9. The 4 November, 1984, Election – a Reformist Orientation¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the 4 November 1984 election in Nicaragua marked a decisive reformist turn by the FSLN leadership, consolidating a strategy of class collaboration that ultimately betrayed the revolutionary potential of the Sandinista Revolution. The core claim is that the FSLN, having formally broken with the Nicaraguan Socialist Party (PSN), nevertheless imported its Stalinist theory of stages — the notion that a democratic, capitalist stage must precede any transition to socialism. This is presented not as a pragmatic concession to external pressure but as an ideological choice rooted in the false belief that a progressive national bourgeoisie exists, capable of leading national development independently of imperialism.
The chapter draws heavily on Marxist revolutionary theory, invoking Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Guevara as figures who fought against precisely this kind of reformism. It also references the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, which warned that refusing to step beyond bourgeois-democratic limits turns alliance with the peasantry into support for capital — citing the Mensheviks in 1917, the Chinese Communist Party in 1925–27, and popular fronts in Spain and France. The polemic is directed squarely at the FSLN leadership, particularly Jaime Wheelock, who openly embraced the stages theory, and at leftist commentators who defended the election as progressive while simultaneously calling for Soviets — a contradiction the chapter likens to the counter-revolutionary dual-power argument of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1917.
Evidence for the reformist orientation includes the FSLN’s election platform, which explicitly renounced the elimination of private enterprise and the socialisation of the means of production. The chapter notes that the government transformed the Council of State into a traditional bourgeois parliament, a qualitative step backwards obscured by the FSLN’s majority and the context of imperialist attack. Land reform, though accelerated under Contra pressure, did not fundamentally challenge private ownership; the distribution of over half a million hectares in 1984 came primarily from underused capitalist holdings, and the government guaranteed capitalist farmers’ land would not be confiscated if they produced efficiently. The shift of UNAG from a peasant-based organisation to one dominated by capitalist farmers is cited as evidence of the demobilisation of the poor peasantry.
The chapter also highlights the FSLN’s failure to extend workers’ control over production and distribution as shortages deepened, contrasting this with the communal feeding programmes of early Soviet Russia. The election itself, while a democratic advance compared to previous Nicaraguan elections, is presented as a mechanism that limited the struggle to bourgeois parliamentary forms, thereby restricting the democratic freedoms it ostensibly advanced. The FSLN’s policy on women, defending the nuclear family, is cited as a warning sign of bureaucratisation, paralleling the degeneration of the Russian and Chinese Communist Parties.