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fulfill necessary technical tasks under FSLN direction, the Sandinistas began almost immediately to hand them back control over the commanding heights of the 'Some people have asked whether the government is the FSLN or the GNR ... the truth is that the government Junta is in charge of all the high functions of the state.

There, the FSLN, which at the beginning took charge of the country, is now in the process of handing over the administrative and government apparatus to the Junta. (Daniel Ortega, member of the Joint National Directorate. of the FSLN, Barricada July 31 1979)

From the very start, the reconstruction the Junta sought to carry through, was to depend. on international finance capital.

At the same time as Robelo, the millionaire on the Junta, was embracing with Castro in Havana, both bankers brought in by the guerrillas and the FSLN leadership itself were negotiating for loans from Venezuela, the EEC, the IMF and the private banks.

According to Arturo Cruz, president of the national bank:

'We are fully aware. we have to work with the IMF und submit to a certain discipline. We don't want to be the mavericks of the world...

Closely linked to this was the question of arms sales and military training.

Reprimanded

The supposedly "Marxist' Minister of the Interior, Romas Borge (who protests that he is as much influenced by John Steinbeck and his mother as by Lenin!) declared that there were "serious indications that the U.S. wants to Change its attitude" . He reprimanded his second-in-command for threatening to buy arms from the Soviet Union, and indicated that approaches would be made to Belgium and the U.S. • These arms are destined for a "small, efficient, professional army" , rather thän the popular militias.

Far from strengthening the militias as the armed expression of the indepentent working class, the FSLN is moving rapidly to lisarm all those not under its direct control:

• the militias are being concentrated and trained to incorporate them into the army".(Commander Luis Carrion, Barricada, July 271979):

Lest there should by any illusions in the possible proletarian character of this new force, the Programme of the Junta spells out with absolute clarity that:

"The members of the National Army will not be allowed to engage in politcal party activities, but their political rights as citizens will be guaranteed'.

(Programme of the GNR June 1979 para 1.12)

These moves to reconstruct a capitalist state apparatus that had been destroyed by the civil war rest firmly on the categorical pronouncement that:

'private property will not only be respected but absolutely guaranteed'.

(Commander Bayardo Ace, La Prensa, Buenos Aires, August 1 1979)

"Mixed Economy"

Jaime Wheelock, Minister of Agriculture and leader of the TP, who a year ago was inveighing against the 'petty bourgeois hegemony' of the other tendencies of the FSLN, is now vigorously pursuing the policy of «a gradual advance towards a mixed economy outlined in the Junta's proof 'caution':

The nationalisation of Somoza's property, which comprised 25% of all industry and 40% of all workable land, was a political necessity imposed by the mass mobilisation: but state control of the national banks was a move required by capital if any form of control was to be placed on the bankrupt Similarly, the state monopoly on the export of agricultural produce is the only possible means in which sáles of this year's disastrous cotton and coffee crops can be optimised on the world market.

: No basic assault These developments have altered the configuration of capitalism in Nicaragua: but upon it.

Quite the reverse, they are the most efficient means of defence, and have been supplemented by a consolidated effort to defend private property relations in the countryside.

The state agrarian reform agency, INRA, and the official peasant trade union ATC have ejected peasants who spontaneously occupied land.

And in some areas, such as that around the city of Leon, which was liberated early in the civil war by the GPP and where extensive redistribution was encouraged, this has led to considerable tension.

Against this overwhelming evidence that the FSLN is moving towards the reconstruction of the bourgeois state it is widely argued, in the capitalist press as much as in the pages of Socialist Challenge or Intercontinental Press, that the Sandinista Defence Committees (CDS's) have been built into organs of popular power through which the revolution can be carried forward.

There can be little doubt that the precursors of the CDS's played a vital part in the revolution, and had the potential to become soviet-type organisations.

Moreover, they are virtually the only organised means of expression for the masses, and have demonstrably unsettled the bourgeoisie.

However, it is not the job of Marxists to gawp uncritically at the enthusiasm of popular participation.

Not The CDS's, for all the gains they represent, are not the independent organs of the working class; they have been established under the political direction of the FSLN which has in the process relieved them of police or military functions and retained the right of appointment of the 'delegates' for security on each committee.

Closely connected I. to this control from above is the growing offensive against those groups that pose the question of working class independence and attack the FSLN leadership.

The most outstanding example to date has been the expulsion of the Simon Bolivar Brigade, the causes and consequences of which will be dealt with separately in another article.

Less publicised, but no less important, are the campaigns against the Maoist Frente Obrero (Workers Front) and Movimiento de Accion Popular (Popular Action Movement) whose paper El Pueblo has been subject to suppression and whose militants have been arrested as 'counter-revolutionaries' Trade union leaders who are close to or members of the Trotskyist' Liga Marxista • Revolucionaria (LMR), (which once described itself as a sympathising organisation of the USFI but in view of USFI instructions for it to dissolve itself into the FSLN is unlikely so to remain) have also been arrested, and the LMR claim that one at least is dead.

It is certainly true that the FSLN has subsequently been forced to release many of these militants-but when questioned about the activities of the Maoists and the LMR, a Sandinista told a member of the SL two weeks ago "these people are our class enemies;.. we are at war with them.' The 'generous revolution' that released hundreds of Somoza's butchers has yet to prove itself capable of maintaining such a benevolent attitude towards working class militants.

But this revolution is very jealous of its 'generosity'; the FSLN has reiterated on numerous occasions that. it has no intention of 'exporting' the revolution to the rest of Central America.

They have announced that Nicaragua is a 'special case': that they are incapable of providing assistance to other movements, and that if they did so they themselves would be crushed. • Here is one of the most cogent expressions of the FSLN's nationalism and capitulation to imperialism.

It is against these developments that our next article will make an assessment of the sundry slogans and policies put forward by would-be Trotskyist forces for the Nicaraguan Soviets We do so in the context of arguing that the political task for Trotskyists is to take up the struggle for a workers'. and peasants' government in Nicaragua.

This must centre on the construction of independent organs of the working class -from trade unions through to soviets and proletarian militias.

In the countryside, the peasants, whose legitimate desire to expropriate the "anti-Somoza" landlords are being held in check by the FSLN regime, must build committees that will link up with the workers in the towns in the struggle against the exploiters.

A central agitational lemand must be that the 'proletarian": tendencies within the FSLN take up the struggle for the full scale nationalisation, without compensation, of the means of . production under workers' management, and the land, which must be placed under the control of the peasants' committees.

Elected committees of workers must be established to open the books of industry and agriculture and, jointly with the peasants, formulate a socialist plan for production.

Such a struggle will expose the real role being played in the government by the millionaires, bankers and bourgeois politicians, who are using the fall of Somoza to protect or even enhance their own power at the expense of the Nicaraguan masses.

These figures must be ›usted trom the govefnmenı nd their centralised standing army-with its developing links with the Panamanian dictatorship-disbanded Final days of the civil war and replaced with the arming of the working class.

Imperialist overtures and all forms of secret diplomacy must be rejectedwhile tangible aid and. assistance must be publicly demanded from the international workers' movement, and the Stalinist regimes in Cuba, the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of Europe and Asia.

At the same time full solidarity and assistance must be given to the revolutionary struggles throughout Central and Latin America which offer the only longterm way forward from the national isolation of Nicaragua to the necessary United Socialist States of Central America.

Trotskyist party

To press through the fight for this kind of internationalist and consistent socialist perspective, a principled, Trotskyist party is essential.

Only through such a party persistently defending and extending the political independence and leading role of the Nicaraguan working class in the struggle for socialist revolution, can the waverings and retreats of the petty bourgeois FSLN leaders be combatted, the possibilities of the full restoration of bourgeois dictatorship averted and the necessary permanent revolution in Nicaragua brought about.

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gramme, and has proved one of the foremost proponents

in no sense do they represent -a. basic assault