Edwin Castro (no relation) has many of the typical personality traits of a chief whip, which is the position he currently holds for the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). He is warm, charming, mischievous and full of you know what.
Behind him, through his fifth-floor window, you can see the demonstration by banana workers. They claim that pesticides gave them cancer and they want justice and action from a government that says it is not its problem but that of the banana farm owners.
It’s an impasse reflected in the docility of the protestors. Many are seriously ill; it is very hot and the hammocks strung up between the trees swing as lightly as the flutter of a single blue and white Nicaraguan flag. They have succeeded though in closing the road that runs in front of the National Assembly, which is probably just as well given the size of the potholes.
Inside there is a buzz in the offices of the FSLN. Most are wearing Lula badges — clearly hope springs eternal in the chests of revolutionaries past, present and future, and the landmark presidential victory of the Brazilian workers’ leader has awakened in these parts at least a sense that radical politics are not extinct.
Whatever did happen to the Sandinistas, a great cause celebre for 1980s left politics? The revolutionary movement that seized power in 1979 and stood firm against illegal United States support for the Contras. I’d always wondered. Many in the hemisphere would like to forget: the US State Department website calmly airbrushes one of the most shameful episodes of US foreign policy with one sentence: “The Reagan administration provided assistance to the Nicaraguan Resistance”, as if, in fact, all that General Oliver North was doing was lending them a Kleenex.
Perhaps like me you still have the T-shirt, bold red and black insignia faded to gentle pink and grey. Well, like the banana workers, the Sandinistas are waiting for their moment. Castro talks of the need to “democratise the economy and the distribution of wealth”. This cannot be done, he says, if “the state is a ‘do nothing’ state”. Apart from the role of the state, he bangs a second drum — “we must move from representative democracy to participatory democracy” — and one that can be heard now in Brazil, in the Indian state of Kerala and in other places where the real left struggles on in its search for new contemporary meaning.
As I sit listening to Castro, I find the question intrudes into my mind: is this the same space the African National Congress is in? Well, of course, it would depend which bit of the ANC. Probably only the bit that Thabo Mbeki and, now, Dumisani Makhaye describe as “ultra left”. Because I can no longer imagine either of them agreeing with Castro’s complaint against “the market’s invisible hand, which, whether invisible or not, has gold rings on its fingers”.
Nor, certainly, would they respond to the question “what is your ideology these days?” by saying, as Castro did to me, “we continue to be a left-wing party, aspiring to socialism”.
Echoing his 1984 statement that “the ANC is not a socialist party. It has never pretended to be one, it has never said it was, and it not trying to be. It will not become one by decree for the purpose of pleasing its ‘left critics’,” Mbeki told the ANC policy conference in September that “…our movement, like all other national liberation movements throughout the world is, inherently and by definition, not a movement whose mission is to fight for the victory of socialism”.
I think that a certain Fidel, as well as Edwin Castro might have a word or two to say about that. It is, after all, an extraordinary statement: to claim that by definition a national liberation movement cannot be socialist. This helps explain the obsession with the phrase the “National Democratic Revolution”, which sounds nice and radical, but is — by definition, apparently — not about anything as radical as socialism.
Not that the Sandinistas have exactly been the model of ideological purity in recent years. After 10 years out of power, in January 2000 it entered into a bizarre pact with the liberals who for 46 years prior to the revolution of 1979 offered institutional cover for the despotic rule of the Somoza family. It is impossible to resist noting the symmetry with the ANC’s decision to enter into a pact with the party that for 46 years denied South Africa democracy and justice, though there is no equivalence between the position of strength of the ANC and the growing desperation of the Sandinista Front’s veteran leader Daniel Ortega.
But while the green shoots of radical left revival, small and precarious though they may be, appear in the soil of Latin America, here apparently the ANC’s leadership and acolytes want to tread on them with hobnail boots.
Makhaye’s recent article, Left Factionalism and the Democratic Revolution, is a calculatingly brutal assault on what he claims are factions within the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Its appearance on the ANC website is proof of the leadership’s approval.
Whoever in the ANC had the bright idea at Mafikeng in 1997 of making the national conference a five-yearly event must surely be regretting it now. It would have been an attractive idea at the time and every year since. Until now. If you only give your party one chance every five years to influence the composition of the power structures and the core ideological and policy soul of the party, then you are looking for serious trouble during the build-up to the conference.
Which is what is happening now and it is entirely unsurprising for all that, though one would have hoped for a slightly more original label than “ultra-left” to be deployed for the purpose of discrediting one’s most dangerous opponents. It’s so passé, so thoroughly Eighties, though at least then the British Labour Party had a more jocular alternative — the “loony left”.
The consequence for British politics was to suck the life out of the radical left, which has yet to recover lost morale. Clearly, a similar strategic and tactical manoeuvre is in progress within the ANC alliance, though the brand new draft Preface to the Strategy and Tactics of the ANC is a much more sophisticated and intellectually rigorous contemplation of the ideological dilemmas facing the ANC.
I don’t know for sure who penned it, but the more empathetic critique of the ultra-left as victims of “subjectivism — a confusion of what is ‘desirable’ with what is actually and immediately possible”, has the ring of Joel Netshitenzhe about it.
Admittedly, socialists can be excruciatingly irritating, with their earnest self-righteousness, their dogma and didactics, the deadly dreariness of their prose and their ideological primness.
But more than anything they prick consciences. And it is this that I smell between the lines of Makhaye’s far more hubristic defence of his own class position and interest. Guilt is a natural, though unprepossessing, human trait, as omnipresent in politics as in human relations. I have an idea the Sandinistas are feeling a little guilty about their current strategy and tactics; perhaps they are not alone.
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