaraguan future bourgeoisie**? That is what they wrote in Lutte de classes (No. 104, June 1983).
This analysis by Lutte Ouvrière flows from their statement that in Nicaragua "we have not seen the working class win and exercise polit- ¡cal power" (ibid.).
Historically, the industrial proletariat is certion. Trotsky never said anything different in his theory of permanent revolution.
Within this framework, the Sandinista leaders never hid the fact that they conceived of the alliance they established with the oppositional bourgeoisie on the eve of victory as tactical and limited in time.
"We simply carried out a policy making it possible for us to spread out. To achieve that we established de facto alliances. Our problem was to overthrow Somozaism in order to take power and, from there, to make the revolution" (Humberto Ortega).
Before the fall of the tyranny there was a situation of dual power between the dictatorship and National Guard on the one side and the revolutionary movement on the other. After July 19, 1979, this dual power was transformed. It took on a more precise class aspect: between the bourgeoisie, based on private property, on the one side, and the proletarian revolution behind its Sandinista vanguard on the other.
Ever since, the Sandinista policy has always been to secure and consolidate control of political and military power and to establish alliances with the bourgeoisie on the economic level, especially through the form of maintaining the "mixed economy." But, and this is the essential thing, in each confrontation with the bourgeoisie, the FSLN has shown itself to be intransigent: from the creation of the people's militias in early 1980 to the rejection of the elections demanded by the bourgeois political
Democratic figure Robelo's Nicaraguan Movement, to take those examples.
Today, it is showing this same intransigence in the face of the imperialist aggression.
Any a priori characterization, any sectarian approach to the Nicaraguan revolutionary process must be ruled out. It is a process that, in each of its phases, shows that there is no gap, no discontinuity between accomplishing the democratic tasks and beginning to accomplish the socialist tasks of the revolution. It is a revolutionary process whose advances are threatened more and more every day by imperialist aggression. It needs our most active, most massive, and militant solidarity.