Doug Henwood wrote: > Louis Proyect wrote: > > >My experience is in Central America and I can tell you that the revolutions > >of the 1980s which led to a major political crisis in the United States > >called "contragate" were primarily an expression of peasant resentment over > >loss of land. > > 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 And at least 50% of those urban dwellars are dispossesed peasants trying to eke out a living in the informal urban sector. The working class in Nicaragua is miniscule. So is the middle class and the aristocracy. The FSLN had its social base in all sectors of Nic. society including the bourgeoise. Capitalism throws people off the land faster than it can employ them in industry. So the task of socialism, I think, would be to create an expanding industrial sector to employ the peasants or to work out a land reform and, most importantly raise peasant productivity, lower transport costs by building better roads so the peasants can get their goods to market( or urban areas). In S.Korea, land reform was enacted and expanding industry created to employ recent migrants to the city. This contributed, at least for a while, to social stability, growing productivity, and a growing economy with growing real incomes for the majority of society. The problem with peasant agriculture is to raise productivity enough to create a surplus that can be reinvested into the economy. Incentives are needed to raise productivity, then there is the infamous problem of getting the surplus from the peasants. Preobrazenski called this socialist primitive accumulation. These are all facsinating questions and the best discussions of them, I think, took place in the USSR in the 1920's. Sam Pawlett
