"On Radio Sandino, denunciations of U.S. imperialism are followed by commercials for Pepsi Cola, but then the Sandinistas are such a thret to the Yankee Empire that they had to get $60 million in aid from companero Jimmy Carter. In Nicaragua there are a wonderful variety of 'mass organizations' that are supposed to give the illusion of popular power when they are actually one-way transmission belts from the ruling junta downwards to the masses. The country is covered by a network of Cuban-styled Saninista Defense Committees (CDSs), which act to integrate all citizens into the reconstruction plans of the state and which also serve to spy on anyone suspected if disloyalty to the regime." --Keith Sorel, Socialism (in quotation marks), No Middle Ground, Fall 1984-Winter 1985.
"In Nicaragua today, under the 'revolutionary socialist' vanguard of the Sandinista Front, the most basic defensive weapon of the working class, the strike, has been banned." --Keith Sorel, Socialism (in quotation marks), No Middle Ground, Fall 1984-Winter 1985.
"In the past forty years or so, many new nation-states have been created by the struggles of 'national liberation' movements. But what really changes for the vast majority of people? Imagine that you live in a small village in Angola, or work in a factory or farm in Vietnam. One day the bosses and landlords leave town. A horrible war develops and is fought against a vicious foreign power or local tyrant, and when the fighting ends the bosses and landlords march into town at the head of an army, hang up red banners and portraits of the new leaders everywhere and announce that from now on you will work just as hard as before the new bosses have taken over and they know what's best for you and all members of the working-classes. All of this is presented to you in the name of a 'people's revolution.'" --Keith Sorel, Socialism (in quotation marks), No Middle Ground, Fall 1984-Winter 1985.
"The writer gets into trouble when she insists on referring to what is going on in Nicaragua as a revolutionary process. A government consolidating itself is not a revolutionary process. It never was and never will be. What is crucial in any revolutionary process is the autonomous, radical activity of the people involved, with definite movement toward a cooperative society, dispensing with the inefficiency and dehumanization of capitalism (state or laissez faire) and resisting the rigidification of new institutions of society into hierarchies. Authoritarian formations come about when certain individuals/groups during revolutionary upheavals (or not) are able to make powerful positions for themselves, and others allow, or even encourage, this to occur. When this happens, of course, the revolution is a failure." --Sally A. Frye, "Revolution on a leash", No Middle Ground, Fall 1984-Winter 1985.
"For genuine democracy to exist in Nicaragua, it would mean that decisions at all levels of Nicaraguan society, from the local coffee farm to major national issues, would be shaped and concluded by the people themselves, not by a few leaders. But the FSLN's talk of 'democracy' is a pathetic joke, this is equally true of their use of the phrase 'workers control.'"" Tom Wetzel, "Where is Nicaragua going?", No Middle Ground, Fall 1984-Winter 1985.