>Nicaragua's population, according to the superficial bourgeois >statisticians at the World Bank, is 63% urban, with 26% in "urban >agglomerations of over 1 million." Attributing the revolution "primarily" >to "peasant resentment over the loss of land" would suggest a narrow social >base for the Sandinistas. > >Doug Doug, the World Bank statistics don't tell the story. You have to get over the habit of viewing these sorts of numbers ahistorically. In 1980, just after the Sandinista triumph, the Ministry of Labor did its own statistical survey, which resulted in the following breakdown: Category: Salaried number of 1000s: 91.6 percentage of economically active population: 10.1 Category: Proletariat (fulltime factory workers) number of 1000s: 181.5 percentage of economically active population: 20 Category: Semiproletariat (part-time, mostly plantation hands) number of 1000s: 229 percentage of economically active population: 25.2 Category: Subproletariat (street peddlers, maids, etc.) number of 100,000s: 192.9 percentage of economically active population: 21.2 Category: Peasants number of 100,000s: 213 percentage of economically active population: 23.5 To summarize, the base of the revolution was in the last 3 categories which amounted to 66.4 percent of the economically active portion of the population: plantation hands, people who had lost their means of subsistence in the countryside and peasants. What has happened in the past 20 years is continued population migration into the city because of war and economic ruin. The fact that Doug does not recognize this is a sign of a certain gap in his knowledge. To fill in this gap, I'd recommend that he read George Black's "Triumph of the People," which puts meat on the statistical barebones shown above. For an understanding of how Nicaragua's demographics changed in the intervening 19 years, I'd recommend works by Carlos Vilas and James Petras. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
