[The following article was published in the November 16 issue of La Gauche, French-language fortnightly newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (POS), Belgian section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The manner in which the election campaign was organized in Nicaragua, the way it unfolded, and the results that flowed from it contain important general theoretical lessons. These lessons are of such scope that they deserve to be highlighted.
For the first time since 1917-21 in Russia, a victorious and living socialist revolution organized free elections, that is, elections allowing the workers and peasants to choose between different political parties, different political platforms ranging from the bourgeois right to ultraleft grouplets.
This advance toward political pluralism — which is an indispensible prerequisite for any real socialist democracy worthy of that name to be able to function in real life — is all the more remarkable in that it took place in the midst of full-scale civil war, when the acts of imperialist aggression and the attacks and crimes of the Nicaraguan contras are escalating daily.
The Sandinista comrades were completely correct to reject any political rights for the murderers and organizers of armed aggression. They were completely right to grant the right to participate in the legal political life and freely express ideas to any organization that in real life respects revolutionary legality, whatever its ideology and goals might be.
Far from constituting some kind of concession to the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie or to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois international public opinion, this concept of political life and of the role of elections under the workers and peasants power completely conforms to the interests of the revolution. It constitutes the best means of consolidating this power, enlarging its popular base, and ensuring an increase in the level of activity and class consciousness of the workers.
The Sandinista comrades are in the process of showing in practice that the conquest of political power by the workers, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the construction of socialism in no way mean a restriction of democratic freedoms for the masses. On the contrary, they permit a considerable enlargement of the right to assembly, association, free expression of ideas, freedom of the press, etc., for the greatest number.
It is not socialism that is responsible for the dictatorship in power in the workers states such as the USSR or China, but rather the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy that usurped the power of the workers and peasants, thereby allowing the international bourgeoisie to drape itself in the mantle of "democracy."
By acting in this way, the Sandinistas are coming back to the Marxist tradition on this subject. Need we recall that Marx and Engels considered the Paris Commune a model of the dictatorship of the proletariat? That Commune was elected by universal suffrage, with a plurality of parties and political currents, with public, free, and impassioned political debates.
To assert that the elections in Nicaragua were elections for a bourgeois parliament confuses the form of institutions with their content. A parliament is not bourgeois because of its form. It is bourgeois if it is elected in the context of the political power of the bourgeoisie.
It would obviously be absurd to assert that after the disarming of the bourgeoisie, after the elimination of the bourgeois state apparatus, prisonment.
Such measures generally have the opposite effect on the level of ideas. The struggle against these ideas cannot be carried out properly except on the level of ideas, obviously with practical experience aiding ideological clarification. Far from fearing the influence of bourgeois ideas, a true people's revolution should encourage debate over these ideas before the broad masses, and with the participation of these masses. That is the best way to raise the political consciousness of the workers and the toiling population in general.
Obviously, to consolidate workers power, organs of power of the workers and people's council type are more effective than a parliament. But by itself this does not answer the question of whether, alongside such councils, a body of the national-assembly type remains useful or necessary. Nor, in particular, does it answer the question of how these councils and - the assembly should be elected.
Comrade Tomás Borge, one of the main Sandinista leaders, gave a perfect explanation of the correct way to look at the question:
"We don't censor them, we debate and refute them.... [W]hen only the voice of one political force is heard it tends to fall prey to arrogance. The existence of these remnants of the past are [sic] explained by the very strength of the Sandinista People's Revolution. Our Revolution developed a style of ideological confrontation and political debate that prevents everyday life from becoming boring.
"The existence of critics, opponents, dissidents, nonconformists and reactionaries gives life and vigor to the revolution. Confrontation and debate are going to keep the people's political-ideological muscles in shape. It's a permanent gymnasium that doesn't allow for any atrophy and passivity" (interview published in Granma Weekly Review, October 7, 1984. p. 10).
Whatever the future vicissitudes of the Nicaraguan revolution might be, this political position and the practice that concretizes it will remain a lasting contribution to the world cause of socialism.