Political Report 1464 - Nicaragua: Chronicle of an Election Foretold

by LAP Editor, William I. Robinson

Posted by NACLA

With seven opposition presidential candidates imprisoned and held incommunicado in the months leading up to the vote and all the remaining contenders but one from miniscule parties closely allied with President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the results of Nicaragua’s November 7 presidential elections were a foregone conclusion. The government declared after polls closed that Ortega won 75 percent of the vote and that 65 percent of voters cast ballots. The independent voting rights organization Urnas Abiertas, meanwhile, reported an abstention rate of approximately 80 percent and widespread irregularities at polling stations around the country.

The vote was carried out in a climate of fear and intimidation, with a total absence of safeguards against fraud.The vote was carried out in a climate of fear and intimidation, with a total absence of safeguards against fraud. In a complete breakdown of the rule of law, Ortega carried out a wave of repression from May to October, leading the opposition to issue a joint statement on October 7 calling for a boycott of the election. Several dozen opposition figures—among them, presidential candidates, peasant, labor, and student leaders, journalists, and environmentalists—were arrested and detained without trial, while several hundred others were forced into exile or underground.

Among those exiled were celebrated novelist Sergio Ramirez, who served as Ortega’s vice president during the 1980s revolution. While the government charged Ramirez with “conspiracy to undermine national integrity,” his crime was provoking the ire of the regime by publishing his latest novel, Tongolele No Sabía Bailar, a fictionalized account of the 2018 mass protests that marked the onset of the current political crisis and the degeneration of the regime into dictatorship. The book was promptly banned in the country, with customs authorities ordered to block shipments at ports of entry.

Latest LAP issue! The Nicaraguan Crisis and the Challenge to the International Left

edited by William I. Robison

https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lapa/48/6

Debate is heating up among scholars over the ongoing crisis in Nicaragua. For some, the Ortega-Murillo government is a continuation of the 1980s Sandinista revolution while for others it is a corrupt and nepotistic regime that has promoted capitalist expansion while carrying out harsh repression against its opponents. This symposium brings together 10 scholars who debate the crisis at a time when it is generating deep fissures among the left and progressives in and out of the academy.

This issue also includes two commentaries on the July 11, 2021 protests in Cuba as well as nine additional articles on a variety of topics including indigenous movements, agriculture, precarious work, religion, and film as well as a number of book reviews.

Table of Contents

Virtual Forum - The Nicaraguan Crisis: A Left Perspectives

hosted by NACLA and WGNC

with introductory remarks from William I. Robinson, LAP Editor and editor of LAP's latest issue The Nicaraguan Crisis and the Challenge to the International Left.

The crisis in Nicaragua has divided the Left in the United States and throughout the Americas. Significant sectors of this international Left claim that President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo represents a leftist project for Nicaragua that should be defended, and that the United States is trying to overthrow the government. This event aims to address those claims from an explicitly leftist perspective. As well, as a reminder, the latest issue of LAP features a symposium/debate on the Nicaraguan crisis.

WHEN: October 7, 2021, 8:00pm-9:30pm EDT

Please click on this link to register. Registration is free:

https://nacla.salsalabs.org/thenicaraguancrisis/index.html

Political Report # 1394 A New Socialist Movement Must Oppose Both Capitalism and Imperialism

By Ashley Smith, Truthout

Spurred on by the global justice movement of the late 1990s, and the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, Marxists like David Harvey and Ellen Meiksins Wood have produced a flowering of theorization about capitalism and imperialism. Author William I. Robinson has been a key contributor to this new body of work, in particular with his books A Theory of Global Capitalism and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. His latest collection of essays, Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism, is a provocative and accessible summary of his argument that globalization - which he calls the “master process of our age” - has ushered in a new epoch of capitalism. He contends that this epoch was born out of the global recession the system underwent in the 1970s. Up until then, capitalism was a world economy divided up into hierarchically organized national economies, dominated by great imperial powers like the U.S. To overcome the recession, corporations broke out of that national framework in search of cheap labor, resources and markets. Over the subsequent decades, transnational corporations established a new global system of production, finance and services. In the process, Robinson argues, a new fraction of capital emerged: a transnational capitalist class that is not tied to any particular nation-state. Their corporations run global assembly lines, their boards are made up of executives from many different countries, and they advocate common ideologies and policies of neoliberal globalization.

Political Report # 1388 The Second Implosion of Central America

By William I. Robinson NACLA William I. Robinson is also a LAP Editor

The decline of global capitalism points to another total economic collapse of Central America, reminiscent of the regional upheaval of the 1970s and 80s. Some three decades after the wars of revolution and counterinsurgency came to an end in Central America, the region is once again on the brink of implosion. The Isthmus has been gripped by renewed mass struggle and state repression, the cracking of fragile political systems, unprecedented corruption, drug violence, and the displacement and forced migration of millions of workers and peasants. The backdrop to this second implosion of Central America, reflecting the spiraling crisis of global capitalism itself, is the exhaustion of a new round of capitalist development in recent years to the same drumbeat as the globalization that took place in the wake of the 1980s upheavals. Lost in the headlines on Central American refugees fleeing to the United States is both the historical context that has sparked the exodus and the structural transformations through capitalist globalization that has brought the region to where it is today. The mass revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s did manage to dislodge entrenched military-civilian dictatorships and open up political systems to electoral competition, but they were unable to achieve any substantial social justice or democratization of the socioeconomic order. Capitalist globalization in the Isthmus in the wake of pacification unleashed a new cycle of modernization and accumulation. It transformed the old oligarchic class structures, generated new transnationally oriented elites and capitalists and high-consumption middle classes even as it displaced millions, aggravated poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, and wreaked havoc on the environment, triggering waves of outmigration and new rounds of mass mobilization among those who stayed behind. Hence the very conditions that gave rise to the conflict in the first place were aggravated by capitalist globalization.

Political Report # 1363 The Nicaraguan Crisis and the Manicheanism of the US Left

by William I. Robinson, Verso (LAP Editor)

Washington's primary interest in Nicaragua is not getting rid of Ortega but in preserving the interests of transnational capital in the country and the hegemony of capital over any post-Ortega political project. In accord with the infantile manichean view of a significant portion of the US Left, the world is black and white and there are good guys and bad guys. This is a template into which everything must by political dogma fit. Since the US is intervening in Nicaragua (which it is, and which is condemnable) then, ergo, it is doing so in order to overthrow the regime of President Ortega and his wife, Vice-President Rosario Murillo, and ergo this regime must be the good guy. In these accounts there is absolutely no focus on - apparently a quite studious non-observation of - the internal contradictions in Nicaragua that have given rise to the crisis. There is little or no inkling of an understanding of the internal class, social, and political dynamics in the country, much less what exactly what the US is up to in Nicaragua or what its National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding actually seeks to achieve. Typical of a spate of articles in US Left media outlets charging that the Nicaraguan crisis can be explained by US regime change against a revolutionary government, a “color revolution," and a “right-wing coup d’état” by Washington and its allies, Roger Harris published an article in early August, “Regime Change in Nicaragua,” duly reprinted in a slew of Left media venues. In it, Harris points to high growth rates that he notes have received accolades by the IMF and the World Bank, the reduction of poverty, the provision of free health and education. He attributes allegedly “inexplicable” violence that erupted in April to the Ortega-Murillo regime “being targeted by the US for regime change” because “the good things it has done provoked the ire of the US.” He also points to $1.5 million dollars recently approved by USAID for NED for the purpose, in his words, of “overthrowing the government.” He concludes, “any replacement of Ortega would be more, not less, neoliberal, oppressive, and authoritarian.”

Political Report # 1265 What Is Behind the Renegotiation of NAFTA? Trumpism and the New Global Economy

By William I. Robinson (LAP Editor), Thruthout

The Trump administration's decision to renegotiate with Mexico the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been interpreted by most observers as the opening salvos of a new wave of US protectionism. But Trump's public discourse should not be confused with the essence of his government's economic         program and likely trade policies. A better explanation for the renegotiation, which may begin as early as mid-August, is to be sought in the transformation of the US and the global economy in the years since NAFTA went into effect in 1994. The North American economic region is part of a globally integrated production and financial system. Even if they were so motivated, US political and economic elites could not, without utterly disrupting and destabilizing the country, disentangle the United States (or the North American region) from the vast network of chains of subcontracting and outsourcing that characterize the global economy. Trump and his billionaire cabinet members are part of the transnational capitalist class. The Trump family's business empire spans the globe, including factories in Mexico that take advantage of cheap labor and export back to the United States, thanks to the provisions of NAFTA. Trump railed against NAFTA during his electoral campaign as part of his strategy of garnering a base of support among sectors of the US working class who face heightened insecurity and downward mobility as a result of capitalist globalization. No viable candidate can hope to be elected without putting forward a populist message. Hillary Clinton was forced as well during the campaign to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that Trump jettisoned upon taking office, just as Obama lashed out against globalization and its devastating effects on working people when he first ran for the presidency.

Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! by William I. Robinson

Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! 
by William I. Robinson 
William Robinson is Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective, published in 2008. 

It was Fall 1980. I had recently returned to New York from a three-year stint in Africa and would shortly be heading to Nicaragua, where I would spend the next 10 years. At the time I did not know much about the Cuban Revolution, but my political awakening had taken place on a continent that was still in the process of overthrowing the shackles of colonialism.