Sandino's Communism: Spiritual Politics for the Twenty-First Century 9780292716032

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SANDINO'S COMMUNISM

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SANDINO'S COMMUNISM Spiritual Politics for the Twenty-First Century Donald C. Hodges

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN

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Copyright © 1992 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1992 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hodges, Donald Clark, 1923Sandino's communism : spiritual politics for the twenty-first century / Donald C. Hodges. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-292-77657-8 (alk. paper) 1. Sandino, Augusto Cesar. 1895-1934—Philosophy. 2. Communism—1945- I. Title. F1526.3.S24H64 1992 91-44264 CIP

ISBN 978-0-292-71603-2 (library e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-71647-6 (individual e-book)

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For my daughter, Sojourner Truth, on her fifth birthday, 5 July 1991

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Contents

Foreword by Napoleon Chow Introduction: Understanding Sandino's Legacy

ix i

PART ONE. SANDINO'S POLITICS 1. Red and Black 2. Property Is Theft 3. People's War, People's Army 4. The Conspiratorial Vanguard 5. The Comintern Connection

15 17 30 41 56 68

PART TWO. SANDINO'S PHILOSOPHY 6. The Flag of Many Colors 7. God Punishes Proprietors 8. Pursuing the Millennium 9. The Scriptures Unveiled 10. From Solomon's Temple to Moses's Kabbalah Conclusion: The Relevance of Sandino's Communism Postscript Appendix: Sandino's Suppressed Legacy Notes Bibliography Index

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his book could not have been written at a more timely moment. Precisely when the painful and prolonged experience of authoritarian socialism is coming to an end around the world, Donald C. Hodges asks the obvious and often-avoided question, Where do we go from here? The dramatic reassertion of freedom in modern political consciousness is an event to be celebrated joyfully. But the demise of Marxism-Leninism has become more an occasion for smug self-congratulation than a golden opportunity for sober self-examination. The crumbling of Eastern European socialism does not constitute a confirmation of liberal capitalism or of the various forms of social-democratic economics. Today, the most powerful capitalist nation is itself in crisis, a crisis involving spiraling debt, economic dislocation, what appears to be a permanent underclass plagued by drug dealing and addiction, an apathetic body politic, and other signs of social disaffection. The United States of America is not Utopia, nor anything approaching it. We must be clear-eyed; social narcissism is the last attitude we need now. In this sequel to Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, itself a sophisticated study of the connections between the "unique blend" of Sandino's revolutionary thought and the Sandinista revolution, Hodges turns his attention from the politics and philosophy of Sandino to the lucid and confident exposition of a Utopian vision: spiritual communism. Spiritual communism? If ever a seeming oxymoron could grate on American ears it is this. No two concepts could seem more incongruous. But let us look again. Spiritual communism has been at the heart of the Christian longing for radical fellowship: its first communities, monasticism, and the religious orders of the church were, and are, attempts at maximizing the social bonds and human realization that ubiquitous social hierarchies—especially the economic one—clearly seem to prevent or hinder. These experiments in communistic Christian brotherhoods were not a panacea, but they can be taken as harbingers of what is possible for society as a whole. Therefore, in spite of how jarring it sounds, the idea of a spiritual com-

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munism is not a novel one. One reason why we have not heard much about it is because it has been hiding under the wings of another name: anarchism—an ideal with more militant and secularized connotations, but that nevertheless has continued to cherish the freedom and creative spontaneity that belong to the children of God. Just as Anabaptists, with their radical egalitarianism, were an irritant to the churches of the Reformation, so the anarchists were anathema to both capitalism and authoritarian socialism. The revolution of May 1968 in France shook not just the Left and the Right, but the whole French establishment. The inevitable elements of agitation and destruction, and sometimes even terrorism, that have been linked to such protest demonstrations have not done much to endear the anarchistic ideal to the general public. But the rejection of regimentation, of large organizations, of unnecessary complexity and luxury, and, in general, the eradication of hierarchical obstructions to human fulfillment have exercised their potent attraction among the best and the most sensitive. Those who have felt the appeal of anarchism include Thomas More, Thomas Jefferson, Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Stephane Mallarme, Max Stirner, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Vinoba Bhave, Mahatma Ghandi, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Read, and, in Nicaragua, Augusto C. Sandino. In any case, we should remind ourselves that agitation is not the essence of the movement; the search for human emancipation is. Spiritual communism is not a theocracy, or the reign of the saints. Hodges points out that there is as yet no political theory for this new type of communism in the manner, say, of Marx's blueprint for socialism. Spiritual communism has not reached this stage. But the enduring relevance of the ideal of spiritualizing human organizations, an ideal Sandino held, should serve as a reminder and promise of things to come. The aspiration toward freedom is the most profound in the human heart. Owing to the human condition, it is also subject to much misunderstanding and to practical abuses. The freedom for which generous and reckless youth fights is not the freedom of the experienced and seasoned. Modern mystics have probed other dimensions of freedom that give infinitely more depth to the libertarian yearnings of novices in the arena of political consciousness. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista Front was perceptive and shrewd enough to assess correctly the enormous influence that religiously inspired revolutionaries could have in helping to bring down the Somoza regime and in symbolically legitimizing the Front's socialist policies once it was in power. In promoting what they called a "strategic" alliance between Christians and Marxists, the Sandinistas were reinterpreting, with great political adroitness, the old Marxian prejudice against religion as the opium of the people. The alliance served the Sandinistas, at least in the short run. In the long run, however, theologians of liberation may have to reevaluate such alliances be-

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cause the Popular Church neglected its prophetic critical function, because it was used mainly as a conveyor belt of Sandinista policies and as good public relations with foreign Christian communities and institutions, and because the presence of priests in key ministerial posts did not add anything substantially Christian to the Sandinistas' conduct of politics. These developments raise serious questions about liberation theology's societal analyses and prognoses and its tactical and strategic alliances. These questions must be resolved if liberation theology wants to create itself anew from the present political ashes. The great novelty of liberation theology is its unwavering insistence on interpreting reality from the perspective of the poor. Salvation, then, acquires a this-worldly aspect that was lacking in traditional theologies. Since liberation theologians had no satisfactory analytical apparatus to analyze concrete situations of poverty and underdevelopment, they naturally resorted to the most trenchant critique of capitalism available, that is, Marxism. Although they adopted analytical Marxism as a "tool" only, they eventually found themselves committed to an authoritarian ordering of society as the only way out of underdevelopment and socioeconomic injustice. Because liberation theologians have not given proper attention to pre-Marxian communism, they have lacked the flexibility to consider alternative and more spiritually satisfying ideals of social organization. And in the case of Nicaragua, instead of fully utilizing the richness of the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition in criticizing the seductions of power so inevitable in any human administration and examining values behind concrete governmental policies, they were widely perceived as loyal but uncritical apologists for the Sandinista regime. This does not mean that the Sandinistas came to power with the explicit intent of causing mischief. Far from it. The Sandinista program was neither worse nor better than other standard authoritarian socialist blueprints. Its literacy program released an enthusiastic national altruism, and today, even though they are out of power, it is noticeable that rude conduct based on old class distinctions is behavior not very often seen in the Nicaraguan social setting. If self-respect becomes a permanent attitude of the Nicaraguan popular classes, that is a development to be highly prized, although it has come by way of a painful and spendthrift revolution. Yet, going as far back as 1982, those of us who had the opportunity of talking with diplomats from socialist countries such as Hungary and the Soviet Union were surprised at how they looked at the Sandinistas as irresponsibly willful and narcissistic newcomers who lost their heads and their sense of direction at the first sniff of power. What these diplomats saw was that romantic image-making and revolutionary dilettantism had taken precedence over prudent and solid management of the economy. That the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie has ample reason to feel resentful should not surprise anyone, though Violeta Chamorro's government has begun its administration in a con-

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ciliatory stance. What is surprising and ironic is that the popular classes, in the cities and in the countryside, have manifested an unexpected bitterness against outgoing Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were shocked not to get the vote of those whom they thought to be their most solid supporters—the young, the urban poor, and appreciable numbers among the military. Something went wrong. We have sufficient evidence today that an autocratic certainty as to what the people want is a dangerous path to follow. Julia Preston, writing in the New York Review of Books, summarizes what seems a historical judgment on the Sandinistas: "Right up to election day the Sandinistas continued to work on the arrogant assumption that their original revolutionary victory automatically endowed them with superior political judgment. They communicated with Nicaraguans by using aggressive catchphrases. . . . Like the deafening sound system they deployed at their final rally, they could make noise, but they couldn't listen" (12 April 1990). With obvious justification, liberation theologians could refer to Nicaragua as their geographical and political capital, even more so than Cuba, where Christian thought and presence are institutionally weak. Nicaragua functioned as a sounding board and as a center for spreading liberation theology. With one exception, Nicaraguans have not made any first-rate, intellectually cogent contributions to the fund of liberationist ideas, but that exception is a massive one. Ernesto Cardenal has presented poetically his version of the Kingdom of God on earth, where barriers between Marxism and Christianity have been broken down. Cardenal is not a theologian, and his poetic approach eschews complex scholarly justifications of his millenarian hopes. His Marxism is naive and his pegging of class consciousness to Jesus's message somewhat crudely insistent. But there is an engaging Franciscan quality in his monk's vision of what constitutes a pre-Marxist Utopia, since ultimately the hair shirt of his Marxism does not quite fit the Christian body of his hope. What is implied in Cardenal's religious yearning was clearly and consciously held by Sandino in his eclectic Gnostic-theosophical-millenarian vision: political restructurings are not sufficient for fundamental changes in human relations. Sandino was unashamedly spiritualist in his very earthly political struggle, so spiritualist as to make the Sandinistas wince in discomfort and hide as much as possible how un-Marxist Sandino was in his rejection of secular rationalism and materialism. What will come as a surprise to other Nicaraguans is that Sandino is an exemplar of the new political style in which the wisdom of the East meets the knowledge of the West. This new style includes the ideals that propel movements such as ecological activism, women's and peace movements, animal liberation, and movements in which Christ, Buddha, and Lao-Tzu are harmonized. These new social and political dynamics are pushing toward a voluntary social arrangement in which freedom and human relations will be paramount, and in which a holistic perspective that

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sees humanity's intimate relation with nature, along with a spiritual worldview, will prevail. This hoped-for outcome Hodges winsomely describes as non-Marxist communism. By detecting the unity behind various liberation movements—from overtly political to broadly cultural—Hodges has opened widely the scope of our political reflection. He has clearly seen how these diverse movements converge in their search for the spirituahzation of society and the attainment of universal kinship. It is for us to pursue his insight to its desired realization. NAPOLEON CHOW

Advisor to the Ministry of Culture and vice-director of the Technical Office of the Presidency of Nicaragua

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If socialists show themselves capable, if they learn how to annul egoisms . . . they will be able to proclaim not just socialism, but rather communism without frontiers and private plots . . . [so] that everything belongs to everybody in common . . . [and] nothing is left to the individual except the wisdom for moral and spiritual elevation, while its material benefits belong to the commune.—JOAQUIN TRINCADO, FILOSOFIA AUSTERA RACIONAL ( 1 9 2 0 )

We have now explained the five loves and infallibly laid the foundations of the Communist Ethic . . . the complete man is the Spiritist Communist. —JOAQUIN TRINCADO, LOS CINCO AMORES: ETICA Y SOCIOLOGIA ( 1 9 2 2 )

Here I am forcing myself to receive "intuitively" the spiritual inspirations relative to the organization of our first government of the Universal Commune, for which I have had to reread in these moments our book Los cinco amores [The Five Loves].—SANDINO TO JOAQUIN TRINCADO, 22 JUNE 1931

I made myself the firm promise that as soon as the war for independence came to an end, . . . I would . . . free Nicaragua from the barbarism into which exploitation has submerged it, first feudal-colonial and now capitalist. SANDINO IN A CONVERSATION WITH JOSE ROMAN, BOCAY, MARCH I933 I had become unionized in Mexico. . . . With workers and peasants I want to forge a new Nicaragua. We are going to organize them. In Managua we will buy a building to use for the House of the Laborer, as in Mexico. . . . No more exploiters . . . everything will be in cooperatives.—SANDINO IN A CONVERSATION WITH NICOLAS ARRIETA, NIQUINOHOMO, NOVEMBER 1933 On one occasion, speaking to me about his belief in . . . the future of communization . . . , Sandino added with a jovial air: "But look, if I were to say this openly, people would take me for a screwball."—RAMON BELAUSTEGUIGOITIA, CON SANDINO (1934) I saw Augusto Sandino for the first time in Prinzapolca. He addressed me, saying that he wanted to fight in the interior. . . . At the same time he gave me a written statement concerning his ideas, the concluding sentence of which proclaimed that "PROPERTY IS T H E F T . " — G E N . JOSE MARIA MONCADA,

AS CITED BY ANASTASIO SOMOZA GARCIA, EL VERDADERO SANDINO, O EL CALVARIO DE LAS SEGOVIAS ( 1 9 3 6 )

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SANDINO'S COMMUNISM

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Introduction: Understanding Sandino's Legacy

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he present work is a sequel to my Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution. There I formulated a new paradigm for understanding Sandino, but considerations of space interfered with a full exploration of its ramifications.1 Building on that book's foundations, I here wish to penetrate further into the inner sanctum that still partly conceals Sandino's communism from the public eye and the image he cultivated of himself as a national liberation hero and new Bolivar. In my earlier work I was tempted to skim over the occult passages in Sandino's writings; however, I remained haunted by the prospect of finding a key to their meaning. It was not to be found among the principal works concerned with Gnosticism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and millenarianism. Not until I traveled to the Buenos Aires seat of the Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune, which was then virtually unknown in the United States and Western Europe, did Sandino's seeming gibberish begin to make sense. I now realize that his occult philosophy was not only the foundation of his communism, but also the single-most-important clue to his motivation as a revolutionary. Yet none of these underground and subversive currents is generally believed to have shaped Sandino's ideology. The prevailing stereotype of Sandino is that of a Nicaraguan nationalist with populist leanings. That he was concerned above all with the liberation of his country from foreign occupation was the consensus of Mexican and Central American political commentators during the 1920s. Carleton Beals, among other North Americans, shared this interpretation in his February-April 1928 series of articles in The Nation. It was the impression Sandino chose to give in interviews leading to the first authorized biography, by Emigdio Maraboto, Sandino ante el coloso (1929). The most-important source of Sandino's writings while he was still alive, Gustavo Aleman Bolanos's Sandino, el libertador (1933), also stresses his patriotism. But if patriotism had been Sandino's main concern, he would have adopted Nicaragua's national flag as his army's emblem. Instead, he made a

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point of rejecting it for the red and black banner of Spanish and Mexican anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism and, when he finally displayed it alongside the flag of his projected Hispano-American Oceanic Union, he did so as an adept of a philosophical school for which patriotism was a means to universal communism.2 A more accurate reading of Sandino's intentions, albeit still wide of the mark, is to be found in the ghost-written biography by Anastasio Somoza Garcia. It depicts Sandino as a murderous and vindictive bandit with illdigested ideas stemming from Spiritualist and Theosophist as well as anarchist and Communist sources.3 Until the 1980s, it was the only work containing Sandino's correspondence with Mexican Communists and representatives of the Communist International, and the only work containing his correspondence with the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Although Somoza aimed at discrediting Sandino, his biography is invaluable in reproducing Sandino's letters defending communism on philosophical grounds. Ironically, this correspondence has been deliberately withheld from publication by the Sandinistas or otherwise excised and published in truncated form. Thus, they, too, must share responsibility for the current image of Sandino as mainly a fighter for national liberation. With the revival of interest in Sandino following the Cuban Revolution and the republication in Havana of Gregorio Selser's works on Sandino, virtually the same stereotype continued to be disseminated.4 North American scholars have repeated the same theme. Oddly enough, this is true of both the Sandinistas' supporters and those who favor the contras.5 Somoza's account has been overwhelmingly rejected as a caricature and falsification of the historical Sandino based on documents of questionable authenticity. The Sandinistas were among the few to appreciate the kernel of truth in Somoza's distorted depiction, although, for the most part, they misinterpreted and minimized the significance of the communist component in Sandino's thought.6 The Sandinistas, Sandino's presumptive heirs, have concluded that, since he was not a Marxist-Leninist, he was not a communist. They have also found his counterculture of the occult to be politically embarrassing. Concerned that some of Sandino's writings might damage his image as the father of the Sandinista Revolution, they give us a sanitized image of their hero as something he was not. Nonetheless, that Sandino began his political career under the influence of Mexican anarcho-syndicalism and that he soon became a flaming revolutionary is the interpretation of at least one of his biographers.7 That he never relinquished his anarcho-syndicalist creed but reinforced it with its anarchocommunist cousin has also been persuasively argued.8 But if that were the extent of his communism, how does one explain his fellow-traveling with the Mexican Communist party? There is reason to believe that Somoza exaggerated Sandino's ideological

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kinship to the Communist International.9 But if Sandino differed with his Communist allies, it was not over the goal of a proletarian revolution. Was it, then, because he was a libertarian rather than an authoritarian communist? I no longer believe so. What is inaccurate or misleading about depicting Sandino as an anarchocommunist? By anarcho-communism or communist anarchism is usually meant libertarian communism, a presumptive synthesis of anarchism and communism on fundamentally anarchist terms. Consequently, anarchocommunists have vigorously opposed the authoritarian communism associated with the names of Francois Noel ("Gracchus") Babeuf, Filippo Buonarroti, and Auguste Blanqui, not to mention the nominal communism of Karl Marx and his latter-day followers. What is distinctive about Sandino's communism, as I argue in part one, is its synthesis of anarchism and communism on fundamentally communist terms. In such a pragmatic mix, almost any means will do, provided they are effective. Should anarchist methods prove feasible, then all the better; if not, then authoritarian ones. The appropriate label for such a synthesis is not "anarcho-communism," but simply "communism." Further research into Sandino's elusive and enigmatical ideology now leads me to believe that the goal of a classless and egalitarian society mattered more to Sandino than did liberty and libertarian methods. That would explain the conjunction of his anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism with the strain of authoritarian communism he assimilated from other than Bolshevik sources. In this interpretation, the traditional animosity between libertarian and authoritarian communists that predates the Bolshevik phenomenon has little to do with Sandino's discrepancies with the Mexican Communist party. Thus, more credence should be given to Sandino's authoritarian communism, with the proviso that it not be confused with that of the Mexican Communists or that of the Communist International. Although my revised paradigm of Sandino's communism must not be equated with what he "really" believed, it can at least claim to approximate historical reality more closely than do the interpretations it encompasses and supersedes. Marginal historical material assimilated for the first time accounts for the difference. It is a sorry commentary on the present state of Sandino studies that new books on Sandino persist in ignoring these marginal data. As recently as 1990, a Sandino anthology was published based on a Sandinista compilation whose American translator regards "the great love he [Sandino] felt for his country and his constant wish to see it sovereign and free" as his "basic motivation."10 After insisting that one must search for the "true Sandino" exclusively in Sandino's writings, he notes that nowhere does Sandino mention the luminaries of communist and anarchist thought, notably Ricardo Flores Magon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and that the

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men he revered and imitated "were not anarchists or contemporary radical or revolutionary leaders."11 In fact, Sandino made repeated allusions to each and followed in the footsteps of more than one contemporary communist. Sandino named one of his camps after Joaquin Trincado and shared the ideals of Agustin Farabundo Marti, an agent of the Communist International.12 As we shall see in this volume, Sandino split with the Comintern over matters of strategy, not over what he believed to be its communist objectives. The most credible interpretation of Sandino is one that provides a place for all of the data. Instead of being limited to his written work, it would also take into consideration his actions, alliances, and organizational affiliations. Like its precursor, the present work is not based on a selective editing of Sandino's writings, but embraces and absorbs different readings of Sandino—as a Nicaraguan patriot, social reformer, fellow-traveler of both the Anarchist and the Communist internationals, and a communist in his own right. Biographical studies of Sandino have yet to reconcile his ideological proximity to Farabundo Marti, of whom he said, "I did not disagree with him ideologically," and his intention of building a "new Nicaragua" in the image of the anarcho-syndicalist House of the World Laborer (Casa del Obrero Mundial).13 They have yet to focus on his July 1928 claim in a letter to the Spanish Socialist Luis Araquistain, that his national and racial struggle was but a prelude to an international "struggle between the past and the future . . . [aimed at] a total change in human values." 14 And they have yet to take seriously his December 1926 memorandum to the supreme commander of the Constitutionalist forces, Gen. Jose Maria Moncada, summing up his political ideology under the slogan "PROPERTY IS THEFT." 15 Sandino's suppressed correspondence with Joaquin Trincado, founder of the Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune and his acknowledged mentor, has yet to receive proper attention. The same may be said of Sandino's role as director of the school's Nicaraguan branch and his assimilation of its philosophy as expounded in Trincado's major works. That Sandino was a feminist, that his school decried patriarchy and endowed the Father-Creator with the attributes of a Mother-Earth Goddess, must come as a surprise to those who see in him only a champion of national liberation.16 The redemptive role Sandino and his school assigned to Mahomet and to Islam is hardly less surprising, along with his reverence for "humanity's spiritual guides" and his characterization of Jesus as a "revolutionary communist." 17 In his own words, Sandino was a "rationalist communist."18 That, too, requires further scrutiny. Among the traditional methods used to penetrate Sandino's inner sanctum, I have relied on a close reading of his written legacy and on a detailed contextual knowledge of the varying circumstances to which his texts responded. I

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have paid special attention to ferreting out Sandino's multiple meanings, to tracing allusions to other writings, and to searching through those texts for phrases and concepts that recur in Sandino's works. Virtually everything he wrote of philosophical consequence from 1930 to his death in 1934 is an assimilation of the philosophical works of his mentor. But for such a study to succeed, I also had to consider the intellectual milieu in which his mentor worked and the major intellectual influences that shaped Trincado's thought. The result is a reconstruction of Trincado's legacy as the basis for understanding Sandino's. Although this work focuses on the components of Sandino's ideology and their intellectual coherence, its analytic concern is subordinated to the historical dimension of his thought. Corresponding to his first and second trips to Mexico, the most formative experiences of his lifetime, two clearly delineated stages are evident in the development of Sandino's communism. The first responded to his initiation into the labor struggles and revolutionary side currents of the Mexican Revolution. The second responded to his initiation into the Magnetic-Spiritual School, which gave substance to his until-then impressionistic and loosely constructed philosophy. It was the school's spiritual interpretation of history and of cosmic evolution that provided a metaphysical foundation for Sandino's politics. Under the influence of the legacies of authoritarian and libertarian communism, Sandino looked forward to the destruction of the old world of capitalism and imperialism based on the pursuit of profit. This led him to make common cause with Bolsheviks, as well as anarchists, anarcho-communists, and revolutionary syndicalists. Simultaneously, he heralded a New Age of the Spirit, which would give prominence to the neglected moral and spiritual dimension of the world revolution, the reformation of consciousness, and the making of a new communist man and woman. In the struggle to turn society upside-down, Sandino believed humanity, too, would have to be revolutionized. A graphic clue to Sandino's communism may be found in a 1931 photograph of the general holding two new flags symbolizing his cause.19 The photograph is blurred, so that in the absence of visual evidence there is only Trincado's word that the flag in Sandino's right hand is Nicaragua's national flag rather than his beloved red and black, "the emblem and theme of his life." 20 The horizontal stripes from the hoist down of the flag in his left hand indicate that it is the blue, white, red, yellow, purple, green, and rose banner of the Hispano-American Oceanic Union, representing the flags of all the Spanish-speaking countries, from Spain on the other side of the Atlantic to the Philippines on the rim of the Pacific. The super-Bolivarian confederation for which it stood—Sandino was the vice-president—was to be the first step toward his school's political objective of the "whole world communized."21

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Paradoxically, the national flag, too, symbolized Sandino's communism, since, according to his mentor, "without being good patriots, you cannot be good universal communists."22 Closely tied to Sandino's adoption of these new emblems was his new identity. Although his official seal read "A. C. Sandino," this was not how he later signed his letters to representatives of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. To them, as in the school's official roster of stewards (celadores), he was Cesar Augusto Sandino.23 When it first caught my attention, this name change struck me as a typographical error, but he alone was responsible for it. Baptized Augusto Nicolas Sandino, he afterward took his mother's surname, Calderon, after which he began calling himself Augusto C. and then Augusto Cesar Sandino. Thus, as the supreme commander of his liberating army he was Augustus Caesar, but as the second-in-command of the HispanoAmerican Oceanic Union he was Caesar Augustus, a switch whose significance—the spiritual reinforcement of his communism—has been completely lost on his interpreters. To understand Sandino's communism one must investigate its sources. It is noteworthy that he became a communist not in Nicaragua, but in Mexico, under the influence of the great Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. Thanks to the Mexican government's policy of political asylum, Mexico City became the haven for political exiles in the twentieth century that Paris had been in the nineteenth. Spanish as well as Latin American revolutionaries flocked there to escape repression from local dictatorships, even before Spanish republicans began arriving there en masse in 1939. Trotsky found a sanctuary there in 1937 and Fidel Castro in 1955. And it was in Mexico from 1923 to 1926, and again from 1929 to 1930, that Sandino assimilated the revolutionary currents that subsequently took root in Nicaragua. Recent discussions of the international significance of Mexico's revolutionary legacy focus mainly on the nationalist and populist mainstream given prominence by the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), founded in Mexico City in 1924 by Peruvian exile Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. Sandino was directly influenced by the APRA's populist ideology and by its representative on his general staff. But there is another side to the Mexican Revolution whose significance has been generally underestimated— also with an international dimension. Stemming from the organizing junta of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), the House of the World Laborer, and the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), the revolution's communist side current also profoundly influenced Sandino's struggle against the U.S. Marines in Nicaragua. In the annals of political thought, Sandino ranks not even as a minor figure, yet his message still carries weight. Historical circumstances contributed to making him the heir of two initially distinct communist traditions. Although one was anarchist, or libertarian, it was not the anarchism celebrated in the

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1

English-speaking world, where the stress on the individual versus the state failed to generate even the semblance of a mass movement. Nor was Sandino's authoritarian communism a replica of Marxism, which assigns to the state the task of nationalizing the means of production and directing the national economy. The two communisms that shaped Sandino's political thought were the legacy, via Mexico, of the Great French Revolution of 1789. From that revolution emerged the ideal of community (communaute), a new type of economic and political order based on equality. Contrary to what is generally believed, the word communism (communisme) did not first acquire currency in the Blanquist secret societies of the 1840s, but in the 1790s. Revolutionary communism, or egalitarianism, had three principal advocates: Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, Sylvain Marechal, and Babeuf. Preceding Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by half a century, they were the original founders of modern communism. The first to have disseminated the term "communist" was the Parisian journalist Restif de la Bretonne, the prolific author of nearly 250 volumes of popular French literature. As early as 1781, this "Rousseau of the gutter," as he was known in literary circles, had written a fantasy of an egalitarian society governed by the principle of equal work and equal rewards, and in 1782 had introduced the term "community of goods" with a strategy for "establishing equality" in all the nations of Europe.24 But it was not until February 1793 that he began using the term "communism" for this prospective new order, followed in 1794 by its regular use in Monsieur Nicolas, a multivolume work in which he first set forth his full-blown communist project.25 His three-part sequel, Philosophic de Monsieur Nicolas (1796), called for a universal community of goods and referred to the "communists" as no longer Active, but as an active vanguard in the real world. Marechal, a close friend of Restif and Babeuf's long-term journalistic protector and sponsor, was the first to predict an egalitarian social revolution as the sequel to the revolution of 1789.26 Also a prolific journalist, in 1785 he began using the term "community of goods" to describe his egalitarian project.27 In 1793, he published Correctif a la revolution, which contained the prophetic words, "The Revolution is not complete," and declared that it would not become so until there ceased to be masters and servants as well as rich and poor.28 Thus Marechal added to his communism a strong dose of anarchism not just as a strategy for economic leveling, but also as a final goal. Although a professed atheist calling himself VHSD, short for Vhomme sans dieu, he was not above occult appeals to the Masonic symbolism of a secret revolutionary brotherhood, as in his monumental Voyages de Pythagore 0799). 29 Competing with "communist" to describe revolutionary egalitarianism was Babeuf's "communitist" (communautiste)—also in reference to the commu-

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nity of goods.30 Under the influence of Restif and Marechal, he published in November 1795 the first of the communist manifestos in the new genre made famous by Marx and Engels's manifesto of 1848. Calling for a "total upheaval," his Le manifeste des plebeiens invoked the names of Jesus and Moses to justify his messianic mission.31 Unlike Marechal, for whom Pythagoras was the exemplary revolutionary, Babeuf took Jesus as his model.32 Accused of fomenting a civil war of the poor against the rich, "he accepted with pride the accusation that his friends were 'anarchists,'" while anticipating Proudhon by nearly half a century in popularizing the thesis that private property is theft.33 To understand Sandino, one must turn to the pre-Marxist legacy to which his writings repeatedly allude. Marx tried to make the legacy picked up by the revolutions of 1848 respectable by making it "scientific." Instead, he pulled its teeth. The first major revisionist of communism, Marx briefly flirted with both its name and its ideology, but at bottom he rejected egalitarianism. His response to the communist specter haunting Europe in 1848 has become the prototype of contemporary efforts to make Sandino's communism manageable through a combination of historical neglect and political amnesia. As for the Communist International after Lenin, Sandino's break with it involved an affirmation rather than a repudiation of the communist legacy going back through 1848 to 1789. "A specter is haunting Europe," wrote Marx and Engels on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, "the specter of Communism."34 They were quick to add that it was more than a ghost, and that Communists should meet this nursery tale of the specter with a manifesto revealing to the world their views and aims. The resulting sketch was the celebrated Communist Manifesto, initially published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish. Who, in fact, were the Communists of 1848? As Marx wrote in the wake of the 1848 upheavals, the bourgeoisie identified communism with the person of Auguste Blanqui—the most notorious and influential revolutionary in Europe at that time.35 "Communism" and "Blanquism" were then virtually interchangeable. What did Blanqui and his followers advocate? Behind their transitional demands, they stood for "the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally."36 Such was Sandino's program for Nicaragua. Following his first trip to Mexico (1923-1926), Sandino made a point of concealing his communism. But in his public utterances one can detect traces of both communism and its philosophical grounds in an idiom stamped with the indelible imprint of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon's What Is Property inspired Sandino in a moment of weakness to repeat its most celebrated aphorism: property is theft.37 Sandino also sought a spiritual basis for communism in a cosmic or divine justice that ultimately guar-

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anteed the victory of Reason and Right. This happened to be Proudhon's spiritual rationale for communism summed up in another aphorism: God punishes proprietors.38 Despite Proudhon's hostility to what he narrowly depicted as communism, he unreservedly accepted the communist principle of equal burdens and equal benefits. Suppose that farmworkers are assigned different social tasks, such as ploughing, hoeing, reaping, and that the average time required to finish each is seven hours. Then, "provided each one furnishes the quantity of labor demanded of him, whatever be the time he employs, they are entitled to equal wages." 39 Under those conditions, "the loftiest intelligence must submit to the equality of possessions."40 This goes beyond the nominal communism of the Communist Manifesto, advocating, at most, the abolition of "bourgeois property" or capital in the means of production.41 In his biography of Sandino, the first Somoza mistook both the nature and the sources of Sandino's communism by confusing it with the propaganda of the Communist International. Actually, it had an earlier source in Proudhon and in other communist ideologues inspired by the Great French Revolution. Representing the extreme rather than the moderate Left, the legacy that shaped Sandino's communism included Auguste Blanqui, Mikhail Bakunin, Petr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Ricardo Flores Magon, and Lenin in 1917-i 918. In his own way, each made an important contribution to Sandino's politics. After traveling a second time to Mexico (1929) and remaining there almost a year, Sandino began to flesh out his communist politics with a supporting communist philosophy. In Intellectual Foundations I argued that Sandino's "liberation theosophy" served as a philosophical prop for his revolutionary politics. However, further research reveals that his politics ultimately became a practical adjunct of his philosophy. While this may also have been the case earlier, it is especially evident after 1930, when his political manifestos became saturated with theosophical lore. While waiting for an interview with the Mexican president, Sandino joined the Yucatan branch of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. There he grafted onto his communist politics the school's austere rational philosophy—tantamount to a spiritualized form of communism. Trincado, the author of Filosofia austera rational, was familiar with Proudhon's masterpiece and, like Sandino, was heavily indebted to it. He called his philosophy the "Spiritism of Light and Truth," having Justice as its centerpiece in a constellation of austere rational morality.42 The idiom was Proudhon's: "Mankind makes continual progress toward truth," "light ever triumphs over darkness," and "Justice is the central star that governs societies [through] . . . a more austere morality."43 Trincado shared Sandino's political legacy and looked on the Bolshevik Revolution as the advent of world communism. The Chinese Revolution of

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Introduction

1911 had provided the impulse for the Russian Revolution of 1917, "until in these moments the two largest land masses on earth join hands and . . . communism spreads like an electrical current throughout the earth." 44 This signified not just the abolition of bourgeois property or capital, but the abolition of private property generally. If the socialist factions were to learn how to set aside their differences, they would be "able to proclaim not just socialism, but rather communism."45 Without private plots and titles of ownership, "nobody owns anything except his wisdom, but its fruits belong in common." 46 This is a weak sense of "owns," signifying possession rather than property. Indeed, Trincado believed with Proudhon not only that property is theft, but also that God punishes proprietors. Sandino was a freethinker. This accounts for his interest in Freemasonry, for his interpretation of the historical Jesus as a questioner and breaker of idols, and for his preoccupation with philosophy as a form of truth seeking.47 In Mexico he had immersed himself in the antiestablishment and bohemian counterculture in the wake of the Revolution and World War I and had sought the company of Freemasons, Spiritualists, Spiritists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Theosophists, and vegetarians. Later, during his second trip to Mexico, he became an adept of the Magnetic-Spiritual School in the conviction that these spiritual legacies converged on its cosmogony and philosophy of universal communism. Just as Sandino's philosophy did not emerge ex nihilo, neither did its principal source, Trincado's austere rational philosophy. I trace the origins of both to the occult underground that cradled them at the turn of the century. Its theosophical and millenarian currents sprang from the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement in America and the corresponding Spiritist movement in France. Behind these loomed the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg and the Church of the New Jerusalem, a modern-day expression of the Gnostic tradition in the West. Occultism is a covering term for beliefs and practices that are neither scientific nor religious; it also refers to the survivals of pre-Christian pagan religions and to the so-called wisdom of the Orient. Besides "belief in or practice of such pseudosciences as astrology, magic, alchemy, theosophy, and spiritism . . . , [the] term is used broadly to designate attempts at achieving contact with supposed mysterious powers of nature or the supernatural world and to gain benefit from them." 48 Not just to benefit oneself, I should add, but also to discomfit and overwhelm one's enemies. In all of these different significations, Sandino was unquestionably an "occultist." Occultism is an expression of free thought, a flight from the established ways of interpreting the world in the light of accepted scientific and religious beliefs and traditions.49 "The Establishment culture of the late 18th and 19th centuries was organized on the principles of the practical man . . . [which] defined 'reality' as material goods and possibly as a simplistic form of 'trea-

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sure in heaven.'" 50 Challenging it was a body of intellectual opposition to the establishment that has since become a prominent feature of Western society, an underground of rejected wisdom characterized by its opponents as giving prominence to the irrational. The cult of a New Age has been traced by its critics to the French Revolution of 1789. That was the beginning of the revolutions that washed over Europe in the nineteenth century and that have since spread to the Third World; it was also the beginning of the occult revival in the West.51 As in 1789, so again a half-century later: "1848 was the year of revolutions in Europe; it also represents the beginning of Spiritualism in America."52 As one historian of the occult observes, "the Establishment culture of late 19thcentury Europe—based on capitalism, individualism, and the pursuit of profit—was confronted with a selection of idealisms whose kingdoms were not of this world, whose categories of thought were apocalyptic."53 In his inquiry into the modern origins of the revolutionary faith in a final solution to the social question, James H. Billington concludes that it was shaped not so much by the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment as by the secular surrogates for religious belief disseminated by the German Illuminati and the revival of occult rationalism.54 The influence of the Illuminati is evident on the precursors of modern communism—Restif, Marechal, and Babeuf—through their association with Nicolas de Bonneville. Also a Parisian journalist, he was converted to occult Masonry by the German Illuminatus Christian Bode, during the first of Bode's two visits to Paris, in June 1787.55 Bonneville disseminated the Illuminati's faith in absolute equality through the Social Circle he founded in 1790, a secret revolutionary society whose ideals were traced to Pythagoras.56 Reputedly the founder of the first communist society in the West, Pythagoras was celebrated for having brought from the Orient the system of instruction and initiation basic to occult Masonry. Marechal's Voyages de Pythagore may be traced to his association with Bonneville. One should not discount the direct influence of Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati, however, who in 1789 published his own work on Pythagoras with the final blueprint for politicizing his secret brotherhood.57 Marechal's "mysterious designation of Paris as 'Atheopolis' and himself as VHSD . . . represented precisely the ideal of Weishaupt's inner Areopagites: man made perfect as a god-without-God."58 The history of the past two centuries testifies that communist revolution and occult counterculture run on the same paths.59 Thus, it should not come as a surprise that prophets of a classless society often express themselves in pseudoscientific and rationalistic language while seeking philosophical justification in pre-Christian worldviews that provide the nucleus of the occult. Sandino is a case in point. The occult underground that emerged with the French Revolution has pro-

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Introduction

gressed through several stages. Following its initial thrust, says one critic, "the sixty or so years preceding 1880 saw a progressive development of the crisis of consciousness, and the thirty years after that date witnessed an outburst of the most extravagant irrationalism."60 The Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) and the New Thought movement that emerged in the United States in the decades following the Civil War contributed to the spread of the occult counterculture. Then came almost universal disillusionment over the carnage of World War I. Such was the spiritual milieu in which the MagneticSpiritual School appeared in Argentina and spread to Mexico in response to the Revolution of 1910-1920. 61 The assimilation of this occult underground distinguishes Sandino's communism from that of Ricardo Flores Magon. As the Mexican revolutionary interpreted the impact of occultism in the Los Angeles area, where he and his comrades had sought political asylum, a spiritual awakening is a weak substitute for real revolution. "Studying the notice board at Blanchard Hall, which is perhaps the greatest and most central meeting place, I find the following set out as the intellectual menu . . . : 'Psychology of Life, Health and Power;' 'Instructive New Thought Talks;' 'Helpful New Thought Talks;' 'Social Science and Thought Mastery;' 'Theosophical Society;' 'Mazdaznan;' 'Astrology;' 'Rosicrucian Fellowship.' " 6 2 To the occultist credo that " 'the mind is its own place, and of itself can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell,'" Flores Magon retorted, "It isn't." 63 Sandino thought otherwise. What was the nature of this New Thought movement and its Mexican counterpart, which contributed to Sandino's spiritual awakening and belief in the dawning of a New Age? Like the New Age movement of the late 1970s and the 1980s, New Thought focused on altered states of consciousness and on holistic and mental healing.64 It was deeply imbued with pantheism and, as one scholar describes it, represented a latter-day development of Gnosticism. "The movement has strong Gnostic overtones. Inner power is generally available only to those who have been initiated into a new pattern of life. . . . [Its] philosophical monism is drawn largely from Neoplatonic and Oriental thought. . . . While most New Thought groups believe in immortality, and some hold doctrines of reincarnation, the various kinds of New Thought sects are marked by a fundamental this-worldliness. . . . Jesus Christ becomes simply a symbol of the divine spark in every man. He does not reconcile or redeem but points out that every man is an incarnation of God." 65 This account of the occult fits Sandino's philosophy like a glove. In the Tampico area, he had come under the simultaneous influence of Adventism and Theosophy, the former with a millenarian bent and the latter with a Gnostic orientation. Unlike Adventism, Theosophy had a pronounced this-worldly concern for social reforms, a concern bordering on revolution. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, made the first article to which it was pledged and the first of its aims the creation of a spiritual van-

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guard, "the nucleus of the United Brotherhood of Humanity."66 Annie Besant, her successor as secretary of the society, then changed its tenor by grafting onto Theosophy a "traditional semi-Christian prophecy of the return of Christ . . . the classical Millenarian buffer against disturbed times." 67 A socialist before she became a Theosophist, Besant continued to be politically active and was subsequently rewarded for her efforts by becoming the first president of the Indian National Congress. A similar theosophical-millenarian synthesis served as the philosophical cornerstone of the Universal Commune propagated by the Magnetic-Spiritual School. While Sandino had been groping for such a synthesis, he found a ready-made one in Trincado's austere rational philosophy. It, too, was shaped by the occultist underground, whose influence had become worldwide. Here was subversion with a vengeance, a belligerent dismissal of all religious dogma as superstition, with a particular hatred for the Roman Catholic church. It, too, fitted Sandino's image of himself as a freethinker. Historical circumstances contributed to making Sandino the heir not only of the Mexican Revolution's political legacy, but also of its spiritual heritage. As a movement of protest against the worldly interests and reactionary role of the Catholic religion in Mexico and Central America, his spiritual revolt took two principal forms. One was Western and millenarian, the other was in the Gnostic tradition of the Orient. The Magnetic-Spiritual School had managed to unite them in a syncretism that Sandino made his own. His uniqueness lay in linking political and philosophical currents hitherto considered incompatible: communism with a belief in a Final Judgment, and mass insurrection with transcendental meditation. It was an ideological and practical tour de force. In this perspective, Sandino's philosophy has a contemporary ring. It does not suffer from secular materialism, the popular drawback of Marxism.68 When Sandino's struggle was on the point of collapse, he revived it with the help of a materialist-spiritualist pantheism.69 Far from representing an escape from the real world, his new philosophy added a vital impetus to his struggle against the U.S. Marines and the National Guard in Nicaragua.70 Basic to Sandino's communism were communes that pooled earnings as well as energies. In Soviet Russia, the communes were the principal rivals of collective and state enterprises until they were effectively suppressed in the 1930s. Stalin distinguished the commune from the artel, or collective: "Unlike the artel, where only the means of production are socialized, the communes until recently socialized not only the means of production, but also the appurtenances of life of every member of the commune."71 Stalin criticized the communes for being premature under conditions of undeveloped technology and generalized poverty and for practicing a form of equalization incompatible with Marxism. He wrote with contempt, "in the commune there is equality, because the requirements . . . of all its members

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have been made equal . . . [but] every Leninist knows (that is, if he is a real Leninist) that equality in the sphere of requirements and individual life is a piece of reactionary petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of a primitive society of ascetics."72 At issue was the interpretation of communism as a Republic of Equals or as a socialist society organized on meritocratic lines. The Comintern's program did not suffice for Sandino, since, like his mentor Trincado, he looked forward to something more than socialism.73 But is Sandino's communism a living presence in Nicaragua or is it the ghost of Sandino haunting the memories of poets like Ernesto Cardenal, playwrights like Alan Bolt, and social critics like Napoleon Chow? Each in his own way is a partisan of "Forever Onward" (Siempre mas alia)—the motto of Sandino's philosophical school. In varying degrees, each wants what Sandino wanted for Nicaragua: a society based on human fraternity, impossible without a final solution to the social question. Sandinismo is not that solution—the communism of Sandino is. Sandino's struggle was not simply a historical curiosity confined to the backwaters of Western civilization. Its egalitarian premises were shared by the rural collectives and industrial federations that made Spain a showcase of libertarian communism during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939. 74 Spain, not Russia, "demonstrated the best way of organizing a self-managed economy without the heel of bureaucracy pressing on the workers."75 If the country that is socially aware shows to the less aware the image of its own future, then Sandino's words were prophetic in calling Spain a "predestined nation . . . charged with spreading communism throughout the world."76 By 1990, the Bolshevik Revolution had come to a dead end. That the formerly dominant parties in Eastern Europe had changed their names from "Communist" to "Socialist" was symptomatic of more than a change of face. If one adds to this crisis the betrayal of communism by the Marxist parties in the West, it is evident that Marxism and Marxism-Leninism each contains the seeds of communism's self-destruction. The only communist projects that have survived the vicissitudes of the past seventy-five years are those associated with Marx's communist predecessors or with heresies that subsequently broke with his philosophy. Paradoxically, what Marxists scornfully dismiss as pre-Marxist communism shares common ground with its post-Marxist development. Precisely that is the relevance of Sandino's legacy today.

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ot so long ago, before the Sandinista victory in July 1979, the Sandinista oath began by invoking the "immortal patriotic example of Augusto Cesar Sandino and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara." 1 After Sandino, Che was the Sandinistas' most revered figure. But today Guevara and the luminaries in the Marxist-Leninist pantheon—Marx, Engels, Lenin—have replaced Sandino as the "great teachers and guides of the working class." 2 Sandino's name is still invoked, but it has little more than a patriotic ring. Red and black are the colors of Sandino's and the Sandinistas' flag. But is the symbolism of the colors the same for each? The immediate precursor of the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN) was the New Nicaragua movement. Organized in July 1961, it adopted the same emblem Sandino had raised in 1926. "That emblem is a flag that in the upper part is red, signifying Tree Homeland,' and in its lower part is black, signifying 'Death.' That is to say, it symbolizes Sandino's phrase: 4I want a Free Homeland or Death.'" 3 Sofia Montenegro, a journalist for the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, concurs with her party's view that Sandino intended red for liberty and black for death. But the Sandinistas have given a new twist to Sandino's symbolism. In keeping with Marxism-Leninism, "The red stands for Marxism; the black for anarchy"—as if that were the fundamental choice for Nicaragua.4 Sandino had declared his intention of building a "new Nicaragua." 5 But the Sandinistas interpreted his revolution as an anti-imperialist and antifeudal one that would have stopped short of a fully developed socialism. At most, it would have "put an end to the people's extraordinary misery and the oligarchy's extravagance."6 But the red band in Sandino's flag also stood for a final solution to the social question. As we shall see, it heralded a Red Republic, a Republic of Equals, not just a Republic of Liberty. The colors of Sandino's flag have an arcane and ancient pedigree. During the French Revolution of 1789, the tricolor was adopted as the country's new flag. Blue and red were the colors of the city of Paris and white was the king's color—along with gold, which did not figure in the new emblem. Checked

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on one side by blue and on the other by red, white signified the king's subordination to the people and to the city of Paris, that is, constitutional in place of absolute monarchy. But with the proclamation of the republic followed by the king's execution in January 1793, white became completely eclipsed by the blue and the red. Blue came to represent the republic; red became the symbol of the revolution. The red flag began by representing liberty, but as the Revolution progressed, it also came to signify equality and fraternity. During the First Republic (1792-1804), the catch phrase of the Jacobin and Cordelier political clubs had the radical content assigned to "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. But by the time of the Second Republic (1848-1852), this slogan had become sanitized as freedom of thought, speech, and association, equality under the law, and peace with mutual respect among nations. For the communists of 1848, red continued to be the symbol of revolution, but for the Second Republic, it had metamorphosed into a parlor pink. The professed "Friends of Liberty and Equality" were ardent Rousseauists. In the Social Contract, they found an interpretation of the "greatest good of all," the goal of their new system of legislation, which Rousseau reduced to two main objectives: "liberty and equality."7 As for the third ingredient, fraternity, it was found in his theory of the General Will. Each citizen constituting "an indivisible part of the whole," it follows that "it is impossible to offend against one of the members without attacking the body." 8 Thus what is true of members of the same family also applies to the wider fraternity of a Republic of Equals. Precisely this was the interpretation of equality given by Rousseau's more extreme followers, from whom the equation of the red flag with communism derives.9 The modern history of the red flag began with the Great French Revolution. The flag gained prominence during the French Revolution of 1848, and became the official flag of the Paris Commune in 1871 and of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1917. To its partisans it was a symbol of liberty: "Down with the flag of royalty which reminds us of our servitude and its crimes! Hurrah! for the red one, the symbol of our freedom!"10 But to its enemies it was a symbol of violence and bloodshed. As the liberal republican Alphonse de Lamartine replied to the just cited outcry by French workers, "I will reject even to death this banner of blood . . . [which] made the circuit of the Champs de Mars through the people's blood in 1791 and 1793"—and threatened to do so again in 1848. u Unbeknownst to liberals, the red flag was also a symbol of peaceful industry, not just disorder and revolution. In Greco-Roman times, the mythological patrons of agricultural workers and of the various trades were Ceres (Demeter), Proserpine (Persephone), and others, all clothed in flaming red. "It [red] was the favorite color of the plebeians of Rome; it was the emblem of the

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poor in Athens." 12 The crimson banners of the laboring poor were a fitting response to the white military banners of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the white and blue ensigns of the nobility and the priesthood, "white carrying the idea of 'no toil or soil from labor—detested labor,' . . . azure, representing the vaulted sky . . . of high, celestial, or heavenly origin (or divine appointment)."13 White and blue were also colors of the gods of the blueblooded aristocracy, the heavenly patricians of war, power, and opulence, such as the great Jupiter (Zeus).14 The fraternal organizations of laborers in Rome and Athens sported red banners.15 "Following the progress of the Roman legions through what is now Spain, France and the neighboring country, on and into Great Britain, were established the trades organizations, and with them, in nearly every instance, was the red flag."16 Among the trades that waved the red flag were masons, carpenters, saddle and bridle makers, confectioners, cutlers, glaziers, weavers, shoemakers, tanners, furriers, hatters, glove makers, painters, surgeons, and apothecaries. Their aims coincided with those of their present-day counterparts: "They divided in a more equitable way the results of their toil; had death and sick benefits, and assisted and encouraged, by social, benefactory and militant effort, the members of the organizations."17 Preceding the Great French Revolution by more than a millennium, the doctrine of universal brotherhood may also be traced to these "red" trade unions. The black flag is of more recent vintage, but its symbolism, too, has ancient roots. Like red, black was the color of the grain goddess Ceres, the goddess of fertility and agricultural skills.18 Associated with the birth and death cycle symbolized by the moon's waxing and waning, in Roman legend she reaped the grain with her crescent-shaped sickle.19 Although white, the color of the moon's waxing, later became the symbol of the Heavenly Father, black retained its connection with the moon's waning. Thus, black was always tied to Ceres, "the red reaper, and the dark-winnower of the cereal grain." 20 But black has not always been the symbol of death and dying. Excavations at £atal Hiiyuk in central Anatolia in the 1960s uncovered the art treasures of a matrifocal culture dating from roughly 6400-5600 B.C. Its goddesscentered worship can be traced back to 25,000 B.C. and its symbols to an even earlier period.21 The colors of this pre-Aryan cosmic deity were red, white, and black and corresponded to her threefold function as giver of life, wielder of death, and regenerator after death. Symbolic of her triune nature, red for passionate life, white for excarnate bones or death, and black for the fertile and regenerative earth, they represented the periodicity of the seasons, of the moon, and of the female body—as opposed to the Indo-European symbolism, in which white and gold were the colors of the shining sky and life-giving sun, and black the symbol of death.22 Next to red, black was the goddess's favorite color, symbolizing her two most-celebrated roles through the name most often given to her—the Mother Earth Goddess.

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Sandino's Politics

It was the Aryan invasion of Old Europe and Old India circa 3000 B.C. that was responsible for the transformation of black from a symbol of fertility into a symbol of evil and death. As the color of the Indo-European Sun God or Sky Father, white contributed to the downgrading of black among the colors of the Triple Goddess. In India, "the Virgin-Creator was Sattva, white; the Mother-Preserver was Rajas, red; the Crone-Destroyer was Tamas, black," while in southern Europe "Theocratus, Ovid, Tibullus, and Horace all said the sacred colors of the life-threads [of the Triple Goddess, or Three Fates, in Greek mythology] were white, red, and black." 23 The Aryan invasions simultaneously displaced the color red as the symbol of life. With the advent of patriarchal civilization, white became the symbol of the superior male spirit or mind, black of the inferior female nature or matter.24 Later, under the influence of Christianity, red and black symbolized the raging fires of hell and its demons headed by Satan, the male adaptation of the overthrown Mother Earth Goddess—also symbolized by a serpent. Thus, Sandino's red and black reproduced the colors of subversion against the male order of domination on earth as it is in heaven. In modern times, the black flag appeared with the re-creation of the International Working Men's Association (IWMA), founded at the London Congress of anarchists and communists in July 1881. The first IWMA (18641872) was known as the Red International, after the color identifying its hegemonic coalition of state socialists and authoritarian communists, and the second IWMA (1872-1876) as the Bakuninist International. The third IWMA (1881-1914) was known as the Black International, after the color adopted by Bakunin's followers.25 Organized at the initiative of German emigre Johann Most (1846-1906), the Black International subscribed to Most's propaganda for armed insurrection based on the premise that a war of the poor against the rich contains the only final solution to the social question.26 The foremost exponent of the propaganda of the deed, Most was indirectly responsible for getting the London Congress to adopt his strategy of "armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready to resist, gun in hand, any encroachment on their rights"—also the guiding principle of Sandino's Defending Army in Nicaragua.27 What did the black flag stand for? Bakunin had inspired it with his dicta "The passion for destruction is a creative passion" and "By the revolution we understand the unchaining of everything that is today called 'evil passions,' and the destruction of everything that in the same language is called 'public order.' " 2 8 His tribute to revolutionary nihilism and his apostleship of chaos account for his eulogy of Satan's rebellion against heavenly tyranny, whose earthly representative is the state.29 Since the revolutionary should have the very devil in him, Bakunin counseled, it seemed only reasonable to his followers that the Devil's color should become the banner of the anarchist International.

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Such is the background of the resolutions adopted by the American section of the Black International at its second congress in Pittsburgh in October 1883. Entitled To the Workingmen of America and known as the Pittsburgh Manifesto, the first of its six stated goals called for "destruction of the existing class rule, by all means." 30 Drafted by Johann Most, the manifesto provided an outlet for his melange of communist, anarchist, and Blanquist ideas.31 A similar melange would be revived by Sandino approximately half a century later. The most-influential branch of the Black International turned out to be the Chicago-based International Working People's Association. Within two years of its founding in October 1881, it had garnered some five thousand members, with as many as fifteen thousand sympathizers and supporters. Distributed in the hundreds of thousands, its 1883 manifesto appeared simultaneously in German and was soon translasted into Czech, Yiddish, French, and Spanish and appeared in anarchist publications around the world.32 The black flag of anarchy traveled with it. Following a demonstration of some three thousand workers in Chicago in November 1884, the flag was unfurled for the first time on American soil. It was interpreted in anarchist circles as the symbol of death, hunger, and misery.33 It was also said to be the "emblem of retribution."34 And in a labor procession in Cincinnati in January 1885, it was further acknowledged to be the banner of working-class intransigence, as demonstrated by the words "No Quarter" inscribed on it.35 Sandino was not impervious to these different meanings. His army's official seal depicted a Sandinista soldier taking revenge on an American marine by scalping him. In reminding the "machos" that his soldiers would give no quarter, the seal also symbolized direct struggle in a duel to the death. Besides serving as a symbol of Sandino's cause, black stood for everything evil. The "machos" were being counseled by "Black Spirits" in the White House—white on the outside but black within—funereal forces responsible for his fellow citizens' misery and death.36 Thus, Sandino reproduced the ambivalence of the black flag, a "fearful symbol" for workers as well as capitalists.37 There is a corresponding ambivalence in Sandino's slogan, "Free Homeland or Death!" "Free Homeland" meant effective sovereignty through the expulsion of the marines and foreign capitalists from Nicaragua. But, as we shall see, it also meant ridding the country of native capitalists. The alternative of "Death" is no less ambiguous, signifying as it does both danger to his companions in arms and death and retribution to the "machos" and their business associates. Said Sandino in a letter to the American manager of the Luz and Los Angeles Mining Co., after blowing up the works, "everything North American that falls into our hands is sure to meet its end." 38 Sandino had called on his army to "terrorize the terrorists" and to mete out justice to

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traitors: "Liberty is not conquered with flowers but with bullets and that is why we have had to use the VEST CUT, GOURD CUT, and BLOOMERS C U T " — three forms of extreme retribution involving mutilation of the marines and their collaborators.39 It is not easy to unravel the symbolism of Sandino's flag, for he gave contradictory versions of both it and the cause for which it stood. In conversations with Sandino in February 1933, Ramon de Belausteguigoitia wondered if his rebellion had a specifically social character. As Belausteguigoitia recalled, "You have even been stigmatized as communists."40 That was not the significance of his struggle, replied Sandino. "This movement is nationalist and anti-imperialist. We hold aloft the flag of freedom for Nicaragua and all of Spanish America." As he had explained a year earlier to Enoc Aguado, the Liberal vice-president elected with General Moncada in 1928, the flaming colors of his flag stood for "Liberty or Death," the firm determination to become "Free, Sovereign, and Independent."41 But in remarks not intended for public consumption, Sandino presented a quite different face. As he recalled to a delegation of visiting workers at his father's home in Niquinohomo, he had covered up his real intentions during the civil war of 1926-1927. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives knew where he stood, with the possible exception of Moncada, the Liberal general. "We opened a breach in the Conservative ranks and I sent Moncada a messenger with a red flag"—standing for some form of socialism or possibly communism.42 The context of Sandino's account is significant, for to the same workers he confided that he intended to build a new Nicaragua without exploiters and political parties, that his nationalist and anti-imperialist struggle was only for the moment, and that it would subsequently take a socialist course.43 The idea for Sandino's flag came from Mexico. "I had become unionized in Mexico," Sandino confided to the same group of workers. Influenced by that experience, he had chosen the anarcho-syndicalist House of the World Laborer in Mexico City as a model for organizing workers and peasants in Nicaragua.44 A fusion of anarchism and trade unionism originating in France during the 1890s, anarcho-syndicalism rapidly spread to Spain and from there to Mexico, bringing its red and black banners with it. On the insignia of Mexico's House of the World Laborer, the red band stood for the economic struggle of workers against the proprietary classes, and the black for their insurrectionary struggle. In Mexico, the red and black flag had more than one interpretation. For anarcho-syndicalists, it symbolized their most-cherished principles, while it had mainly strategical significance for labor's rank and file. To this day, the red and black is unfurled in virtually every demonstration by Mexican workers, signifying little more than huelga (strike). Nor is it surprising that on

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different occasions Sandino offered a trade-unionist as well as a nationalist interpretation of his colors as it suited his political purposes. The red and black was also the flag of libertarian communists. The anarchocommunist synthesis fathered by Mikhail Bakunin's Italian disciple, Errico Malatesta (1853-1932) antedated anarcho-syndicalism by approximately two decades.45 Petr Kropotkin (1842-1921) raised it to the level of theoretical respectability in his journal Le Revolte. After the Anarchist Congress in London in 1881, anarcho-communism became the prevailing current in international anarchism.46 By the turn of the century, it had made its way to Mexico through the efforts of Ricardo Flores Magon and the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM). The insurrectional tendency in Italian anarchism first took shape at a national congress of anarchists in Florence in October 1876. Inspired by communist as well as anarchist principles, Malatesta organized a column of twenty-six armed insurgents for the purpose of catalyzing peasants in southern Italy to take up arms in self-defense. From their base in the mountains, on 8 August 1878, they "descended into the village of Letino carrying their redand-black flags."47 To my knowledge, this is the earliest recorded instance of the fusion of the red flag of communism and the black banner of anarchism. Sandino's slogan of a "Free Homeland" had more than the superficial significance he gave to it for the benefit of Nicaragua's Liberals. It stood for a "new Nicaragua" fashioned in the image of Mexico's House of the World Laborer—a republic not just of the free but of the free and equal. Ideologically, Sandino was the offspring not of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, but of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Said Proudhon, "Liberty is equality, because liberty exists only in society; and in the absence of equality there is no society."48 To translate this into ordinary language, liberty implies equality, lacking which there can be no cooperative order based on fraternity and mutual aid. As Bakunin reformulated Proudhon's thesis, "Without political equality there can be no real political liberty, but political equality will be possible only when there is social and economic equality."49 That was the profound sense of "liberty" signified by Sandino's slogan. As he acknowledged in his first political manifesto (1 July 1927), "I swear before the nation and before history that my sword will defend the nation's honor and be the redemption of the oppressed . . . [we] should wear the Phrygian cap [liberty cap worn by French revolutionaries], inscribed with the beautiful motto symbolized by our red and black emblem."50 At best, liberals would die to save the nation's honor. But Sandino vowed to liberate the working class. In this reading of his slogan, red stood for equality and fraternity in addition to liberty, and black for the combativeness associated with anarchism. It is noteworthy that Sandino's flag, as reported by General Moncada, con-

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tained an additional symbol distinguishing it from the red and black of Mexican workers—a death's-head.51 This insignia provides a clue to the flag's esoteric meaning, for if black represents the supreme sacrifice for liberty, there was no need to duplicate the symbols for death. A more plausible interpretation is that death is symbolized by the skull and that black stands for something else. To Belausteguigoitia's question, "What do the colors of your flag signify?" Sandino replied, "Red for liberty; black for mourning; and the skull for a struggle to the death." 52 Why mourning, and for what? Mourning not only for Nicaragua's loss of national sovereignty, but also for the workers' loss of life and liberty in the struggle to become free from the tyranny of property, or "theft." In effect, "Free Homeland or Death!" signified "Social Revolution or Death!" So interpreted, Sandino's red and black banner stood for the same objectives as those of Mexican anarcho-communists. In September 1921, at the first national congress of Mexico's General Confederation of Workers (CGT), two social doctrines were debated: "scientific socialism" and "anarchism." 53 The first derived from Marx, the second from Bakunin. They were the two poles of the labor movement since 1870, "the one founded on the economic law of motion of modern society, the other on the moral doctrine of the producers of working people." In other words, "two conquests that complement each other."54 Although the Bolsheviks or authoritarian communists in the CGT repudiated anarchism, they were overridden by the bulk of the delegates, who, as anarcho-syndicalists, wanted a synthesis of both doctrines tantamount to "libertarian communism."55 It was hardly an accident that in 1927 Sandino teamed up with the volunteer forces of Gen. Francisco Parajon and went forth to battle the Conservatives not as Liberals, but as Laborites carrying the red and black flag. As Salomon de la Selva recalled, Parajon had been one of the field organizers for the Nicaraguan Federation of Labor, which considered the civil war of Liberals versus Conservatives not as a social revolution, but as a "political revolution from which the workers had nothing to gain." 56 He added that the Liberal cause was not popular among workers and became even less so when Moncada became its top commander. Such was the context of Sandino's letter to a friend: "we must not oppose the . . . [Liberal] revolution but get into it and, as a part of it, save it from Moncada."57 For what purpose, if not to push it toward a social revolution in addition to a merely political one? To be sure, the red in Sandino's flag could stand for socialism rather than communism. As the syndicalist movement outgrew its anarchist and communist origins, it acquired a Marxist visage. But it was communism, not Marxism, of which he had only a superficial knowledge, that appealed to Sandino. Thus, Moncada characterized Sandino's politics as "something more than socialist."58

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There are several plausible sources for Sandino's communist ideas: first, the Tampico branches of the House of the World Laborer and the CGT with their local libraries, which contained the anarchist and communist classics; second, the Mexican branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which was active among the oil workers in Tampico; third, former PLM activists in neighboring Villa Cecilia, who also contributed to radicalizing Tampico 's oil workers; and fourth, the Grupo Cultural "Ricardo Flores Magon," which disseminated a similar revolutionary message.59 Nor should one discount the role of informal interest groups in Tampico and Cerro Azul, where Sandino lived and worked, his neighbors in the working-class barrios, and co-workers in the oil fields. Under the sway of the Mexican Revolution, the vecindades (working-class barrios), factories, and oil rigs had become "seedbeds of revolutionary ideas broadcast by ideologues and organizers expounding the European doctrines of Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin, and, to a lesser extent, Marx." 60 Although the Mexican anarchists called themselves "socialists," they drew their ideology from the libertarian communism inspired by Marx's workingclass opponents in the First International. "The 'socialism' that they adhered to at first was the Proudhonist-Bakuninist version, exported first to Spain and then to Latin America. Later, in the early twentieth century, they adopted the communist anarchism of Peter Kropotkin and eventually espoused anarchosyndicalism."61 Anarcho-syndicalism was basically a trade union adaptation and extension of the anarcho-communist position.62 As its principal exponent, Rudolf Rocker, declared, anarcho-syndicalism stood for "equal economic conditions for everybody."63 Petr Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, explained why. "All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth. . . . If the man and the woman bear their fair share of the work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced."64 What is a fair share? For Kropotkin's followers, it signified an equal share: "Communist anarchism . . . means free and equal participation in the general work and welfare."65 Thus the reply to the question "Does that mean equal pay for all?" was "It does." 66 From Kropotkin the anarcho-syndicalists derived the principle of common ownership not only of the means of production, but also of the entire mass of social wealth. "Anarchy leads to Communism, and Communism to Anarchy, both alike being expressions of the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality . . . the enjoyment in common of the fruits of common labor."67 Unlike Marxists and Marxist-Leninists, who advocated only the expropriation of bourgeois property or "capital" exclusive of specialized skills

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and articles of consumption, Kropotkin called for an end to all private ownership.68 The red and black flag was an appropriate emblem for this intransigent communism. In communist society people would be obliged to share "the chores of life—that everyone tries to avoid."69 As brothers and sisters of the human family, they would be expected to personify the communist principle of solidarity in all areas of economic life—that means the obligation of everybody to perform manual labor. For Kropotkin, sharing this social burden was even more critical than sharing its benefits, for it was "precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social Revolution."70 If some people were unwilling to share in the common chores, then they could not claim an equal share of the fruits. Even so, "Need will be put above service." 71 This has led Kropotkin's critics to attribute to him the communist principle "to each according to one's needs," but unrelated to its corollary, "from each according to one's abilities."72 In this interpretation, no matter how competent or incompetent, each would have a right to satisfy all wants, not just the ones required for survival. This is a caricature of Kropotkin's communism designed to demonstrate its unfeasibility, and it makes a mockery of the symbolism of the communists' red and black flag. Kropotkin favored "free taking of everything that exists in superfluity, and rations of that in which there is a possibility of dearth; rations according to needs, with preference to children, the aged, and the weak in general."73 As he pointed out, that was being done.74 As for the argument that distribution according to needs encourages loafers, shirkers, and absentees, Kropotkin recommended their exclusion from civilized company.75 The communist credo of anarcho-syndicalism received its most complete expression in the writings of its avant-garde Spanish ideologues. Although published the same month in 1934 in which Sandino died, a statement of this credo in the information bulletin of Spain's principal anarchist organizations—the National Confederation of Work (CNT), the International Association of Workers (AIT), and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI)—faithfully reflects their thinking several decades earlier. It begins, "There is only one regime that can give the workers liberty, well-being and happiness: it is Libertarian Communism . . . the organization of society without a State and without private property. It is unnecessary to invent anything or to create any new social organization to achieve it. The centers of organization around which the economic life of tomorrow will be coordinated exist in presentday society: they are the syndicate [trade union] and the free municipality [commune]."76 To this communist credo, anarcho-syndicalists added a novel strategy. Their claim to originality was to have adapted anarcho-communism to the industrial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a strategy

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that made the trade union the center of the class struggle and the nucleus of a new social order. "The emphasis on the syndicate rather than the commune as the basic social unit, and on industrial action as opposed to conspiratorial or insurrectional action, were the two points on which the anarchosyndicalists principally differed from the anarchist communists."77 As Rudolf Rocker explains, the trade union had a double purpose for anarcho-syndicalists: it was the economic fighting organization of the workers best suited to direct action and confrontation with their class enemy, and it was a school for communism, including the training of workers in the technical management of production, "so that when a revolutionary situation arises they will be capable of taking over the socio-economic organism into their own hands." 78 The symbolism of the red and black flag may be traced to this dual purpose of revolutionary syndicalism: red for its schools of communism and black for its fighting organizations. Following the example set by Mexican anarchists during the Revolution of 19io-1920, Sandino relied on an insurrectionary strategy in addition to the syndicalist strategy of a general strike. Although the trade union was his specifically economic organization of workers for combat, he believed that victory ultimately hinged on the political-military organization of workers and peasants. Solidly backed by the Nicaraguan Federation of Labor, General Parajon found no difficulty in combining these strategies. Nor did Sandino, with his base of support in the communards of San Rafael and the peasants of the Segovias. It is clear from Sandino's project for a Central American political union that an alliance of communes rather than of trade unions would be the central administrative unit, hence his preferred name of "Central American Communards." He derived this appellation from reading about the Spanish comuneros (communards) of the 1520s and 1820s, not just from the French communards during the Paris commune of 1871,79 Sandino's efforts to communize Nicaragua by force survived the dissolution of his Defending Army of National Sovereignty in January 1933. It was succeeded by his Autonomous Army of Central America, organized in August of the same year.80 Having shelved for the moment his plan to seize power directly in his own country, he planned to do so indirectly by mobilizing communards from all over Central America toward the establishment of a federation of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica— their presidents to be replaced by governors under the authority of a federal president elected by citizens of the newly formed union.81 Sandino planned to adopt the same flag for his Central American communards that he had adopted for his Nicaraguan communards.82 That is to say, he chose the red and black for the emblem of Central American fraternization, i.e., communization. That he intended the color black to add a combative quality to his flag is

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suggested by the passages he underlined in a book the National Guard found in his possession. Among the sentences he underscored from Francisco Canadas's El sindicalismo was one likening the anarchist trade unions to "a swelling force that will inundate and overrun the river-beds of traditional Right, of outworn customs, breaking all the dikes and completely changing the landscape." 83 For Canadas, "the weapons that shall be used against capitalism should not be exactly the same as those that were used in the past century and that are still current among the socialists." That is because the tactics of electoral participation, legislative reform, and economic arbitration were ill-suited to the mortal combat with the bourgeoisie.84 During the years of the First International, the anarchists waved the red flag, then substituted for it the black flag, but later settled for the red and black in "an attempt to unite the spirit of later anarchism with the mass appeal of the International."85 While the red flag usually stands for socialism, the socialist mass parties gave no credence to communism even when they did not betray socialism in principle. Thus, as a symbol of intransigence, black combined with the socialists' red flag to indicate that there would be no compromise. Together, red and black represented the final solution to the social question. Contemptuously referred to as "black hands," to distinguish them from the world of "white hands," manual workers throughout the nineteenth century geared themselves for a confrontation with their new masters—the bourgeoisie. Bakunin described them as "innumerable millions of exploited proletarians, tired of suffering and preparing to demand their rights in return, massed together like a huge black finger pointing towards the horizon." 86 This rising black specter would be "baptized the 'red specter,' this terrible ghost of the rights of all men opposed to the privileges of a fortunate class, this justice and reason of the people." Sandino, too, associated red and black with "Reason, Justice, and Right," a slogan of his popular cause in Nicaragua, along with "Free Homeland or Death!"87 The final solution to the social question became a cause celebre with Gracchus Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals in 1796.88 The objective of this conspiracy by leftist Jacobins was "human brotherhood," or equality, signifying "the real abolition of classes, the political and social equalization of individuals . . . possible only through the equalization of the economic means of education, instruction, labor, and life for everyone."89 But workers first had to assimilate the great lessons of history that could not be learned from Babeuf. Thus the French working class had to undergo the revolutions of 1789 and 1793, followed by those of 1830 and 1848, to realize that, to succeed, a communist revolution must have "economic equality as its immediate and direct purpose."90 That was the final solution to economic exploitation, and it was almost unknown at the end of the eighteenth century, "when Babeuf appeared and

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posed the economic and social question."91 Bakunin recognized his intellectual debt to Babeuf: "this man retains the honor of having posed the greatest problem that has ever been posed in history, that of the emancipation of humanity in its entirety."92 But the goal of a revolutionary transformation from below exercised no influence beyond the circle of a chosen few: "the communist testament of Babeuf, transmitted by his illustrious friend and colleague Buonarroti to the most energetic proletarians by means of a popular and secret organization . . . was still only a subterranean activity."93 Not until the revolution of 1848, heralded by the Communist Manifesto, did the anarchist and communist specter begin to take hold and workers finally come to understand that the world of white hands was their inveterate enemy. Sandino's anarcho-syndicalism presupposed this anarchist and communist legacy and its summary by Kropotkin at the close of the nineteenth century. Mutual Aid, the Russian anarchist's best-known work available in Spanish translation, could hardly have escaped his attention.94 His familiarity with its central thesis would explain the remark concerning the "society of mutual aid" he was building along the River Coco and his equation of "fraternization" with "communization."95 It would account for his references to Nicaraguans of all classes as "flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, that is, our own brothers [and sisters]," and for his dictum, "all of us are brothers [or sisters]." 96 It would explain his salutation "Dear Brother in the Homeland" in correspondence with members of his Defending Army, and the reason behind this salutation, "to keep present in our people the concept that the Homeland is our Mother, that . . . . it is our duty to go to the forefront of her defense, because in defending her, we defend ourselves."97 Thus the multiple sources of Sandino's ideology, including Kropotkin's classic summary, are the basis for my inference that Sandino's red and black banner represented the cause not only of Nicaragua's independence in his struggle against the U.S. Marines, but also of Nicaraguan communism.

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2. Property Is Theft

I

n December 1926, Sandino presented Gen. Jose Maria Moncada with a memorandum summarizing his political ideas and his reasons for supporting the Liberal Party in Nicaragua's civil war. But Moncada sensed there were ulterior motives because of Sandino's concluding statement, "Property is theft!"1 Moncada may not have known that this was the thesis of What Is Property, a book by the father of modern anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Nor is it likely he knew that anarchism was the bearer of the seeds of a communist tradition with its roots in the Great French Revolution of 1789-1794. But he was astute enough to recognize that Sandino's political ideas smacked of anarchism and verged on bolshevism.2 Sandino was familiar with Proudhon's major work. Besides assimilating its fundamental thesis, he made Proudhon's moral philosophy his own. The subtitle of What Is Property is An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government. What is that principle? "Justice, nothing else: that is the alpha and omega of my argument."3 Proudhon defined justice as an expression of sociability, of the affinity one feels for another. "Justice is this same attraction, accompanied by thought and knowledge. But under what general concept, in what category of the understanding, is justice placed? In the category of equal quantities."4 One form of justice is the exchange of equal instead of unequal values. Another is consumption contingent on what one produces. Property is unjust because it enables its owner "to consume without producing . . . , to live upon the labor of another."5 To do so is tantamount to theft, according to Proudhon. "What is it, then, to practice justice?" Proudhon asks. "It is to give equal wealth to each, on condition of equal labor." 6 Because "mutuality of services neutralizes privilege," justice finds expression as cooperative labor and mutual aid.7 Sandino, too, was a mutualist. As he remarked in a letter written from his cooperative at Wiwili in July 1933, "here I am dedicated to founding a society

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of mutual aid and universal fraternity; I want to place my grain of sand in support of the emancipation and well-being of the working class which, as you know, has always been exploited."8 Rather than equality under law, Proudhon defined justice as equality above the law. Suppose our idea of justice were ill-defined or misconstrued. Then the rule of law would be unjust, he argued, and "all our legislative applications would be wrong, our institutions vicious, our politics erroneous." 9 By arguing that justice precedes law, he contested the liberal assumption that justice is the rule of law. Sandino, too, contested this liberal assumption. Right, or doing one's duty, was a subordinate principle for Proudhon. ''Right" is the principle of government, "the sum total of the principles [or rules] which govern society."10 Behind right lies justice, whose foundation must be sought in human reason. "It is our reason which teaches us that the selfish man, the robber, . . . sins against Nature . . . ; it tells us what our morality is." 1 1 For Sandino, too, right was a function of justice, and justice the application of reason to human conduct, hence the defense of his sacred cause "in the name of Justice, Right, and REASON." 12 Although he listed justice first, reason is in capital letters, to indicate that it belongs to a different sphere occupying a still-higher plane. This may explain why he gave precedence to reason in his open letter to U.S. Pres. Herbert Hoover: "In Reason, Justice, and Right I have guaranteed my response to the policy you pursue in my country."13 Following Proudhon, Sandino defined justice not as the application of moral rules, but as the fundamental moral standard based on a knowledge of people and society.14 Proudhon summed up that knowledge under the heading of reason. So did Sandino.15 The meanings Sandino assigned to the trinity Reason, Justice, and Right were the meanings Proudhon had assigned them. This suggests that Proudhon's classic contributed to shaping Sandino's plan for a rationally based and completely collectivized economy.16 As Sandino noted in a circular dated 27 August 1932, "Our army is preparing to take the reins of national power in order to then proceed to the organization of great cooperatives of Nicaraguan workers and peasants." 17 He might have confined his project to agricultural cooperatives. Instead, he promised to collectivize the entire economy. "Everything will be in cooperatives." 18 He would begin with peasants in the areas under his control. "We are going to clear the mountains and set up a cooperativized agriculture where we are all brothers. . . . Now the peasants don't have anything, but they will have everything."19 In Marxist terms, capital had no place in Sandino's projected society of mutual aid. But in answer to Belausteguigoitia's question, "Do you believe in the development of capital?" Sandino replied, "Undoubtedly, capital will be allowed to do its work and develop, provided the worker is not humiliated and

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exploited."20 Within a Marxist framework, that is impossible, because capital is a word for bourgeois property and signifies exploitation. So what did Sandino mean by it? He understood by this word its simplest economic meaning as one of three classical factors of production—land, labor, and capital. In this sense, "capital" stands for the instruments and raw materials of labor, a stock of accumulated wealth. Capital is not simply the property of capitalists. No mode of production is possible without it. Sandino's usage of the term derived from Proudhon. Not capital but property, wrote Proudhon, is the "right of increase."21 So capital must be something else. It is harmless, consisting of stored-up labor materialized not only in tangible commodities but also in human skills. Examples: "with a given landed capital, production is proportional to labor, not to property"; "Talent . . . is an accumulated capital, of which the receiver is only the guardian"; and "producing by his capital" means "producing by his tools." 22 Capital should not be confused with capitalism. That is why the abolition of property did not signify for Sandino restraints on the development of capital. Proudhon's communism is evident in his detailed response to the property question. We must ascertain, he says, whether the claims of property are consistent with people's primitive and uncorrupted notion of justice.23 Others had argued that landed property and the ownership of capital were unjust. What makes Proudhon's book unique is that it does not conflate the communist principle of equal work and wealth with the socialist principle of rewards proportional to merit. Industry is not its own reward, say the socialists, but requires material incentives through a privileged share of the fruits. The diligent should be credited and the shirkers penalized following the principle "To each according to his capacity, to each capacity according to its results." 24 By this, most socialists mean that salaries must be governed by both capacity and performance. But why, Proudhon asks, should inequality of skills be an argument for unequal economic reward? Since the division of labor is predicated on unequal capacities, its potential benefits belong to everybody.25 Otherwise, the principle of cooperative labor—the principle governing a society "where we are all brothers . . . without egoists, without exploiters"—is violated.26 Proudhon's principle of cooperative labor requires that each person be assigned equal burdens within the social division of labor. That does not mean that everyone will labor at the same tasks, but only that all will have to labor the same amount of time, other factors being equal. Where other factors are not equal, allowances will be made so that eight hours of normal labor may be matched by fewer hours of heavy labor and additional hours of sedentary work. Suppose that the average time required to complete a given task is seven

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hours. "One laborer will finish it in six hours, another will require eight," but as long as all fulfill their duty to society, "they are entitled to equal wages." 27 The diligent are rewarded in noneconomic ways. Those who finish early may rest, if they choose, or devote themselves to science and the arts without injury to anyone. But do not let them, on the grounds of superior skill and diligence, obtain more than their share. Thus, in order to ensure equality of pay, nobody will be assigned more burdens than anyone else.28 Such is the communist principle of equal burdens and equal benefits. In the common struggle between humankind and nature to eke out a livelihood, "it is each one's duty to take his share." 29 Those who assist weak and less-skilled workers deserve special praise, "but their aid must be accepted as a free gift—not imposed by force, nor offered at a price." 30 The first condition of an association among equals is the assignment of "an equal task," to which corresponds "the equality of wages." 31 Considering its source in Proudhon, Sandino's vision of a cooperative commonwealth, as opposed to a society of egoists and exploiters, suggests as much. The principle of distribution according to work rests on a mistaken premise, says Proudhon, that "tasks must necessarily be unequal." 32 Given a division of labor, he objected to correlating the pyramid of capacities from superior to inferior with a corresponding scale of wages.33 Jobs can be equally burdensome independently of the inequality of powers, he argued, so that inequality of capacities need not be a barrier to equality of fortunes. Proudhon acknowledged that some skills are more valuable than others. Among social equals, the value of anything is the amount of time and expense it costs.34 The same applies to human skills. But not being responsible for the superior value of his or her skills, "the loftiest intelligence must submit to equality of possessions."35 Is there any reason for the gifted to complain that superior and inferior skills receive equal pay? No more than for the unskilled laborer to believe that coarse, boring, and repulsive jobs are entitled to extra pay.36 "The artist, the savant, and the poet find their just recompense in the permission that society gives them to devote themselves exclusively to science and to art: so that in reality they do not labor for themselves, but for society, which creates them, and requires of them no other duty."37 That such work is no more deserving than any other is implicit in the principle of mutual aid. Not every society can afford to maintain people with highly cultivated talents. If a society of ioo farmers can support a shoemaker, it may need 150 for a blacksmith, 200 for a tailor, and tens of thousands for an artist or scientist.38 The last are extremely expensive, but one can survive without them. "Society can, if need be, do without prose and verse, music and painting, and the knowledge of the moon and stars; but it cannot live a single day without food and shelter."39 Consequently, artists and scientists owe a debt

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of gratitude to the farmers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and tailors, who not only provide for their daily needs, but also exempt them from common chores. The cultivation of exceptional powers is a social product. Like the material instruments of production, specialized skills depend on progress in the arts and sciences, on the dissemination of knowledge slowly accumulated by a few masters through the aid of many subordinate industries. Whatever people's capacity, Proudhon reasoned, they do not have moral title to it. "When the physician has paid for his teachers, his books, his diplomas, and all the other items of his educational expenses, he has no more paid for his talent than the capitalist pays for his house and land when he gives his employees their wages. The man of talent has contributed to the production in himself of a useful instrument. He has, then, a share in its possession; he is not its proprietor."40 Experts have no claim to property in their expertise, because "it is an accumulated capital, of which the receiver is only the guardian."41 Considering Sandino's maxim, "Property is theft," it seems that he shared this Proudhonian interpretation of capital as a cooperative trust. Perhaps the most shocking feature of Proudhon's thesis is what he included under the heading of theft. Even Marx would agree that owning capital is, indirectly, a kind of theft. But Proudhon went further in identifying talent as an accumulated capital; hence, inequality of wages exacted by property in human capital is also a form of theft.42 Proudhon classified theft into three general categories: impermissible and liable to ignominious punishment, as in the case of murder; impermissible but liable only to correctional punishment, in such cases as cheating and swindling; and permissible or liable to no punishment at all. Under this last heading he included interest, rents of all kinds, profits, sinecures, honorariums, and wages in excess of the average.43 In authorized forms of robbery, he noted, force and artifice are concealed within a useful product. As a result, "no nation has yet got rid of that kind of robbery which acts through talent." u The touchstone for distinguishing a communist from a socialist is the capacity to recognize and the willingness to denounce theft in the ownership of intangible factors of production, such as creative powers and specialized skills. It was precisely Proudhon's acknowledgment that above-average wages also count as exploitation that authorizes us to call him a communist in spite of himself. Unlike Marx, Proudhon did not base his communism on the real or empirical movement that abolishes the present state of affairs—a movement leading to workers' self-management independently of how the final product is distributed.45 Based on a principle of justice, Proudhon's communism was rationalistic rather than materialistic or historical. In effect, he was a rationalist

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communist, in the same sense that his disciple Sandino would later proclaim himself to be one.46 But why call Proudhon a communist, when he specifically disowned the label? As the first species of slavery, he wrote, communism is suitable at best to the dawn of human civilization.47 Certainly, the defense of communism was not Proudhon's claim to fame. It comes as a surprise to discover that Proudhon rejected communism because "communism is inequality." Under communism, inequality results from treating excellence and mediocrity, diligence and laziness, skill and stupidity, virtue and vice as equal.48 The fact that communism treats unequals equally signifies that its equality is purely formal and a right of inequality in its content. There is only one kind of communism, according to Proudhon: the vulgar, ascetic, thoughtless, and leveling egalitarianism that reduces everybody to the lowest common denominator. An expression of generalized envy, it makes brute labor or drudgery compulsory for all. As the abstract negation of the world of culture, it represents a regression to the simple condition of those who have yet to reach the stage of property.49 "The members of a community, it is true, have no private property; but the community is proprietor, and proprietor not only of the goods, but of the persons and wills." 50 There is no indication that Sandino subscribed to this kind of communism. Ironically, it was from Proudhon that Marx derived his critique of crude communism as "a community of labor, and an equality of wages paid out by the communal capital—the community as the universal capitalist."51 But Marx's critique of this dehumanized communism did not dissuade him from appropriating the name for his own humanized solution to the social question. So if Marx could call himself a communist, why not Proudhon? Actually, it is more in keeping with historical usage to call Proudhon a communist— simply because he defended egalitarianism and Marx did not. How does this depiction square with Proudhon's celebrated anarchism? The anarchist's fundamental enemy is supposedly the state.52 But this stereotype comes from a misreading of Proudhon. The context of his startling declaration, "I am an anarchist," is his discussion of the "second effect of property . . . despotism"—the anarchist's immediate enemy.53 The fundamental enemy appears in his discussion of the first effect of property—inequality, or theft.54 Communism was his antidote to inequality, anarchism his antidote to despotism. But despotism is at most the protector and guarantor of inequality, not its source. Thus Proudhon confronted state power not as the main evil, but in the course of challenging the principal enemy, which is inequality. Sandino's anarchism is to be understood in the same light—as instrumental to his communism. A scrutiny of Proudhon's work shows that behind his professed anticom-

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munism lurked a subversive egalitarianism in the tradition of Frangois Noel Babeuf. Faithfully transmitted by Filippo (Philippe) Buonarroti in his classic manual on communism, Babeuf s principal writings and those of his followers became accessible to Proudhon.55 But Proudhon mistakenly attributed to Babeuf the crude leveling doctrine of Sylvain Marechal, whose Manifesto of Equals was repudiated by his fellow conspirators.56 "Gracchus Babeuf wished all superiority to be stringently repressed. . . . To establish his communistic edifice, he lowered all citizens to the status of the smallest."57 That was Marechal's edifice, not Babeuf's. Proudhon rejected Marechal's communism for "mistaking uniformity for law, and levelism for equality."58 By "levelism" he understood not the doctrines of the self-styled "Levelers" during the English Civil War, but the crude leveling implicit in Marechal's declaration, "Let all the arts perish, if necessary, as long as real equality remains." By "real equality" Marechal meant not only economic and political equality, but also the same amount of food and education for all. "Let there be no differences between human beings other than those of age and sex!" he raged.59 This statement expresses the leveling mentality with a vengeance. Understandably, Proudhon repudiated it. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Sandino did, too. At the same time, Proudhon had the decency to acknowledge his intellectual debt to Babeuf.60 But he did not give credit where credit was due. He failed to credit Babeuf's thesis that property is the result of "brigandage" or "pillage." He failed to acknowledge Babeuf's discovery that the intelligent have defrauded others through the high prices fixed for their services. As Babeuf put it, if manual laborers had been able to keep up with them, they would "have established the merit of the arm to be as great as that of the head, and the fatigue of the entire body . . . as sufficient compensation for the fatigue of the small part of it that ruminates."61 Finally, Proudhon failed to credit Babeuf's discovery that "everything owned by those who have more than their individual due of society's goods [beyond what is sufficient for individual needs] is theft and usurpation."62 Proudhon, and through him, Sandino, owed an even greater but unacknowledged debt to Buonarroti. From Buonarroti they derived not only the name "anarchist" for the loyal friends of equality, but also the principle of equality to which Auguste Blanqui's followers gave the name "communism." 63 Buonarroti divided the principal parties and factions at the climax of the Jacobin Terror of 1793-1794 into the partisans of egoism and the friends of equality.64 Among the latter he distinguished the true or loyal friends of equality from the false or disloyal, and the prudent from the imprudent.65 At that time, the true friends of equality were called by their enemies "anarchists." 66 Both Buonarroti and Kropotkin credit them with being the precursors of Babeuf's conspiracy of equals.67 The most likely source of Proudhon's knowledge of Babeuf was Buonarro-

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ti's 1828 manual of communist subversion, Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality. Wrote Buonarroti, "labor is evidently for each citizen an essential condition of the social compact; and as each, in entering into society carries with him an equal stake and contribution (the totality of his strength and means), it follows that the burdens, the productions, and the advantages ought to be equally divided."68 Those who reasoned in this way, he added, "saw in the community of goods and of labors—that is to say, in the equal distribution of burdens and enjoyments—the veritable object and perfection of the social state." That equality of labor and enjoyments should be the sole end of honest citizens and a legitimate motive for insurrection followed from Buonarroti's identification of this end with the "greatest possible happiness of all." 69 Buonarroti's classic bears the imprint of the Illuminati and their fellow travelers among the Masonic lodges in France and the various Jacobin clubs. Founded in 1776 by Dr. Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830), a professor of canon law at the University of Ingoldstadt in Bavaria, the Order of the Illuminati became the archetype for revolutionary communists in the nineteenth century. A subversive undercurrent during the French Revolution, it aimed at nothing less than the complete destruction of the three-headed hydra of State, Church, and Capital. Thus the Illuminati's war on princes, priests, and property makes Weishaupt, rather than Babeuf or Buonarroti, much less Proudhon, the original source of Sandino's communism. That the Illuminati were the first anarchists of modern times, the first nihilists, was the testimony of Weishaupt's contemporaries, who warned against the insidious consequences of his doctrine. According to one authority, he aimed "to overthrow all thrones, all altars, annihilate all property, efface all law, and end by dissolving all society."70 According to another, the Illuminati "accounted all princes usurpers and tyrants, and all privileged orders as their abettors; they meant to abolish the laws which protected property . . . and to prevent for the future any such accumulation, they intended to establish universal liberty and equality."71 Like Proudhon, Weishaupt was heavily indebted to the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.72 Weishaupt underscored the nihilistic implications of Rousseau's political views: "Equality and Liberty are the essential rights of man. . . . The first attempt against Equality was that of property; the first against Liberty was that by political societies and governments. The sole supports of property and governments were religious and civil laws. Therefore, to reestablish man's original rights of equality and liberty, one must begin by destroying all religion, all civil society, and finally, all property."73 The ranking is important—equality first and then liberty—the same that we find in Proudhon. Weishaupt summarized his doctrine of equality in his metaphor of "The Three Stones"—the rough, the split, and the polished. "The rough stone, and the one that is split, express our condition under civil government; rough by

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every fretting inequality . . . and split since we no longer are one family and are further divided by differences of government, rank, property, and religion." 74 It follows, according to Weishaupt, that civil society is anything but polished, and its government a mockery of reason and justice. If it is tempting to see in Weishaupt's revolutionary brotherhood the original source of Proudhon's communism, it is because the communist twist Proudhon gave to Rousseau's doctrine was anticipated by the Illuminati. Proudhon's principle of equality was secondhand, as was Sandino's. It derived not only from Babeuf and Buonarroti, but also from Louis Auguste Blanqui, to whom Buonarroti directly transmitted it. As Blanqui summarized the Babeuvist credo in an 1835 handbill, "the end for us is the equal distribution of the burdens and benefits of society—it is the complete establishment of the reign of equality."75 The man who makes the soup should get to eat it, Blanqui argued in an essay of that title in 1834. But that is not the rule: "A few individuals have seized upon the common earth by ruse or by violence and, claiming possession of it, have established by laws that it is to be their property forever." Under this absolute right called property Blanqui included "the accumulated products of labor, designated by the term capital." Here we have the source of Proudhon's concept of capital representing not only the worked-up materials and instruments of labor, but also what Blanqui called intelligence—the result of education or stored-up knowledge.76 Proudhon also owed a debt to Blanqui's belief in progress, "which conspires through the centuries to destroy the exploitation of man by man in all its forms." 77 Although for thousands of years the right to property had held sway, for Blanqui the progress of equality led inexorably to the reign of justice through common possession in place of individual ownership.78 I mention Proudhon's and Sandino's intellectual debt to Weishaupt, Buonarroti, Babeuf, and Blanqui because they all defended the system known as "communism," though they differed over matters of strategy. With the exception of Weishaupt, Proudhon's principal precursors upheld a centralized and authoritarian version of the community of goods. In contrast, Proudhon and Sandino favored a system of voluntary cooperation. Like Weishaupt, they were anarchists as well as communists. Even the young Engels saw no inconsistency between anarchism and communism. Commenting in 1843 on the rise of communism in France, he noted that the "most important writer . . . in this line is Proudhon, a young man, who published two or three years ago his work: What Is Property? . . . where he gave the answer [that] . . . Property is robbery." Engels acknowledged it to be the most important philosophical work by communists in the French language and added that, "having proved that every kind of government is alike objectionable, no matter whether it be democracy, aristocracy, or

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monarchy . . . he comes at last to the conclusion: . . . What we want is anarchy."79 "Property is theft" was not Sandino's only tribute to Proudhon. Like Proudhon, he believed that the only rational society is one based on free association and self-managed cooperatives.80 That justice or equality implies comradeship is a Proudhonian idea basic to Sandino's equation of "communization" with "fraternization."81 And Sandino's insistence on a rational basis for communism coincides with Proudhon's principle of rationally based egalitarianism.82 Sandino's summary statement of his political ideas shows at least a superficial acquaintance with Proudhon's work. Carleton Beals reported that Sandino was an omnivorous reader, and Ramon de Belausteguigoitia tells us that in Tampico "Sandino took advantage of his spare time by dedicating himself to reading." 83 Considering that Proudhon's book was accessible in Spanish translation both among the anarchist circles in which Sandino moved and in the libraries of Tampico's House of the World Laborer and the CGT, Sandino's reading of What Is Property offers a plausible explanation of these extraordinary coincidences. Sandino's intellectual pedigree can be traced back through Buonarroti to Babeuf. Founded in February 1921, before Sandino arrived in Tampico, the Mexican CGT upheld the principles of "libertarian communism" aimed at the "complete emancipation of workers and peasants." 84 The communist component it traced to Babeuf. Luis Araiza, one of the CGT's founders and its most prominent historian, reproduced "The Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf" in his monumental history of the Mexican labor movement because it served as a model for the CGT's communism. Written in 1796 by Babeuf's co-conspirators in the Society of the Pantheon, this document neatly summarizes their egalitarian philosophy: "(1) Nature has given every man an equal right to the enjoyment of all its goods . . . ; (4) All work and the enjoyment of its fruits must be in common . . . ; (6) No one has ever appropriated the fruits of the earth or of industry exclusively for himself without having committed a crime . . . ; (10) The aim of the Revolution is to destroy inequality and to re-establish the common welfare."85 If Sandino meant what he said in his memorandum to General Moncada, and there is every reason to believe he did, then he shared these egalitarian premises. That should suffice to dispute the interpretation of Sandino's ideology as an "identification with social ideas bordering on socialism."86 If his ideas had verged on socialism, he would have found some aphorism other than "Property is theft!" to summarize them. Such a slogan is unacceptable to Marxists because of its ultra-Left connotations. The Communist Manifesto is a critique of "bourgeois property," not of property in general.87

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That Sandino was an extremist is evident from a discussion with Carleton Beals in February 1928 in which he laughingly noted that priests were the first thieves, soldiers the second.88 He repeated what he said in a letter to Jose Hilario Chavarria (12 May 1931): "The first thieves on earth were those you today call priests; the second, those you today call soldiers."89 Later, a third class of thieves appears, those who are called "bankers," against whom Jesus launched a communist revolution.90 The first class of thieves illustrates Proudhon's legally authorized robbery based on superior talent and intelligence. Priests were the first intellectuals, the first professionals; hence, it is reasonable to conclude that Sandino, like Proudhon, identified private property based on superior knowledge as a subtle form of theft. Proudhon and Sandino stretched the usual meaning of "theft" to suit their political purposes. Proudhon asked if the idea of property was consistent with "the primitive notion of justice." 91 If not, there was an original theft that transformed what was possessed in common into the private property of greedy and ambitious souls. Unlike the act of possessing, a simple matter of fact, the act of ownership provides an unqualified right to a thing. The question is how this right was acquired, if not by an original act of dispossessing others of the earth and its fruits, which were their common heritage.92 Besides being a moralist, Proudhon was a supreme realist—and the same may be said of Sandino. Independent of any moral judgment, those who violate the principle of equal burdens and equal benefits are both shirkers and freeloaders. In living at someone else's expense, they get something for nothing, whether actively as exploiters or passively as parasites. This is a description of a state of affairs, not a moral evaluation—an account even shirkers and freeloaders can accept. Even so, living off another's labor is lawful, so why call it theft? Short of exaggerated feelings of comradeship for others, which Proudhon called "sociability" and Sandino "fraternity," it is not even immoral. Although prior to writing Capital Marx, too, indulged in this Proudhonian rhetoric—as in the Grundrisse, where he criticizes the "theft" of alien labor time—"theft" did not have for him the moral significance Proudhon attached to it.93 Neither Proudhon nor Sandino envisaged that exploitation might be compatible with Reason, Justice, and Right through the exchange of equal values. But as Marx painstakingly showed in Capital, the commodity labor-power may exchange at its value and still be used to produce "surplus value." 94 In view of Marx's analysis, is there any reason for retaining the Proudhonian rhetoric? As Proudhon observed, quoting the French mathematician and philosopher Jean le Rond d'Alembert, "the ordinary truths of life make little impression on men, unless their attention is especially called to them." 95 How to get the attention, asks Sandino, that would awaken sleeping people and communicate at a glance the lessons of human history?96 In the way Proudhon originally sought to do so, by the startling epigram "Property is theft!"

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3. People's War, People's Army

T

|he title of this chapter was purloined not from Vo Nguyen Giap's People's War, People's Army, but from Bakunin's "Letters to a Frenchman," written almost a century earlier. By "people's war" Giap meant the armed struggle of oppressed nations led by a political-military vanguard— the "people's army." l Bakunin was not so literal, understanding by "people" subjugated races and classes as well as nationalities, by "war" racial and class as well as national antagonisms, and by "army" any body of persons organized for intransigent struggle. Thus, the masses become organized for war through the struggle between labor and capital: "Strikes spell war . . . ; they create, organize, and form a workers' army, an army which is bound to break down the power of the bourgeoisie and the State." 2 Composed on the eve of the Paris Commune, when the Prussian invaders were at the gates of Paris, Bakunin's letters outlined the strategy that both libertarian and authoritarian communists follow to the present day: first, the transformation of defeat in a war between states into a war for national liberation; second, the transformation of a war for national liberation into a revolutionary civil or class war. Wrote Bakunin on that memorable occasion, "only the workers in the cities can now save France . . . France can be saved only by a spontaneous, uncompromising, passionate, anarchic, and destructive uprising of the masses" against domestic as well as foreign oppression.3 In his "Appeal to the Slavs," written two decades earlier, Bakunin called for a racial as well as a national struggle by the united Slavic peoples against their German and Turkish oppressors.4 But he simultaneously aimed at the overthrow of the Russian Empire, making clear that his objective was the deliverance of the Slavic race from internal as well as external despotism. This required the emancipation of those he collectively labeled the "poor class . . . the greatest part of humanity . . . this class, which constitutes the true people." 5 Sandino's patriotic struggle was also to become a springboard, first, for a race war, and, second, for a class war. In the second of two chronicles by a

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foreign visitor to Sandino's "Light and Shade" encampment in April 1932, there is the following account of Sandino's objectives: " 'Aren't you the young Colombian,' Sandino asked. 'Yes, my General,' I replied. 'And how do you characterize this struggle?' 'I believe, General, that your struggle for the complete liberation of Nicaragua is not just limited to this country, but is rather the beginning of a Race War. You represent in these moments all the energy and all the proud spirit of the Latin soul, the young soul of Indo-America, which has risen against Anglo-Saxon Imperialism brought to these virgin lands by the brutal and ultra-civiLiZED blondes.' 'Precisely,' Sandino responded."6 Thus his revolutionary Indo-Americanism corresponded to Bakunin's revolutionary pan-Slavism. But this was not the final objective of Sandino's struggle. As he acknowledged in a letter to Luis Araquistain in July 1928, "if in the present historical moment our struggle is national and racial, it will become international as colonial and semicolonial peoples learn to unite with peoples of the imperialist metropolises."7 Unite for what purpose? For the class war to which his race war was a prelude. In this respect, too, he followed in Bakunin's footsteps. For Bakunin, the International Workingmen's Association was the classic example of a people's army in the class war with the bourgeoisie. Against the political-military power of the capitalists, the workers counterposed an economic organization that directly represented their interests, "a popular force capable of crushing the military and civil power of the State . . . which the International Workingmen's Association is doing now." Since the social question cannot be resolved peacefully or legally, this workers' army "calls upon them to revolt." Toward what end? "The International Workingmen's Association would have no meaning if it did not aim at abolition of the State. It organizes the working masses of the people only for the purpose of this destruction."8 Bakunin assigned the International the task of preparing the social revolution during the more or less protracted period separating the workers from the final military showdown with the bourgeoisie.9 This task called for "the rallying of the mass of workers into one association and the building up of 'resistance funds.'" 10 Sandino, too, believed in the strike as a weapon and in the union of workers as a militant association for waging class war. "Nicaraguan comrades and all who are still unorganized and outside the Latin American Confederation of Labor . . . we appeal to you: Organize! Your post is in the ranks of the only union organization that defends the interests of the working class." 11 The escalation and spread of local strikes signified for Bakunin "that economic anarchy grows with each day, and that we are marching with gigantic steps toward the inevitable end-point of this anarchy—toward social revolution . . . [the] great cataclysm, which will regenerate society."12 Bakunin

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envisioned this upheaval as a general strike leading to mass insurrection in response to "great political and economic crises, when the . . . herds of human slaves, crushed and flattened down but still unresigned to their position, rise up at last to throw off their yoke." 13 Again, in almost the same terms, Sandino characterized the coming cataclysm as the "hecatomb" that would "light the match of the 'Proletarian Explosion' against the imperialists of the earth." 14 Besides urging workers to form economic associations, Bakunin insisted on their political organization. His model was the Committee for the Salvation of France, organized in the city of Lyons in September 1870 at the height of the Franco-Prussian War. With the defeat of Napoleon III and the proclamation of a republic to replace the empire on September 4, Bakunin returned to France, where he chose for the center of his agitation the country's secondlargest city. From there he planned to extend the revolution to the rest of France and then to neighboring countries.15 He was not successful. As a result of a mass uprising on September 28, the city hall of Lyons momentarily fell into the hands of Bakunin's followers, but they were soon dispersed by the national guard. The event is important historically as a clue to Bakunin's political-military organization. His revolutionary committee in Lyons issued an appeal that was posted on the city's walls. Point five read in part: "All existing municipal administrations are abolished, and . . . there shall be set up in their place Committees for the Salvation of France, which shall exert all power under the direct control of the people." According to the appeal, "Every committee of a provincial capital shall send two delegates for the purpose of constituting the Revolutionary Convention for the Salvation of France." 16 It would meet in Lyons, where, because of the city's remoteness from the occupying forces, it was in the best position to undertake an energetic defense of the country. The appeal closed with an exhortation for the people to arm themselves against the newly established republic as well as the Prussian armies. Such was the model Bakunin chose for organizing and mobilizing the workers politically—his counterpart of the Paris Commune.17 Sandino's political-military organization operated along similar lines. It, too, took the form of a revolutionary committee for the salvation of his country and was headquartered in a provincial region remote from the invading army. As the Defending Army of National Sovereignty, it, too, raised the issue of patriotism and issued a call to arms. Sandino, like Bakunin, planned to abolish frontiers by spreading the revolution to neighboring countries, "to proclaim the Union of Central America under the name of Central American Communards led by the workers and peasants."18 That would have been his counterpart of the Paris Commune. In this perspective, revolutions are the work of masses rather than of conspirators. They can be foreseen, but cannot be forced: "revolutions are not

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improvised . . . one cannot accelerate their explosion."19 Thus, Bakunin cautioned the workers against prematurely engaging the class enemy in an armed struggle. A strategy of barricades and violent overthrow of the political order is effective only during great economic and political crises, when the bourgeoisie has its back to the wall. "The bourgeoisie understand this only too well, and that is why they try to provoke a struggle now. Today they still hope that they have sufficient power to crush us. . . . Therefore, they want to force the International to battle today."20 In the same spirit of caution, Sandino agreed to peace terms in 1933, when conditions were no longer propitious for his revolutionary war. In exhorting the workers to organize in self-defense, Bakunin pursued a complex strategy. Their class interests would be represented by an activating minority. "Several hundred well-intentioned young men, when organized apart from the people, of course do not constitute an adequate revolutionary force. . . . But those several hundreds are sufficient to organize the revolutionary power of the people." 21 This revolutionary force would be organized into two contingents, each headed by a vanguard: the International Workingmen's Association occupied with defending the workers' day-to-day economic interests against the encroachments of capital; and a political-military vanguard to take shape on the eve of the anticipated social and political upheaval. Under normal conditions, "it is indeed enough that one worker out of ten, seriously and with full knowledge of the cause, join the International, while the nine remaining outside of this organization become subject to its invisible influence."22 And under conditions of crisis, "ten, twenty, or thirty well organized persons, acting in concert and knowing where they are going and what they want, can easily carry along a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred people, or even more." 23 Influenced by his Mexican connections, in turn indebted to Bakunin, Sandino adopted this twofold strategy. In Mexico, too, the workers had both a vanguard economic organization—first in the House of the World Laborer and then in the General Confederation of Workers—and a political-military vanguard in the anomalous Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and then in Emiliano Zapata's Army of the South. Each was suited to different conditions and the changing correlation of forces in Nicaragua. Just as Mexico's vanguards failed in their objective of a government of workers and peasants, so in Nicaragua Sandino had to shift gears from a political-military to a mainly economic struggle. But his retreat was directed by a global strategy in which a military resolution continued to play a decisive role. Although Sandino's economic strategy followed the guidelines of libertarian communists, his political-military strategy contained a strong dose of authoritarianism. On this score, too, his Mexican precursors provided an example. The Revolutionary Convention that governed Mexico in 1914-1915 was dominated by the followers of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Mod-

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eled on the rule of the French Jacobins in 1793-1794, the Convention discussed the creation of a Committee of Public Safety to oversee a Jacobin-type terror. As one prominent Zapatista delegate recalled, "Those of us who led the delegation of the South . . . had become saturated with readings and impressions of the French Revolution and . . . the doctrines derived from the anarchist ideas of Kropotkin, Reclus, Malato, and the other theoreticians of anarchism . . . we also contemplated setting up a Committee of Public Safety . . . the Jacobins of 1793 had formed such a committee in France and we, their giddy disciples in revolutionary Mexico, felt irresistibly compelled to imitate them." 24 What is so remarkable about this confession is that it runs together a commitment to libertarian communism with a relentless authoritarianism that brooked no opposition from enemies of the revolution—the paradoxical mix also personified in Sandino. In Mexico the general staff of the Zapatista army organized a commune to represent the workers' and peasants' interests. "Even as the Paris Commune foreshadowed the future of proletarian power in Europe at the end of the preceding century, so the 'commune of Morelos' embodied the future of peasant-worker power in Latin America at the beginning of the present century."25 That Sandino was not immune to the Mexican example is indicated by his plan for a Central American Commune. The commune in the state of Morelos was a by-product of Floresmagonism. The relationship between Flores Magon and Zapata began in 1912 when the former sent Magdaleno Contreras to serve as an emissary and adviser to the guerrilla chieftain. Contreras warned Zapata against Francisco Madero— the official leader of the Mexican Revolution (corresponding to General Moncada in Nicaragua)—and also encouraged Zapata's rupture with the Mexican president. After the break, Jose Guerra became the second emissary to Zapata's headquarters, where he found an even more favorable reception. Guerra was responsible for inducing Zapata to change his earlier motto of "Justice, Liberty, and Law" to the Magonist motto of "Land and Liberty." A third emissary, Jesus M. Rangel, also made his influence felt in Zapata's camp. It was to Rangel that Zapata proposed that Flores Magon should return from exile and edit his communist newspaper Regeneration under the protection of the Army of the South.26 By then, Zapata had transformed his civil war into a revolutionary one. Sandino's strategy likewise was to turn a civil war into a revolutionary war. None of this was lost on General Moncada, who refused to give Sandino arms in December 1926 and then collaborated with the occupying forces after the civil war ended in May 1927. Sandino managed to hold out only because of popular support in the areas under his control. Relying on a strategy of the people in arms, he recruited his guerrillas from volunteers—a grass-roots alternative to Moncada's army of conscripts.

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This strategy hinged on winning over the local population preliminary to establishing a liberated territory in the Segovias. But to get people to take up arms or to support those who did was no easy task. Sandino began by organizing co-workers at the San Albino Mine. After gaining the miners' confidence, he told them about the Mexican Revolution and enjoined them to imitate its example. He praised Mexico's advanced system of social legislation, "a labor department charged with protecting workers from exploitation, with assuring their payment in money, with providing medical attention, schools, an eight-hour day, and other advantages the Nicaraguan pariahs had to do without."27 As a revolutionary culture broker, he patterned his propaganda after that of the Mexican Liberal Party and its 1906 transitional program: "a national minimum wage, a six-day work week with Sunday rest, cash wage payments rather than company script monies tenable only in a company store, the abolition of the company store (tienda de raya), the abolition of child labor, owner-management payments for industrial disability expenses, and the establishment of minimum standards for job safety and working conditions."28 Subsequently, Sandino articulated a program for Nicaragua's peasants in an effort to incorporate them into a popular-based insurrection. To minimize the alarm his agrarian reforms might cause among big landowners, he limited his demands to the redistribution of uncultivated lands held by the state.29 These would be cultivated by the peasants not individually, as Nicaragua's Liberals would have preferred, but collectively, through the organization of rural cooperatives. Here, too, he was carrying out the program of the PLM by providing land for the land-hungry.30 Thanks to these coordinated appeals to workers and peasants, Sandino was able to persevere in his revolutionary war for almost seven years. This was the same strategy the PLM had employed, but with less dramatic and enduring results during the Mexican Revolution. Sandino had learned from the PLM's mistakes. Except for his initial slip in revealing his political intentions to General Moncada, he so scaled down his demands that they stopped short of socialism, not to mention communism. This eventually lost him the backing of the Communist International, but in shunning all "isms," he gained credibility and garnered the support of patriotic sectors that otherwise might not have joined him. Organized labor was another source of Sandino's strategy. When he arrived in Tampico in the summer of 1923, the country's organized workers were divided into the so-called yellows of the mildly socialist or social democratic Regional Confederation of Mexican Laborers (CROM) and the reds, belonging to the anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Workers (CGT).31 Next to Mexico City, Tampico was the principal stronghold of the CGT and one of the few cities in which a majority of organized workers had come under anarcho-syndicalist influence.32 By the end of World War I, there were several

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independently organized anarcho-syndicalist vanguards operating in the Tampico area: a local House of the World Laborer, which managed to survive the closing of its Mexico City headquarters in August 1916; Force and Brain (Fuerza y Cerebro); the Red Brothers of Villa Cecilia, a Tampico suburb; Free Life (Vida Libre); Germinal; and a local of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).33 The most successful anarcho-syndicalist organizing efforts outside Mexico City were in the Tampico area where, besides the IWWaffiliated Industrial Petroleum Workers of Tampico, sixteen other unions were affiliated with the local House of the World Laborer.34 Their emblem was the red and black flag. The CGT, launched in February 1921, was modeled on the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Work (CNT), founded in Barcelona in September 1910. Affiliated with the Communist or Third International until September 1921, the CGT upheld the following fundamental principles: "libertarian communism"; "rationalist education" for the working class; "class struggle"; and "direct action." This last principle excluded members of political parties except for the Communist Party, whose cadres were originally welcomed into the CGT. The CGT accepted the principle of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," although it gave it an anarchist interpretation in which the control group consisted of "Soviets" or workers' councils rather than a political-military vanguard. Moreover, unlike the House of the World Laborer but like Flores Magon's Liberal Party, it made a special point of resisting what it called "Yankee imperialism."35 Sandino's co-workers in Tampico's oil fields from 1923 to 1925, and then at Cerro Azul, some fifty kilometers southwest of Tampico, from August 1925 to May 1926, were among the most militant in Mexico. The crest of Tampico's labor mobilizations occurred during those years. Rosendo Salazar, originally an anarcho-syndicalist organizer but subsequently a leader of Mexico's Communist Party, has given a vivid description of them in his history of proletarian struggles in Mexico.36 Sandino was directly touched by the events. The strike by Tampico's electrical workers began on 2 September 1923, but was not resolved until 16 February 1924. Because of the hostile attitude of the electric company's manager, American Harvey S. Leach, the Mexican Union of Electrical Workers demanded his expulsion from the country. The strike ended only after the government of President Obregon seized the company's properties and deported Leach. This episode was followed by a strike of oil workers against the Britishowned El Aguila, the Eagle Petroleum Company of Tampico. It began on March 25 and lasted through the middle of July 1924. On March 29, in an interview with the commander of the local garrison, manager Alfred Jacobsen explained his refusal to bargain with the workers: although they had occupied the refinery in reprisal against the company's policy of hiring "scabs," they had done so illegally. Tampico's labor unions responded by launching a gen-

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eral strike in support of the oil workers. On April 2, President Obregon instructed the army to intervene. But the strike continued even after workers were compelled to abandon the refinery. By then they had won over the scabs contracted by Jacobsen to break the strike. The CROM also lent its support by directing its affiliated unions to boycott the company's products. On May 8 the nation's railway unions gave notice of their refusal to transport anything bearing the company's brand—a boycott supported in the United States by the American Federation of Labor. On the same day, the strikers sent a letter to the president demanding the expulsion of Jacobsen for breaking Mexican laws designed to protect the workers' rights. Meanwhile, the CROM's leaders tried to reach a settlement with the company. On June 9, the CROM's boss, Luis Morones, worked out a compromise with Jacobsen in an effort to nullify the subversive influence of the "reds." But on June 17, the trade union local at El Aguila disowned the agreement and simultaneously broke off relations with the CROM. The army then intervened a second time, an action repudiated on July 2 by thirty-six labor organizations as a disguised form of strike breaking. Shortly afterward, the CROM withdrew its support of the striking workers. In response to this "betrayal," some twenty-seven of Tampico's unions joined the strikers in petitioning the government to deport Jacobsen, described as the "second Leach of Tampico." On July 18, the company finally acceded to most of the workers' demands. Other strikes followed. On September 10, a strike in the oil fields of Mexican Gulf prompted the government to occupy the company's properties in Tampico. But on October 2, the occupying troops fired on defenseless strikers, killing one and wounding another eleven. The CGT responded by sending an ultimatum to the company's manager, Mr. Tompkins. On New Years' Day, 1925, a pact of solidarity was signed by Tampico's workers in support of the strikers and against the "yellows" in the CROM. The violence continued. On January 11, three thousand workers attending a "red ceremony" in Tampico were fired on by police. By February, the strike had spread to the Huasteca Petroleum Company, and by the beginning of March, fears were being expressed that the five thousand oil workers already on strike might be joined by others, bringing the total to fifteen thousand. On March 13, these fears materialized when workers at four of El Aguila's oil fields also went on strike. Finally, on May 28, the strike against the Huasteca Petroleum Company spread to the oil fields at Cerro Azul and half a dozen others. The CGT, Salazar notes, worked subversively to extend the strike to the entire country. An important feature of these strikes should be kept in mind in assessing their influence on Sandino. They were directed against American- and Britishowned companies and their managers, two of whom were obliged to leave the

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country. It is generally assumed that Sandino's anti-Yankee strain was an outgrowth of events in Nicaragua. But this hypothesis is unlikely if, as it now appears, his anti-imperialism had a Mexican origin in the CGT and the strikes of Tampico's workers. Sandino did his utmost to appear the heir of Bolivar and San Martin, the emancipators of Spanish America, but it was not their kind of liberation that struck the deepest chord of his personality. It was the labor-oriented and anarcho-syndicalist propaganda for social as well as national emancipation favored by the CGT. Here as elsewhere, there are too many pieces that fit the puzzle of Sandino's formative influences to pass off as mere coincidence. The CGT's involvement in the strike at Cerro Azul came on the heels of its fourth national congress (4-10 May 1925). It adopted resolutions against class conciliation, for peasant land expropriations through direct action, for a six-hour working day, and for the establishment of "Rationalist Schools" to assist in the dissemination of anarcho-syndicalist principles orally and through the written word.37 By then the CGT had added two newcomers to the three classical enemies of anarchism. As Enrique Flores Magon, Ricardo's younger brother and partner in revolution, explained at a meeting organized by the CGT on 20 April 1923, "The proletariat shares in common five enemies: capital, clergy, government, labor leaders, and politicians. The most dangerous for the working class and for the entire world are the leaders among the workers who appear in sheep's clothing."38 These were the "yellows" in the CROM. Sandino was not impervious to this admonition. In response to the oil strikes, he became a "red" and adopted organized labor's red and black flag. As Carleton Beals recalled, "Sandino did participate in several oil workers' strikes under the . . . red-black banner, which he later adopted as the insignia of his own forces." 39 What Beals reported was confirmed by Sandino.40 The CGT's immediate precursor was the House of the World Laborer. Along with the PLM, it was a major transmitter of anarchist ideas. As early as 1913, it had sponsored a Rationalist School in Mexico City, with branches in other cities aimed at laying the foundations of a proletarian cultural revolution. Its Bakuninist control group "taught ideology in classes called . . . 'ciencia, luz, y verdad" [science, light, and truth], and 'egalidad, libertad, y amor' [equality, liberty, and love]." 41 The House's growth permitted expansion of its school library, which by 1913 contained works by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and several others in Spanish translation.42 A decade later, when Sandino arrived in Tampico, the CGT was sponsoring anarchist study groups. An avid reader of literature on the social question, Sandino may have participated in some of their sessions. He may also have read some of the essays on political theory and strategy published in the CGT's newspaper Verbo Rojo (Red Word). "European writers—Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Lorenzo, Malatesta, and Reclus—provided the essays

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on political theory . . . while the Mexicans contributed their views regarding contemporary conditions and CGT strategies for their own country."43 But unlike his comrades in the oil fields, Sandino chose the path of armed struggle championed by the PLM. Although conditions in Mexico were no longer ripe for a mass insurrection, the approaching constitutionalist war in Nicaragua suggested that his country was moving toward a Mexican-type revolution of its own. Ricardo Flores Magon had pointed the way. "He [Ricardo] could not understand the Platonic adherence to anarchist ideas, but insisted on constant resistance to authoritarianism and exploitation by any and every means." This practical bias is what distanced him from most of the theoreticians of European anarchism and prompted him to reject the anarcho-syndicalist current as insufficient. "Conditions in Mexico at the time," says Abad de Santillan, "offered more possibilities for armed insurrection than for defensive actions by the trade unions." 44 The same practical bias also characterized Sandino's struggle in Nicaragua. While the theorists of international anarchism stressed the liberating role of ideas and the proponents of anarcho-syndicalism placed their faith in a revolutionary general strike, Flores Magon believed in mass insurrection. As he wrote to Elena White (5 September 1921), "I do not believe that syndicalism [in a follow-up letter on September 19 he explained that by syndicalism he meant revolutionary trade unionism] can ever by itself succeed in breaking the chains of the capitalist system; that will be achieved through a chaotic conglomeration of tendencies and the blind work of the masses driven to act by desperation and suffering." 45 Several years before Francisco Madero began his nationwide military uprising heralding ten years of revolution, the PLM had provided an example by launching a series of partial insurrections. In September 1906, in his capacity as president of the PLM, Ricardo Flores Magon had issued the first call for armed struggle against the Diaz dictatorship.46 Other attempts of the people in arms would follow from June through August 1908, another in October 1908, in May and June 1910, and again in October of the same year.47 This way of building up steam for a revolution through fits and starts was also the strategy Sandino pursued in Nicaragua. What was the source of this insurrectional strategy that Sandino assimilated during his first stay in Mexico? In a tribute to Malatesta, Flores Magon acknowledged that the PLM's strategy during and leading up to the Mexican Revolution had followed the Italian's strategy of mass insurrection. Malatesta had urged his followers to "take part in all revolutionary movements or those that may lead to revolution, and work so that events do not take a course other than the one we want." 48 Responding to this counsel, Flores Magon said, "We adopt Malatesta's opinion as our own . . . the PLM's members are not satisfied to wait for the Mexican revolution to begin. Instead, we impel it,

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precipitate it, in order to have the opportunity to channel it with deeds and words toward communism." That is why, he explained, "[w]e did everything we could to arouse the people, to incite them to rebel, and initiated the insurrectional movements of September 1906 and June 1908, preparatory to the tremendous movement that began on 20 November 1910." 49 After Bakunin's death in 1876, Malatesta emerged as the dominant figure in the international anarchist movement. In and out of jail, persecuted from one country to another, he acquired the reputation of a second Bakunin not only in his native Italy, but also in Spain and the New World. Hunted by the police, he spent nearly half of his life in political exile founding anarchist groups among Italian emigres throughout the Mediterranean, the Near East, North Africa, Western Europe, the United States, and remote Argentina.50 In Italy he organized three separate armed insurrections, in August 1874, August 1877, and again in April 1878.51 Malatesta had been prepared for this task by Bakunin's strategy of the people in arms, a strategy formulated during the Franco-Prussian War and first applied during the seizing of Lyons.52 But unlike Bakunin, he believed in forcing the march of events—as did Sandino. Under Malatesta's influence, in 1876 Italian anarchists adopted an intransigently revolutionary program aimed at general insurrection on a national scale.53 That same year, he wrote in the Bulletin of the Swiss Federation: "The Italian Federation believes that the insurrectionary deed, destined to affirm socialist principles by acts, is the most efficacious means of propaganda." As a leading advocate of the propaganda of the deed, he carried the new gospel to the rest of the international anarchist movement.54 Picked up by anarchist theoreticians in Spain, this strategy made its way to Mexico, where it received its classic expression in the repeated insurrections of the PLM, which culminated in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. In the conviction that "sometimes workers are economically and morally much nearer to the bourgeoisie than to the proletariat," Malatesta dissuaded other anarchists from immersing themselves in union affairs and neglecting other methods of struggle.55 Trade unions, he argued, are inevitably reformist rather than revolutionary in outlook.56 Distrustful of workers who let themselves be led to the slaughterhouse like lambs, he cautioned that "we would be deluding ourselves in thinking that propaganda is enough to raise them to that level of intellectual development which is needed to put our ideas into effect." Slaves are not in a position to liberate themselves: "Slavery teaches men to be slaves." They have to be incited to revolt, to be pushed to want always more, "to expropriate the bosses and put all goods in common." 57 Italian anarchists, followed by the Mexicans, were the first to put into practice this insurrectionary strategy. Malatesta upgraded the anarcho-syndicalist strategy of the general strike to include factory takeovers as well as w6rk stoppages. Describing the insurrectionary strike movement in Italy in 1920, he wrote, "Instead of abandoning

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the factories, the idea was to remain inside without working, and maintain a night and day guard [Red Guards] to ensure that the bosses could not operate the night shift. . . . Workers thought that the movement was ripe to take possession once for all of the means of production. They armed themselves for defense, they transformed many factories into veritable fortresses, and began to organize production on their own. Bosses were either thrown out or held in a state of arrest. . . . It was the beginning of a revolution."58 Such was the CGT's strategy in Tampico when Sandino was active among the oil workers, and also his strategy on returning to Nicaragua, when he inflamed his coworkers to take over the San Albino Mine. Some fifty years before the Mexican Revolution, the country's workingclass slums and factories became seedbeds of revolutionary ideas broadcast by anarchist ideologues and organizers. The first Bakuninist cell, founded in 1863, helped pave the way for this insurrectionary strategy. A clandestine society organized in 1865 and calling itself "La Social" became the forerunner of the organizing nucleus of anarchists in the Mexican Liberal Party and the House of the World Laborer. It was also the forerunner of the secret brotherhood "Luz," which operated within the House as a Bakuninist control group.59 Thus a strategy of mass insurrection began to take shape among the combative sectors of the Mexican working class long before Sandino arrived on the scene. It would haunt him throughout the rest of his life. What is a mass insurrection like? Flores Magon characterized it as an eruption of the blind impulses of the oppressed masses, as "the chaotic explosion of anger, unrestrained by the guard's revolver or the hangman's gallows." In doing so, he followed in Bakunin's footsteps under the direct influence of Florencio Bazora, a comrade of Malatesta he had met in Saint Louis in February 1905. m Through Librado Rivera, an associate of Flores Magon who moved to Villa Cecilia in 1924 to spread propaganda among the oil workers, Sandino, too, may have come under the influence of this insurrectional legacy.61 The origin of this strategy may be traced to Bakunin. Among the catalysts of a general insurrection, he drew attention to the so-called destructive passions bred by poverty and despair. But these alone do not suffice to provoke people to revolt. "That can take place only when the people are stirred by a universal ideal evolving historically from the depths of the folk-instinct . . . developed, broadened, and clarified by a series of significant events, and distressing and bitter experiences."62 People must have a general sense of what their rights are and a willingness to defend them, come what may. They must also be passionately moved by the misery and misfortunes of others. But these elementary catalysts are of no avail if, despite the workers' preponderance in numbers, they are "unarmed, ignorant, and deprived of any organization."63 Bakunin hoped to awaken the masses to a full awareness of their plight. Social impotence breeds ignorance, he wrote, while "ignorance is the cause

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of social impotence." How to break out of this vicious circle when, "first, the people are overwhelmed by hard work and even more by the distressing cares of daily life; and second, their political and economic position condemns them to ignorance?" They have two books to learn from: "the first is bitter experience of want, oppression, plunder, and torments dealt to them by the government and the ruling classes; the other book is living, oral tradition, passing from one generation to another and becoming ever broader in scope and ever more rational in content."64 Against the repressive forces of the state, Bakunin urged the organization of so-called people's power. "It is not enough that the people wake up, that they finally become aware of their misery and the causes thereof . . . [for] an elemental force lacking organization is not a real power." The fundamental question is "whether they are capable of building up an organization enabling them to bring the rebellion to a victorious end—not just to a casual victory but to a prolonged and ultimate triumph."65 As we have seen, Bakunin suggested the First International as a model. He anticipated that it would expand in numbers and cohesion, so that when the insurrection broke out there would be an international force "capable of taking the Revolution into its own hands and . . . replacing the departing political world of the state and the bourgeoisie."66 Once 10 percent or more of the European proletariat had joined its ranks and every branch of industry and the various forms of agricultural labor were represented in the International, Bakunin predicted, the stage would be set for abolishing both the civil and the military power of the state.67 Toward this objective but in the interests of Latin American workers, Sandino would later rely on the Communists' Red Trade Union International and its affiliate—the Latin American Confederation of Labor. Bakunin believed the International should prepare for an armed insurrection. The verdict of history is that "to render harmless any political force whatever, to pacify and subdue it, only one way is possible, and that is to proceed with its . . . complete destruction." For that purpose, a regular army must be crushed by a superior military capability. "It is clear that the people, longing for emancipation," he wrote, "cannot expect it from the theoretical triumph of abstract right; they must win liberty by force."68 Bakunin based his strategy of the people in arms on a worker-peasant alliance that would coordinate strikes by the industrial proletariat with land seizures by the peasants. Unlike his principal rivals for leadership of the workers, Auguste Blanqui and Karl Marx, Bakunin had confidence in the revolutionary potential of the peasants and believed that failure to win them to the side of the revolution spelled disaster.69 This can be done, he argued, only by speaking to them in their own language and making them cognizant of their interests. "They love the land? Let them take the land and throw out those landlords who live by the labor of others." They resent mortgage, tax,

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and rent payments? Then encourage them not to pay them. To the objection that this strategy must lead to violence, Bakunin retorted: "Yes . . . [but] why be so afraid of civil war?" "Civil war, so destructive to the power of states is, on the contrary, and because of this very fact, always favorable to the awakening of popular initiatives and to the intellectual, moral, and even the material interests of the populace."70 To these conditions of mass insurrection within the people's control, Bakunin added other conditions independent of their volition. They were, first of all, economic: "Universal public and private bankruptcy is the first condition for a socio-economic revolution."71 But unlike Marx, who relied mainly on an economic crisis to catalyze a revolution, Bakunin believed that a military catastrophe might produce the same result. Given a military invasion and the prospect of foreign-imposed despotism, revolutionaries should not sit idly by, but should launch a popular uprising through appeals to broadly shared patriotic and republican sentiments.72 As a consequence of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the empire collapsed. But the republican government that replaced it hesitated to arm the workers and peasants in a popular war of resistance. In response to the government's failure, Bakunin called for a mass uprising "determined to destroy everything and ready even to sacrifice lives and possessions rather than submit to slavery." Against the people in arms, "no army in the world, however powerful, however well organized and equipped with the most extraordinary weapons, will be able to conquer."73 Because the sentiment of patriotism and the striving for liberty play into the hands of revolutionaries, Bakunin construed the "Prussian invasion as a piece of good fortune for France and for the world revolution."74 Sandino shared similar thoughts concerning the U.S. occupation of his country. Because the marines helped to catalyze a war of national liberation, he considered their presence in Nicaragua a piece of luck. When the Liberal Party won the elections in November 1928 and the marines prepared to leave, Sandino lost the two principal pretexts for continuing his struggle: the defense of the Constitution and of Nicaragua's independence. Did that dissuade him from shifting from a war of national liberation to a revolutionary civil war? Not at all, although in doing so he lost the support of his chief representative abroad, Froylan Turcios, along with Gregorio Gilbert, a member of his general staff.75 That a secret revolutionary purpose underlay his struggle then became apparent. Bakunin's vision of the social explosion against the combined forces of Church, State, and Capital depended on a worldwide conflagration—as did Sandino's. As Bakunin wrote in 1866, "the world will inevitably split into two camps, that of the new life and of the old privileges, and . . . between these two opposing camps, created as in the time of the wars of religion not by national sympathies but by community of ideas and interests, a war of

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extermination is bound to erupt, with no quarter and no respite." Consequently, the social revolution "will not lay down the sword until it has destroyed all States and all the old religious, political and economic institutions both in Europe and throughout the civilized world."76 That is how Sandino depicted his struggle in Nicaragua—as the prelude to a Central American and then a world revolution.77

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4. The Conspiratorial Vanguard

T

he Latin American Confederation of Labor and the Defending Army of National Sovereignty were not the only vanguards Sandino relied on to carry his revolutionary project forward. Operating under the cover of his Defending Army was a conspiratorial vanguard known only to himself and to chosen members of his inner circle. This vanguard within the vanguard functioned as an invisible dictatorship over his Defending Army—an army publicly committed to defending the Constitution but secretly dedicated to making a communist revolution in Nicaragua. Sandino's objective was a revolutionary dictatorship, albeit designated by another name. Such was the legacy of Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), the dominant current within French communism and the principal rival of Proudhon's antiauthoritarian tendency. The roots of this legacy go back to Filippo Buonarroti and to Babeuf's "Conspiracy for Equality" in the wake of the French Revolution. Thanks to his Mexican connections, Sandino, too, became an heir of this conspiratorial tradition. In Mexico from 1923 to 1926, Sandino assimilated the rudiments of this Blanquist or vanguardist legacy. Returning to Mexico in 1929, he became even further steeped in it, owing to his association with the Mexican Communist Party and the Communist International. From his Mexican connections he learned that revolution and war depend on fraud in addition to force (in war, the two cardinal virtues). As Machiavelli noted, the would-be ruler who acts as a fox comes out best: "But one who has this capacity must understand how to keep it covered, and be a skillful pretender and dissembler."l Buonarroti was the first modern communist to take Machiavelli's lesson to heart.2 Blanqui, whose favorite prison reading was The Prince, was the second.3 Bakunin was the third. Bakunin believed that, although conspiracy was not a substitute for the spontaneous action and organization of the masses, no social revolution could be successful without it.4 Initially a disciple of Blanqui and only later of Proudhon, Bakunin transmitted Blanqui's conspiratorial leg-

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acy to Malatesta, who passed it on to Flores Magon. Sandino was their collective heir and another link in the chain. Sandino was a master of subterfuge. From the beginning of his struggle in Nicaragua, he called himself a liberal and espoused the constitutionalist cause. Later, in an effort to garner support from the political Left, he donned a populist and democratic mask. His biographers mistook these fronts for the political reality they concealed. Sandino worked hard at disseminating the image of himself as a liberator in the tradition of Simon Bolivar and, on a national scale, Benito Juarez. During 1927 and 1928, Froylan Turcios, in his journal Ariel, pounded away at this theme. Reiterated by Emigdio Maraboto in his 1929 biography, Sandino ante el coloso, the image of Sandino as liberator contributed to building international support for his army. In the role of liberator, Sandino appeared free of political ambitions and the base intrigues of party politics. Speaking for Nicaraguan intellectuals at the end of 1932, Salvador Calderon urged him to continue furnishing an object lesson of this kind: "Let the others—the Liberals and Conservatives—shoot dice for the robes of Jesus, that is to say, the presidency, or better said, the Yankee proconsulate . . . and lift your gaze to the continental consciousness that spontaneously bestows on you the title of Liberator."5 Behind the facade, Sandino was hardly the disinterested patriot—as General Moncada and later Somoza surmised. His teachers were political extremists who taught him to proceed with caution. From them he learned the art of disguising extremism as moderation: "If from the start we had called ourselves anarchists, only a few would have listened. . . . In order not to have everybody against us, we will continue with the same tactics that we have already used with such success; we will continue to call ourselves liberals during the course of the revolution, but in reality we will go on propagating anarchy and carrying out anarchist deeds." 6 As Sandino acknowledged in a letter to Aleman Bolaiios, political expediency guided the image he presented to the public in order "to reorient the disoriented, the mistaken, and the confused, and . . . not to lose touch with the patriots of limited vision." Again, "we have known how to keep uppermost that which is suited to the hour through which we are passing . . . we have a program that we believe appropriate for Nicaragua's social problems, one that will also allow the backward workers . . . to understand their position in the nationalist struggle." 7 For almost a decade, Flores Magon had carefully concealed his communis!" intentions behind the fagade of a liberal party, and Sandino would do the same on returning to Nicaragua. Like his Mexican counterpart, he followed Malatesta's counsel of not revealing his true colors. Revolutions, according to Malatesta, have to be made with people as they are, not as we might wish them to be. Thus, in the epigraph to one of his essays, Flores Magon cited

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Malatesta: "If in order to make a revolution we were to wait for it to begin with a precise anarchist or communist program, we would be waiting in vain. The masses will become anarchist or communist during the revolution, after it has begun, not before." 8 Malatesta championed an insurrectionary strategy that relied on the active mobilization of the working class, but in the conviction that the masses were not equipped to prepare and lead an insurrection. Established toward the end of 1873 as a shadow junta within the reorganized anarchist sections of the First International, Malatesta's Committee for the Social Revolution began operating clandestinely "to provoke a group of well-planned risings in carefully selected parts of Italy, which it was hoped might set going by chain reaction a whole series of regional insurrections in which the sections of the International would guide the mass uprisings toward a general social revolution." 9 Because the International Workingmen's Association had other tasks that excluded the secrecy needed for planning and directing a social revolution, this committee had to function independently of the larger organization. One of its tasks was the planning and "preparation of illegal activities."10 Despite his anarchist predilections, Flores Magon, too, had little faith in the masses. "The people are the eternal child," he wrote, "credulous, innocent, candid." That is why they were perpetually duped, and also why their painful efforts at emancipation led nowhere.11 What is surprising is that this was the authoritarian communist, not the typical anarchist, assessment of the jrevolutionary potential of the masses. Rather than the voice of Proudhon or v ' C~6ven Bakunin, it echoed Blanqui's excoriating indictment of the "stupidity J and ingratitude of the people." 12 V Sandino followed suit. As he confided to a trusted follower, the people everywhere were "asleep." 13 People had become so degraded by ignorance, he complained, "that neither Liberals nor Conservatives know what they are talking about."14 Thus, he did not believe that Nicaragua's workers and peasants could emancipate themselves. For that, they stood in need of a politicalmilitary organization, like the PLM or his Defending Army, a vanguard secretly committed to turning Nicaragua upside down. By 1906, the PLM had become reorganized as a political-military vanguard with forty-four clandestine guerrilla units operating in the five zones into which the country had been divided. A strong and trusted comrade with the title of delegate commanded in each zone, under a national commander-inchief who reported to the PLM's organizing junta in exile in the United States. "Beneath the zone delegado was the guerrilla unit commander (Jefe de guerrilla) and his assistant, the subjefe, the only two members of the local units who knew the identity of the zone delegado."15 The guerrilla units varied in size, some as large as three hundred, but averaging around fifty. Each unit elected the jefe and subjefe from among its own members, whereas the zone delegates and the national commander were appointed by the junta. Thus the

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PLM successfully combined representation from below with secrecy and centralized direction from above. - - The PLM's strategy included a mix of authoritarian and libertarian devices, a Blanquist conspiratorial brotherhood geared to armed insurrection and the anarchist reliance on industrial strikes and peasant land seizures. As Flores Magon assessed these disparate legacies, "a select minority of the working class of our country [is] the real nucleus of the great organism that will resolve the social question in the near future . . . by taking action at an opportune moment it will be able to carry along the great mass of workers toward the conquest of their political and social emancipation." In Mexico, popular mobilizations "had to end in armed conflict . . . [because of] land seizures and trade union organization." In sum, "What is necessary is an energetic minority, steeled and incapable of treason . . . which will move the masses to take possession of the land and the machinery of production, despite the doubts of the incredulous, the prophecies of the pessimists, and the alarm of the prudent, coldly calculating, and cowardly."16 Such was the sketch of the insurrectionary model that served as the prototype for Sandino's politicalmilitary vanguard in Nicaragua. In an autobiographical sketch dated 4 August 1932, Sandino recalled how, in response to the news of a Liberal expeditionary force from Mexico in May 1926, he hoped to participate in the Liberal revolution. "If there were only one hundred men who loved Nicaragua as much as I do," he said to his Mexican friends before returning home, "our nation would recover its full sovereignty menaced by the Yankee empire." His purpose on leaving Mexico was to ferret out those one hundred revolutionaries. "I wanted to find those one hundred men and, as fate would have it, I was led to assume my present role." 17 A hundred men are a hundred men, nothing more or less. But what seems innocent enough on the surface has more than numerical significance. It suggests an activating minority, a band of professional revolutionaries intended to catalyze the masses into taking the path of armed insurrection against domestic as well as foreign enemies. This strategy, as adapted by both Flores Magon and Sandino, was evidently influenced by Malatesta. But why the choice of one hundred instead of some other figure that might do as well? Virtually all of Malatesta's themes can be traced to Bakunin. Of the influences on Malatesta's anarchism, Bakunin took pride of place as "the great revolutionary, he who we all look upon as our spiritual father."18 It is a safe bet that, just as he was familiar with Proudhon's legacy, Sandino also had some knowledge of Bakunin's basic ideas. The specification of one hundred souls for his political-military vanguard is a case in point. One hundred was precisely Bakunin's figure for his conspiratorial vanguard within the First International: "For the victory of revolution over reaction it is necessary that there be an organ to provide unity for revolutionary thought and action.

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This organ should be . . . a sort of revolutionary general staff composed of dedicated, energetic, intelligent individuals, sincere friends of the people above all, neither vain nor ambitious, but capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the interests of the people. There need not be a great number of these men. One hundred revolutionaries, strongly and earnestly allied, would suffice!"19 As Max Nomad comments on this celebrated passage, "The International Brothers . . . were, so to speak, the 'Bakuninists of the first rank' in the terminology of the Blanquist societies of the same period. Bakunin believed that about one hundred International Brothers would suffice for organizing the world revolution."20 In 1864, Bakunin organized his secret International Revolutionary Association, better known as the International Brotherhood. Astonishing in a selfproclaimed anarchist was the structuring of his brotherhood from the top down instead of the bottom up. According to its 1866 statutes, it was divided into the International Family and the National Families, the International Brothers at the top and the National Brothers below them.21 The International Brothers were the militants, the National Brothers the apprentices of revolution. Organized into an international directorate, the International Brothers appointed the members of the national juntas, who acted as intermediaries and transmitted their directives to the rank and file.22 Bakunin's secret organization served as the model not only of Malatesta's clandestine Committee for the Social Revolution and the political-military structure of the PLM, but also of Sandino's general staff at the helm of his Defending Army. In 1869, in order to clear his followers of the accusation that they were plotting to take over the First International, Bakunin formally dissolved his "general staff of the revolution." But he simultaneously reorganized it as the Secret Alliance of Social Democracy, or simply the Secret Alliance.23 When the open society that served as its front applied for membership in the First International, the application was rejected.24 Consequently, it, too, was formally dissolved. Its national sections then applied separately for admission and were accepted. In reality, they continued functioning as secret Bakuninist cells. In Spain, "the Alliance essentially became a small underground organization within the larger, open arena provided by the Spanish sections of the [First] International." Nor was this second edition of the International Brotherhood inconsequential. Although a conspiratorial body boring from inside and outside the First International, within less than two years the sections in Spain alone numbered between twenty thousand and thirty thousand members.25 Such was the beginning of the international anarchist movement that finally surfaced in 1872, following the expulsion of Bakunin and his followers from the First International for conspiring against it. In response to this action at the Hague Congress of the International in September 1872, the anarchist delegates assembled two weeks later to create their own International Work-

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ingmen's Association. Dubbed the Anarchist International, it was responsible for organizing Spanish workers into anarchist trade unions and culminated in the founding of the National Confederation of Work in 1910—the model for Mexico's General Confederation of Workers. It is understandable that Spanish as well as French sources were decisive in shaping Mexican anarchism. Consequently, since Spanish anarchism owed its origin to the proselytizing activities mainly of Bakunin, Sandino's and Flores Magon's anarchisms testify to his influence.26 Bakunin provided the strategical guidelines for the conspiratorial vanguards of professional or full-time revolutionaries, who had tried to turn Spain and then Mexico upside down. Nonetheless, one should not discount Blanqui's legacy. The specter of communism haunting Europe in 1848, to which Marx and Engels alluded in their prologue to the Communist Manifesto, consisted of the secret revolutionary societies inspired and, in most instances, directed by Blanqui. Indeed, the manifesto had been commissioned by the League of the Just prior to changing its name to the Communist League. The league was a secret society of predominantly German, Swiss, and English workers and was initially patterned on Blanqui's clandestine Society of the Seasons. There is no doubt that Bakunin came under Blanqui's influence. Passages from his 1851 "Confessions to Tsar Nicholas I," composed under duress in the hope of reducing a prison sentence that kept him out of circulation for more than a decade, demonstrate this kinship.27 "The secret society directing the revolution was to consist of three groups, independent of and unknown to each other: one for the townspeople, another for the youth, and a third for the peasants. . . . Each was to be organized on strict hierarchical lines, and under absolute discipline. These three societies were to be directed by a secret central committee composed of three or, at the most, five persons. In case the revolution was successful, the secret societies were not to be liquidated; on the contrary, they were to be strengthened and expanded."28 Despite his subsequent rejection of Blanqui's model of a visible dictatorship and revolutionary state, he remained to the end attached to Blanqui's conspiratorial schemes.29 While disagreeing with Blanqui concerning the feasibility of a political insurrection aimed at seizing power and using it for revolutionary purposes, Bakunin had no qualms about establishing an invisible dictatorship on the margins of the state. As he wrote to his friend Albert Richard (7 February 1870), "I see the only salvation in a revolutionary anarchy directed by a secret collective force . . . the only dictatorship that I accept, because it is the only one compatible with the spontaneity and the energy of the revolutionary movement." To this he added, "We must direct the people as invisible pilots, not by means of any visible power, but rather through a dictatorship . . . without ostentation, without titles, without official right, which in not having any appearance of power will therefore be more powerful."30 This Machiavellian

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counsel in favor of an invisible vanguard, which would not be exposed and devoured by the reaction that a visible vanguard might provoke, would later rub off on Sandino. A comparison of Bakunin's and Blanqui's thought indicates that on matters of strategy the similarities overshadowed the differences. "The one like the other relied on conspiracy . . . persuaded that the road to their respective goals could be blasted open by a band of determined revolutionaries."31 Blanqui talked about establishing communism through a revolutionary dictatorship and Bakunin, through the abolition of the state. But these differences turn out on inspection to have been only skin deep. Blanqui's ultimate goal was the administration of things rather than people—a stateless society such as the anarchists envisioned. "And the rules Bakunin drafted for his International Brotherhood . . . gave total power to a central directorate for the duration of the revolutionary period, so that his modus operandi would be every bit as dictatorial as Blanqui's.32 Blanqui's first conspiratorial vanguard, founded in 1834 and known as the Society of the Families, was organized along hierarchical and authoritarian lines and required blind submission to orders. The principal difference between his Families and Bakunin's was that Blanqui's chain of command resembled that of an army. "The chiefs of several Families were subject to the authority of a 'chief of section'; a number of these, in turn, had above them a 'district commander'; the officer in charge of several district commanders was called a 'revolutionary agent' . . . [and] the three main agents constituted the supreme authority of the organization." Unlike Bakunin's families, secrecy became an imperative on all levels, even at the bottom, which consisted of tiny cells of from five to twelve members, each with a chief who alone knew the names of his associates.33 When the Society of the Families was broken up by the authorities in 1836, Blanqui reorganized it as the Society of the Seasons. Patterned on the principal subdivisions of the year, its basic unit was a "Week" of six members under the command of a "Sunday."34 Four weeks made up a "Month," commanded by a "July." Three months constituted a "Season," commanded by a "Spring." Four seasons composed a "Year," headed by a "Revolutionary Agent." There were three Years, hence three revolutionary chiefs, as in the original Society of the Families. Because Blanqui relied on an armed vanguard backed up by a mass uprising rather than on a mass uprising catalyzed by a revolutionary vanguard, his secret organization had to be structured differently from Bakunin's. But Sandino also relied on a military structure to achieve his ends. Thus, it is not surprising that his Defending Army combined features of both Blanqui's and Bakunin's conspiratorial vanguards. Are there any other clues to Sandino's Blanquism? Like Blanqui, he proposed to establish a revolutionary dictatorship. Toward this end he aspired not

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only to economic and political power, but also to ideological control over Nicaragua. As he wrote to Col. Abraham Rivera (22 February 1931), "It is possible that we shall have the opportunity to get military, civil, and religious [sic] control of our republic. In that happy event for our people we shall make an analysis of everything that interferes with human progress, which will be swept away with the brooms of our bayonets."35 In effect, Sandino's proposed dictatorship would be not only liberating, but also authoritarian. Nor did Sandino shrink from revolutionary terror in a mini version of the Jacobin Terror of 1793-1794. That he had no compunction about using terror is evident from a circular of 10 April 1931, in which he calls on his followers "to complete the job of terrorizing the terrorists."36 Liberty would be conquered with bullets instead of flowers, and by inspiring fear among local capitalists and whoever collaborated with the American occupation. Once in power, he planned to abolish all political parties. On the heels of the marines' departure, he reported that "our government is still not autonomous" and could not be expected to become politically and economically independent "as long as our governments belong to given political parties." 37 Thus, he was reported as saying, in a series of conversations at his father's house in November 1933, "We will not tolerate those political bandits. We are going to abolish the Liberal and Conservative parties." 38 What would take their place? In line with his intention of organizing workers and peasants to build a new Nicaragua and of establishing a "House of Labor on the Mexican model," he would eventually have dissolved his revolutionary dictatorship by handing over power to workers' and peasants' organizations.39 Meanwhile, Sandino did not rely on workers and peasants to defend their own interests. As he complained to a trusted associate, one cannot reasonably invest with political power those who have become degraded, when "the only thing that exists in our people is a great deal of ignorance."40 Sandino had doubts even about those who, having supported his cause when the invaders were physically present, began to cool off as soon as the marines departed. Their loss of interest, he explained, occurred because "the people don't see— and what is worse don't believe in—the political and economic intervention they suffer, and this situation puts us in very difficult circumstances."41 Although he relied on workers and peasants as the only popular forces capable of making a revolution, far too many of them were timid, hence his references to the people as a "colt" suffering from "greenness"—a herd that must be led.42 Belausteguigoitia compared Sandino's Defending Army to Cromwell's New Model Army. He attributed the former's success less to military discipline than to the extraordinary comradeship that bound Sandino's soldiers into a revolutionary association akin to a "religious sect." The "absence of distinctions in the distribution of food and clothing, in which all shared equally regardless of rank," compensated for the inequalities associated with rank.43

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Sandino became their teacher and, by example, taught them the superior force of comradeship in strengthening morale.44 He taught them not only to address one another as "Brother," but also to consider themselves members of the same revolutionary family.45 In these several respects, Sandino paid tribute not to Blanqui's legacy but to Bakunin's. Sandino's army had an international as well as a national contingent, corresponding roughly to Bakunin's International and National "families." The national brothers were the apprentices of revolution and owed unqualified obedience to Sandino, who inspired in them "a kind of blind fanaticism."46 The international brothers belonged to his general staff and were expected to carry the social revolution in Nicaragua to their respective countries. Among them were Gregorio Gilbert of the Dominican Republic, Salvadoran Agustin Farabundo Marti, Peruvian Esteban Pavletich, and Mexican Jose de Paredes. The last three in particular played a key role in Sandino's strategy of alliances with organizations based in Mexico.47 But was Sandino's general staff Bakunin's "invisible dictatorship," or was there a Blanquist Central Committee situated above his International Family? Sandino kept his innermost plans concealed even from his general staff; hence, there is reason to believe that he stood at the apex of a revolutionary pyramid distinct from Blanqui's Society of the Seasons in that it had only one revolutionary agent. As the moving spirit behind his Defending Army, Sandino enjoyed undisputed authority. Elected to the position of general by the initial band of twenty-nine miners he had persuaded to join the constitutionalist cause, he never came up for reelection as their commander in chief. Nor were his officers elected or their ranks determined by consultation with his soldiers. Sandino picked and promoted them as he saw fit. In an otherwise sympathetic portrait by an officer who served under Sandino in 1927, Humberto Torres described his chief as a virtual autocrat. By currying favor with ordinary recruits, Sandino effectively blocked the ambitions of his officers. Sandino "explains his plans in great detail to his lowest subordinates but often keeps his officers in doubt . . . , believing that his wisdom is infallible . . . he will not tolerate for long a subordinate of outstanding ability."48 Farabundo Marti was dismissed early in 1930 for, as Sandino put it, trying to impose the line of the Communist International on his Defending Army.49 About the same time, he also expelled another member of his general staff, Esteban Pavletich, for subordinating the objective of Latin American unification to Marti's and the Comintern's goal of establishing soviet republics.50 And from Gregorio Gilbert we learn that Sandino's general staff functioned not so much as an advisory council or sounding board for the general's plans as a rubber stamp.51 Gilbert had been led, for example, to believe that the purpose of the De-

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fending Army, as presented in its statutes, was to repel the invader. Imagine his chagrin when he learned that it had an ulterior purpose, that Sandino intended to use it to unite by force, if necessary, "all the countries of Latin America with the goal of creating a single, strong, and respected nation with a single flag." Gilbert assailed this secret project as a violation of the sovereign rights of the Latin American states hardly less criminal than the intervention of the marines in Nicaragua.52 Let those make a revolution who want to, he argued, but do not impose a revolution by force. Through Bakunin, Sandino became the heir not only of Blanqui's legacy, but also of the legacy bequeathed to Blanqui by his revolutionary precursors. Blanqui did not generate his conspiratorial strategy in an intellectual vacuum. His principal mentor, the gray eminence responsible for his and Bakunin's invisible vanguards, was the naturalized French citizen (thanks to the Great Revolution), the Italian-born Filippo Michele Buonarroti. After meeting the aging conspirator, Blanqui, as well as "most of the other radicals of the late twenties, had fallen under the spell of the remarkable old man." Through Buonarroti, Blanqui became informed of Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality. He also read Buonarroti's major work on revolutionary theory, the first manual of revolutionary communism in Western Europe.53 Buonarroti, even more than Blanqui or Bakunin, has a claim to being "the first professional revolutionary." The conspiracies that directly followed Babeuf's conspiracy in the wake of the French Revolution were brewed by Buonarroti and his immediate disciples in Italy and France during the 1820s and 1830s. More than anyone else, Buonarroti spun the "thread of revolutionary practice and theory which reaches as far as the twentieth century and may even go back to the Illuminati."54 Indeed, the latest research indicates that the Conspiracy for Equality incorporated revolutionary strategies that were Buonarroti's and that he influenced Babeuf, not conversely, as had been supposed.55 It was during their time together in prison, from March to October 1795, that they and their close associates conspired to overthrow the moderate government that had replaced Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety in 1794. But it was Buonarroti who brought to their association a knowledge of conspiratorial techniques derived from the Illuminati. Rather than relying on a popular uprising, Buonarroti staked his hopes on "a revolutionary elite, acting, as required, against the wishes of the people until the people should be enlightened enough to understand its own best interests." Publicly committed to one policy, Buonarroti's co-conspirators would pursue another one "behind a fagade of openly avowed intention." Such was the strategy that "runs from its sketchy adumbration in the doctrines of the Illuminati down to the teaching and leadership of Lenin." 56 Its first significant expression in action was Babeuf's conspiracy in March 1796, followed by Blanqui's abortive uprisings in May 1839, February, April, and May 1848, and August and October 1870.57 These are not the only reasons for giving prominence to Buonarroti's legacy

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rather than Babeuf s. Dating the origins of modern communism from Babeuf leaves a tremendous gap in the revolutionary heritage occupied by, among others, Adam Weishaupt who founded the Illuminati in 1776. Unlike Babeuf, Buonarroti preserved the structure of the secret societies originally sketched by Weishaupt. Revolutionaries were "divided into different grades of which alone the highest grade, composed of a small number, controls and directs the other grades, who do not know the men at the summit, neither the place of its residence."58 Thus, in the event some of the basic cells were discovered and liquidated, the supreme leadership might still survive and continue to reproduce new ones. In 1809, Buonarroti organized the first international revolutionary society modeled on the Illuminati's Sublime Perfect Masters. "Its hierarchy, its methods of initiation, its employment of the catechism, all were almost identical with the structure of the Illuminati. Even the name of Buonarroti's organization evoked Weishaupt's original name for his order—the Perfectibilists."59 So did the name of its highest grade or innermost circle, the Areopagus, the "Areopagites" having been the chosen few among the Illuminati who alone knew the real purpose of the order and the identity of its founder. By this time, Buonarroti had abandoned his earlier strategy of a revolutionary putsch, favored by leftist Jacobins in 1796 and by Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality, for the strategy of building a countersociety that would undermine the old order from within by gnawing at its entrails. In line with Weishaupt's original strategy, only Freemasons were admitted. There were also other parallels with the Illuminati. "The three grades of Perfect Sublime Master, Sublime Elect and Areopagite were modelled on the Illuminati grades, and, as in the earlier organization, the lower grades did not know the full secrets of the society. The Elect were aware that they were to work for a republican form of government; [but] only the Areopagites knew that the final aim of the society was social egalitarianism, and the means to it the abolition of private property. "*° The Sublime Perfect Masters had an essentially Masonic structure and followed the rituals and symbols of Freemasonry. Each of the three hierarchic grades required a separate profession of faith. The lowest degree, the first credo, contained a profession of liberalism based on the Masonic belief that all men are brothers, children of one common father, and therefore bound to mutual love. The second credo, corresponding to the second degree, went beyond liberalism in its profession of democracy, for the sake of which "no means are criminal which are employed to obtain this sacred end." The third credo, that of the Areopagus, made the final step to communism: "Let us break down the masks of private property. . . . Let the Republic be the sole Proprietor: like a mother it will afford to each of its members equal education, food and labor."61 This was the secret and controlling program of the society, the Ariadne

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thread for understanding Buonarroti's Illuminati-type communism. It affords the evidence or "proof that Buonarroti's Communist Creed of 1796 never ceased to be an essential part of his activities during the Restoration." It also provides a clue to the origin and structure of Blanqui's secret societies. Thus, the Areopagites had a directing body called the Grand Firmament, also known as the "disciples of Babeuf," consisting of Buonarroti and one or two of his close friends—the model for Blanqui's revolutionary agents.62 Buonarroti relied on his Sublime Perfect Masters to supervise and direct secret revolutionary societies throughout Europe.63 Through the Grand Firmament he created the first instrument of international social revolution; it coordinated local revolutionary movements in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.64 Thus, through Buonarroti's efforts, the revolutionary legacy of the Illuminati was preserved and handed down to his principal successors, Blanqui and Bakunin.65 This was the legacy of the invisible vanguard that Bakunin transmitted to his Spanish and Mexican heirs. It was a complex scheme that, wedded to Bakunin's strategy of the people in arms, anticipated the Bolshevik strategy in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. As one commentator observes, "The father of Bolshevism professed to be the most orthodox among the orthodox Marxists— yet in his practical activities as a revolutionist, he followed the methods of Marx's bete noire, the Anarchist Bakunin, and he greatly admired such unscrupulous ultra-rebels as the Blanquist Tkachev and the Anarcho-Blanquist Nechayev."66 Such was the revolutionary heritage that Sandino shared with Lenin and kept alive in Nicaragua.

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andino was a fellow traveler and for two years a formal ally of the Third, or Communist, International. In May 1928, the Venezuelan Communist Gustavo Machado appeared in Sandino's camp with a "Confidential Memorandum" from the Mexico-based Hands Off Nicaragua Committee, affiliated with the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas—both Comintern fronts. The memorandum recommended "the anti-imperialist unification of the entire continent on the basis of a message directed by General Sandino to all patriots, anti-imperialists, workers and peasants, students and intellectuals, small merchants and industrialists . . . so that, passing over their particular differences, they might become unified in a single army with the same program and the same strategy." Sandino agreed to these terms, but was unaware that the memorandum was the work of a Comintern agent.1 Originally adopted at the Comintern's Third Congress in June 1921 and reaffirmed at its Fifth Congress in July 1924, the strategy of a united front had already become a permanent feature of Sandino's struggle in Nicaragua. But this strategy was momentarily shelved at the Sixth Congress in JulyAugust 1928. In response to its abandonment, Sandino broke with the Mexican section of the Comintern in April 1930, as did other dissidents, who returned to the fold only after a popular front strategy was approved at the Comintern's Seventh Congress in 1935. Thus Sandino's much-publicized differences with the Mexican Communists appear to have been little more than a family quarrel. The Hands Off Nicaragua Committee had collected one thousand dollars to sustain Sandino's army. Unknowingly, Sandino had accepted money from a Communist front and invited a Communist to become his army's representative in Mexico. Machado accepted the honor and received the appropriate credentials.2 He also received detailed instructions to keep the general informed of the committee's negotiations with the Mexican government for providing aid for Sandino's struggle against the marines. In the summer of 1928, and with Machado's assistance, a Sandinista dele-

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gation drawn from the general's supporters in Mexico had their passages paid—presumably with Comintern money—to the First International AntiImperialist Congress in Frankfurt.3 But July, August, and September passed without a word from Sandino's representative in Mexico. Not until December did Sandino receive a note, dated several months earlier, with news of the committee's activities.4 In response, Sandino wrote Machado on 19 December 1928, explaining the strategy underlying his proposed provisional government for Nicaragua and his choice of Dr. Pedro Zepeda as president. A Nicaraguan physician living in Mexico City, Dr. Zepeda presided over a pro-Sandino committee that had provided assistance to Sandino's army. Machado, negligent in his duties, had accused Zepeda of a similar failure. But as Sandino replied, negligence and indifference were not enough to make him abandon Zepeda, because he had no choice but to rely on all the support he could get.5 Sandino then outlined his strategy of a united front—the Comintern's strategy prior to the Sixth Congress. We must be careful that the enemies of Nicaragua's freedom do not make us appear as radicals, he warned, since that could undermine the common front of different social classes against imperialism. "The advantages of having Dr. Zepeda represent us . . . [are that] we will attract to our ranks many deceived by the traitor Moncada, because by our position we have succeeded in reorienting the Liberal Party's nationalist struggle. As you know, liberalism includes in its midst different social strata and, if at this time we differentiate among them, we will only defeat our purpose. . . . We must provide the opportunity for liberals to unite on the premise that Moncada is a traitor to the Liberal Party." 6 Shortly afterward, Sandino received notice of the resignation of his continental representative, the Honduran writer Froylan Turcios. In search of a replacement, he sent the Hands Off Nicaragua Committee a letter dated 18 January 1929, asking it to represent his interests in the Americas and before the rest of the world.7 Should the committee accept this honor, he promised to relieve Machado of his assigned duties and allow the committee collectively to represent his army's interests. The committee did not respond. The only news that reached Sandino was a scolding in El Libertario (June 1929), the organ of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas. The article questioned the choice of Zepeda as the head of Sandino's proposed provisional government and also the bases of his anti-imperialist program. As Sandino complained in a 2 January 1930 letter to the Mexican Communist Party's general secretary, Hernan Laborde, the committee should have agreed to represent his army, despite mistakes he may have committed, since that would have helped to correct them.8 Instead, the committee let February, March, April, and May pass without so much as acknowledging his letter, followed by the insulting article in June. To the last letter from Machado, dated 5 December 1928, Sandino re-

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sponded with an acknowledgment of his letter to the committee and an explanation of his motives for transferring responsibility to it. Machado never replied. Imagine Sandino's surprise when, on arriving in Veracruz in June 1929, he learned that Machado had returned to Venezuela without even naming a substitute.9 Still hoping for a response, Sandino waited until October before designating Zepeda as Machado's replacement. Thus, from May 1928 to October 1929, Sandino had no one to represent his interests in the Americas, thanks to the irresponsible conduct of Machado and the Mexican Communist Party. Sandino concluded his letter to Laborde not by breaking off relations with the Mexican Communists, but by continuing to recognize their vanguard role in the world anti-imperialist struggle. He expressed gratitude at "having received from the Mexican Communist Party the most support in our antiimperialist struggle in Nicaragua."10 By continuing to defend the united front strategy sketched in Machado's "Confidential Memorandum," Sandino sought to impress Laborde with his loyalty to the Comintern. But by then the Comintern had charted a different strategy. At its Sixth Congress it shifted from its former defensive strategy to an offensive one. In the semicolonies, it urged the direct transition to a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry on the basis of Soviets and a revolutionary workers' and peasants' army. This new strategy would explain Machado's negligence and the committee's refusal to represent Sandino's army before the Americas and the world. Sandino had the requisite army, but demurred in setting up a government without Liberal support. Hoping to retain his links to the Liberal Party's left wing, he picked Dr. Zepeda as the anticipated head of his provisional government. His choice was obviously at odds with the Comintern's new strategy. With the politically respectable and cautious Zepeda as its head, Sandino's provisional government could not possibly have passed for a democratic dictatorship of Nicaragua's workers and peasants. In the months following the Sixth Congress, the Comintern provided a theoretical foundation for its new strategy by interpreting the political history of the postwar era as falling into three periods. The first, characterized by revolutionary upheavals, had lasted until 1923; the second, that of capitalist stabilization, had supposedly ended in 1928; and the third, diagnosed as the end of stabilization, foresaw the coming collapse of capitalism and imperialism. In this scenario, the contradictions of capitalism were coming to a head while parliamentary governments and democratic liberties were being eroded by the rise of fascism. Several months before the stock market crash of October 1929, the Comintern predicted a rash of strikes in the advanced countries and a leftward swing in the semicolonies preliminary to armed insurrections. Thus, the Comintern believed that a revolutionary situation was imminent.

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No longer would the Comintern support movements of national liberation in semicolonial countries that were not controlled by Communist parties. In June 1929, at the Congress of Latin American Communist Parties held in Buenos Aires, the delegates abandoned their strategy of a front with small merchants and industrialists on the grounds that these were linked to imperialist interests and could no longer be trusted to support radical social measures. The new strategy favored by the Congress would receive its most memorable application in El Salvador with the creation of workers' and peasants' Soviets, but with disastrous results for the workers' movement in that country. Sandino did his best to carry out the Comintern's directives. He kept abreast of its new strategy and ways of implementing it through Salvadoran Agustm Farabundo Marti, his personal secretary and the Comintern's representative on his general staff. His decision to continue the civil war and to establish a provisional government in the areas under his control followed the Comintern's new line, as did his acknowledgment of the changed conditions of struggle and his allusion to the "Third Period" at the end of his letter to Laborde. Although his original strategy aimed at enlisting all classes in the struggle against imperialism, experience had shown that "most of the social classes that make up our America—with the exception of the working class— have withdrawn from the struggle and denied us even the right to defend ourselves."11 The presence of Marti on his general staff contributed to Sandino's kinship with the Comintern, as did the presence of the Peruvian Pavletich, who came to share Marti's ideology. In July 1929, under the influence of fellow Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariategui, Pavletich joined the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Peru (PSRP)—the precursor of the Communist Party in that country.12 Thanks to Pavletich, Sandino corresponded with Mariategui and also received and read Mariategui's journal Amauta, which published Sandino's letters and alerted its readers to the significance of the events in Central America. While Marti kept Sandino abreast of changes in the Comintern's political line, Pavletich added fuel to Sandino's earlier conviction that a social revolution had to go beyond the Mexicanization of Nicaragua. In a two-part essay published in Amauta, Pavletich explained why Mexico's revolution was not a model worthy of communists. The Mexican upheaval was antifeudal and demoliberal, but it stopped short of socialism. Although the English and French revolutions had their token communists in Gerard Winstanley and Gracchus Babeuf, and the Mexican Revolution had one in Emiliano Zapata, in each case, communists represented only a side current.13 Thus the net result of efforts to dignify the Mexican Revolution as socialist was to undermine support for the only authentic socialist revolution under way—the Russian Revolution represented by the Comintern. A month later, Sandino issued his "Manifesto to the City and Country

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Workers of Nicaragua and of All Latin America" (26 February 1930), testifying to his adherence to the Comintern. Noting that Latin American workers suffered from double exploitation, that of national capitalism as well as foreign, he added, "In this criminal endeavor, imperialism relies not only on the open support of Latin American dictatorships, but also on even more opprobrious agents [among] the organizations and 'leaders,' that is, trade union bosses, bought with crumbs drenched with the blood of colonial peoples." In the same context, he lashed out at multiclass patriotic fronts led by "nationalist charlatans of the Left, who with demagogical gestures and phraseology retard the crystallization of a real anti-imperialist movement based on the exploited workers and peasants."14 This suggested a move away from his earlier united front strategy and an endorsement of the Comintern's leftward shift at its Sixth Congress. Prudence, however, dictated that Sandino look not only to the Comintern for aid, but also to the nationalist wing of Nicaragua's Liberal Party and to Mexico's nationalist and nominally revolutionary government. Thus, behind the scenes he continued to apply his earlier strategy in conjunction with the new one. As he wrote to Aleman Bolanos on 9 September 1929, "Neither extreme right nor extreme left but rather United Front is our motto. That being the case, it would not be unreasonable if in our struggle we were able to achieve the cooperation of all social classes." 15 But that no longer sufficed to endear him to the Comintern. The Mexican Communists not only questioned Sandino's intentions, but also became increasingly incensed over his negotiations with the Mexican government. In 1929, the Mexican Communist Party suffered the mostintense persecution since its founding a decade earlier. In May a Communist peasant leader and fifteen members of his general staff were assassinated after having defended the government against a right-wing military rebellion, and in August the police assaulted the offices of the party's Central Committee, destroyed its printing press, and outlawed its confederation of trade unions. It was against this background that the party switched from its earlier strategy of supporting the government to a position of steadfast opposition. In the middle of these developments, Sandino chose to visit Mexico at the government's express invitation. Jose de Paredes, a Mexican volunteer in his army, arranged with Mexican authorities for the government to cover the cost of passage and the expenses of staying in the country. Sandino was lured by a promised interview with Pres. Emilio Portes Gil, a former Socialist, in the hope of securing arms. The party rightly suspected that Sandino had been either tricked or bought and eventually accused him of both. But as one sympathetic commentator notes, Sandino had no way of knowing that the Mexican government had laid a trap.16 When Sandino arrived in Mexico, the president informed the U.S. ambas-

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sador of Sandino's intentions and asked for a response from the State Department. "The Secretary of State Frank Kellogg leaped at the opportunity being offered: he urged Portes Gil to play along with Sandino, enticing him into Mexico, but then confining him in some isolated corner of the country where he could be kept under surveillance" and out of the public eye.17 Thus, Sandino was hosted at government expense at a cheap hotel in Merida in remote Yucatan. Although he finally got to meet the president, he received for his troubles only token support. So the Comintern had reason for distrusting Sandino. While the government was executing Communists and cracking down on the party's organizations, Sandino planned to interview the president. During his stay in Mexico, Sandino and his staff received a government subsidy of two thousand pesos a month.18 The same month that he met with the president, the government broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Understandably, the party began pressuring Sandino to break off negotiations with a government that had betrayed the workers' and peasants' interests and stopped the Mexican Revolution in its tracks. In November 1933, Sandino recalled his differences with Marti and the Comintern's ultra-leftist strategy at that time. "Farabundo Marti insisted on transforming my struggle into a struggle for socialism. . . . I explained to him that for the moment we weren't capable of it and that my struggle should continue being nationalist and anti-imperialist. I explained to him that we should first defend and liberate the Nicaraguan people from the imperialist claw, by expelling the dogs [marines] and the Yankee companies from our soil; and that the next step was to organize the workers." 19 With the departure of the marines in January 1933 and the end of the civil war, Sandino began to take this new step—but not before. Sandino's differences with Marti were not simply a question of tempo, since he took for his model a communist legacy that diverged from that of the Comintern. His communism rested on cooperatives, not on bureaucratically managed state enterprises. Like Marti, Sandino planned to remodel the country's political structure and to put an end to bourgeois democracy.20 But his proposed revolutionary dictatorship would be independent of the Comintern and Russian interests. Despite his singular respect for the Comintern as a vanguard of world revolution, Sandino berated the conduct of its Mexican section. As he wrote to Zepeda after returning to Nicaragua (15 August 1930), "It is not true that Laborde, with the small camarilla surrounding him, are communists. They seem to share with the common enemy of our peoples the same guidelines that impede the development of all patriotic work in support of our IndoHispanic America." How else explain their calumnies against Sandino as a traitor to a party to which he never belonged?21

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They also accused him of reneging on a planned propaganda tour of Europe at the invitation of the World Anti-Imperialist League. "The invitation was made in writing, and so was its acceptance [on 4 February 1930] . . . in the cause of the world proletariat." Funds for Sandino's tour were promised within a week, but "a month passed, and a second month, and the funds never arrived." Who, then, reneged on their promises, Sandino or representatives of the League? "We believe the League's failure to keep its promise resulted from lack of funds and not from ill will against us, and that its error was not to have informed us in time," wrote Sandino. "Nonetheless, we did not blame it for anything and always appreciated it for what it was worth." But neither the League nor Laborde showed the same respect for Sandino. Who, then, was a traitor to communism, Sandino or the "false apostles who want to follow Laborde's line?" 22 Marti, Pavletich, and Constantino Gonzalez, Sandino's representative to the League, told a different story. As Ernesto Carrera informed Sandino in a letter from San Salvador (18 June 1930), "You are accused of treason, because in your name Dr. Zepeda, with ample and special instructions, so he claims, has denied your connections with communism and the AntiImperialist League." Suspecting Zepeda of double-dealing, Carrera and his friends urged Sandino to clarify his actions: "Do you unquestionably approve the attitude of Dr. Zepeda and his declarations, or do you adhere to your agreements formalized with the League and with communism?"23 On the same day and from the same city, Gonzalez sent a letter to Sandino. Zepeda's repeated attacks on the Mexican Communist Party, allegedly following Sandino's instructions, wrote Gonzalez, had led to a rupture between Zepeda and Sandino's other representatives in Mexico. Should Sandino approve even in part what had been done in the general's name and retain Zepeda as a representative, Gonzalez warned, then he and his friends would break with Sandino. "The issue is clear: either with Zepeda and against your ideals and your old friends, or against Zepeda and with all those who have accompanied you and will sincerely accompany you for the ideal. . . . I am confident that the anti-imperialist organizations will support you again if you make a clear statement. Even the Communist Party, as exaggerated and dogmatic as it is, will recognize your sincerity and the rectitude of your intentions."24 Where, in fact, did Sandino stand? It seems that he excoriated not only the Mexican Communists in his communications with Zepeda, but also Zepeda in discussions with his former friends. In a letter to Zepeda dated 28 June 1930, Gonzalez explained that Sandino had not disclosed the agreements with the Communist Party, because "he knew only too well that you have no revolutionary ideas and are frightened at the shadow of modern ideas that agitate the entire world." Gonzalez, too, was kept in the dark, until he learned directly from Sandino at a joint meeting of the Hands Off Nicaragua Committee

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and the Communist Party about the agreements signed with Sandino's own hand and formalized with the seal of his army.25 Sandino entered into negotiations with the Comintern without alerting his representative, which would explain why Zepeda believed he was acting in good faith in disavowing Sandino's connections with the Mexican Communists. From what we know of Sandino's strategy, he relied on any allies he could find while presenting a different face to each. Even so, that hardly supports the contention of Sandino's enemies that, "for reasons of convenience, he authorized Zepeda to deny . . . his relations with communism."26 The onset of dogmatism in the Communist International had begun at its Sixth Congress; it continued with Nikolai Bukharin's removal as its general secretary in 1929. Until then, there had been competing tendencies, a rightwing current led by Bukharin, a left-wing by Trotsky, and the center dominated by Stalin. By 1929, Stalin's domination of the Russian Communist Party was virtually complete. Thereafter, the opportunities for standing up to the Comintern and pursuing an independent line as a junior partner or ally all but vanished. At that point, Sandino became marginalized by the Comintern, as did Mariategui in Peru. Why did the Comintern have such an appeal to Sandino? Because of its Leninist origins, it harbored a communist component that, like the Russian Revolution, fulfilled the deepest longings of rebels everywhere. The respect was mutual. The Comintern had more regard for anarchists than for the democratic socialists who dominated the Second International because the anarchists had done more to oppose World War I than had the established socialist parties. As early as 1917, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to abandon their alliance with the Second International and the traitors to communism for a new revolutionary alliance with the best of the anarchists.27 Meanwhile, Lenin's "Russified" model of the Paris Commune—the Soviets of workers and peasants getting no special compensation for their work and administering their affairs independently of the central power—appealed to anarchists because of its communist as well as libertarian features.28 In view of this confluence of interests, it is not surprising that, after Lenin's rupture with mainstream social democracy, the Bolsheviks assiduously wooed the firebrands within the European and international labor movements. At the founding congress of the Comintern in March 1919, a new revolutionary alliance was forged with representatives of most of the anarcho-syndicalist organizations of Europe and the Americas. In Spain, the National Confederation of Work, the largest and most-influential anarcho-syndicalist organization in the world, adhered to the Comintern during the first two years, as did the Industrial Workers of the World, headquartered in the United States. Founded in February 1921, Mexico's General Confederation of Workers also joined the Comintern, until it, too, withdrew at the end of the year.

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The new alliance between authoritarian and libertarian communists lasted barely three years.29 The anarchists broke with the Comintern over two related issues: first, the famous "twenty-one points," the conditions for continued membership that deprived its national sections of their autonomy; second, the violent crushing of the anarchist-inspired naval mutiny at Kronstadt in March 1921 and the resulting harassment and imprisonment of anarchists in the Soviet Union. Thus, the mass influx of anarchists into the Comintern was followed by a mass exodus and the founding of a rival communist international in December 1922, which took the old name of International Workingmen's Association. Even so, a significant rump of libertarian communists disassociated themselves from their former comrades and chose to remain in the Comintern. Although many shifted their allegiance to the Bolsheviks, others stayed for strategical reasons and out of loyalty to the Russian Revolution and the belief that it would eventually take a libertarian course. As I have noted, there were still competing tendencies and room for maneuver within the International as late as 1929. Then in mid-1929, Stalin launched a program—tantamount to a second revolution—aimed at the forcible collectivization of agriculture. This left turn on the part of the Soviet leadership rekindled hopes for a communist outcome and explains why Sandino, and others like him, continued to be attracted to the Comintern as a vanguard of world revolution. Initially, Sandino believed the Comintern deserved the support of all communists, libertarian as well as authoritarian. If he did not join its international fellowship, it was because he insisted on preserving his independence. Like Mariategui, he believed he was a better judge of his native social reality than were the absentee revolutionaries in far-away Moscow. The Comintern's Executive Committee knew even less about the special conditions of struggle in Nicaragua than did Farabundo Marti, who had to be expelled from Sandino's army for insubordination. "I did not disagree with him ideologically," Sandino recalled, "but he did not understand the limitations of my mission to Mexico." 30 What precisely was the ideology with which Sandino had no disagreement? It was the ideology associated with Lenin and celebrated after his death as "Leninism." Sandino was no Marxist, but he shared more than one legacy with Lenin. Lenin's Marxism was only skin-deep, steeped as he was in "Blanquism"—the communist tradition before Marx made it respectable.31 The fate of Blanqui's Russian followers, also known as revolutionary Jacobins, was to make common cause with social democracy while adapting Marxism to their own designs. Lenin did as much, until he had his fill of the traitors to communism. The Comintern perpetuated this legacy, hence its appeal to Sandino, as long as it remained under Lenin's influence. Lenin's enemies within Russian social democracy were the first to portray

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him as a revolutionary Jacobin or Blanquist.32 Although he initially took pride in the label, Lenin would later defend himself against this accusation.33 In addition to the legacy of authoritarian communism, his critics also perceived a strong dose of anarchism that surfaced for the first time in his direct targeting of the state in 1917. It was said that "Lenin was laying claim to a throne vacant in Europe for thirty years—the throne of Bakunin."34 Both his Blanquism and anarchism were mistaken for political opportunism, however, instead of being assessed for what they really were: a commitment to communism in both its authoritarian and its libertarian versions.35 In anticipation of the potentially revolutionary situation foreshadowed by World War I, "Lenin's politics changed radically and permanently in August 1914."36 Likening the holocaust to a global version of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Lenin joined European anarchists in calling for the conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war after the example of the Paris communards in 1871.37 The model of a commune government based on revolutionary councils became central to his April 1917 theses for "transferring the entire state power to the Soviets." Attended by abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy, this shift in the locus of power would ensure workers' control of production and distribution plus the leveling of official salaries to the average wage of a competent worker.38 What was this program if not Bakunin's and the anarchists' dissolution of the historical state? The response of Russia's Marxists to this manifest heresy was not long in coming. As Lenin acknowledged, "it is becoming increasingly common with the social-chauvinists to accuse the internationalists of anarchism."39 He might have denied the charge. But, as he reported to the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, "Anarchist ideas are now taking on viable forms." 40 Not only social democrats but also genuine revolutionaries believed "the bolsheviks had become a species of anarchist."41 During the first year the Bolsheviks were in power, it was the anarchist commune as well as the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat to which Lenin repeatedly appealed.42 His decrees on workers' control over management were received with enthusiasm by revolutionary anarchists and by the masses of workers, to the consternation of trade union officials and party functionaries. Even prominent Bolsheviks, such as Bukharin, denounced features of workers' control as an "anarchist danger."43 Although couched in a Marxist idiom, Lenin's State and Revolution ranks among the ablest defenses of libertarian communism ever made. Even apologists of Lenin's Marxism are hard-pressed to deny its anarchist content. As one apologist concedes, Lenin's efforts to distance himself from Bakunin's followers rested on a "paper-thin distinction" that could not be maintained consistently. To the careful reader, it seemed that "Lenin's previous dis-

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tinction between Marxism and anarchism disappeared entirely."44 In part, that accounts for Lenin's appeal to anarchists and the Comintern's appeal to Sandino. During the 1920s, Bolshevik historians acknowledged Lenin's intellectual debt not only to Blanqui, but also to Bakunin. Y. Steklov, the author of a four-volume biography of Bakunin, held that the Russian Communist Party was in part the intellectual child of this man who reputedly became the mortal enemy of all authority. Bakunin's guidelines for a political-military vanguard of professional revolutionaries, for smashing the state apparatus, and for erecting a system of workers' control were "in many points practically an anticipation of the Soviet power and a prediction, in general outline, of the course of the great October Revolution of 1917." 45 Because Lenin "reverted to many of Bakunin's concepts which he passed as Marxism," writes Max Nomad, Leninism is aptly characterized as a "hybrid of Bakuninist activism and Marxist verbiage."46 In any case, he had more in common with Bakunin's fiery compound of Blanquist conspiratorial methods and the anarchist credo of people's power than with "Marx's Sancho Panza wisdom of revolutionary words for the future and peaceful deeds for the present."47 In a nutshell, the "father of Bolshevism professed to be the most orthodox among the orthodox Marxists—yet in his practical activities as a revolutionist, he followed the methods of Marx's bete noire, the Anarchist Bakunin."48 Notwithstanding his intellectual debt to Marxism, then, Leninism is a composite of anarchism and Blanquism. In the name of a revolutionary dictatorship under the invisible control of his revolutionary brotherhood, Bakunin presaged the Bolsheviks' strategy. This strategy is usually imputed to Blanqui and to his Russian disciple, Petr Tkachev. But the importance of Blanqui's influence on Lenin has been generally overemphasized and that of Bakunin underestimated. That is because the ideas of permanent revolution, revolutionary dictatorship, conspiratorial leadership, secret revolutionary societies, and professional revolutionaries are associated with Blanqui rather than Bakunin. They are, however, part of the legacy common to both libertarian and authoritarian communists, hence the bond of kinship between Lenin and Sandino. Marxists and anarchists wish to abolish the state, but differ mainly over strategy. Anarchists supposedly want to abolish it overnight, have only a vague idea of what to put in its place and how to do so, and are unwilling to use the present state to obtain their objectives.49 Such was the substance of Lenin's criticism of the anarchists. Yet he agreed with their immediate objective of dissolving the state and cited Marx's heterodox Civil War in France as authority. He castigated mainline social democrats for repudiating Marx's work: "Neither the opportunists [revisionist Marxists] nor the Kautskyites [orthodox Marxists] wish to see the similarity of views on this point between

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Marxism and anarchism."50 With reason they did not, since, contrary to Lenin's belief, this was not one of Marx's representative works. In trying to dissociate himself from the anarchists, Lenin raised the issue of centralized versus decentralized power. Blanqui and Marx were centralizers, whereas Bakunin was a "federalist" and reputedly opposed to centralism even when imposed from below.51 Lenin cited the Paris Commune as an example of voluntary or democratic centralism consistent with centralized authority. But in point of fact, anarchists accepted its authority and faulted Marx for subscribing to a dictatorship of the proletariat that would have preserved vestiges of the bureaucratic and involuntary state apparatus. Here, too, Lenin's disagreement with the anarchists hinged not on any fundamental differences with Bakunin but with the legal anarchism of Kropotkin and his followers, for Kropotkin had joined with legal Marxists in repudiating not only mass violence and an insurrectional strategy but also armed resistance to World War I.52 Just as Bakunin's anarchism shared common ground with Lenin's Marxism, so did Sandino's. Although Sandino systematically boycotted the elections in 1928 and 1932, he simultaneously laid plans for establishing a provisional government, a separate state in the Segovias, and a Central American Commune. Even more revealing, he planned to extract concessions from the Liberal government in 1933 and to occupy several cabinet positions.53 Sandino questioned the Comintern's change of strategy, but not its principles. Despite its authoritarianism, he shared its Leninist premises. He also concurred with Lenin's critique of sectarianism.54 Although critical of communists who had not learned when to compromise, Lenin's Machiavellian reasoning in " 'Left-Wing Communism—An Infantile Disorder" coincided with that of the anarcho-Blanquist current of which Sandino was an heir. Throughout his pamphlet Lenin focused on the ultra-Left's uncompromising posture and lack of political realism. The leftist deviations within international communism were likened to "anarchism . . . a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement."55 By "anarchism" in its pejorative sense, Lenin understood an exaggerated antiauthoritarianism that disputed the role of the revolutionary vanguard.56 Can there be democracy under conditions of illegal work, he asked, when it becomes necessary to "keep the general staff—the leaders—under cover and cloak them in the greatest secrecy?"57 Should revolutionaries turn down the opportunity of participating in bourgeois governments?58 Is it possible to make a revolution without negotiating with the enemy, without stopping at intermediate stations?59 An affirmative answer to these questions smacked of anarchism, but it was not the kind of anarchism that endeared itself to Sandino. Lenin's strategy of a united front hinged on a negative response to each of these questions. This accounts for his conclusion that one has to "link the

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strictest devotion to the ideas of communism with the ability to effect all the necessary practical compromises, tasks, conciliatory maneuvers, zigzags, retreats, and so on." Multiple forms of action, legal as well as illegal, are as necessary to politics as to war.60 Thus, Lenin's strategy could be used to support Sandino's negotiations with the Mexican and Nicaraguan governments: "Communists should constantly, unremittingly and unswervingly utilize parliamentary elections . . . and all other fields, spheres and aspects of public life, and work in all of them in a new way, in a communist way, in the spirit of the Third, not the Second International."61 The Comintern was founded by Lenin with the express purpose of spreading the Russian example beyond the frontiers of the Soviet Union.62 By November 1918, when the German Revolution seemed to be following in the footsteps of the Russian, Lenin believed that all that was needed in the West was a vanguard capable of inserting itself into a revolutionary situation as the conscious leader of the masses. The revolution was beginning to spread, but in Europe an international party of the Bolshevik type was missing. The objective conditions of revolution were present, but not the subjective ones, without which the fate of the world revolution was in danger.63 As one commentator sums up the operational conclusion that emerged from this line of reasoning, "The revolutionary party must at all costs be created, on the European and the world scale; and this must be done before the favorable objective situation changes." M Thus, in a dramatic race against time, the Bolshevik leaders organized the international party of the revolution and its national sections in March 1919—a Blanquist vanguard of professional revolutionaries required to lead the revolutionary class. Such was the vanguard to which Sandino paid homage in his letter to Laborde on 2 January 1930. Turning from the strategical to the ideological common ground shared by Sandino and the Comintern, it is worth noting that Sandino's anti-imperialism had a Leninist cast. His equation of imperialism with the domination of finance capital, a special stage of capitalism rather than a form of statecraft, was intellectually indebted to Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." This is evident from his statement that "North American capitalism has arrived at its highest stage of development, thereby transforming itself into imperialism."65 The strategical corollary, that strong measures were needed to prevent "North American finance capital from penetrating the Latin American states in the form of investments," also bore Lenin's imprint.66 Sandino thus alluded to Lenin's fundamental thesis that the "characteristic feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital," that is, "the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this 'finance capital' of a financial oligarchy."67 Lenin also noted that a few financially powerful states dominated all the rest.68 Imperialism, or the

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monopoly stage of capitalism, had not simply grown out of colonial policy but had "sprung from the banks." 69 Sandino's repeated attacks on the "Wall Street bankers" as the power behind the White House and behind U.S. intervention in Latin America are testimony not only to his anarchist heritage, but also to the profound impact of Lenin's theory of imperialism.70 In February 1930, Sandino sent a message to the Mexican Student Congress in Monterrey. The message said that "imperialism exhibits different aspects of the contradictions it carries within its own structure, contradictions based on the exploitation of colonial and semicolonial countries." 71 The notion of contradictions within capitalism is a Marxist one conveyed through Lenin's study of imperialism.72 Sandino further acknowledged that imperialism operated not only through its lackeys in the developing countries, but also through labor organizations in the advanced ones. As he noted in a letter to Norberto Salinas de Aguilar (6 March 1930), "We consider the American Federation of Labor to be an imperialist agent and instrument of the interests of the White House, as well as of the Wall Street bankers." 73 Here we have another theme traceable to Lenin, who complained of a "bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoise," and claimed that an "imperialist ideology also penetrates the working class." 74 A commitment to leveling from the top down was another feature of Lenin's ideology that Sandino shared. Unlike Marx, who explicitly repudiated the egalitarian current within French communism, Lenin reaffirmed it. Lenin's "The State and Revolution" signaled a tour deforce unique in the history of socialist parties by turning Marx on his head. Marx assumed that the elimination of wage differences would have to wait until a higher phase of communism, when the antipathy between mental and manual labor disappeared.75 Lenin prepared to eliminate those differences in the lower stage by imposing the same work conditions on all. Thus, the "whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay." 76 That some are physically or mentally superior to others is relevant to what each contributes, he conceded, but under conditions of equality of burdens there is no excuse for inequality of benefits.77 This was precisely the egalitarian scenario shared by Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Proudhon, Bakunin, Flores Magon, and Sandino. At Lenin's initiative, this scenario was incorporated into the Bolsheviks' new program adopted at the party's Eighth Congress in March 1919. Although it justified concessions to professional and managerial workers, the program noted that these would be only temporary: "While striving to secure equal remuneration for all labor . . . , the Soviet Power cannot endeavor to effect the full realization of this equality at the present moment."78 Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky published in the fall of 1919 The ABC of Communism, which aimed at explaining and diffusing the new

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program. A popular manual of communism, it acquired even greater currency and authority than Lenin's writings.79 It was a major factor during the 1920s in shaping the thought and actions of millions of persons within the Soviet Union, and was used by the Comintern to gain new recruits and to organize new parties abroad. In supporting a program that was unquestionably communist, its goals coincided with those of Mexican anarchists and provided a rationale for Sandino's collaboration with the Comintern.80 What does the manual tell us? "The aim of communism is to secure equal pay for all . . . it remains our fundamental policy to work for a system of equal pay." Despite resistance from so-called bourgeois experts and the need for concessions to secure their cooperation, the party had already come close to achieving this goal. "At one time the pay of the higher employees (managers, head bookkeepers, important engineers and organizers, scientific advisory experts, etc.) was many dozen times more than the pay of the ordinary laborer. [But] . . . with the decree issued in the autumn of 1919, the minimum income was 1200 rubles and the maximum was 4800 rubles, the latter figure being the maximum for the 'specialists' as well." 81 Although this leveling downward came to a halt and then abruptly shifted in the opposite direction, the party's essentially communist program was not revised until its Twentysecond Congress in 1961—more than fifty years later. Sandino made the Comintern's Leninist legacy his own. Stamped with the imprint of Blanqui and Bakunin, this legacy shared their egalitarian bias. But it would soon be supplanted by a different ideology—the revival of Marxism within Leninism known as "Marxism-Leninism."82 It was tantamount to abandoning Lenin's anarcho-Blanquism for Stalin's authoritarian socialism. The first hint of Stalin's new ideology appeared in his speech to Soviet business executives in June 1931. Fundamental to Marxism-Leninism, Stalin argued, was an end to the communist policy of wage equalization in the name of Lenin as well as Marx. "Marx and Lenin said that even under socialism . . . 'wages' must be paid according to work performed . . . [therefore] whoever draws up wage scales on the 'principle' of wage equalization, without taking into account the difference between skilled labor and unskilled labor, breaks with Marxism, breaks with Leninism."83 From Stalin to Gorbachev, the principal beneficiaries of this abandonment of Leninism were the new managerial and professional elites. They believed they were building the first stage of communism in the Soviet Union. In fact, they were installing a "fourth governing class," the bureaucratic successor to the priestly, aristocratic, and bourgeois ruling classes of yore—the new class of professional and administrative workers envisioned by Bakunin a half century earlier.84 What remained of the Comintern's Leninism after 1931 was Lenin's Machiavellian strategy, conspiratorial methods, and revolutionary vanguard in

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the struggle against imperialism. But the Comintern's communist head had been amputated. As Trotsky noted as early as 1929, the revolution had been betrayed—a thesis that cost him his life.85 Sandino was not far behind, for when he broke with Stalinism in April 1930, he, too, had an inkling that the revolution had strayed from the communist path.

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6. The Flag of Many Colors

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n March 1985, I combed through the filed numbers of La Balanza, the journal of the Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune at its headquarters in Buenos Aires. Among the worm-eaten pages, I stumbled on a photograph of Sandino in an article bearing the title "Cesar Augusto Sandino: With the Flag of the U.H.A.O.," the acronym for his school's projected Hispano-American Oceanic Union.1 Apparently, he had more than one standard symbolizing his cause. Yet nowhere in the literature by or about Sandino had I seen a single mention of it. On my leaving Argentina, the son of the school's founder and its present director, Juan Trincado Riglos, gave me a replica of the flag, with horizontal bands of blue, white, red, yellow, purple, green, and rose.2 Although Sandino never gave up the red and black, this multicolored banner replaced his original flag for the projected Latin American Alliance. The Alliance was to pave the way toward the Latin American Confederation sketched in his March 1929 "Plan for the Realization of Bolivar's Ultimate Dream." As Sandino envisioned his Latin American flag, "it expresses in one harmonious ensemble of colors the fusion of each of the standards of the twenty-one Latin American States, now joined in a single, strong, and glorious Nationality."3 But this was not the flag that appeared in the above-mentioned photograph. Sandino was barely aware, if at all, of the school's teachings when he composed his Bolivarian sketch of a United States of Latin America. As he noted in a letter to the school's founder only a few months before being photographed with his new flag, "I sincerely regret not having had the necessary explications before writing our projected outline with which you are familiar, the 'Plan for the Realization of Bolivar's Ultimate Dream.'" Nonetheless, "we may have succeeded in awakening sympathies among various groups so that, when our project becomes accepted we can change its name to that of 'Hispano-American Oceanic Union.'" Meanwhile, he added, "here I am forcing myself into 'intuitively' receiving the spiritual inspiration relevant to the establishment of our first government of the Universal Commune." 4

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A year almost to the day before Mexico's first Rationalist School was launched simultaneously with the House of the World Laborer on 22 September 1912, in distant Argentina Trincado founded a school along similar lines.5 Organized on 20 September 1911, the Magnetic-Spiritual School proclaimed the Universal Commune on 5 April 1912.6 Aimed at nullifying existing frontiers and establishing world communism, it shared the same goal as the Rationalist schools inspired by the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer Guardia. The only difference was that Trincado's school claimed to possess a secret and ancient wisdom for the regeneration of humanity. The common denominator of these schools was a curriculum freed from religious fetishism, political authority, and economic dogma. They endeavored to replace religious with scientific education, but in line with Ferrer's goal of educating the whole person, they also focused on self-knowledge and on developing the moral faculties. As schools of human emancipation, they promoted "a stern hostility to prejudice . . . [by] banning from the mind whatever divides men, the false concepts of property, country, and family."7 Directed to breaking the tyranny of prevailing ideologies, they launched a veritable cultural revolution inspired by anarchist and communist ideas. In the same spirit, Trincado launched his own Rationalist School. An admirer of Ferrer, whom he regarded as a hero and martyr to the truth, he described Ferrer's mission as the effort "to liberate humanity from the yoke of ignorance, religious and patriotic fanaticism."8 He described Ferrer's anarchism as " 'comradeism' with a tendency toward 'communism,' which despite its errors is the most perfect tendency in a world where nothing is perfect." 9 Thus, "anarchism completes its mission with the birth of communism without frontiers and private plots," beginning with Lenin's communism, which "in ten short years spread throughout the entire world," and ending with the communism of the Magnetic-Spiritual School.10 Like Ferrer's school, Trincado's school aimed at "mobilizing people of progress toward making a social revolution." n By targeting the three fundamental enemies of the anarchists—capital, clergy, and government—it sought to free the victims of wage slavery, to overcome fear and superstition, and to erect above the nations a universal commune. Its motto, "The Whole World Communized," affirmed the solidarity, common origin, and shared destiny of humankind. Sandino's flag of many colors represented a fraction of this universal commune—the Hispano-American Oceanic Union—in fulfillment of his school's goal of redeeming the world materially as well as spiritually. The school's core belief that a person's final destiny was to become a "MASTER OF CREATION" was traceable to the Hindu and Zoroastrian Scriptures, as well as to Moses's "secret Kabbalah."12 This was the supreme purpose of education, to free the divine energy in human beings and to achieve control

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over oneself as a physical phenomenon, a biological organism, a psychological state, and a sociological field of action.13 According to the school's founder, not everyone is qualified to receive wisdom, not in his or her present condition. In order to understand the nature of things, it is "imperative to have moral qualifications required by the science one intends to study." Without that degree of perfection, the study will be incomplete and the knowledge useless or even harmful. Since philosophy has the entire world for its subject matter, the student of philosophy must be morally austere in everything.14 Confronted with persons of goodwill without knowledge and persons of knowledge without goodwill, Trincado's school sought to bring them together. If the soul is to be saved from ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, he reasoned, it must not become a slave of the passions. Thus, his courses on austere rational philosophy combined the morally austere with the scientific and the rational. The school's curriculum consisted of five such courses, corresponding to the five parts of Trincado's Filosofia oustera racional. Beginning with metaphysics, or cosmogony, which reviewed the history of philosophical systems, the student passed on to psychology and to Socrates's imperative, "Know Thyself."15 An elementary course in physiological psychology was followed by an advanced course in spiritual psychology. Then came the study of logic combining the principles of formal reasoning and scientific method. The capstone was a course on ethics, the study of the "laws of human conduct" pertinent to the present stage of civilization.16 Sandino's philosophy was directly shaped by this encyclopedic work. Four other books by Trincado are known to have been in Sandino's possession. He owned a copy of El espiritismo estudiado and, in his own words, had "read closely" and been "profoundly impressed" by El espiritismo en su asiento.11 In a letter to Trincado dated 22 June 1931, he also claimed to have "reread" Los cinco amores, a treatise on ethics, and to have received by mail "Los extremos se tocan," a philosophical interpretation of the course of human history.18 In a world dominated by egoism, competition, civil strife, and war, Trincado relied on sociology to teach "mutual aid." 19 The results of his study of the conditions of living and working together, as the presumptive basis of what is right and just, are summarized in Los cinco amores (The Five Loves). Committed to the redemption of humanity through cooperation, he concludes that some fields of action are more important than others. Thus, love of family is necessary, but love for one's city is less self-centered. Concern for one's region or province is more extensive, but love of country rates still higher. The greatest love of all—love for the universal commune destined to replace patriotism—has the widest scope.20 Sandino's multicolored flag was a token of this fifth love, formalized in his school's "Communist Ethic." 21

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The communist imperative prescribed by this ethic was that work and its fruits be shared. Since only productive labor gives one a right to consume, Trincado taught, communists must wage a continuing struggle against "parasites" who claim this right without producing anything. His list of human parasites is headed by one hundred pontiffs or archbishops representing the principal religions. But for each archbishop there are ten kings or military plutocrats; for each king there are one hundred autocrats; for each autocrat, ten thousand aristocrats; and for each aristocrat, two hundred lesser parasites. Thus, there are approximately "two hundred million parasites opposed to the communal regime, a manifest symptom that they have not fraternized."22 Since the world's population in 1922 was roughly 1.8 billion, one-ninth consisted of enemies of the people. The communism founded on merely scientific or materialist principles appeals to only one side of human nature, Trincado argued, to self-interest as a function of the body's organic needs. In contrast, the communism based on rational or spiritual principles serves the interests of body, soul, and spirit, "the triune man, the complete man." In the first case, we have only a scientific communist; in the second, a "Spiritist Communist.'"23 This message was not lost on Sandino. Just as the scientific heritage of Ferrer Guardia's Rationalist School provided a materialist basis for his communism, so austere rational philosophy provided a spiritual basis. The Magnetic-Spiritual School was not so much a rival of the Rationalist School as a spiritual complement. Like the Sandinista fusion of Marxism and liberation theology, Sandino assimilated the materialism of Ferrer Guardia's school and the idealism of Trincado's school in an unusual synthesis of both legacies. Sandino became a "Spiritist Communist." In September 1929, an American journalist, Thomas Stockes, reported that Sandino had occupied the top story of a Merida apartment building, "where he passed almost all his time living the life of an anchorite."24 As Sandino acknowledged in a letter to Gustavo Aleman Bolanos that same month, "The life of an anchorite, which I lead, according to our enemies, is something I should explain. By nature I am a lover of solitude. . . . It is true that I seldom go out, but it is because I don't have to and prefer to stay in my observatory."25 Doing what, one might ask? Observing the world and studying the fundamental texts of the MagneticSpiritual School of the Universal Commune. As the school's Mexican Regional Council recalled in El Heraldo del Espiritismo (15 March 1934), "With what joy our brother Sandino studied those texts, there on a Yucatan hacienda where he remained for half a year, receiving visits from our brothers of Progreso, among them Francisco Vera, director of the Provincial Cathedra No. 40, "Light and Truth," of Yucatan."26 By October 1929 Sandino had appointed the school's steward for international relations in Veracruz, Francisco A. Pulgaron, to the post of "Traveling Correspondent" of his liberating army.27 Further acknowledgment of his reliance

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on the "brother Spiritists of the Provincial Cathedra of Progreso" may be found in his correspondence.28 That Sandino became a formal adherent of the school is evident from a letter to his mentor on 12 November 1932: "With intense pleasure I received the Diploma, Medal, and other things with which our school honored me. . . . All your important letters are in my safekeeping, and only my bellicose activities have prevented me from replying to them with the dispatch I would have liked. . . . 1 WILL SIGN THE BASIC REFERENDUM OF OUR SCHOOL ON ARRIVAL. In the event I am fortunate to arrive in your Republic, I will do so as a member of our school."29 But he was no ordinary member. He had been invited to visit the school's headquarters in Buenos Aires not only as the head of his Defending Army, but also as the school's steward and principal representative in Nicaragua.30 Among the school's conditions for membership was the successful completion of a course of study.31 After attending four sessions at the school, visitors received a novice card. The next step consisted of intensive indoctrination in the school's austere rational philosophy. After 1935 and possibly earlier, such knowledge had to be demonstrated in at least three written essays submitted to the school's authorities. Once these essays were accepted, the candidate received a sympathizer card and the right to attend additional sessions. The adherent card was reserved for those who not only possessed and had studied the books assigned to the lower grades, but who also signed a declaration to defend the school's doctrines publicly and to support it financially. Two photographs also had to be submitted for the school's records. The school's current director showed me Sandino's photograph and the register of the school's stewards—one for every cathedra—listing Sandino as the forty-ninth. Sandino acquired the novice card in 1929. Before he left Mexico in May 1930, he had qualified for the rank of sympathizer. And by the time of his "Light and Truth Manifesto" (February 1931), he was already publicly disseminating and defending the school's doctrines. In June 1931, he received by mail the last of Trincado's major works;32 hence, he may have earned the degree of adherent in 1931, despite having to wait another year before formally receiving his diploma. The objective of Sandino's patriotic war became evident as soon as peace was declared and the marines began returning home. He began to devote his energies to establishing a microcosm of the Universal Commune in the Segovian mountains along the River Coco. As his "Fraternal Colony of Laborers, Agriculturists, Miners, and Industrialists" was described by another member of his school, it promised to be a communist paradise: "Modest but comfortable and hygienic dwellings were built for the families of settlers, who were instructed in the wise doctrines of our school. The general himself served as teacher, as a kind father of all for all, lovingly treating everybody equally. There was no money, but the colony provided for everybody's

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needs." 33 Gold was mined for buying machinery and much-needed supplies to be paid for through exports, but the colony was not designed to make anyone rich. Sandino's participation in his country's civil war followed by his armed resistance to the U.S. occupation had for their secret objective the establishment of communism in Nicaragua. This ultimate goal was the thread tying together two ideologically coherent but distinct phases of his struggle. The first, from May 1926 to May 1929, was dominated by the communist philosophy he had assimilated during his first trip to Mexico. The second, from January 1930 to January 1933, saw the imposition on his original philosophy of a spiritual counterpart assimilated during his second trip to Mexico from 1929 to 1930. Although there was a spiritual dimension to his communism from the beginning, only later would it become well defined and identified with a particular philosophical school. After 1930 the flag of seven bands became a symbol of his new worldview, a philosophy that was at once rationalist and communist.34 The adoption of this new philosophy was accompanied by a change in salutation to members of his Defending Army. Instead of "My dear friend" or "My dear comrade," the latter under the influence of the Communist International, we find "My dear brother"—in Spanish, hermano, also a general term for sister (hermana).35 It was, of course, customary for anarchosyndicalists and members of trade union circles to address one another as "brother" and "sister." Even before his acquaintance with the MagneticSpiritual School, Sandino used this greeting in correspondence with representatives of organized labor. As early as December 1927, in a letter to the secretary of the Group in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan Labor Movement, he had addressed Berta Munguia as "My Dear Sister," urging her to communicate his message of hope to "our brothers, the artisans."36 This had yet to become the accepted greeting among soldiers of his Defending Army, however. Actually, the full salutation used among members of the Magnetic-Spiritual School was "Peace and Love, My Dear Brother"—or "Sister," as the case might be. That is how Sandino addressed Trincado in his letters of 22 June 1931 and 12 November 1932, and that is how he addressed other members of the school in Nicaragua.37 Love, the source of social justice, without which there can be no solution to the social question, and peace, the reward of justice, were the keynote. Toward these ends, Trincado wrote, "one must abolish frontiers, abolish castes and classes" by establishing " 'the commune without private plots and without property' . . . which alone will put an end to all the miseries, all the sorrows, all the mean-spirited of the earth . . . [and] kill war by removing its cause." 38 Sandino's use of the word brother was more than a formality, since it transcended sex differences and extended to all who shared his principles. "You and the other brothers involved in this struggle," he wrote to one of his gener-

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als, "should know that I am nothing more than an instrument of Divine Justice for redeeming this people and if I must suffer some of the miseries on earth it is because I had to come before you also born of woman, and to experience fully the same human miseries like everyone else in this terrestrial world, because you wouldn't have believed me if I didn't talk your language and live under the same conditions."39 Here Sandino appears in the role not only of a liberator after the manner of his idol, Simon Bolivar, but also of a missionary spirit from another world, a messiah or savior-king. As if this were not enough, he adds that "you and those around you have been with me in other existences."40 Although the significance of "brother" is not explained, Sandino for the first time committed himself in writing to an explicit doctrine of spiritual beings and their reincarnation, even to the point of acknowledging a shared existence with his generals in previous lives. In line with this crystallization of his philosophical outlook, Sandino also altered the concluding farewell that had characterized his earlier correspondence. He had ended his letters with the battle cry "Homeland and Liberty." Henceforth, whenever he sought to express his new philosophy, it would be "Forever Onward"—an allusion to his newly acquired spiritual mission to complete and perfect the work of creation. The first letter marking this shift was to Jose Idiaquez in August 1931.41 Later, Sandino incorporated his new slogan into article eleven of the proposed statutes for his Autonomous Army of Central America. It stipulated that official communications end with the words "Forever Onward." Again, these were not mere formalities but an allusion to his emancipatory cause of "universal fraternity."42 Sandino's letters to Colonel Abraham Rivera in October 1930 and February 1931, to General Altamirano in February 1931, to Idiaquez in April 1931, and to Jose Hilario Chavarria in May of the same year, spell out this spiritual philosophy in detail.43 By then he had become the school's foremost representative in his country and the disseminator of its message of an imminent Final Judgment for the agents of political and economic oppression.44 Sandino's struggle in Nicaragua was a tribute to his Mexican experience. So was his austere rational philosophy. Although the Magnetic-Spiritual School was founded in commemoration of the day and month when Garibaldi liberated Italy from papal dominion,45 it also responded to Mexico's nationwide armed uprising on 20 November 1910. On the heels of this spectacular upheaval and encouraged by its social consequences, Trincado founded his school. Thus it is not surprising that with the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, the school began making its first inroads into Mexico. Mexico soon had more local branches than in any other country, including Argentina.46 Trincado noted in particular the exploits of Mexico's legendary hero Pan-

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cho Villa. He credited Villa with a communist revolution that began by "confiscating everything and making it communal property." Later, when the revolutionary government violated the secret terms of a treaty with Villa, the indomitable guerrilla broke with Pres. Venustiano Carranza, as he had formerly rebelled against Porfirio Diaz. Once again, "he began to confiscate railroads and properties that lead to the commune."47 In the areas under his control, he limited the number of priests to one for every ten thousand inhabitants and compelled the rest to emigrate or to work like other citizens—another measure Trincado agreed with. Although Trincado extolled the French Revolution of 1789, he conceded that the Mexican Revolution went even further in its anticlericalism and war on social parasitism. Trincado acknowledged Villa's importance for his school: "I see in Villa's conduct and deeds a good example to imitate, not of the revolution in arms, but of the legislative enactments for cleansing the American house." 48 Villa promised to cleanse it of the vices and injustices proceeding from private property and the pursuit of money.49 Although Trincado interpreted the universal conflagration of World War I as the approach of Armageddon, he saw in Villa and the Mexican Revolution the harbingers of the universal commune he expected to emerge from its ashes.50 Besides titles to property and national frontiers, Trincado assailed "the three fundamental parasites present in all nations—religion, militarism, and rentier capital."51 These parasites also figure in his tribute to Sandino's struggle against the evil trinity of "God-King-Gold." As for the sinister machinations of this trinity, Trincado attacked Wall Street for being the power behind the bloodletting in Nicaragua.52 In view of the foregoing, it is not surprising that Trincado extolled the same anarchist and syndicalist legacy represented by Sandino. "When religion and authority witnessed the birth of such irresistible entities as anarchism and syndicalism—irresistible enemies of militarism and autocracy and therefore more directly of religion—these were called 'enemies of society'. . . . Actually, they were redeeming doctrines whose task was to remind mankind that the sacred regime of the commune was about to dawn." 53 Recognizing only the brotherhood of the human race, the Universal Commune would also recognize "only a single proprietor: THE WORKING PEOPLE." 5 4 The Hispano-American Oceanic Union was organized in embryo on 12 October 1920 in commemoration of Columbus's discovery of the New World. Why Columbus Day? Because of the significance of his "discovery" for the historical struggle of freethinkers against the oppressive dogmas of the church. The courage and rebellion of men of reason would catch fire in those lands where neither Christ nor the other religions had their seat, "through the discovery of a New World . . . where the rebels would become strengthened." From America would come "the voice of a unified mankind . . . con-

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firming that the earth is not the whole of the universe"—a decisive blow against what still survived of the church's geocentric cosmology.55 The promised land opened up by Columbus was South and Central America and the Antilles, not North America. "The land on which Columbus set foot was not the land promised to Moses. But the separate islands with South America were the promised land that . . . Moses, on expiring, ordered his successor to take. That person was Amerigo Vespucci, and he took it in due time!" 56 The date was 1499. Meanwhile, the English laid claim to the northern continent, based on John Cabot's voyage in 1497. Thus the New World became divided between two hostile peoples. But the struggle between Hispanic America and North America was more than a matter of race or nationality. It was the opposition of spirit and matter, Don Quixote and Wall Street.57 Trincado believed it was the continuation and culmination of the strife between the Israelites and the Canaanites—the servants of the one God and the worshipers of the Golden Calf. To Israel or the House of Jacob had been promised the entire earth, not just Palestine.58 In an allusion to Isaiah 60:9, Trincado identified the distant "isles" where all the nations would one day pay tribute to God as "America, which the Creator set aside as a refuge for his people, all . . . his children, be they Angels or Demons." 59 Hispanics were chosen for a special mission—to resist religion or the worship of false gods. Although all human beings were God's children, Hispanics were his chosen people. In Trincado's theodicy, Jacob, or Israel, became reincarnate in James, the brother of Jesus and the patron saint of Spain.60 In popular legend, James emigrated to Spain with his mother, Mary, and settled in the Galician town of Compostela, where the Church of Santiago de Compostela supposedly retains his bones.61 As the author of the Epistle that bears his name, he personifies the credo of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. That credo "admits of no faith except works, as a result of which Spain refused [until the fifteenth century] to accept either the Papacy or Catholicism." James is important as the continuator of the house and work of Jacob, who did not construct a temple, nor build an altar, nor "make a religion for his people."62 Thus, in opposition to historical Judaism and Christianity, James helped transform Spaniards into spiritual Israelites who thrived on works instead of faith.63 The school's identification of Hispanic Americans with the modern Israelites, and of North Americans with Canaanites, did not escape Sandino. In his Manifesto to the Peoples of the Earth and in Particular to Those of Nicaragua, he remarks that the English turned to piracy in response to Spanish colonization of the New World. "Most of the English pirates did not return to their country but sought refuge in North America, principally in what today is called New York, inhabited by descendants of the Golden Calf!"64 As the symbol of dollar imperialism and Anglo-Saxon piracy, the Golden Calf de-

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fined for Sandino the essence of North America and North Americans.65 Consequently, the struggle being waged in Nicaragua between the U.S. "filibusters" and his Defending Army suggested a continuation of that between the Old Testament Canaanites and the Israelites. But why an Oceanic Union with Spain? The original seat of rebellion against the church was Spain, not America. As Trincado interpreted Spanish history, the Moorish invasion preserved Spain from defilement by the Vatican.66 For fourteen centuries, the kings of Spain maintained their independence of Catholic authority, until Isabella finally became induced to accept it.67 Nothing less than the Inquisition was required to subdue the independence of the Spanish people.68 Spain was crucified on the occupation of a foreign spiritual power, much as the Indo-Hispanic peoples would be crucified by the conquistadores. But thanks to Spanish colonization of the Americas, Spain transmitted its spirit of independence to the New World. This spirit of independence is symbolized by the three central bands in the flag of the UHAO. Bearing the red and gold of the Spanish flag, the conquistadores were instrumental in planting in the New World the purple banner of the communards of Castille. According to Trincado, the communards who revolted against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain, 1516-1556) were the first to proclaim the reign of the Universal Commune; compelled to disperse in 1521, some fled to the New World, where they found a refuge for their "communism."69 In 1492, Columbus had taken possession of the New World in the name of the Spanish Crown, but with "the purple standard of the communards of Castille hoisted on the Santa Maria," his flagship. His divinely appointed task was to "seek shelter beneath its folds in the 'Promised Isles' where Jehovah had ordered Jacob to go," to find a sanctuary for the victims of the Inquisition and for the Spiritism of Light and Truth beyond the watchful eye of the Vatican.70 In the Old World, the rebels had defied Charles V on behalf of the "communism of love and law," but their communism would be free to develop only in the New World.71 For the Magnetic-Spiritual School, purple stood for the "color of Jacob's robe," a token of the land promised to his descendants, "the land where the races are fused into a single race, where at the designated time in the Testament of Abraham the final judgment would occur and the Commune would be proclaimed."72 That land was not Israel but South America. "Spain did its duty by taking the Indies and implanting the purple banner, the sign of love and Jacob's robe"; by hoisting "the standard of Castille, Spain showed to the world a New World."73 The conquistadores took possession in the name of the official colors of Spain symbolizing work (red) and wealth (yellow or gold). But by implanting the purple standard alongside it, they inadvertently testified that the New World belonged neither to the Spanish monarchy nor to

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a privileged aristocracy, but to "all the inhabitants of the earth in the most just equality."74 Before studying at the Yucatan Cathedra of the Magnetic-Spiritual School, Sandino considered Spanish colonization to be as onerous as British imperialism. Originally, he was "proud that American Indian blood, more than any other, flows through my veins, for it contains the mystery of loyal and sincere patriotism." Later, he prided himself on his Spanish blood. "I used to look with indignation upon the colonizing work of Spain, but today I have profound admiration for it." 75 Thus, his original motto, "The Spirit will speak for my race," would become infused with a Spanish motif in the "Hymn of the Race," celebrating the Hispano-American Oceanic Union: Oh hear, men and women of the earth, The sonorous song of our being, It is the lively and enduring Hispanic Race, United for centuries without end.76 The Hispanic race would continue to live united, because, as God's chosen people, it had the divine mission of spreading fraternity among the nations and of communizing the world, of "forging a single soul and tongue" in defense of "love, liberty, and justice." 77 In line with Sandino's belief in the redemptive mission of the Spanish people, he believed that Spanish America was the Promised Land. "The lion is the symbol of Spain, spiritual leader of the entire terrestrial globe, because no other nation before or after can imitate its heroic feat of discovering the continent in which we live—the promised land for all free people of the earth." As the greatest among the animals, "the lion rules over all the instincts . . . and therefore symbolizes the spirit of all of them." In other words, the Spanish people represented the fulfillment of the human race. Such were the people chosen by God to stand up to the "North American assassins representing the Golden Calf of Sinai." 78 Sandino's estimation of North Americans was that of a nation of bullies and oppressors of weak peoples. Not only the Wall Street bankers, but also ordinary Americans were consumed by the imperialist frenzy: "North American people are as imperialist as their leaders. If in the United States there are some anti-imperialist organizations, it is not because they are integrated mainly by North Americans but because the majority of their members are Russians, Lithuanians, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Latin Americans, and from all over the world, least of all North Americans." With few exceptions, Sandino believed that Americans shared with their government the guilt of all the crimes committed in the name of freedom and all the blood shed at the ex-

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pense of others. Because the cause of justice would not allow those crimes to continue, the mission assigned by Divine Justice to Sandino's Defending Army was to defend the sovereignty of Nicaragua and all of Hispano-America against the imperialist colossus.79 As the successor to his Defending Army, Sandino's Autonomous Army of Central America aimed at establishing the "first government of the Universal Commune" with its capital not in Nicaragua, but on Honduran territory.80 It would be a major step toward his projected United States of Latin America, to be followed by unification with Spain, and would have for its flag "an extended arm holding up five mountains [the five Central American republics] with a quetzal on the highest peak . . . the bird of liberty because it dies twenty-four hours after losing its freedom."81 However, taking precedence over the flags of his projected Central American and Hispanic-American unions, the red and black continued to be Sandino's choice as the flag of the Universal Commune.82 Sandino's red and black emblem and the flag of the UHAO complemented each other in representing the same communist philosophy, the same "doctrines of universal fraternity." Their common "emancipatory cause" accounted for Article 11 of his new model army: "The Autonomist Army of Central America ADOPTS THE RED AND BLACK FLAG AND EMBLEM. The official

communications, whether by its leaders, officers, or soldiers, shall begin with the words 'DEARLY BELOVED BROTHER' and shall end with the words 'FOR83 EVER ONWARD.' " Thus the red and black also came to represent his newly adopted spiritual politics. In the Magnetic-Spiritual School's Declaration of Principles, universal fraternity is equated with complete communization.84 But this equivalence was already a fundamental theme of Sandino's politics before he became conversant with the school's communist philosophy. Was his new mentor Trincado, then, beholden to the same source? Sandino's source was Proudhon, the only anarchist Trincado mentions by name. "As a third in discord, Proudhon . . . launched the idea of the reciprocity of individual services," the fraternal principle behind Trincado's project of building communism through cooperatives and mutual aid.85 What precisely did Trincado propose? "Each produces what one can for the general store, without considering whether one's brother or sister consumes more or less than oneself—as long as each person's needs are satisfied."86 Such is the "Mother Law" of communism, or the "Law of Love" governing the "family written large," the principle of "each producing as much as one can and consuming what one needs [which] is the design of the supreme and only Father of us all." 87 At first glance, Trincado's Mother Law contradicts the principle of equal burdens and equal benefits. It also runs afoul of his premises, that "who does not work shall not eat" and "only productive work redeems and gives a right

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to consume." 88 As Trincado put it, "we establish fraternity through the real equality of rights and obligations, not as . . . anarchists have conceived them, as giving to each an equal amount."89 But the application of his Mother Law is contingent on all sorts of people's needs becoming satisfied, whereas Proudhon's principle of equal burdens and benefits presupposes that their needs cannot be satisfied short of a system of rationing. Certainly, Proudhon's principle was not meant to apply to persons too ill, too young, or too old to work. Just as no follower of Proudhon would insist on equal burdens and benefits for the physically fit and the disabled, so no adept of Trincado's school would settle for gross differences in consumption under conditions of generalized poverty. In this perspective, their principles do not appear to be contradictory. Unlike communists, Marxists give a different interpretation of the principle "From each according to one's abilities, to each according to one's needs." They include under "needs" unnecessary as well as necessary consumption, and they postpone the application of this principle to an indefinite future in which work is no longer a burden but a benefit in a land flowing with milk and honey. Meanwhile, they settle for the principle "From each according to one's abilities, to each according to one's work." For Trincado, this meant that the possession of unequal capacities and different levels of education became a sanction of inequalities of wealth.90 Although he granted that socialism was a stepping stone to equality for persons lacking the Spiritism of Light and Truth, he neither dignified it as a separate and protracted stage of history nor postponed the struggle for communism until another day. Instead, he called socialism a "bridge between bondage and freedom, between a brutal and egoistic imperialism . . . and the communism of love and justice." 91 Proudhon interpreted the principle of equal burdens and equal benefits in the light of human differences.92 Since people's capacities and needs are unequal, equality is achieved neither by making them work the same number of hours nor by assigning the same amount of goods to each. It is enough that output be proportional to one's capacities and that each one consume only what is necessary. In his own idiom, Trincado agreed with Proudhon.93 The school's communist principle challenged the right to private property. If all people are members of the same family and their goal is universal fraternity, then private property is "impossible without destroying the universal family."94 By disrupting the bonds of kinship, private property provides an excuse for parasitism, and in dismembering our common patrimony, it provides a justification for theft.95 Thus, nobody has a right to own anything— another pet Proudhonian theme. To understand what Trincado meant by preparing the advent of communism, one needs to examine the school's Declaration of Principles. The full statement reads:

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The universe in solidarity. The whole world communized. The law is one. Substance is one. One is the principle. One is the end. Spiritual magnetism is everywhere.96 The school's brochure of continuing studies clarifies the declaration's meaning. Under the heading "Justice by Justice Itself," one learns that the purpose of justice is solidarity on a universal scale through communization or "human fraternity." Its material foundation is a single substance filled with Spirit shared by all. In effect, we are all brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of a single "Father-Creator," members of a universal family held together by spiritual magnetism.97 That magnetism is love, of which justice is a necessary expression and communism the final outcome. Thus justice takes care of itself and does not depend on the god of any religion to implement the communist principle. A fuller explication is to be found in Trincado's Filosofia oustera racional. There he claims that the school's declaration contains everything disclosed by metaphysics and everything that concerns the life of man in his three roles as body, soul, and spirit.98 Labeled the "Doctrine of Rational Spiritism," it corresponds to what Sandino assimilated at the Spiritism of Light and Truth Provincial Cathedra of Yucatan. A further clue to the declaration's meaning is the school's enigmatic emblem. Emblazoned above the Declaration of Principles in the school's prospectus, the emblem contains a graphic lesson in a language known for its universality. Although I originally described it as a shield having the appearance of certain Kabbalistic drawings, it also resembles the badges of the Masonic orders. A double circle, double triangle, and pair of scales are among the most common Masonic symbols. The emblem of Sandino's school reproduces all three, plus the faint suggestion of a cross in the perpendicular anchor suspending the pair of scales, and in the two open-ended flares at opposite sides. It also contains a mysterious fifth symbol suggestive of a rose—three concentric pentagons with equal arcs between the points traced by one continuous line. Traditionally found in heraldic representations, the five-petaled rose is symbolic not only of love and friendship but also of secrecy, as in the expression sub rosa. Does this rose in the school's emblem contain the secret of the seventh band in the flag of the UHAO? It is noteworthy that rose is the only color missing in the flags of the Hispanic peoples. Why, then, was it included in the emblem of the Hispano-American Oceanic Union? And what is the significance, if any, of its positioning in seventh place? More than circumstantial evidence links Trincado's school to the secret

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association of the Rosicrucians, for the veiled rose and cross in his school's emblem reproduce the Rosicrucian symbols. Although the association's reputed founder was the fifteenth-century German scholar and physician Christian Rosenkreutz, its principal teachings derive from Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, originally Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541). Trincado not only read his complete works, but also traced their doctrinal foundations as far back as Zoroaster and the patriarch Abraham—allegedly the sources of Trincado's own philosophy." Zoroaster, he concludes, "belonged to the Rosae Cruris" and, in this broad sense of the term, so did Trincado.100 There has always been considerable doubt as to whether the name "Rosicrucian" derived from the Christian symbols of the rose and the cross for the blood of Christ and his crucifixion, or "whether this was merely a blind to deceive the uninformed and further conceal the true meaning of the order."101 As the Rosicrucians were not Christians but Gnostics steeped in a secret doctrine of the East as well as the mysteries of the Kabbalah, one must seek their sources elsewhere than in Christianity. Long before the Christian era, the rose and the cross were phallic symbols for the generative process, the rose female and the cross male, and for the regenerative process of spiritual rebirth.102 This pagan interpretation of the rosy cross carries considerably more weight than does the Christian. The rose represented the secret wisdom of the Orient and the Gnostic Great Mother. The Greek Sophia, the spirit of female wisdom, was the FatherCreator's mother, "the great revered Virgin in whom the Father was concealed from the beginning before he had created anything"—hence the secret wisdom that the Cosmic Mother begat the Heavenly Father.103 "In fact it was in India that the Great Mother, whose body was the temple, was first addressed as Holy Rose," the five-petaled "Flower of the Goddess" that later appeared in ancient Greece as Aphrodite's "Mysteries of the Rose" and in ancient Rome as the "Flower of Venus"—Aphrodite and Venus being the Greek and Roman names, respectively, for the Mother-Earth goddess in her primarily sexual functions.104 It is more than curious or simply coincidental that the founder of the Magnetic-Spiritual School should have wanted to carry forward the Rosicrucian tradition. An electrician by trade and thus a person for whom electricity and light were symbolic of the Father-Creator, he may have known that the Rosicrucian cross had still another meaning, as the chemical hieroglyph for "light," the material counterpart of his symbolism of light and truth.105 For Trincado, as for the Rosicrucians and the Kabbalistic or Hermetic teachings they transmitted, the number seven was another hieroglyph for the Spiritism of Light and Truth.106 In the Kabbalah we read, "He [God] loved seven more than any other number beneath His throne . . . more than any

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other thing under the heavens."107 The number seven pervades the symbolism of the Grand Rosicmcian Alchemical Formula.108 And in the symbolism of the flag of the UHAO, there are seven stripes, one of which is rose. With his insider's knowledge, Sandino shared his mentor's identification with the Rosicrucians. Like Trincado, he singled them out for special mention.109 Otherwise baffling, his fascination for the secret doctrines of this "golden fraternity," golden because of the rose's concealed heart of gold (a gold corresponding to the spiritual gold concealed within human nature), now has an explanation.110 In summary, Sandino's flag of many colors stood for the spiritual unity of humanity in the struggle for universal communism. Its colors symbolized the fusion of all races and nations into a single cosmic race and nationality—that of the Hispanic-American Oceanic people. Rose and purple were the communist bands in Sandino's flag: rose represented the occult Kabbalah transmitted in modern times by the Rosicrucians; purple stood for the redemptive project of the communards of Castille transmitted to the New World by Columbus. Thus, rose represented the promised wisdom, and purple the promised land.

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n Cuernavaca, Mexico, in a February 1975 interview with political exile Francisco Juliao, I asked if there was a secret to his success in mobilizing ignorant and illiterate peasants in northeastern Brazil. The founder of Brazil's peasant leagues reminded me of Sandino. His answer also had a Nicaraguan parallel. "We mobilized them with the only cultural experiences we had in common: songs of protest to the tune of folk music, the law that had been shamelessly violated by the big landowners, and the Bible." Belausteguigoitia has left a record of the nightly ritual of singing revolutionary folk songs that rang through Sandino's camp. To the music of "Adelita," the rousing song of the Mexican Revolution thrummed on the guitars of Tranquilino Jarquin and Pedro Cabrera, the guitarists sang: Comrades, patriots, brothers! Never flag in your bravery. For if we die in defense of our homeland, History will say we did so with honor.1

Besides songs telling of Sandino's defiance of the U.S. Marines, there was an adapted version of the Russian revolutionary anthem the "Internationale": Finally, the earth shall become a lovely garden. Under the red flag, no more suffering. Exploitation must perish. Rise up, loyal people, To the cry of Social Revolution.2 From the beginning, Sandino's struggle rested on the defense of his country's basic or constitutional laws, which had been violated by the Conservative Party. In response to this violation, the Liberal Party organized a Constitutionalist Army modeled on its Mexican Revolution counterpart. But the le-

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gaily questionable and dishonorable treaties with the United States remained in force even after the Liberals regained the presidency. This became Sandino 's legal justification for armed struggle against the politicians of both parties, who had climbed the presidential ladder supported by Yankee bayonets and the U.S.-imposed "National Guard." The presumably unconstitutional treaties also underlay his demand for legal guarantees for his demobilized forces after the marines withdrew.3 Thus, the law was not a passing concern, but a continuing source of Sandino's patriotic appeals to other Nicaraguans. Even more important, Sandino used the Bible to induce Nicaraguans to put their lives on the line. In allusions to the Old Testament notion of a chosen people, he pictured his army as a spiritual and moral vanguard elected by God to regenerate humankind. Simultaneously, he sought support for his cause in the prophecies of an end time in the Book of Revelation. Sandino believed that the struggle of his army in Nicaragua was a prelude to Armageddon and the Final Judgment.4 The Bible had authorized him to use violence in defense of right and justice: "To destroy injustice it is necessary to attack it; we have seen many come with that mission on earth, among them Jesus . . . [thus] there will be justice, and the war of oppressors of free peoples will be killed by the war of liberators."5 Sandino did not mince words. In his "Light and Truth Manifesto" (February 1931), he depicted his Defending Army as an instrument of God's wrath, an army "chosen by Divine Justice to begin the judgment of injustice on earth." 6 Nine months later, he issued his "Manifesto to the Capitalists," warning of retribution should they continue cooperating with the invaders. "I have been informed that in Jinotega a Chamber of Commerce has been organized with the intention, according to the capitalists, of attracting more support from the intervened government and the invaders of Nicaragua. They should be convinced by now that there will be no guarantees of life or interests while the occupation lasts. . . . Liberty is not conquered with flowers but with bullets, and that is why we have had to resort to the VEST CUT, GOURD 7 CUT, and BLOOMERS CUT. " In the vest cut, capitalists' heads would be lopped off and their arms severed at the shoulders, in the gourd cut, the tops of their skulls, in the bloomers cut, their legs at the knees. Convinced that these cuts were authorized by Divine Justice, Sandino believed he was acting on God's behalf. In view of Sandino's anarchism, it may come as a surprise that he invoked a spiritual justification for these acts against proprietors. Most anarchists follow Bakunin in holding that God and human freedom are incompatible. "For if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, and absolute Master, and if such a Master exists . . . neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity . . . is possible." 8 God is not only a tyrant, but also a thief and a proprietor, since "he fills and enriches himself with all the realities of the existing world." 9 The worship of God has led to the abdication of human reason, smoothed over

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by appeals to divine justice and love. Thus "If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him."10 As the doctrine that holds that a supreme being both transcends the known universe and lords it over his subjects, theism was the principal butt of Bakunin's criticism of religion. Sandino, too, rejected theism for substantially the same reasons. But instead of being an atheist, he was a pantheist; he believed that God was completely submerged in the universe and that a divine "spark" was present in all things, whether animate or inanimate.11 This was not the god of any theology or religion.12 Reduced to a force of nature, God was simply love operating as a law of nature—the ultimate guarantee of justice and freedom.13 Rather than a lord and proprietor who glorified himself, Sandino's god redeemed the propertyless and punished proprietors. From his very first manifesto, Sandino presented himself as a man without property "who demands of his homeland not even a handful of dirt." The illegitimate offspring of a domestic servant, he claimed as his greatest honor to have been born in the bosom of the oppressed.14 His father, a proprietor who did not wish to exploit others, claimed that "if he did not, he would be exploited by the exploiters." Sandino found his father's attitude contemptible.15 If not on earth, where would proprietors like his father be punished? According to Sandino, elsewhere, initially by piecemeal judgments and then by a judgment depicted in the Bible as final. Not belonging to God's elect, Sandino's father would be unfit to enjoy the blessings of Paradise. But rather than burning in a fictitious Hell, he would be banished from the earth and made to expiate his sins on some other planet.16 Several years later, in conversations with Belausteguigoitia, Sandino was asked if he had ambitions to acquire property for himself. "Nothing of the kind!" he retorted. "I will never own property. I possess nothing." Even the house he lived in belonged to his wife. But surely he hoped to leave something to his children? "No!" replied Sandino. "Let there be work and activity for everybody. I prefer that the land should belong to the State." 17 As his mentor Trincado commented concerning personal property and inheritance, "In the commune nobody is a proprietor of anything except his wisdom, but the fruits are possessed in common." Private property is absurd and, like the religions from which it sprang, "it is against divine law, against the spirit, against God." 18 God is the sole proprietor, so that any private claim to property is theft. Property is established by a social contract, with the absurd result that people who are born free are everywhere in chains.19 Here Trincado alluded to Rousseau as well as to Proudhon. A devastating critique of British social contract theory, Rousseau's discourses aimed at nullifying the social contracts responsible for destroying liberty and equality. Disgusted with these oppressive conventions, Trincado had only praise for Rousseau's "doctrine that leads infallibly to communism."20 Since property is unlawful, Trincado argued, God punishes proprietors.

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God's justice is "the law that whoever is consumed by iniquity must become purified through suffering, that whoever cheats the law must pay for it in the same currency."21 We have here more than the moral injunction that, if any mischief follow, "thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth" (Exod. 21123-24). It is the law of Karma built into the structure of the universe, the spiritual counterpart of Newton's Third Law of Motion that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sandino's mentor called it a Judgment of Liquidation, an allusion to Noah's Ark and the biblical story of the Flood. Sandino never wavered in the conviction that because all property is theft, all proprietors will be punished. It is noteworthy that both dicta have a communist pedigree. Both derived from Proudhon's What Is Property, the first from his First Memoir, the second from his Second Memoir. At the end of the First Memoir, Proudhon appeals for justice to the "God of liberty and equality."22 God will inspire the proprietor with a horror of his theft, so that he may "apply for admission to the redeemed society . . . [and may] the promptness of his repentance be the ground of his forgiveness." The punch line, however, is reserved for the Second Memoir: "God, who governs society by eternal laws, . . . rewards just nations, and punishes proprietors."23 God punishes proprietors because theft violates divine law as well as human reason. Proudhon took the Decalogue as the supreme expression of moral wisdom. He interpreted the injunction "thou shalt not steal" to mean "thou shalt not suffer under unequal conditions"—conditions that are "wrong because they cannot exist without what in effect is theft, taking from a man what is rightfully as much his as anybody's."24 Property, Proudhon concluded, is the last of the false gods. The authority of Moses was reinforced by that of Jesus. Calling himself the "Word of God," this man "went about proclaiming everywhere that the end of the existing society was at hand, that the world was about to experience a new birth." He challenged the existing order, the prevailing form of justice, and shook society to its foundations by opening the abyss of revolutions. He attacked the priests, questioned the ruling authorities, and taught "that masters and slaves were equals, that usury and everything akin to it was robbery, that proprietors and idlers would one day burn." 25 How does God punish proprietors? Since Proudhon rejected belief in a transcendent Being, he also rejected the corollary doctrine of a Supreme Judge of human actions. To Proudhon, God was immanent in human nature, not a being apart from humankind. That Proudhon was a pantheist is suggested by his characterization of the Divine Spirit as "Logos, the common soul of humanity, incarnate in each one of us," and by his claim that "justice is not at all a commandment decreed by a superior authority to an inferior being . . . [but] is immanent in the human soul." 26 Proudhon's Logos was not only the rational or ordering principle of the universe, but also the collective

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reason of society and the voice of reason in each of us. Thus, that God punishes proprietors means that nature punishes us and that individually and collectively we punish ourselves by acts that are self-defeating. Sandino, too, reinterpreted the God of the Bible and its theologically based morality to fit his social and political convictions. The result was a cult of Divine Justice with an austere morality. Sandino's moral trinity—his appeals to the principles of "Reason, Justice, and Right"—had a Proudhonian origin.27 His claim that "Divine Justice is the only daughter of love" recalls Proudhon's remark about philosophers: "Justice they say is a daughter of heaven"—a pious metaphor with a rational content.28 Sandino's depiction of himself as a rationalist communist coincides with Proudhon's principle of rationally based egalitarianism, so that Sandino's philosophy cannot be attributed solely to Trincado's influence.29 Although Sandino invoked the same precepts of justice and right as did Flores Magon, the latter founded them on sentiment.30 Sandino founded his precepts on eternal reason reinforced by heavenly justice. What might seem at first glance to be straightforward liberal principles, such as those learned by Sandino from his father before leaving Nicaragua, turn out to have been principles he later infused with communism in the spirit of Proudhon rather than of Flores Magon. Proudhon's masterpiece, a treatise dealing with property and with justice and right, is the most likely source of Sandino's principles. As Proudhon observed, "you will find here only a series of experiments upon justice and right."31 The history of moral wisdom he summed up in the biblical adage known as the golden rule. Beginning with the revolution in ideas associated with Christianity, justice ceased to be the exclusive prerogative of masters and commenced to exist for slaves.32 Such was the supposed essence of Jesus's and his disciples' revolution in morals. Belief in God was not a mere article of faith, according to Proudhon. "God is a fact as primitive, an idea as inevitable, a principle as necessary as are the categorical ideas of cause, substance, time, and space to our understanding." Although to Proudhon God was not a fact in the sense of an object of human experience, he was more than a simple postulate of practical reason. For Proudhon, God was known intuitively: "God is proven to us by the conscience prior to the inference of the mind; just as the sun is proven to us by the testimony of the senses prior to all arguments of physics." 33 Sandino, too, took God's existence for granted. In any case, God's existence is presupposed by the belief that justice is more than a mirage. "It is said that the gates of hell will not always prevail, that The Word of God will return, and that one day men will know truth and justice." 34 Despite the perversion of justice in our minds and therefore in our acts, history testifies to progress in ideas.35 Thus, "sooner or later, privilege and servitude will disappear, and the despotism of will must give place to the

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reign of reason."36 Sandino shared Proudhon's optimism, since "early or late, injustice must be defeated by Divine Justice."37 That justice is bound to prevail was a fundamental principle of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Like Proudhon, Trincado appealed to the Bible's theodicy in support of the world overturned. " The last shall be first,' said Jesus. And he said it because some men believed they were better than others, despite the fact that in the Sanskrit [Laws of Manu] 'All men are brothers.' And it is true that the first shall be last." Thus proprietors were destined to be banished and the poor to inherit the earth.38 In view of Proudhon's belief in divinely ordained justice, it is not surprising that he joined the Masonic lodge at Besangon. As he later sketched his belief in a supreme being in his trilogy On Justice in the Revolution and the Church, "The Masonic God is neither Substance, Cause, Soul, Monad, Creator, Father, Logos [sic], Love, Paraclete, Redeemer . . . God is the personification of universal equilibrium."39 Although this was not Trincado's conception of the Father-Creator, the French anarchist was the only communist other than Robert Owen mentioned by Trincado as a precursor.40 Proudhon was not the first to provide a biblical foundation for his egalitarian project. The most illustrious of his predecessors, Babeuf and Buonarroti, had also sought in the Bible a justification for communism. In paying homage to them, Proudhon noted that the "followers of Babeuf [were] guided by a lofty horror of property."41 But because they demanded equality, not just of burdens and benefits but also of knowledge and virtue, they "were ruined by exaggeration of their principles."42 Even so, Proudhon became the bearer of Babeuf's and Buonarroti's philosophical legacies. Although there is no indication that Sandino had any direct knowledge of their writings, through Proudhon he, too, became an heir to their revolutionary philosophy. In his defense during his trial at Vendome, Babeuf justified his egalitarian doctrine by an appeal to Scripture: "It entirely sums up the Law of Moses and the prophets."43 He thus placed himself in the company of Jesus, who said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matt. 5:17). Imprisoned from March through October 1795, Babeuf became interested in the doctrines of revolutionary Masonry and laid plans for a new Masonic order. In July, Charles Germain, his most important confidant, had been directed to initiate his cell mate Goulliart "into the secret of the holy and apostolic doctrine." As Germain acknowledged in a letter to Babeuf on August 15, "I have executed your order. Goulliart is a Knight of the Order of Equals; he has pronounced vows with all the fervor and piety that are appropriate to the mission which we hold from justice and reason." At Babeuf's trial in 1797, Germain testified that they "regarded themselves as members of a kind of sect like the Epicureans and Stoics"—possibly to cover up their role in one of the Illuminati's several front organizations.44

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Buonarroti was among the instigators of the Order of Equals, a conspiratorial inner circle of peers with links to revolutionary Masonry for more than a decade. Later, in 1809, he founded a Masonic International, the Sublime Perfect Masters. Its lowest degree of Perfect Sublime Master was followed by an intermediate degree, the Sublime Elect, and crowned by the Areopagites, who were modeled on the Illuminati—the archetype of revolutionary Masonry.45 To the lowest order only the most elementary secrets of the Bible were revealed, that everyone is born of the same Father and therefore all are bound as siblings to love one another. Only the Areopagites were privy to the final aim of the Scriptures. Thus, they alone knew the esoteric meaning of the Second Coming and the Kingdom of God as communism or egalitarianism.46 After tracing Babeuf's communism to Rousseau, Buonarroti acknowledged the roots of Rousseau's communism in the New Testament. "The social order of Rousseau is the same for which all true philosophers have sighed from time immemorial, and has had illustrious advocates in all ages, as, for example, . . . the law-giver of the Christians (Jesus Christ)." 47 As his English translator comments in a footnote, "the doctrines of Babeuf are as nearly as possible (making allowances for different epochs and circumstances) the same that our Savior preached 18 centuries ago." 48 Although there is no indication that Buonarroti identified Jesus with a divine personage, he had no use for what he called the "infatuation of the Atheists."49 Although he opposed organized religion, he defended the Jacobins' policy that "would have established equality as the only dogma agreeable to the divinity."50 His translator interpreted this to mean that Buonarroti favored Robespierre's credo of a "Great Being, who watches over oppressed innocence, and punishes triumphant crime [with] . . . the vengeance of heaven in default of the popular thunder."51 Thus, even the god of theism can serve a revolutionary purpose by punishing proprietors. Babeuf's, Buonarroti's, and their followers' interest in Rousseau can be explained by his doctrine of equality and the general will. Believing that the voice of the people was the voice of God, Rousseau conceived of the ideal political society as the secular equivalent of a monastic order in which individuals found salvation through subjecting their particular wills to the general will, in turn, a surrogate for God's will. This accounts for his contempt for civil society and its laws and his appeal to a higher authority, to the "voice of heaven," "supernatural instructions," "the Divine Being," "celestial intelligences," and the "eternal prize" due those who practice equality instead of selfishness.52 As Buonarroti expressed his intellectual debt to Jean Jacques, "Rousseau was my master."53 Although converted to liberalism by John Locke, Buonarroti learned its limitations from Rousseau. It is a plausible supposition that both Proudhon and Bakunin became communists through the revolutionary interpretation of Rousseau disseminated by Buonarroti under the spell of the

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Illuminati. Sandino seems to have followed a similar path from liberalism to communism. In the course of tracing the roots of Rousseau's communism to the New Testament, Buonarroti read Rousseau's doctrine of liberty and equality into the gospel teachings. He appears to have followed Weishaupt, who had also turned to communism after reading Rousseau.54 Weishaupt used Rousseau as the key to the interpretation of Scripture: "Let us take Liberty and Equality as the great aim of his [Jesus's] doctrines and Morality as the way to attain it, and everything in the New Testament will be comprehensible; and Jesus will appear as the Redeemer of slaves. Man is fallen from the condition of Liberty and Equality, the STATE OF PURE NATURE. He is under subordination and civil bondage, arising from the vices of man. This is the FALL, and ORIGINAL SIN. The KINGDOM OF GRACE is that restoration which may be brought about by Illumination."55 For Buonarroti, as for Weishaupt, Jesus had a secret doctrine and warned against revealing it to outsiders. In an allusion to Matthew 7:6, Weishaupt claimed that "Freemasonry is concealed Christianity"—unfit for dogs and swine.56 As Baron Knigge, Weishaupt's foremost disciple, explained the Christian doctrine of the elect: "To these elect were entrusted the most important secrets; and even among them there were degrees of information. There was a seventy, and a twelve. . . . The Jewish Theosophy was a mystery; like the Eleusinian, or the Pythagorean, unfit for the vulgar. And thus the doctrines of Christianity were committed to the Adepti . . . in hidden societies, who handed them down to posterity; and they are now possessed by the genuine Free Masons [Illuminati]."57 But they were not the doctrines of Christianity—they were the doctrines of Rousseau masquerading as Christian. Sandino, too, concealed his pearls from swine. Although Buonarroti had a low opinion of established Freemasonry, he made an exception of the "almost unknown lodges in which the light is preserved in its purity."5* Even so, he used the established lodges as a nursery for revolutionary ideas he passed off as Christian. Accordingly, every candidate for the supreme command of his Sublime Perfect Masters had to infiltrate a Masonic lodge and rise through its hierarchy to a key position. Sandino, too, joined a Masonic lodge in an effort to further his political purposes. Buonarroti made a similar use of the Italian Carbonari and its French branch, the Charbonnerie. Although the Carbonari failed to meet his strict criteria concerning secrecy and the inculcation of ultrarevolutionary goals, by 1818 he had successfully altered the structure of its lodges in Tuscany, Piedmont, and Lombardy by adding a third grade aimed at dovetailing its hierarchy with that of the Sublime Perfect Masters.59 The French branch, under moderate liberals and socialists, became alerted to the danger, but Buonarroti continued to be a decisive factor in societies of Carbonarist extraction as late as 1830.

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The transmission rods linking Freemasonry and the communist secret societies of the nineteenth century were the German Illuminati and the Italian Carbonari. "Whether or not some of the democratic brotherhoods were consciously modeled upon the Illuminati of the eighteenth century, they certainly adopted Masonic rituals and in some cases overlapped with the more radical lodges. . . . Mention has been made of Buonarroti and the Charbonnerie, and of how the latter constituted a link between the older and the newer forms of revolutionary action, i.e., between Jacobinism and Blanquism or 'communism.' " 6 0 Revolutionary Masonry had targeted two main enemies, the clergy and the nobility. Buonarroti added a third, as did Sandino—the Third Estate. Blanqui joined the French branch of the Carbonari in 1824, and, under Buonarroti's influence, moved from republicanism through radical democracy to communism.61 He was not the first or the last to travel by this path and to encourage others to do so. Buonarroti had been a Freemason before him, Babeuf had made plans to found a revolutionary lodge, Proudhon and Bakunin would later become Masons en route to the same communist goal, and among Spanish anarchists so would Anselmo Lorenzo and Francisco Ferrer Guardia.62 Marx and Engels objected to this feature of Buonarroti's legacy and its adaptation by Babeuf's followers. Unlike the English and the German schools of socialism, wrote Engels, "the French reject philosophy and perpetuate religion by dragging it over with themselves into the projected new state of society."63 Although English socialists found little they could agree with in Christianity, "the French Communists, being a part of a nation celebrated for its infidelity, are themselves Christians." "One of their favorite axioms is that Christianity is Communism," Engels added, which "they try to prove by the Bible." 64 While conceding that a few passages of the Bible might be interpreted as favorable to communism, he believed that the spirit of its doctrines was totally opposed to it, as to rational and scientific thought in general. As for the legacy of Babeuf and his followers: "The French Communists could assist us in the first stages only of our development; but we soon found that we knew more than our teachers."65 Unlike the English and the German socialists, the French communists did not qualify as consistent materialists, that is, atheists. Evidently, Sandino was the heir of Babeuf and the Babeuvists rather than of the philosophical school of Marx and Engels. The two principal sources of Sandino's philosophy, Proudhon and Trincado, concurred with their French communist precursors that God punishes proprietors. But they were not the only sources of Sandino's communism, nor was the Bible its only justification. Although he used the Bible for disseminating communism among his soldiers, Sandino also treasured it as the repository of a still-more-ancient wisdom traceable through the Zoroastrian Avesta to the Hindu Vedas. They, too, provided a philosophical foundation for his communism and for the doctrine that God punishes proprietors.

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Sandino revered the Bible mainly for the austere spiritual values it shared with other religions. "I love Justice and for it I am willing to sacrifice myself. Material treasures have no power over me; the treasures I hope to possess are spiritual."66 His spiritual concerns dated from his first stay in Mexico, when he came under the direct influence of the Mexican theosophist Justino Barbiaux.67 Always in search of a better life and repeatedly disillusioned with what he found, Sandino explained his predicament in a letter to Froylan Turcios (i April 1928): "I confess that in our profane world I never found happiness and because of that, and in search of spiritual consolation, I read books on mythology and searched for teachers of religion, of whom the last was the honorable Justino Barbiaux, who lives in Alamo, Veracruz."68 During his first trip to Mexico, Sandino studied Yoga as well as theosophy. He also surrounded himself with "a group of Spiritualist friends," with whom he carried on a day-to-day discussion of social questions.69 Later, when he returned to Mexico to seek support for his Defending Army, he became steeped in Spiritist lore.70 Since it is not an easy task to distinguish Spiritism from Spiritualism, not to mention Theosophy, Sandino had a more sophisticated knowledge of these matters than most. Sandino's justification of communism was not simply a matter of class interest or even of moral principle. He attributed to communism a spiritual dimension: "Revolution is synonymous with purification!" he repeated in successive letters beginning in October 1927. As he noted to the secretary of the Group in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan Labor Movement, "the solidarity you seek to incarnate is justified by the same idealism in my emancipatory principle, spiritualized by the great love for our country and crystallized in the redemption of Nicaragua's wage laborers and artisans."71 His choice of language is telling. The focus on "revolution," the "Nicaraguan Labor Movement," his "emancipatory principle," and the plight of "Nicaragua's wage laborers" underscored his war against property; words like "incarnate," "spiritualized," and "redemption" provided it with a philosophical justification. Sandino's cause stood to benefit from his conviction that God was on his side. As he acknowledged in a letter to Froylan Turcios on 20 September 1927, "only God omnipotent and heartfelt patriots will know how to judge my work"; he added on September 24, "the great love for my country and the wish to see it free, as also faith in God, will encourage my army and me to go on struggling against the invaders." This was not an isolated expression of his reliance on occult powers. As he wrote to his wife, Blanca, on October 6, "Not only treason and gold triumph. With more reason Justice will also triumph. Be optimistic, have faith in God, and he will help liberate us. . . . God not only has favored our cause, but also has become an interested party. . . . God's grandeur is our protection."72 Thus, God rewards his friends and punishes their enemies.

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He reaffirmed this faith in letters to his many supporters. Sandino advised one of his officers, on October 30, to "ask God for comfort . . . God will give us the definitive victory." To another he wrote on November 26, "God will sustain and help us with his infinite power to defeat the traitors and invaders." And in another message, dated December 1, "Take care that our boys do not act unjustly, so that God will protect us; that is why we have won great victories over the enemy, because we never strayed from the line of justice." As he summarized his convictions to Turcios on 4 January 1928, "My army is fortified by its faith in the cause of justice, and in God, who will help us become independent of Yankee imperialism."73 A belief in God figured in the maxims Sandino repeated to his troops. Among them Carleton Beals reported "God disposes of our lives," "With God's help we shall win," and "God and the mountains are our allies!" 74 Beals was not the only one to be impressed by Sandino's spirituality.75 As Humberto Torres described his chief in November 1928, "Sandino is . . . very religious and believes that for every wrong committed adequate punishment will be meted out to the offenders, regardless of steps taken by agents of the law."76 Sandino's faith in retribution was tied to his belief in Karma, the doctrine of successive reincarnations required to work off one's debt of accumulated sins, a doctrine that also makes an appearance in Christian Scripture but is veiled in mystery, parables, and other secret teachings.77 During the first phase of Sandino's struggle, when he still identified with the Liberal Party, he also professed the Roman Catholic faith. He not only attended mass at the Catholic church in San Rafael del Norte, but also paid for the expense of administering it to his troops. That was in May 1927, preliminary to his marriage to Blanca Arauz, to be consecrated in the same church. The day he married her he took confession again and did so, he claims, sincerely.78 As he later expressed in a letter of appreciation to his civilian supporters, "[considering] that I and my army are religious Catholics, we ask you to pray for us, because prayers will be our principal weapons in defeating the enemy."79 In view of his philosophical convictions at the time, Catholicism seems to have been mainly a front and, like Liberalism, a cover for his communism based on the Bible. When Carleton Beals interviewed him in February 1928, Sandino was still a professing Catholic. "I'm a Catholic, and I do not permit desecration of the churches. The Marines usually loot them. I've recovered many holy articles, which I have restored to where they belong—that gold chalice from the Ocotal altar for instance."80 Should one take these claims at face value? In the same interview, Sandino added laughingly, "You know the first thieves on this planet were priests." 81 Although it is possible to be a Catholic and anticlerical, at that time the church was notoriously reactionary and insisted on retaining its monopoly of religious truth in Nicaragua. Since Sandino had returned from Mexico a con-

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vinced freethinker, he was using the church to advance his revolutionary interpretation of Jesus's mission. Sandino believed he was following in Jesus's footsteps. In a letter to Col. Pompilio Reyes dated 10 December 1927, he wrote, "Whoever tries to become a redeemer has to die crucified, and must imitate Jesus Christ in resignation and say: 'Forgive them Father, for they know not what they d o . ' " For that reason and because the people were ungrateful, he added, "I am disposed to forgive everybody."82 It was easy enough for him to say so, for Sandino believed that what escaped punishment under human justice could not evade divine retribution. After returning from Mexico in May 1930, Sandino no longer made a public show of being a Catholic or, for that matter, a Christian of any sort. Instead, he taught a higher truth directly revealed by the spirit or inner light in each of us. In place of theology and religious dogma, he laid claim to a philosophy bearing the secret wisdom of the ancients. It had been Sandino's special brand of spirituality for some time, but until then he had kept it hidden. By February 1931, he was ready to reveal it. As he addressed his soldiers in his "Light and Truth Manifesto": "Divine impulse is what has inspired and protected our Army from the beginning, and thus it shall be until the end. . . . All of you witness a superior force to yourselves and to all other forces of the Universe. That invisible force has many names, but we have known it by the name of God." Sandino depicted this spiritual being as "a great will, that is, a great desire for there To Be that which did not exist—that which we have come to know by the name of Love . . . the beginning of all things is Love; that is God." 83 In this capacity, God is the "Father-Creator of the Universe," but he also guarantees that justice will prevail. How can one tap this great spiritual resource? Sandino's answer was by discovering the divine spirit or "spark" in each of us that gives life to the body and nourishment to the soul. Tuning in on the spirit is our access to a supersensory reality. One then learns that there is no reason for injustice in the universe and that, "when the majority of humanity comes to know that they live by the Spirit, Injustice will end forever and only Divine Justice, the sole daughter of Love, will reign." 84 Belausteguigoitia had heard Sandino's soldiers say that justice was on their side and that was why they were winning against vastly superior forces. How had Sandino succeeded in proselytizing them? He explained: "By talking to them repeatedly concerning the ideal of justice and . . . the idea that we are all brothers." Sandino relied on his philosophical beliefs to strengthen his soldiers' morale. "Above all, when the body languishes I have tried to raise the spirit. Occasionally, even the most valiant lose courage. It is necessary . . . to put off fear by getting them to see that death is only a trifling affliction, a passage [to another life]." 85

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We see, then, that Sandino belonged to the same philosophical tradition as Proudhon, Buonarroti, and Babeuf—but with a difference, owing to his belief in reincarnation. Proudhon was speaking metaphorically when he quipped, "To say nothing of the Babeufs, the Marats, the Robespierres, who swarm in our streets and workshops, all the great reformers of antiquity live again in the most illustrious personages of our time. One is Jesus Christ, another Moses, a third Mahomet!"86 Sandino said as much but gave a literal interpretation to their survival, because "the spirit survives death, life never dies." 87 Such was the philosophical basis for his belief that God punishes proprietors—piecemeal at each reincarnation in addition to a Final Judgment. It rested on two separately derived premises: first, that there is a God or master of creation who rewards the just and punishes the unjust; second, that property is theft.

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n a category apart from the great religions, Sandino found in the MagneticSpiritual School traces of oriental wisdom grafted onto a biblically derived view of the end time. His mentor's "Spiritism of Light and Truth" shared common ground not only with Theosophy but also Adventism—at the same time that it differed from each.1 These are strange bedfellows, because Theosophists look to the Hindu scriptures for inspiration, whereas Adventists look to the Bible. But aside from doctrinal differences, they share a concern for the despised and downtrodden, who find the established religions unsuited to their social and psychological needs. They share the peculiar taboos of the poor against drinking, dancing, and whoring along with a withering criticism of the privileges that only property can buy: "fine churches, organs, costly raiment, jewelry, indulgence in worldly amusements, and the like." 2 Perhaps that explains why Sandino, who completely scorned worldly pleasures, made a point of studying both. Sandino was a millenarian. He expected the imminent end of the world as we know it and the erection of the Kingdom of God on its ruins. But there is more than one kind of millenarianism, so we need to know what was distinctive about his peculiar brand. Carleton Beals reported that when Sandino returned from Mexico in 1926 he "brought back a number of books, among them various volumes on sociology and syndicalism—and strangely enough—a bulky Seventh-Day Adventist tome, a fact confirmed by Sandino's mention to me, in a jocular vein, on several occasions, of this sect." 3 Nor was Beals the only one to acknowledge that in Tampico Sandino had studied Seventh-Day Adventism along with Theosophy.4 Adventism rests, if not on a literal interpretation of the Jewish and Christian scriptures in their historical setting, on their literal adaptation to the present. Its millenarian philosophy shares with Zoroastrianism the vision of a "titanic struggle between good and evil forces personified as demons and angels, the

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reflection in the cosmic sphere of the struggle of the oppressed with their oppressors."5 Assimilated by the Jews during their Babylonian captivity and the Persian period of their history, this cosmic fantasy helped bolster their flagging spirits when they faced new persecution on returning to their homeland. The early Christians revived this fantasy when they became the victims of similar persecutions by the Roman emperors. Considering that Sandino's epic struggle against the U.S. Marines could hardly have been victorious without the intervention of angelic hosts, it is understandable that his Defending Army relied on their support.6 Adventists believe that Christ's advent, or second coming, is at hand to inaugurate the millennium. This expectation of a spiritual world-crisis has a long and distinguished history tied to heretical movements within Christianity, as seen in the Montanists, Waldensians, Anabaptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and many other bodies.7 But the term also has a restricted meaning in connection with the Adventist groups that arose in the nineteenth century with the teachings and prophecies of William Miller (1782-1849). A lay Baptist minister, Miller fathered an interdenominational movement based on an interpretation of the apocalyptic texts of Daniel and Revelation. In 1831, he began to preach that Christ would return in 1843. His followers, known as "Millerites," included more than seven hundred Protestant ministers who expected the Second Coming. When his Adventist views met opposition from other clergy, he urged his followers to leave their churches for the Adventist movement. When Christ did not return in 1843, Miller reset the date for March 1844, and later revised it to October. The latter date also passed without incident. His estimated fifty thousand to one hundred thousand followers became disillusioned and mostly abandoned him. But convinced that the end was still imminent, a remnant organized the Adventist churches. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, organized in 1863, would become the largest among the Adventist bodies, numbering in 1980 more than a million and a half members, two-thirds of whom resided outside the United States. Its main doctrinal works are believed to be divinely inspired. Like their Anabaptist and Reformation precursors, Seventh-Day Adventists believe in continuing prophecy focused on Christ's Second Coming. They believe the story of the Flood and Noah's Ark foreshadows the end of time, when the earth will again be destroyed, the wicked punished, and the righteous saved. These Adventist beliefs rest heavily on the historical drama of human salvation depicted in the prophetic and apocalyptic texts. As a movement established in fulfillment of the biblical eschatology, Seventh-Day Adventists stress the premillennial character of Christ's Second Coming. Following the text of Revelation, they believe in two resurrections: the first, when Christ returns and the faithful are rewarded with eternal life thanks to the atonement; the second, when the wicked will be raised one

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thousand years later but denied the gift of immortality. "This is the second death" (Rev. 20:14). Then a new earth will be created and a New Jerusalem will descend from the clouds to become the final abode of the blessed. Through Seventh-Day Adventism Sandino became initiated into what Norman Cohn calls the "pursuit of the millennium."8 It was his first step along a path that would eventually place him in the same company as the Fifth Monarchy Men and even more notorious Ranters during the English Civil Wars. It was a line leading from the Medieval Brothers of the Free Spirit to the eighteenth-century Illuminati, the same line to which the revolutionary pastor Thomas Munzer belonged with other precursors of modern communism. An avid student of revolutionary aspirations as expressed in Adventist or millenarian symbolism, Friedrich Engels traced the communism of Thomas Munzer to the chiliastic obsessions of the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Floris.9 The founder of the most-influential prophetic system in Western civilization—so-called Third Testament Christianity, centered not on Christ but on the Paraclete, or third person of the Trinity—Joachim prophesied an imminent Age of the Spirit constituting the Sabbath of humanity. Property would be abolished along with governments and churches, and the world would become one vast monastery of spiritually perfected beings living together in peace and love.10 The parallels between Joachim's adventism and Sandino's are too many to explore here. It is enough to note that Sandino was spiritually indebted to the Calabresian monk. In Joachim's writings one discovers the central paradigm of revolutionary eschatology. In Norman Cohn's summary of it, the "world is dominated by an evil, tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness . . . [it] will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable—until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God are able to rise up and overthrow it." 11 In conjunction with the related fantasy of a Messiah or Savior-King at the head of a spiritual vanguard of the so-called elect, the millennial expectation became a stimulus as well as a comfort for the Jews and other oppressed peoples and classes struggling for emancipation—as in Sandino's Nicaragua. As the centerpiece of adventist prophecy, the Apocalypse expected the end time to occur during the first century of the Christian Era. Only after this expectation did not materialize was Christ's Second Coming projected onto a distant future. But during the eleventh century, the belief in Christ's imminent return enjoyed a revival, for the first time in association with secular revolutionary movements.12 For those movements the burning question was how to determine the precise time when the blessed transformation might occur so as to prepare the elect for it. As adherents of these movements interpreted the quest for collective salvation, it signified redemption from the demonic furies of church, state, and property that continued to rule the earth. Thus millenarianism became the spiritual correlate of anarchism and communism.

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This explains its appeal to Sandino. Millenarianism is the typical cult of the desperate, poor, and oppressed. Their sole hope is "divine intervention and a cosmic cataclysm, which will destroy the world and the 'worldly' classes and elevate 'the saints' to the position they could not attain through [established] social processes."13 The principal source of such fantasies is the Apocalypse, which is not a monopoly of Seventh-Day Adventists. But because of the imminence they give to its prophecies, Sandino had a high regard for them. But Sandino did not share their profound pessimism. Adventists believe that society has been morally deteriorating since the time of Adam; the downward trend will continue until Christ returns to set matters right.14 Because this conviction has discouraged efforts at social regeneration, Adventists have not taken an active part in human history. In contrast, Sandino believed in the progress of an elect as matters got worse and in the redemption of humanity as the divinely assigned task of a spiritual vanguard.15 Because he felt assured that his Defending Army enjoyed divine protection, he was not intimidated by the overbearing presence of the U.S. Marines.16 Sandino also objected to the Adventists' focus on Christ's Second Coming. Nowhere in his writings is the millennium associated with Christ's return, nor does he refer to Jesus as the Christ.17 Instead, he lists Jesus's name alongside other messiahs, teachers, and saviors as one among many and inferior to the one Father-Creator and Judge of humankind. That it is not Jesus who returns to judge the quick and the dead is in fact the teaching of Rev. 20:12: "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God . . . and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works." These themes from the Apocalypse were reinterpreted and given new life in Sandino's celebrated "Light and Truth Manifesto." He addressed his troops in the first public statement of his millenarian worldview: "You have heard many times of a Last Judgment of the world. By Last Judgment of the world we understand the destruction of injustice on the earth and the reign of the Spirit of Light and Truth, that is, Love." When would this hoped-for event take place? "You will also have heard it said that the twentieth century, the Century of Lights, is the epoch prophesied for the Last Judgment of the world." Since Sandino accepted the truth of this prophecy, this meant that "the announced hecatomb must come to pass in the remaining 69 years." What did it portend for his Defending Army? "Soon we will achieve our definitive triumph in Nicaragua."18 This interpretation of the Apocalypse was not original to Sandino. It was that of his mentor and spiritual master: "The anxiety, the uncertainty, the agony of all humanity will end during the present century. But before the end, the commune will reach its apogee throughout the world." From the beginning of this announcement at the school's founding on 20 September 1911,

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Trincado prophesied that only ninety years would be required to accomplish the school's goals. It followed that the year 2000 was the appointed deadline, "the date on which the whole earth may sing the Hymn of the Victor, for by then nobody will any longer be outside the law: justice will already have garnered all the grain and burnt all the straw."19 The transition would not be peaceful. Trincado's premonition of the coming international conflagration followed closely the Johannine prophecy beginning with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rev. 6:2-8). As to when they might be free to wreak havoc on humankind, he believed the hecatomb had begun with World War I. In the brief space of a year, beginning in September 1915, to the disasters of the greatest war yet witnessed were reputedly added no less than 142 tremors and earthquakes around the world, the appearance of new volcanoes and the reactivation of old ones, the disappearance of entire islands, huge inundations, and horrendous fires in urban and rural areas. Trincado interpreted these as signs that the end time had arrived and indicated "the fourth of September 1915 as the date when the four horses of the Apocalypse were unloosed."20 By the end of the war, another prophecy had been fulfilled: "it is certain that the horsemen of the Apocalypse have been defeated." Nor did Trincado doubt that the Word of God seated on the white horse of the Apocalypse was "directing the battles in defense of the law, in defense of the Creator, in defense of the people." 21 This was an allusion to Sandino's struggle and that of his Defending Army in Nicaragua. Trincado suggested that Nicaragua might be the first country to abolish its frontiers, thereby paving the way for the universal commune; therefore, "Attention, Hispano-America!"22 What Sandino did not reveal in his "Light and Truth Manifesto" was his school's and Trincado's correlation of the end of the world with the end of Christianity. In his reading of world history, Trincado identified the sixth, or penultimate, stage with the appearance of Jesus.23 But this stage had a nether side—the emergence of Occidental Christian civilization, or the reign of Christ. The advent of the "Dragon Christ," or Satanic millennium, precedes the millennium announced in the Apocalypse by approximately one thousand years. This is precisely the Christian Era dating from the eleventh century, and not the misnamed Christian Era that goes back to the Apostles. But it is finished, "the Christian millennium is over and by its deeds condemned to a second death." 24 That Christendom emerged as a world power after rather than before the Dark Ages has surely more to recommend it than its conventional dating in the Christian calendar. By the close of the first millennium, Islam dominated the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula, while Christianity had yet to penetrate beyond the narrow confines of Europe. With reason, Trincado dates the Christian Era from the reign of Pope Gregory VII, otherwise known as Hildebrand.25 This was the pope who proclaimed the superi-

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ority of the so-called spiritual over the temporal power, in reality the power of the church to dethrone as well as to excommunicate kings and emperors, the same pope who imposed the vow of celibacy on the priesthood. Sandino, too, accounted Hildebrand responsible for these presumed brakes on human progress.26 In Trincado's theodicy, the Christian millennium is the one-thousand-year kingdom of Christ on earth before the Final Judgment and the two resurrections. But Christ reigns only figuratively through the church and his followers. Behind the image of Christ Crucified is neither a person nor a thing. The person supposedly designated was a living being, but Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ. Nor is Christ a thing, but a "heap of passions and concupiscences engendered in men in their wish to be gods." 27 Like the devil in each of us, Christ is a fever that conspires against its creators to the point of selfdestruction. Trincado blamed celibacy, Pope Gregory VII's irrational effort to curb sexuality, for the aggression-prone behavior behind the most horrendous wars known to humankind.28 The fundamental commandment, he believed, was the first: "Be fruitful, and multiply" (Gen. 1:28). The snowball effect of sexual love and procreation was to bind together, not to drive apart, "to arrive at universal peace, at the abolition of frontiers, at the commune of brothers and sisters." 29 Believing that procreation is the fundamental fact of life, not war, Trincado conceived of the Father-Creator as a species of vegetation deity; hence, the connection he made between the Bible's fundamental commandment and the overcoming of aggression and exploitation. You may transgress all the other laws given to humankind, declared Trincado, as long as you obey the law of procreation. So important is this mandate that should you obey all the laws except that of procreation, you may still be neither saved nor regenerated. Celibacy places all humanity in danger by upsetting the equilibrium in Jacob's dream: "behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaching to heaven and . . . the angels of God ascending and descending on it" (Gen. 28:12). For the descending spirits to become reincarnate and settle their burden of Karma, the supply of new babies has to meet the demand. That is how Trincado interpreted "Jacob's Ladder," as embodying the wisdom of the Orient.30 Those who cut their ties to posterity by withholding life, Trincado believed, have a debt to pay by having their own lives cut short. There is an invisible connection between celibacy and war: "In truth, this is the terrible cause of this horrible effect of war. . . . Inexorable justice obliges celibates to reincarnate in order to settle accounts with their human condition, because being men they broke the ties of families. These are the majority of those who fight." Thus celibacy is the sin of sins, because "only celibacy constitutes a sin against the Father and against the Universal Family."31 Along with celibacy and war, Trincado included abortion as one of "the

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three arms of religion."32 He believed that abortion had the same effect as celibacy—the destruction of sacred life. In fact, celibacy prevents the creation of life; it does not destroy life. As a sacrificial religion, Christianity, according to Trincado, had the world record in piling up corpses in repudiation of Jesus's gospel of peace and love.33 The Catholic Church began its nefarious career by declaring war on all other religions. Eight Crusades or holy wars would later extend its power over unbelievers, followed by eight "wars of religion," involving France as the principal victim. The struggle to expel the Moors from Spain was initiated by the Vatican. The nightmare of burnings, dismemberings, disappearances, and forced emigrations that resulted from the Spanish Inquisition took another estimated twelve million lives. The church played a part in the wars of Austria against Hungary, the Holy Alliance against France, and the Carlist wars in Spain. But its crowning achievement was World War I.34 In that holocaust, the Christ and his vicar on earth destroyed more than twenty million souls and another fifty million as a result of the plagues and epidemics caused by the war, as many deaths as in all the other wars of Christendom combined. All this happened "since the Dragon [Christ] was left in liberty for a millennium."35 For Sandino's school, the ravages of the sword were ultimately the responsibility of the cross. "It has now been confirmed by deeds that the Christ is the root and cause of all the evils suffered in the world."36 Because of Christianity's record in genocide, culminating in World War I, "the name of Christ will ring so terribly in the ears of the scorched survivors that the memory alone of the immense heap of human rubbish and elements destructive of humanity . . . may drive them crazy."37 The temporal allies of the Vatican in these atrocities were unquestionably the nations of Western Europe, hence Trincado's identification of Europe, the seat of the world empire, with "Babylon the Great, which has to fall" (Rev. 17:1-18). What was happening in Europe, a community tied together into a single family by religion but torn asunder by World War I, was unintelligible except on this assumption.38 As for the responsibility of America in this holocaust, the war would have ended within six months in a German victory had the "United States not committed the tremendous crime of supplying England and its allies with arms." Thus, to the Vatican's and Europe's unholy alliance of the Cross and the Sword could be added a third partner, the United States, with its "insatiable lust for Gold." 39 As Sandino characterized this nation that made a business of death, it consisted of worshipers of the Golden Calf, represented by Wall Street's "murderous bankers." 40 In Trincado's millenarian eschatology, World War I figured as one of the five most-crucial events in human history: first, the appearance of the Adamic Race as the vehicle of human regeneration and the eventual reunification of

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humanity under the Father-Creator; second, the appearance of Jacob who created an entire people from a single family, a people who were subsequently liberated by Moses, who gave them the Decalogue; third, the emergence of a counterforce to the Divine Plan through the invention of the Idol-God Christ and the founding of the Roman Catholic Church; fourth, the discovery of America, which put the lie to the Christian dogma of the earth as the center of creation and the work of a vengeful and bloodthirsty deity; and fifth, the war that brought in its train a "psychic revolution of all the spirits, the throwing off of all the yokes in order to establish the Commune of Love." 41 World ruin was necessary to bring people to their senses. The war was so horrible, its malice so great, its actions so shameful that it ended by producing its opposite. Because people desired war, they got it in such great abundance that they choked on it, and they will continue choking on it "until they vomit it and the divine law has the assurance that war and its causes are driven from the hearts of men." 42 Precisely that is the sense of Trincado's repeated references to the war that will end war. The Great War signified for Sandino's school nothing less than the approaching end of the world. Thus, "one arrives at Armageddon . . . because all the kings and captains and armies of the earth (as told in the Apocalypse) have risen in arms, and there have been all sorts of plagues." Only one thing is missing, "a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great" (Rev. 16:18). But it will soon come and most of the living will be here to witness it, "the earthquake whose purpose is to abolish frontiers and landmarks," to abolish property, and to inaugurate the "redemptive commune." 43 Basic to Sandino's millenarian vision was Trincado's interpretation of the Satanic trinity: the Dragon (Rev. 12:3), the first beast (Rev. 13:1), and the second beast with the false prophet of the Apocalypse (Rev. 13:11, 19:20). "How can anyone not agree and affirm that religion is the [first] beast, that it is summed up in 666, that Christ is the Dragon as confirmed by his very deeds, and that his representative is the false prophet who wants to populate the world with celibacy, a sacrament signifying the destruction of humanity, and who finally declares himself infallible and therefore God?" 44 In this interpretation, "Christ" is the secret name of the Dragon, "666" is the CatholicChristian second beast, or 666th religion on earth, and the false prophet is Gregory VII. Where does early Christianity fit into this scenario? If 666 is the number of the last, or "Catholic-Christian," religion, then its immediate predecessor would be number 665. Thus, Trincado distinguished the "Christian religion," founded by Saint Paul, from the "Catholic-Christian religion," founded some three hundred years later.45 In this scenario, Jesus's apostles "could only be and were anti-Christians because Jesus, like John the Baptist, preached

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against the Christ." 46 Sandino believed as much, having taken the side of the Apostles against not only "Christ," a symbol of danger, but also the early Christians and the Catholic-Christian religion.47 Original Christianity received a fatal blow, according to Trincado, thanks to the Apostles' preaching of Jesus's gospel.48 In the Apocalypse, the Evangelist sees one of the first beast's heads wounded to death, but its deadly wound is healed (Rev. 13:3). He also sees the Great Whore seated on the first "beast that was, and is not, and yet is" (Rev. 17:8). As Trincado interpreted these passages, "the beast that dies is the Christian religion and the Catholic religion is born from its ashes with the alliance of seven religions (seven heads) and ten horns (ten kings or nations) that have served this religion."49 If Christ was crucified, it was by Jesus's apostles, who mortally wounded the head of the Apocalyptic beast. Jesus the Messiah, too, was crucified, but by the Christ. This doctrine Sandino shared. Where does Islam fit into this picture and why is it not the last great religion? Because of his reaffirmation of monotheism and repudiation of the Christ-Idol, Mohammed belongs with Jesus and the other great prophets and seers as a redeeming spirit of humanity.50 Mohammed sought to revive the original doctrine of Abraham as Moses presented it in the Bible; this would make Islam a variation on Old Testament prophecy. Muslims believe that Mohammed, "the Seal of the Prophets," had essentially the same message as Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus, a message he came to reaffirm against innovators and distorters. Sandino shared their belief and the Muslims' reverence for their "Prophet" and submission to "Allah" under a different name.51 As Trincado presents Islam, it was brought forth by Divine Justice "to serve as an insurmountable barrier to Christ, who should not be allowed to arrive in India . . . the cradle of the Adamic race and custodian of the Sanskrit."52 As K. S. Latourette summarizes Islam's role: "For centuries Islam was Christianity's most dangerous and formidable rival. . . . It won from Christianity a larger proportion of the latter's territory than did any other competitor. Moreover, it usually held the ground it won. Only in the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily did Christianity regain substantial portions of the populations among whom Islam had once supplanted."53 According to Trincado, unlike Christianity, "Mohammedanism [is] based on the most rigorous truth of the Sanskrit."54 Mohammed founded a doctrine, not a religion. Thus, Trincado distinguished the doctrines of the Prophet from the religion of Islam. Yet even as a religion Islam performs a regenerative role. Using the analogy of an electrical current, Islam is the resistance between the negative pole of religion represented by Christianity in the West and the positive pole represented by Hinduism in the East. Thanks to Islam, the errors of these two religions are "metamorphosed with a tendency toward

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the truth." 55 Destroy the resistance and a short-circuit occurs—the explosion heralding the end of the world.56 There are some strikingly original features in this presentation of the school's millenarianism: first, the dissociation of the millennium from Christ's return; second, the identification of Christ's Second Coming and thousandyear reign with the "Christian Era" beginning around the year A.D. iooo; third, the association of Satan with Christ; fourth, the interpretation of the first beast of the Apocalypse as organized religion and priestcraft; fifth, the identification of the second beast with Roman Catholicism, and the false prophet with Paul reincarnate as Pope Gregory VII; sixth, the association of Jesus's apostolate with a community of sworn enemies of Christ; seventh, the inclusion of Mohammed in the same company with Jesus and the Old Testament Prophets; and eighth, the interpretation of the millennial kingdom as humanity's deliverance from devil worship, which is to say, from religion and the most bloodthirsty of all religions, Christianity. All this added fodder to Sandino's millenarianism. The claim that Christ is Satan and Christianity the foundation of all evil offered a far stronger motive for waging a revolutionary war than the narrowly secular struggle against church, state, and capital. Sandino needed a spiritual justification of violence for his Defending Army.57 He found it in the Apocalypse. But unlike his mentor, he did not believe that Babylon and its North American ally would self-destruct because of World War I. He agreed with Trincado's slogan concerning a "war that will kill war."58 But he did not repudiate revolutionary war, "a war of liberators aimed at killing the war of oppressors."59 The notion of a holy war in which the angels would participate was basic to Sandino's pursuit of the millennium.60 Although the Magnetic-Spiritual School shunned the use of violence and what Trincado called the "revolution in arms," it made an exception for Sandino.61 Sandino knew that atheism could be of little help in expelling the U.S. Marines. A mainly intellectual phenomenon, atheism lacks both force and fire. Against the materialistic Colossus of the North, far stronger medicine was required. Nor could atheism compare with millenarian expectations in forging a social revolution in Nicaragua. A great myth was needed to mobilize workers and peasants for Sandino's epic struggle, a task for which atheism did not qualify. His pursuit of the millennium filled the bill.

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rincado rejected the term "theosophical" as a description of the doctrines of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. A "mixtification" (mixtificaciori) and distortion of the Secret Wisdom of the Rosicrucians, Theosophy had made a virtue of eclecticism by fusing doctrines of the major religions and had attempted the impossible by reconciling religion and modern science.11 find, however, that these criticisms also apply to the "Spiritism of Light and Truth." Despite Trincado's efforts to distance himself from Theosophy, his core beliefs exhibit strong theosophical features. Besides, there is a more general and ancient usage of the term "theosophy" than that associated with the Rosicrucians and their modern offshoots. Thus, I apply the term not only to Trincado's school, but also to his premier disciple in Nicaragua. What is the nature of Sandino's Theosophy? His theosophical writings, mainly in the form of letters to those who shared some of his spiritual beliefs, date from his second stay in Mexico. The first such letter (2 January 1930) clearly states his belief in reincarnation: "Keep in mind, General Pedro Altamirano, that I sincerely esteem you and that you and your companions have been with me in other existences."2 Although he had no religion, Sandino believed that the spirit survived the body and that life was never extinguished. Having no earthly altar and dependent on neither priests nor sacraments, Sandino shared with Theosophists the conviction that the Kingdom of God is within. "Religions are matters of the past," he exclaimed. "We are guided by reason." 3 By "reason" he meant the cognitive powers of intuition as well as induction and deduction—the role of an inner light, as in his "Light and Truth Manifesto." Theosophists take as authoritative not only the various sciences, but also this inner light and the testimony of its principal bearers, known as heavenly messengers or spiritual masters. Trincado was supposedly one of those messengers, and Sandino believed himself to be another.4 Sandino's liberalism concealed a communist with a strong streak of anarchism; his god talk concealed a communist with a secret key to the Scriptures. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures are regarded by Theosophists not as a

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unique depository of revealed truth but as among the last in a series of holy books containing the same fundamental message as other religions when esoterically interpreted. Sandino agreed with the Theosophists' underlying thesis, that "the great primordial force or will is Love, whether you call it Jehovah, God, Allah, or Creator."5 Committed to exoteric as well as esoteric Theosophy, he further believed in implementing the Divine Will through fraternization or communization. The term "theosophy" was coined by the Hellenistic philosopher Ammonius Saccas (A.D. 175-242) to fit a diversity of Eastern philosophical doctrines stressing extrasensory perception and the immateriality of the human spirit. One of the founders of Neoplatonism in Alexandria, Saccas taught Theosophy and attracted some influential pupils, among them the Greek philosopher Plotinus (A.D. 205-270). He wrote nothing, but Plotinus studied under him for eleven years and looked on him as a spiritual master. Thus, there is reason to believe that Plotinus's pantheism—his doctrines of an indwelling world spirit and of the tripartite nature of the universe and human beings as spirit, soul, and body—was a faithful reflection of his master's thought. Since Sandino subscribed wholesale to these Neoplatonic doctrines, we may look to them as one source of his Theosophy. Although the word theosophy fell into disuse, it was revived in the seventeenth century to refer to the strain of occult wisdom associated with the Hermetic adepts, Gnostics, Kabbalists, and Rosicrucians. With the appearance of the Theosophical Society in 1875, it came to designate the teachings of its founder, Madame Helene P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), the principal heir, systematizer, and disseminator of the occult tradition. The syncretistic character of her principal works, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, is evident from the kinds of persons attracted to them—Spiritualists as well as Kabbalists and Rosicrucians—and by such other names proposed for her society as "Hermetic" and "Rosicrucian."6 Although Sandino used the term "theosophy" in its more general meaning, as did Blavatsky, the cosmogony of his Magnetic-Spiritual School is so heavily indebted to the same sources that it qualifies as theosophical in the narrow sense. Blavatsky acknowledged in the "Summing Up" to the first volume of The Secret Doctrine a special debt to the "Hermetic-Kabalistic philosophy of Paracelsus." Whatever she considered important in Eastern religion she had found in Hermetic literature, with the advantage that the Corpus hermeticum contained the only fragments accessible to Europeans of the secret doctrine of antiquity. "Taking the two most ancient religious philosophies on the globe, Hinduism and Hermeticism, from the Scriptures of India and Egypt, the identity of the two is easily recognizable . . . [although] the only works now extant upon the subject matter . . . within reach of the profane of the Western 'civilized' races, are the above-mentioned Hermetic Books."1 The Hermetica consisted of a collection of treatises in Greek but originat-

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ing in Egypt (around A.D. 100-300). They were based on a popularized version of Neoplatonic philosophy with close affinities to Gnosticism. Combining elements of Eastern religions with Egyptian astrology, alchemy, magic, and the cult of Isis, the texts were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Greatest), the Greek name for Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom.8 Hermeticism enjoyed a great vogue during the Renaissance and along with the Jewish Kabbalah—the other major source of Rosicrucianism—was revived by Madame Blavatsky as one of the pillars of the "Secret Doctrine." But it was not the Greek-language compilations of Hermetic philosophy that she considered important; it was the "fundamental philosophy" surviving in them from supposedly earlier and "original Egyptian texts." 9 The name "theosophy," from theos (god) and sophia (wisdom), contains another and neglected clue to the Secret Doctrine. In occult lore, Sophia represented either the female soul of God or the source of his creative powers. The Trattato Gnostico said Sophia was God's mother, " 'in whom the Father was concealed from the beginning before He had created anything.'" 10 Since she " 'brought forth in primeval time herself, never having been created,'" she became identified with Isis-Hathor, Egyptian Mother of the Gods and Queen of Heaven.11 Thus, both the name chosen for Blavatsky's society and the title of her first book, Isis Unveiled, drew attention to a pre-Christian goddess cult, the Mother-Earth Goddess of ancient Egypt. By showing that deities were originally either androgynous or female, Blavatsky challenged the worship of a male god along with four thousand years of patriarchy. In doing so, she revived the religious beliefs of an earlier matricentric culture opposed to male dominance both on earth and in heaven. With her recovery of the lost sources of feminist wisdom suppressed by the great patriarchal religions, she performed an enormous service both for the women's movement in the late nineteenth century and for its male counterpart in the working class. Patriarchy was their common enemy and it mattered little whether it took the form of church, state, or capital. Besides the impetus Blavatsky's symbolic patricide gave to modern feminism, it helped in launching the Magnetic-Spiritual School's war against religion in general. In my conversations with Juan Trincado Riglos, he disclaimed any debt to Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.12 There is not a single direct reference to her in his father's Filosofia austera rational, yet her influence pervades the pages of Trincado's major work. She distilled the common metaphysical denominator of the occult tradition found in Brahmanic, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Pythagorean, Gnostic, Kabbalistic, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian sources, with a degree of learning shared by few. Although he rejected the Theosophical Society's pretension to a synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy based on occult sources known only to itself,13 Trincado shared its belief in pantheism, animism, Karma, reincarnation, purification, and the role of spiritual masters in inaugurating the coming brotherhood of

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humanity. He also subscribed to some of Blavatsky's finer points, such as the tracing of all life to "ELECTRICITY." 14 That the Magnetic-Spiritual School shared the objectives of the Theosophical Society is evident from the school's effective adoption of the society's 1890 program. Those objectives were, first, to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color; second, to promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern literatures, religions, philosophies, and sciences, and to demonstrate their importance to humanity; third, to investigate the unexplored laws of nature and the psychic powers latent in people.15 The French Spiritist Allan Kardec (1804-1869) was said to be Trincado's principal source of inspiration.16 But Kardec had concerned himself almost exclusively with the last of these three projects. Consequently, he could hardly have inspired the substance of Trincado's austere rational philosophy, and even less the school's project of a Universal Commune. The Theosophical Society took pantheism as its starting point, rejected the idea of a personal god, and followed Plotinus in interpreting the world as an emanation of the godhead.17 According to the Absolute Principle of Hindu pantheism, God does not "create" the world in the biblical sense. Thus, Theosophists believe there is no beginning or end to creation. Trincado made this doctrine his own. Reincarnation is a central tenet of Theosophy. The lowest and the highest forms of matter are believed to be endowed with spirit or consciousness that evolves according to a divine plan. Spiritual evolution occurs through a process of self-knowledge repeated through successive rebirths. Only after passing through the cycle of birth and rebirth can the spirit ascend from its material abode to the point of no return. In the end, all of us reach that point through self-knowledge involving knowledge of the law of Karma. According to that law, injury to others is injury to oneself, so that each must suffer the harm done to others in subsequent rebirths until one's slate is wiped clean. Sandino believed not only in reincarnation, but also in the operation of this law.18 Another name for this wisdom is gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. Gnosis differs from theological knowledge in that it remains hidden. It is a Mystery or Secret Doctrine closely guarded by a spiritual elect organized in groupings that operate underground.19 In the words of Philo Judaeus, the learned Hellenistic Jew, a handful of mahatmas, or spiritual masters, has labored throughout the ages to "keep alive the covered spark of wisdom secretly."20 A secret organization in addition to a secret doctrine also figured in Blavatsky's recovery of the Gnostic tradition: "The ancient Kabala, the Gnosis, or traditional secret knowledge, was never without its representatives in any age or country."21 The gnosis of these invisible helpers, or messenger spirits,

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received a remarkable revival during the nineteenth century, to become "known all over the world and very widely accepted under the term Theosophy."22 The Gnostics kept alive the doctrine of a Mother-Earth Goddess. As in the Greek sophia, their gnosis was almost always personified as female.23 "Leading Gnostic sects focused on the Great Mother and her Dying God—e.g., Eleusinian, Orphic, and Osirian mysteries."24 Official Christianity objected to this Gnostic imagery, since as sister, spouse, and mother of God, the Gnostic Great Mother took precedence over the male deity or was otherwise his equal. Trincado, like the pagan Gnostics of the Theosophical Society, believed that the gods of the patriarchal religions were tyrants and that patricentric religion was the "cause of all immorality." Responsible for actual as well as symbolic matricide, they had imposed a virtual slavery on women through the "terrible injustice of the laws . . . subordinating the mother to her son, poorly educated by his father . . . and superior to his mother who in the event of widowhood becomes a poor slave of her sons, having already been a slave of their father."25 What Trincado calls "patriarchal despotism" or the "omnipotence of pater-familias" had no place in the original matriarchy and its metaphysical worldview and promised to be completely uprooted with the coming of universal communism and its "Commune of Love." 26 The sun is a symbol of patriarchy, but for Gnostics it also stands for enlightenment, or truth. It is in the latter sense that it figures in the emblem of Trincado's school as a symbol of the "Spiritism of Light and Truth." All deities were originally female, and the veiled Isis in particular symbolized the hidden wisdom of early matricentric society. While on her right ear dangled a sun and on her left ear hung a moon, she had as her symbol a circle supporting a crescent, indicating she was a sun goddess as well as a moon goddess.27 Not until the Indo-European invasions (ca. 3000 B.C.) was the Sun Goddess "redesigned," in some cases, forced to undergo a sex change or to share power with the Sun God of the invaders.28 It is noteworthy that before moving to Rome in A.D. 245, Plotinus spent two years completing his studies in Syria and Persia. There he acquired a direct knowledge of the Mysteries and the Gnostic schools. Supposedly, their occult doctrines were revealed only to those fit to receive them, and only after long and tortuous spiritual exercises. As Plotinus acknowledged, "the mandate of the Mysteries . . . orders that they should not be divulged to those who are uninitiated."29 The resulting knowledge, or gnosis, was believed to be superior to the evidence of the senses. Although Plotinus disavowed Gnosticism, it was actually the Christian interpretation of the mysteries that he repudiated. Otherwise, his philosophy qualifies as Gnostic.30 Sandino's mentor distinguished three main Gnostic schools. There were the

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preeminently Christian Gnostics, branded as heretics by the church fathers; the Syncretistic Gnostics, on the margin of Christianity; and the Paganizing Gnostics, who rejected Christianity for "pure Spiritism."31 The last served as transmission belts between East and West, linking the Spiritism of the ancient Persians with its twentieth-century revival by the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Thus, Trincado singled out Zoroaster as the "founder not of a religion but rather of a school," the basis of all the austere philosophies culminating in that of Moses and the Kabbalah. To Zoroaster he attributed the formulation of the fundamental principle of Gnosticism, "Search for the Good in the Truth"32—also the motto of the Theosophical Society, "There is no religion higher than Truth." For Sandino, this made Zoroaster "the founder of Theosophy."33 Like the term "theosophy," "Gnosticism" has a strict as well as a loose meaning. Strictly speaking, it applies only to the sects appearing within and on the margin of Christianity during the time of the church fathers. Although there were only a few that expressly called themselves Gnostics, or "Knowing Ones," by the end of the second century, the name was already being applied to a vast array of heresies and apostasies exhibiting more or less similar features. Modern scholars have further extended the meaning of gnosis by probing into its Hellenistic, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian origins. Thus, they distinguish a pre-Christian Jewish as well as a Hellenistic pagan Gnosticism.34 Although Gnosticism narrowly conceived is a far cry from Theosophy, in the broad interpretation of each there is no fundamental difference. In this loose sense, Sandino was a Gnostic. The goal of Gnosticism is the "release of the 'inner man' from the bonds of the world and his return to his native realm of light." 35 According to the Gnostic School of Valentinus (ca. A.D. 100-165), "What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereunto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth."36 Trincado faced up to the same fundamental questions in his austere rational philosophy: What is the cause of life? Why is there life? What is its destiny? Thus he sought answers to "where men come from, why they are here, and where they are going." 37 In Gnostic lore, the initiate is awakened to the reality underlying appearance through a process of meditation and remembrance of a prior existence. Wordsworth, Sandino recalled, summed it up in his famous "Ode to Intimations of Immortality." "People retain today the recollection of a mind or incarnation, as the Theosophists would say, which has yet to be erased from memory." Although Sandino likened this recollection to a childlike faith rooted in imagination rather than in reason or science, he praised it for its rejuvenative powers. He believed it contributed to an epic sense of life in which the human being is not a helpless spectator, but "an actor in an eternal

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and always renovated drama." 38 Unlike most Gnostics, Sandino was not content with self-knowledge through meditation, but hoped to use it to redeem his compatriots. Sandino subscribed to the same set of doctrines that define both Theosophy and Gnosticism. These include the derivation of all being from a unitary cosmic force, pantheism, metempsychosis, the superiority of the soul in relation to the body, our triune nature, and our perfectibility. But the assimilation of these doctrines took definite shape only in conjunction with his joining the Magnetic-Spiritual School. To be informed that "during his stay in Tampico, Sandino had become familiar with Masonry, while also frequenting Theosophical and Spiritist assemblies," leaves us guessing as to their influence.39 To learn further that he studied Yoga in Tampico in addition to Theosophy does not tell us whether he became an adept in either one.40 Thus, there is no evidence of a fully formed Gnosticism prior to his second trip to Mexico. Nonetheless, it stands to reason that if Sandino studied Yoga, he also took Theosophy seriously, for Yoga offers final deliverance from the law of Karma. On the supposition that the spirit is immortal and transmigrates from one body to another, it carries its burden of Karma with it. According to Gnostic doctrine, this burden of harm done to other sentient beings must be canceled to achieve deliverance. By training in ahimsa (harmlessness) and other austerities, Yoga helps remove this yoke. For most adepts of Yoga, the practice of austerity is tied to meditation. Through the practice of meditation, one discovers the progress of the spirit through different forms of life, a knowledge that comes from inner illumination or insight. As one reads in the Laws of Manu, "He who possesses the true insight (into the nature of the world) is not fettered by his deeds; but he who is destitute of that insight is drawn into the cycle of births and deaths" (6:74). The Laws of Manu were not of marginal interest to the MagneticSpiritual School, but the original source of its austere rational philosophy.41 The wisdom of the East underlay Belausteguigoitia's depiction of Sandino as both a "disciple of the Orient" and a "cultivator of Yoga."42 Yoga aims at overcoming the yoke of Karma through the practice of meditation. For most Indian schools of philosophy, meditation serves to release spiritual energies trapped within the body. But for Sandino it also had an eminently practical purpose, that of reinforcing his army's will to fight, to expel the U.S. Marines, and to establish a Central American Commune as a prelude to world communism. The practice of meditation was not the only symptom of Sandino's Gnostic awakening. There is also a hint of it in his vegetarianism. From his conversations with Sandino in February 1928, Carleton Beals learned that Sandino "attracted attention because he neither drank nor smoked and was a vegetarian." 43 As the Manusmriti, one of India's sacred texts, comments, "Without killing living beings, meat cannot be made available, and since killing is

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contrary to the principles of ahimsa, one must give up eating meat." 44 The Shrimad Bhagavatam further cautions against eating meat, because "in their next lives, such sinful persons will be eaten by the same creatures they have killed"—another instance of the law of Karma.45 That Sandino understood the operations of this law is suggested by the information furnished to the U.S. Marines in Nicaragua by Humberto Torres. Sandino believed that justice was built into the physical laws and structure of the universe, and that for every unjust action there would be an equal and opposite reaction. An apprehension about the consequences of his actions may also explain why, in Torres's account, Sandino was "far from being coldblooded and was never known to commit any act of cruelty himself."46 The conviction that human beings are essentially spirit and that the same spirit resides in all of us underlay Sandino's belief that "we are all brothers"—in the literal sense of being offspring of the same Father-Creator.47 "Knowing one's trinity" through self-knowledge of one's body, soul, and spirit was the basis also of the duty to love oneself in one's neighbor and to work for Nicaragua's redemption.48 These two injunctions, "Know Thyself" and "Love your Brother," also figured as pillars of the Magnetic-Spiritual School.49 For Sandino, philosophy offered a path of deliverance. "I am interested in the study of nature and of the most profound connections among things. That is why I like philosophy."50 Philosophy, by which he understood Theosophy, was for him the basis of both wisdom and justice—wisdom to know what is just, and justice to do what is wise. At the same time, he believed that only the just were prepared to acquire wisdom. This was a fundamental tenet of the Magnetic-Spiritual School.51 Only by rigorously practicing the school's austerities could one hope to become wise. This was in accordance with Gnostic teaching: "the real inner Gnosis, the knowledge of the transcendental Reality underlying the world of Appearances . . . cannot be communicated to any but those who have undergone a special training, physical, mental, and moral." 52 Sandino belonged to the increasing body of students of the Ancient Mysteries, who claimed to have discovered in all ages a "Secret Doctrine or Gnosis, wrapped up in allegory and symbol, the inner meaning of which was only disclosed to those . . . qualified to receive it." 53 In the MagneticSpiritual School he found an interpretation of the gnosis in Christian Scripture, which he proceeded to transmit to his Defending Army. Since his soldiers' receptivity to this gnosis depended on their familiarity with Christian doctrine, he was indebted to his school for revealing the esoteric or hidden meaning of the biblical narratives. But Sandino assimilated only a part of the Gnostic tradition—that part compatible with millenarianism. Most Gnostics and Theosophists discount the millenarian message of the Apocalypse along with the Jewish notion of

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an earthly Messiah or Savior-King. The expectation of an earthly kingdom based on resurrection in the flesh was repugnant to their essentially otherworldly beliefs. So, too, were the prophecies of Armageddon, the Holocaust, and a Final Judgment, tied to the "crude materialistic idea of a physical resurrection." Theosophists accept only the doctrine of a spiritual resurrection.54 As a result, they so allegorize the millenarian content of the Bible that both Testaments lose their Jewish identity. In a direct attack on the Christian Gnostics, the church father Irenaeus (A.D. 125-202) said that they rejected the Old Testament for containing virtually nothing of the revelations of their Sophia, or Divine Wisdom. They also slighted the New Testament for being "so corrupted by the interpolations of the Apostles as to have lost all value." 55 Believing it was a mistake to historicize biblical narrative, they thought it should be spiritualized or interpreted as allegory.56 Not all church fathers shared Irenaeus's repudiation of Gnosticism. As Origen (A.D. 185-254) commented concerning the first chapter of Genesis, "Who is so foolish as to believe that God, like a husbandman, planted a garden in Eden, and placed in it a tree of life, that might be seen and touched . . . these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history being apparently but not literally true." 57 Unlike most Gnostics, adherents of the Magnetic-Spiritual School relied on both an allegorical and a historical interpretation of the narratives—a tour de force of momentous significance for Sandino's struggle in Nicaragua. Trincado made a point of distinguishing his version of the ancient wisdom from what he called its Gnostic and theosophical distortions.58 With few exceptions, the church fathers considered Gnosticism a travesty of Christian doctrine. Trincado, however, believed that Christianity was a travesty of the original Gnostic teachings. Sandino's predilection for the gnosis of the Magnetic-Spiritual School may be attributed to its this worldly as well as otherworldly emphasis, its preservation of the Bible's millenarian as well as Gnostic heritage. The Gnostics had their "elect" of mahatmas, or spiritual masters. The millenarians had their "chosen people," the last on earth destined to become the first—in the New Testament, the poor, the insulted, and the injured. The elect narrowed down to those with mastery over themselves, such as Confucius, Buddha, and Socrates. The chosen people included the liberators of humankind, Sandino's "messenger spirits," such as Adam, Moses, Jesus, and Bolivar.59 Trincado's merit was to have funneled them together. But are they compatible? "Millenarianism" is the generic term for doctrines of collective salvation of a chosen or select people, race, or class through the agency of a messiah or spiritual vanguard; it is based on prophecies of an end time involving a Final Judgment. "Gnosticism" is the covering

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term for doctrines of individual salvation through the agency of a divine spark or inner light that leads to self-knowledge. In the first instance, a spiritual vanguard has been destined by the Supreme Being to carry out a redemptive mission on earth; in the second, each spirit is perfectly free to redeem itself within the parameters of the law of Karma. But the philosophical predicament of freedom and determinism can be resolved, since the Father-Creator may select those who already have redeemed themselves by the Gnostic path to carry out the regeneration of humankind. Following Trincado, Sandino arrived at a similar resolution of the differences between millenarianism and Gnosticism.60 Among the Gnostic beliefs surviving in the doctrines of the MagneticSpiritual School was the role assigned to Seth, Adam's third son, as the standard bearer of "Light." Created in Adam's likeness (Gen. 5:3), Seth played a prominent role in the Gnostic system of the Sethians, who bore his name, and also in that of Valentinus. The Valentinians distinguished three kinds of substance (corresponding to Adam's three sons): Cain (matter or body), Abel (psyche or soul), and Seth (spirit). On the basis of this distinction, they claimed that the sons of Cain were doomed, that the sons of Abel were capable of either perdition or redemption, and that the sons of Seth were already saved.61 Because Trincado believed Adam and Eve were missionary spirits from another planet, whose offspring could only take after their parents, he denied that Cain and Abel could be their sons.62 As the fountainhead of the Ancient Wisdom, India was allegedly the birthplace of the Adamic race. Thus, according to Trincado, Seth was born in the holy city of Hyderabad, as were Adam and Eve.63 Adam was the patriarch of the Adamic race, but Seth was the "Investigator"—a kind of Grand Inquisitor. He kept the records of our deeds and weighed human actions on the scales of Divine Justice. Seth was the Great Lawgiver and Judge, the Solon of humanity.64 "We know that all the philosophical schools have their basis in the 'Sanskrit' or Sethite law and doctrine, subsequently acknowledged by the Vedanta, Brahmanism, and Buddhism."65 Although Sanskrit was the ancient Aryan language of the Hindus, Trincado also used the term to designate the Laws of Manu written in Sanskrit. Reincarnate as Manu, Seth was the author of the Laws, considered by Trincado to be the world's most important literary treasure.66 In Trincado's theodicy, the Master Spirit of Truth was alone cognizant of the Divine Plan. It alone bore responsibility for banishing the recalcitrant spirits on the planet Neptune and ordering them to serve out their purgatory on earth.67 Then in an effort to regenerate them, it assembled a spiritual vanguard of twenty-nine missionary spirits, led by itself.68 Each would have to become incarnate in a human body and continue to reincarnate until it had

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accomplished its objective. All the progress on earth, scientific and artistic as well as moral, Trincado attributed to the work of these twenty-nine Titans—a spiritual vanguard corresponding to Sandino's political-military vanguard.69 The Master Spirit incarnate as Seth would later reincarnate in the world's other great lawgivers, such as Brahma, Confucius, and Moses.70 It would also return as Jacob, because of the supreme moral significance of the story of Jacob's Ladder; as Socrates, because of the Socratic mandate "Know Thyself;" and as Jesus's brother James, because of James's stress on human equality and works before faith (James 2:1-26). 71 In Trincado's Gnostic imagination, the fundamental enemy of humanity consisted of the so-called false gods, or idols of the various religions and of the Catholic church in particular. Under the heading of idolatry he included not only the Christ cult and veneration of the pope, but also the worship of saints. As the founder of soteriology, Saint Paul became the principal target of Trincado's wrath. Without Paul there would have been no cult of Christ as a person, and no papal tradition to interpret it. Such are the premises that make intelligible Trincado's recondite interpretation of the biblical narratives and prophecies in the light of the doctrine of reincarnation. Otherwise, his interpretations are bound to appear both idiosyncratic and arbitrary—as do their assimilation and dissemination by Sandino. Jesus's brother James is the central figure in Trincado's reading of the New Testament. Trincado was especially intrigued by this supposed chief of the Apostles and patron saint of his beloved Spain. James was the author of the celebrated "General Epistle," a catalogue of duties second in importance only to the Decalogue.72 But the most outstanding feature in Trincado's portrayal is James's role as the "Anti-Christ." Turning the tables on every conceivable brand of Christianity, Trincado blames Jesus's death on "Christ"—his term for everything rotten in human society. Thus, in an unveiling of Scripture, James swears to avenge Jesus's death and to rescue his brother's reputation from that odious name.73 It is in James's capacity as the "Anti-Christ" that Trincado identified him with the white horseman of the Apocalypse, the "Exterminating Angel" who slays the beast and the false prophet (Rev. 19:11-21). So strong was Trincado's affinity for Jesus's brother that he surreptitiously lay claim to being James's latest incarnation. In 1870, Pope Pius IX, author of the Syllabus of Errors and the declared enemy of Theosophy, announced, "the Anti-Christ is born." 74 Since Trincado was born in 1866, the foregoing datum provided a clue to his spiritual identity with James, himself a reincarnation of Seth. In the prologue to the Mexican edition of "Los extremos se tocan," the identification is complete. "In Hyderabad, India, Seth and 28 other Spiritual Masters who volunteered to join him became incarnate: Eve, Adam, Seth (the Investigator, Judge, and first of Adam's sons), Anaas (his wife) . . . himself Joaquin Trincado, herself Mercedes Riglos." 75

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Just as Trincado traced his origins back to Seth, Jacob, and Moses, so he traced the spirit of his enemy Pius IX back to its origins. As Moses, Trincado had to fight Aitekes, the son-in-law of Pharaoh and captain of the Egyptian army allegedly defeated at the Red Sea.76 Thus, in Aitekes he found the first incarnation of the spirit of the hated pope. In this Gnostic interpretation of Scripture, the fleeing Israelites left behind the sacred stone that had served Jacob for a pillow on the night of his celebrated dream. Believing that the stone had magical properties responsible for the Israelite victory, Aitekes introduced its worship as an Idol-God. According to Trincado's source—the historian Rivert-Carnad in a communication to the Royal Academy of History—Aitekes left Egypt for the northwestern coast of Spain (modern Galicia), where he founded the Kingdom of the Brigantines, with its capital at Brigantium (now Compostela).77 There he practiced his newly founded religion, interpreted by Trincado as the original Christ cult. Why Christ cult? The word Christ had more than one meaning for Trincado. Besides the selfish passions, which made people want to be treated like gods, it signified the consequences of those passions. Not without a touch of humor, Trincado told the following story of the word's origin. When Jacob woke from his dream of the ascent and descent of angels in the House of the Lord (Gen. 27:17), he understood the dangers faced by humans because of ignorance and "cried out in fear 'Christ!'—a word that meant danger." So as never to forget that vision, he took the stone that served as his pillow and passed it on to his descendants with the secret of the word Christ, so that they, too, might recognize and ward off danger. Having heard repeated shouts of "Christ!" by the Hebrews in their effort to escape Pharaoh's wrath, the Egyptians mistook it for the name of the god in the Hebrews' sacred stone—hence the origin of the Christ cult.78 Trincado claimed that this original Christ cult had been revived by the Apostle Paul, who had learned about it in a previous incarnation, long before his blinding vision on the road to Damascus.79 Paul's originality was to substitute for the worship of Aitekes's stone-Christ the worship of the manChrist. The first Christian with his church at Antioch instead of Jerusalem, he ran into heavy opposition from James over the issue of idol worship.80 Thus, considering that Moses's principal enemy was Aitekes and that James's principal enemy was Paul, since Moses and James were the same spirit, Trincado concluded that Aitekes and Paul were one.81 There were other startling parallels. In view of the similarity between the Christian religion founded by Paul and the Catholic religion inaugurated by the first pope at the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325—the mysterious Emmanuel I, unaccounted for in the histories of the papacy—Trincado concluded, "it is the same spirit."82 How could one explain, he asked, the perversion of the

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principles of brotherly love in the Vedas and among the people of Israel in any other way? Why had Aitekes, Paul, and Pope Emmanuel I annulled those principles and consecrated and practiced the opposite, seemingly under the same name? "The cause is only the arrogance of the spirit of Aitekes, Paul, and Emmanuel I," he answered, "an arrogance whose parallels in the three epic cases indicates they are the same spirit."83 Later, this spirit reappeared in Hildebrand, notorious as Pope Gregory VII, the incarnation of monasticism and papal absolutism.84 Nor was this its last appearance. Trincado believed the same spirit had inspired Pius IX's doctrine of papal infallibility. This was the same pope who had urged the church's defense, "even if it means shedding the blood of all humanity!"85 Since Trincado expressly identified Pius IX as the "false prophet" of the Apocalypse, this pope, too, was an incarnation of the founder of Christianity.86 Sandino reiterated what he had learned from his spiritual mentor: "Paul 'fought' against Moses in the Red Sea. . . . Paul is the same Spirit of Aitekes, Pharaoh's son-in-law, known today under the name of St. Paul." 87 In the same breath he identified this spirit with that of the supposed Pope Emmanuel I and that of Hildebrand. Thus, Sandino believed that Aitekes was the original founder of the Christ cult, that Paul was the first to identify it with the man Jesus, that Emmanuel I was the first to give the Christ cult its established form in the Catholic Christian religion, and that Hildebrand was the pope responsible for launching the Christian Era. How does Sandino fit into this spiritual history? His spiritual master believed that Adam and Eve became reincarnate in Abraham and Sarah, later in Joseph and Mary.88 But their spiritual lineage did not stop there. As early as February 1931, Sandino likened his wife, Blanca, to Mary, which is to say, Eve, who came with Adam and other Spiritual Masters to redeem humanity; they were "missionary spirits who . . . are among us directed by their own leaders!"89 Thus, if his Defending Army was being directed by messenger spirits and his wife was a reincarnation of Eve, then Sandino must have been the original Adam. Was there method in this apparent madness? In conformity with Trincado's austere rational philosophy, Sandino did not rely simply on intuition, the testimony of mediums, extrasensory perception, or continuing prophecy to support these claims. On his mentor's premise that the same causes produce the same effects, he reasoned that wherever those conditions might be repeated, so would the consequences as the work of the same force or spirit.90 Unlike most Gnostics and Theosophists, Sandino made an effort to combine the uniquely thisworldly emphasis of Jewish millenarianism and the Gnostics' otherworldly stress on deliverance from this world. The gnosis in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures pointed the way. Jacob's Ladder provided a link with the Ancient Wisdom not only for the Magnetic-Spiritual School, but also for Sandino. Echoing his spiritual mentor, he acknowledged that it

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was "Jacob who learned that Christ is danger in a dream." 91 This story contained the germs of Sandino's secret doctrine of reincarnation and of liberation from the religious idols he held responsible for the occupation of his country.92 The Magnetic-Spiritual School captured Sandino's imagination because it provided a Gnostic as well as a millenarian rationale for communism. That was no easy feat. Millenarians believe that, in the absence of reincarnation, the only way to settle accounts on the scales of Justice is through a cataclysmic Final Judgment and resurrection in the flesh. Otherwise, the tables will not be turned on oppressors nor will the poor avenge themselves on the rich. In contrast, Gnostics argue that reincarnation makes possible a gradual or piecemeal operation of the law of Karma. People are born brothers or sisters of the same universal spirit, so that in the end everyone will be saved. Attracted to both theodicies, Sandino found in the Magnetic-Spiritual School a partial resolution of their differences. Because their basic premises are contradictory, one or the other had to be abandoned. Trincado favored the Gnostic solution to the problem of injustice, but he salvaged what he could of the millenarian scenario. That required a piecemeal interpretation of the turning of tables, an allegorical instead of a literal interpretation of Hell, and the provision of a separate dwelling place for the still unregenerate. Trincado's tour deforce took the following form.93 To the planet Earth the Father-Creator ultimately planned to allot 2,000 billion spirits as a permanent home. But when the planet Neptune received its judgment of liquidation fiftyseven centuries ago, some 3,500 billion spirits found themselves sentenced to our planet, which was to serve as their purgatory. In effect, a regenerated Earth was being reserved for only a fraction of its actual population. At the same time, the Father-Creator dispatched twenty-nine missionary spirits, each charged with regenerating some seventy billion souls. It was understood that when they accomplished their mission, a new judgment of liquidation would banish from the Earth those unregenerate spirits who were not part of the divine quota. Supposedly, fifty-seven centuries would be required to finish the job. Since the time was almost up, as many as 1,500 billion spirits would have to settle their accounts on some other planet. As a loving parent who would not abandon his children, the Father-Creator had no use for Hell except to obliterate the hideous passions symbolized by Christ and his "false prophet." Since devils as well as angels were among his children, even they could count on being saved.94 It was simply a matter of time, the settling of accounts with Karma on whatever planet or planets they were sentenced to serve out their purgatory. But the holocaust depicted in the Apocalypse was no allegory,95 for the sufferings of war had been brought on the contestants through their own fault, Trincado believed, while the passions that produced war could be purged in no other way. A similar literal interpretation was given of the great earthquake

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destined to kill two-thirds of humanity, to the promised resurrection in the flesh, and to the postmillenarian paradise on earth. In brief, that is how the Magnetic-Spiritual School resolved the contradiction between these rival theodicies. Thus, Sandino might see the light through the unveiled Scriptures and still pursue the millennium.

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10. From Solomon's Temple to Moses's Kabbalah

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n Tampico Sandino attended the meetings of Freemasons, and did so again on his return trip to Mexico in 1929. That same year in Merida, the capital of Yucatan, "Sandino acquired the third degree, passing on . . . to the degree of Master Mason." 1 That he had the highest esteem for his Masonic connections is evident from a letter to the Guatemalan representative of his Defending Army, Gustavo Aleman Bolanos (4 August 1929). In that letter he noted that the most important part of his army's archives, "a moral treasure of great historical value . . . I leave deposited before a notary public in the Grand Masonic Lodge of Yucatan."2 It is noteworthy that he did not join this lodge alone. No less a hardened Communist than Agustin Farabundo Marti became a Mason with him. Although it is rare for Communists to be Freemasons, anarchists have had a long connection with Freemasonry. We have seen that Sylvain Marechal was a Mason, that Proudhon joined the Masonic lodge at Besanc,on, that Bakunin became a Mason, and that the grandfather of Spanish anarchism, Anselmo Lorenzo, also joined a Masonic lodge. So it should hardly come as a surprise that after arriving in Argentina in 1904, Trincado also became a Mason. What is surprising is that having reached the pinnacle of the Masonic degrees, he made a pilgrimage to the Near East in search of the historical sources of Masonry's occult wisdom. In Jerusalem he established contact with the School of the Essenes supposedly founded by Moses, was allowed access to its secret archives, and then was charged by these ancient Kabbalists with the mission of propagating the truths he had discovered.3 Thus the original Kabbalah, freed of the doctrinal distortions and ritualistic practices of the modern cult of Solomon's Temple, became the fountainhead of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. What are the basic doctrines of Freemasonry that appealed to Sandino and to his mentor, Trincado? In the 1975 Mexican edition, the Diccionario enciclopedico de la masoneria describes the secret fraternity as a "philosophical and progressive association, seeking to inculcate in its adepts a love of truth,

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the study of universal morality, the sciences, and the arts . . . , to extinguish hatred among races, antagonisms of nationality, opinions, beliefs, and interests, so as to unite all men by the ties of Solidarity." Toward this end, it takes for its emblem "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."4 The First International also took solidarity for its standard. "What is its motto, its morality, its principle?" asked Bakunin. His answer: "Solidarity. All for one, one for all, and one by virtue of all. This is the motto, the fundamental principle of our great International Association which transcends the frontiers of State, thus destroying them, endeavoring to unite the workers of the entire world into a single family."5 As Bakunin's Mexican followers interpreted it, "an offense against one is an offense against all"—an antidote to the principle of "each for himself, which is the war of all against all." 6 He went on to describe the Masonic order embodying this principle: "before 1830 and especially before 1793 it was active, powerful, and genuinely beneficent, uniting through its organization the choicest minds and the most ardent hearts, the most fiery wills and the boldest personalities." Although it subsequently became an apology for bourgeois domination, it began as a force for revolution, "the vigorous incarnation of the humanitarian idea of the 18th century, as well as its practical implementation." As the international of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, it anticipated the revolutionary international of the proletariat and the principles of the International Workingmen's Association. "All the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, of human reason and human justice—worked out at first in theory by the philosophy of that century and developed within Freemasonry—emerged as practical principles, as the bases of a . . . worldwide conspiracy of the revolutionary bourgeoisie against feudal, monarchical, and divine tyranny."7 Even the Restoration of 1820 failed to curb the revolutionary potential of Freemasonry.8 Although Freemasonry in France never matched the ardor of the original, its torch remained aflame in such less-developed areas of Europe and the New World as Spain and Mexico. Thus, Freemasons played a leading role in the Spanish revolutions instrumental in establishing the First Republic in 1873 and the Second in 1931. Freemasonry played no less a role in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and its consolidation after 1920. Since Mexico in the early twentieth century was experiencing the same kind of problems as France had at the end of the eighteenth century, it is not surprising that Mexican Masonry should have revived the revolutionary principles of 1793. The established Masonic lodges are organized into the Grand Lodges of the Anglo-Saxon countries and the Grand Orients of Europe and Latin America. Although Freemasonry traces its origin to the Grand Lodge of England, organized in 1717, from England it spread to the Continent, where it acquired a different complexion. In the Protestant world, it made its peace with both church and state, but in Catholic and feudal Europe it became anticlerical and antiroyalist. Nondenominational and liberal in the Anglo-Saxon countries,

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Freemasons harbored democratic and even communist sympathies elsewhere. In the Catholic parts of Germany, the Order of the Illuminati advanced a program that was communist and antibourgeois, while in France theosophical doctrines acquired a foothold in some of the leading lodges. Because Freemasonry on the Continent became tinged with heresy, it was interdicted in a papal bull by Clement XII as early as 1738—a ban that was not lifted until 1974. Despite their differences, the Anglo-Saxon and Latin branches of Freemasonry subscribe to a common creed. It consists of, first, deism, or the belief in a Great Architect who leaves the world to its own devices after establishing the general laws that govern it; second, the belief in moral perfectibility and social progress through self-knowledge and the development of the arts and sciences; third, the belief in the grand myth of Hiram Abiff, the legendary stonemason and architect of Solomon's Temple, who personifies the Masonic ideal. Initially restricted to working or craft masons, the original craft guilds or lodges subsequently admitted nonworking, honorary, or "accepted" members. When the building of churches came to a halt with the Reformation, the lodges ceased to be dominated by working masons, and the tools and language of their craft took on a purely symbolic or speculative meaning. The so-called bible of Freemasonry, the Book of Constitutions, was commissioned by the Grand Lodge of England and accepted by its constituent lodges shortly after its publication in 1723.9 Its author, James Anderson, constructed an imposing pedigree for the secret brotherhood: "Pythagoras and Zoroaster were said to have been Freemasons—and, of course, Solomon."10 Eventually, Moses acquired a niche and, in one legend, was supposed to have been given the Kabbalah by God on Mount Sinai.11 This was the "secret Kabbalah," the precursor of the Jewish Kabbalahs, but a Kabbalah that was neither Jewish nor Christian. No wonder that the papacy reacted to the early spread of Masonry by banning it. Since from only 4 lodges in 1717 it had grown to 109 lodges in England alone within little more than a decade, it had become a clear and present danger to the church.12 Thus, the Inquisition was called on to stamp out this "heresy." Clement XII fretted not only over the discrepancies between the Masonic cult of Reason and the Catholic faith, but also over the Masonic "danger . . . to the security of kingdoms . . . [and] the tranquillity of the temporal order." 13 The Diccionario enciclopedico de la masoneria associates modern, or "free," Masonry with the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation, which began by challenging the church and ended by challenging royal power. Luther's reforms struck a mortal blow at the ancient guilds of craft masons by canceling the onerous tribute levied on the population for building the ostentatious cathedrals of the Middle Ages. "Reduced to inaction, without protection from

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the popes and, as a natural consequence, deprived of any value . . . , those celebrated corporations slowly became extinguished to the point that in 1703, with the exception of England, there was scarcely a trace of them." It was then that, in order to forestall their complete disappearance, the lodges began opening their doors to those who were not craftsmen but who shared their basic convictions concerning human freedom.14 Thus, working masonry gave way to the spiritual craft of Freemasonry. The lower, or craft, degrees of "Blue Masonry," the degrees of Apprentice, Fellow Craftsman, and Master Mason, still testify to its operative origins.15 So does the Solomonic legend concerning the architect Hiram. Also known as "the widow's son," Hiram Abiff was sent by Solomon's neighbor, the Prince of Tyre, to serve as the master builder of the restored temple at Jerusalem. The stonemasons working on the temple were divided into the three craft degrees, the first two distinguished by different passwords and handshakes, as well as an escalating scale of wages. The third degree consisted of the three persons in charge—Solomon, the Prince of Tyre (who provided the wood and precious stones), and Hiram Abiff. But before the temple could be completed, a band of Fellow Craftsmen conspired to find out the secrets of the Master Masons. Hiram Abiff was waylaid at the temple door, but refused to reveal anything. So the conspirators killed him and buried him in a secret place. Solomon then ordered a search and, after the hiding place was discovered, ordered the body to be exhumed. The reenactment of the murder and "raising" of Hiram forms the climax of the craft degrees. There is no evidence that this tragedy ever occurred. It has been traced to the Egyptian legend of the murder of Osiris and the search by his wife and sister Isis for his body—also subsequently "raised." No less noteworthy are the parallels with the death of Manes, the founder of the Gnostic religion, who was known as "the widow's son" and barbarously put to death. As the Jewish Encyclopedia suggests, there may also be a Jewish source. Thus, the story of Hiram has been traced to the Rabbinic legend that, "while all the workmen were killed so that they should not build another temple devoted to idolatry, Hiram himself was raised to Heaven."16 Whatever its origin, this Grand Legend has little to do with esoteric Masonry at its highest levels, for the higher degrees trace their origins backward from Solomon through David to Moses, and even earlier to Noah and Adam. The manual for Apprentice Masons of the Spanish Grand Orient divides the history of symbolic or speculative Masonry into three epochs, of which the most ancient stresses sources other than the Bible. "The first includes the ancient times in which famous schools became established in India. These transmitted the sciences to Egypt and from there to Greece and finally Rome. . . . The second epoch begins with Christianity, when the Jews were slaves of the Romans and of their own tyrants, when equality and fraternity were pro-

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claimed by the Gospels, and when the first Christians suffered death to defend those doctrines that, upheld in all their purity in those times, constituted a social revolution. The third epoch embraces the period from the renascence of letters in the 15th century to the present."17 Although the origin of Masonry becomes lost in legend, the legend is nonetheless fundamental to understanding the Masonic mind-set. The following is a reconstruction of the legendary origins according to the Spanish Grand Orient.18 The theogony of the mythical Indra is supposedly the source of the doctrine of a Father-Creator of humankind, his children, and of the doctrines of human equality and universal fraternity—the moral basis of the Masonic system and of Sandino's philosophy. Although local customs effaced these doctrines, Manu and his laws, recapitulated in twelve books, restored them after many centuries. As we have seen, the laws of Manu figured prominently in the foundations of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Among Manu's many contributions was the doctrine of the three ages of humankind. These corresponded to the three quarters, or seasons, of the year in India: spring (creation), summer (growth and propagation), and winter (death and transformation). These seasons, symbolized by the first three degrees of speculative Masonry, became personified centuries later as Brahma (the creator god), Vishnu (the preserver god), and Shiva (the destroyer god). But the Brahmans or priests who transmitted the Vedic male trinity took advantage of their high station to become tyrants and perverted the original doctrine and divided society into superior and inferior castes. Eventually a new reformer appeared in neighboring Persia. Steeped in the original theogony of Indra and the laws of Manu, Zoroaster rejected Brahmanism for the moral doctrine based on the maxim "Love your neighbor as yourself." He restored respect for manual work, industry, and the sciences. Women ceased to be slaves and became companions and the heads of households. The castes were abolished along with other divisive privileges, and animals were treated as if they were people. Zoroaster taught that there was but one deity, that God was infinitely compassionate, that all humankind might be saved from sin, that there was no Hell, but only Purgatory and Paradise. These doctrines made him the most illustrious of all the teachers of ancient Masonry. Incorporated in the Zend Avesta, they would become basic to modern Masonry and also to the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, was Zoroaster's most important disciple. Educated by Brahmans but under the influence of Zoroaster's teachings, Buddha became the reformer of Brahmanism, thereby doing for India what Zoroaster had done for the Persians. He revived the original teachings of Indra based on the one god and father of humankind, taught people to live as family, to respect the equal rights of all, and to work for human progress. As one illustrious Mason summarized the contribution of the three great

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precursors of contemporary Masonry, "Masons of all the rites, enlightened men of all countries, we have here our first founders: Indra, Zoroaster, Buddha!"19 Buddha's followers, however, strayed from the teachings of their spiritual master and, in the effort to escape the stains of this world, abandoned it to its foibles. India's gurus then began associating in secret in order to preserve the purity of the original teachings. These they wrapped up in "mysteries" and communicated only to initiates. Later, the mysteries reached Egypt, where they were embodied in the cults of Isis and Osiris. From there they were transmitted to Asia Minor and Greece. Moses and Pythagoras became the most important of the new teachers. But the mysteries in Egypt and Greece degenerated, and Pythagoras and his disciples were severely persecuted. The light of science and moral wisdom continued to fade, until Solomon undertook to revive the mysteries Moses imported from Egypt. Following the death of Solomon, Jerusalem was destroyed and the Hebrew people dispersed. Since the Masonic Order traveled with them, its doctrines began to spread. But it was barely recognized and did not become influential until Jesus's disciples induced the early Christians to meet in secret to practice its precepts. These he incorporated into his new religion. Preserved by the early Christian congregations, Masonry flourished during the first three centuries of our era. Then it almost completely perished with the conversion of Constantine and the Roman Empire to Christianity. Theological disputations and the incompetence of his successors combined to make a mockery of Jesus's teachings. Masonry survived only among the societies of stonemasons, whose initiates were sworn to protect its secrets. Not until the Crusades was it reintroduced into Western Europe. But the papal and secular Inquisitions transformed Christianity from a blessing into a torment. The voice of reason was extinguished when scientists, because of discoveries at odds with church dogma, were silenced and imprisoned. It was recovered only after the Reformation ushered in the third and last epoch of Masonry, an epoch consistent with the original gospel. Such were the legendary origins of speculative Masonry that attached Sandino to the Masons for the rest of his life. Although his association with Spiritists ultimately induced him to cast his lot with a rival school, the legendary history of Masonry served as a starting point for the MagneticSpiritual School's pedigree, which he made his own. Although Trincado claimed to have uncovered the teachings of Seth, the Investigator, he revered the Hindu scriptures as the principal repository of philosophical wisdom. That wisdom was supposedly transmitted by Manu and his laws and by the two most-important schools of austere philosophy in the ancient world, those founded by Zoroaster and by Moses. In this perspec-

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tive, the schools founded by Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates were derivative. As for Jesus, who was said to be an adept of Moses's Essenic School, his thought, too, lacked originality.20 As in Freemasonry, the strategy of Trincado's school was to divulge its philosophy piecemeal through the three principal degrees of Novice, Sympathizer, and Adherent. But unlike Freemasonry, his school rejected the religious trappings of god worship. "Freemasonry carries within itself a principle of humanity," Trincado wrote, "but it also contains grades and rituals that despite itself emanate from the religions from which it springs." Although Freemasonry "has more merits than faults and is a step on the ladder of spiritual progress," it had become marred by too close association with Christianity.21 Consequently, when Argentine Freemasons awarded Trincado an honorary third-third degree, he turned it down. For the most part, Sandino agreed with Trincado's assessment of Freemasonry. But unlike Trincado, he never repudiated it. There was little cause for a rupture, since Freemasons had agreed to house the archives of his Defending Army and had provided moral support for his struggle in Nicaragua. Besides, Trincado had found a niche for Masonic doctrines that were compatible with the teachings of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Those doctrines were the legacy of a "secret group of philosophical Adepts," who had infiltrated the professional guilds of craft Masonry.22 Although there was more than one secret group of infiltrators, both the Knights Templars and the Rosicrucians figure prominently among them. Founded in Munich in 1775 and representing so-called eclectic Masonry, the Lodge Theodore of Good Counsel harbored the secret teachings of both brotherhoods. Meanwhile, it served as the "nursery or preparatory-school for another Order of Masons, who called themselves the ILLUMINATED." Weishaupt, the chief promoter of the Eclectic System and the Number One Illuminatus, was believed to have been "a Strict Observanz and an adept Rosycrucian."23 The Strickten Observanz (Strict Disciplinarians), founded in 1751, represented a Germanic revival of the Templar Masons, or Knights Templars.24 Their origins go back to 1118, nineteen years after the First Crusade ended with the deliverance of Jerusalem, when a band of nine gentlemen-crusaders organized an order for the protection of pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. In 1128, the order was sanctioned by the pope, and a "rule was drawn up by St. Bernard under which the Knights Templars were bound by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience."25 But through donations and conquests, the order became extremely rich, morally lax, and suspected of heresy. It appears that the Templars were unitarian deists for whom Jesus was only a prophet, not the Son of God.26 A Moslem influence seems likely. Thus, the order was formally banned in a papal bull, suppressed by the Inquisition in 1312, and its Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake two years later.27

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But the Templars survived by going underground. According to one legend, Jacques de Molay appointed a successor in a line of Grand Masters who have succeeded each other without a break until the present.28 In response to persecution by the secular authorities and the church, the Templars were among the first to oppose both clerical and royal power. They also embraced the Kabbalistic legend of Moses's secret doctrine, into which Jesus had supposedly been initiated. The Templars believed the Gospel of John contained the key to this esoteric wisdom—a belief also shared by Sandino and the Magnetic-Spiritual School.29 This tracing of origins back from Solomon's Temple to Moses's Kabbalah is a distinguishing feature not only of the Templars but of all occult Masonry—as distinct from the established Grand Orients and Grand Lodges. With the German revival of the Templars in 1751, an occult revolution, inspired by their heretical doctrines, took place within German Masonry.30 Freemasonry's 18th degree, Knight of the Rosy Cross, symbolized war on religion, while the 30th degree, Grand Elect Knight of Kadosch, became transmuted from a degree for avenging the murder of Hiram into one for avenging the death of Jacques de Molay.31 In effect, "the reprobation of attack on authority personified by the master-builder becomes approbation of attack on authority."32 Here was one source of Weishaupt's doctrine of revolution. The other source was Rosicrucianism, which also had a German origin. The earliest of the modern secret societies, the Rosicrucians were first announced to the world in a manifesto published in Cassel in 1614.33 In its earliest known form it is traceable, if not to the physician and Theosophist Paracelsus, to the circle of his close disciples. I n i 6 i 4 - i 6 i 5 , Johann Valentin Andrea published the Fama Fraternitatis, which claimed that the Society of the Rose and Cross had been founded in 1413 by Christian Rosenkreutz, whose writings allegedly had been buried with him and only recently discovered in his tomb. Only after their publication in 1616 did Andrea acknowledge that the documents attributed to Rosenkreutz were of more recent origin. That same year another of Paracelsus's disciples, the Rosicrucian Robert Fludd, published a treatise defending the brotherhood against charges of magic and heresy.34 Modern Rosicrucianism dates from these two publications. Rosicrucian doctrine supposedly derived from Moses's secret Kabbalah. The seventeenth-century Rosicrucians described themselves as "sons of Moses" and believed that Moses had in his possession a "secret Cabala." No less a figure than Francis Bacon, reputedly a Rosicrucian, "recognized the divergence between the ancient secret tradition descending from Moses and the perverted Jewish Cabala of the Rabbis." 35 Since Trincado, too, believed in a secret Kabbalah descending from Moses, he seems to have shared the Rosicrucians' basic beliefs. Sandino also had high praise for the Rosicrucians and appears to have shared their doctrines, but without ever claiming to be one of them.36

%

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The extant correspondence between the Englishman Fludd and the main body of German Rosicrucians indicates that they were steeped in Neoplatonism and that as pantheists they rejected both the Catholic and the Protestant versions of Christianity. Liable to the charge of heresy, the movement escaped the Inquisition by following the Templars' lead and going underground. As a cover for its activities, it began penetrating the craft guilds that survived from the Middle Ages. With the founding of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717, Rosicrucians made an attempt to stamp their image on it.37 This may be the origin of the disputed 18th degree, or Knight of the Rosy Cross.38 It may also account for the Rosicrucians' self-image as "Masons of the highest grade." According to one account, they imposed on English Masonry its highest grade of the Royal Arch. According to another, there were "Unknown Superiors" in possession of a secret doctrine reserved for still-higher but occult grades.39 The Rosicrucian Brotherhood seems to have suffered the same fate as the Illuminati, but in the late nineteenth century it was revived in association with Gnostic and theosophical doctrines. At the heart of this revival was the belief that human beings are created with a spark of the divine that, by becoming known, can be a source of power as well as wisdom to the initiated. This doctrine was shared by the Illuminati and also reappears in Sandino's correspondence and the publications of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. From the Templars and the Rosicrucians Weishaupt learned the importance of hatching subversive doctrines in secret. But he acknowledged their doctrines to be "pious frauds" and insisted that everyone be free to give any explanation of their symbols that they considered palatable.40 The papers of the order seized in Bavaria show that the "Illuminati employed the forms of Freemasonry, but that they considered it in itself, apart from their own degrees, as a puerile absurdity and that they detested the Rose-Croix."41 Even so, Weishaupt perceived their utility as a bait. So he welded them into a working system—"the disintegrating doctrines of the Gnostics and Manicheans, of the modern philosophers and Encyclopaedists . . . , the discipline of the Jesuits and Templars, the organization and secrecy of the Freemasons, the philosophy of Machiavelli, the mystery of the Rosicrucians."42 So did Sandino, except that he believed in them and in Moses's secret Kabbalah. Even more influential than German Rosicrucianism for understanding Sandino's mind-set was its Latin development by the French Illuminists—not to be confused with the German Illuminati. Trincado credits them with believing in "Spiritism, which was then scornfully referred to as Illuminism."43 In 1754, the Rosicrucian Martinez Pasqualis founded the Order of Elus Cohens (Elected Priests), known later as Martinists or Illuminists. Of Spanish and possibly Jewish descent, Martinez Pasqualis bequeathed to his Kabbalistic sect a large number of allegedly secret Hebraic manuscripts.44 These supposedly shaped the post-craft, or Cohen, degrees and, above these, the "con-

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cealed degrees leading up to the Rose-Croix . . . the capstone of the edifice." By 1760, these concealed degrees had become a cover for teaching the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist and founder of modern Spiritualism.45 The "Ineffable Degrees" of occult Masonry are traceable to French Illuminism. Based on the Jewish mystery that envelops the Ineffable Name of God, this development of Rosicrucianism suggests more than a symbolic Jewish source. Because God's name was never meant to be pronounced by the profane, the Jews replaced it with the Tetragrammaton—four letters derived from the names Jehovah, Jahweh, Yahveh, or Iahveh. The Tetragrammaton supposedly conferred miraculous powers, as did Moses's rod engraved with its image. The Ineffable Name within a triangle figures in Fludd's Kabbalistic system.46 It also reappears in the emblem of the Magnetic-Spiritual School along with the Templar symbols of the double triangle and the pentagon. No less noteworthy were the "Melchisedeck Lodges" on the Continent, which openly admitted Jews and in which again the Rose-Croix degree formed the capstone. In the Rosicrucian Lodges this degree was also known as the degree of Melchisedeck.47 First mentioned in Genesis 14:18-20 as a Priest of God and king of pre-Israelite Jerusalem to whom the patriarch Abraham paid tribute, Melchisedeck is the prototype of both the Davidic King and the Christ-King. As Jehovah says to David in Psalms 110:4 and to Jesus in Hebrews 5:6 and again in 6:20, "Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec." Trincado, too, acknowledged a connection between the order of Melchisedeck and the Rosicrucians. How explain, he asks, that "Melchisedeck had so much wisdom, and that Abraham is recognized by Melchisedeck and finds ways of overcoming the sterility of his wife Sarah." The answer is that "both belong to the Rosy Cross!" 48 Because of their knowledge of the Divine Being and of the secret laws of nature in Moses's Kabbalah, both enjoyed seemingly miraculous powers—powers attributed to Spiritists. That Trincado conceived of his school as a Spiritist or Illuminist variation of Masonry is evident from his tracing of the Spiritism of Light and Truth to the "as yet misunderstood society of Rosicrucians." A legendary society antedating by several millennia the modern Rosicrucian Brotherhood, it counted Zoroaster among its adepts as well as Abraham and Melchisedeck.49 Based on a "secret testament of Abraham," the doctrines of this legendary brotherhood were revived by occult Masonry and by the Magnetic-Spiritual School. What was the content of this secret Rosicrucian doctrine? Among the occult sciences that shaped it—astrology, magic, and alchemy—the last seems to have been decisive. During the Middle Ages, alchemy was not only a pseudoscience, but also an occult philosophy alien to Christianity. "Those who rebelled against the religious limitations of their day concealed their philosophic teachings under the allegory of gold-making. In this way they preserved their

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personal liberty and were ridiculed rather than persecuted." Alchemy taught that God is in everything, that God is the "One Universal Spirit" or "spiritual seed" multiplying itself in an infinity of ways.50 Its goal was the regeneration of our spiritual nature concealed under the metaphor of the transmutation of base metals into gold. In choosing his school's emblem, Trincado relied on this alchemical tradition. The emblem's archetype is the Grand Rosicrucian Alchemical Formula, with its outer circles and projecting rays, its interior equilateral triangle enclosing an anchorlike device, and its six-pointed star suspended from the anchor below the triangle's base.51 Trincado was no stranger to the symbolic alchemy of Paracelsus and his disciples, so it is hardly coincidence that the number of rays in the school's emblem exactly matches the number in the "Tree of Alchemy" or "Leaves of Hermes' Sacred Tree." 52 Altogether there are fourteen, corresponding to the fourteen ways in which the Universal Fire or Spirit of the alchemists manipulates matter and manifests itself throughout creation.53 The culminating process of creation was known as "projection"—the transmuting of base metals into gold. The power to make gold, or the universal medicine of regeneration that brings out the gold in human nature, was attributed in alchemical and Rosicrucian circles to the legendary "Philosopher's Stone." Symbolized by a six-pointed star of two interlaced equilateral triangles—the very same figure as the Star of David—it reappears in the emblem of the Magnetic-Spiritual School dangling from an anchor and connected to a pair of scales.54 In Kabbalistic lore, the Hexagram represents the six days of Creation: "it is the Kabbalistic double triad signifying 'what is up is down,' "that there is no supernatural being in the heavens to be worshiped but only a natural generatrix of all that is.55 It tells us that the creation of the universe took six days and on the seventh day the creator rested, signifying that "one does not get to rest until after work" or, better still, "whoever consumes without producing is a thief!"56 And it tells us that in the history of humankind there are six stages of work and progress, and a seventh stage of rest or fulfillment, corresponding to the advent of the Universal Commune.57 Trincado, we have seen, traced the source of this Rosicrucian doctrine to the Kabbalah. But which Kabbalah? At the time the Grand Lodge of England was organized, no fewer than three Kabbalahs were acknowledged: the ancient secret Kabbalah handed down by the Egyptians and attributed to Moses; the Jewish version, also attributed to Moses, that passed down through Solomon and the Essenes to craft Masonry at the time of the Crusades; and the perverted Kabbalah mingled with magic, superstition, and anti-Christian legends.58 It was the ancient secret Kabbalah, Trincado believed, that the Rosicrucians had assimilated and transmitted to posterity.59 The original Kabbalah supposedly antedated that of the Jews by several

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millennia. It was said to be the foundation of Moses's "secret school of the Essenes," only dimly recognized in the doctrines of the Essenes during Jesus's times.60 According to Kabbalistic lore, Moses established in the midst of the Jews "his secret and symbolical school . . . known as The Tabernacle Mysteries. " When he instituted his mysteries, he supposedly gave to a few chosen initiates "oral teachings which could never be written but were to be preserved from one generation to the next by word-of-mouth . . . in the form of philosophical keys [to the Bible] . . . called by the Jews the Qabbala."61 These keys remained a secret until Trincado was directed to reveal them "for the definitive judgment or sentencing of humanity."62 Trincado further believed that Moses's Kabbalah contained the secret to psychic powers—hypnotic, mediumistic, magnetic, and spiritual—empowering its adepts to perform acts of high magic with the cooperation of Missionary Spirits. Thus the so-called miracles of the New Testament were attributed to "the Kabbalah's rules of Magic." 63 The centerpiece of the occult Kabbalah, according to Trincado's testimony, was a secret testament by the patriarch Abraham not included among the apocryphal testaments bearing Abraham's name. Supposedly dictated to Abraham by the Master Spirit of Truth, it was handed down to Jacob and then to Moses. It contained the original covenant between the Father Creator and his chosen people and promised to multiply Abraham's seed over the entire earth.64 It was not just Trincado's fertile imagination that attributed to Abraham a secret testament. The apocryphal books of the Bible contain several versions of a testament by Abraham, and Jewish legend tells of others. The Kabbalah's testament, hidden for thirty-six centuries, is repeatedly cited by Trincado. Among its salient passages, the following are worth mentioning: (i) "Humans shall be of light, because they shall see the light of their Father, which my Spirits shall give to them"; (2) "My lampblack children whom you call devils were once humans. And my children whom you take to be angels were human, and they shall bring me my lampblack children who, when they acknowledge me, shall become faithful"; (3) "I gave my Light to Adam for my children. . . . And from my son Abraham shall be born my son who is the Truth"; (4) "All are my children, those called angels and those called devils"; (5) "The worlds are infinite and humans must live in all of them, but creation continues and never ceases"; (6) "There never are struggles among people that are not also between incarnate and disincarnate spirits, between angels and devils. . . . The devils who were people fight with people, and people do not see them nor what they do"; (7) "And you shall count the times by centuries of a hundred years and there shall be 36 centuries from when I set down the law until the earth shall know it, and in that century my children shall be of light, because they will see the light of their Father given to them by my spirits, and there shall be peace among all." 65

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What does this secret teaching amount to? It is the basis of the MagneticSpiritual School's doctrine that all people are part of one family, that all share the same destiny, that God loves us all, and that all will be saved. At the same time, it presupposes that, because sin cannot go unpunished, virtually every abode of the living becomes a purgatory for the piecemeal operation of Karma. The first indication that Sandino relied on this legendary Kabbalah for guidance is in a letter to Pedro Altamirano on 3 February 1931. There he says that he cannot reveal the identity of the other Messenger Spirits in his Defending Army, "because the Kabbalah does not permit me." After victory, the time will come for revealing it. In the meantime, his struggle in Nicaragua is guided by "forecasts that have their foundation in our Kabbalah."66 This was not the Kabbalah of the Jews; it was what Sandino had assimilated from the Magnetic-Spiritual School.67 His knowledge of Moses's Kabbalah would later include the passages from Abraham's secret testament cited by Trincado in "Los extremos se tocan."6S Sandino believed that disincarnate spirits fight alongside incarnate ones in the struggle to redeem humanity. As he told Belausteguigoitia, "the spirits also struggle, incarnate and without flesh."69 It seems that in Trincado's school he had discovered a higher, or spiritual, grade of Masonry dissociated from the ceremonies and rituals of the established Masonic orders. Moses's secret Kabbalah is the apocryphal source of Sandino's Gnostic and millenarian syncretism. It is also basic to understanding the symbols of his Magnetic-Spiritual School. In the school's emblem, the dominant symbol of the sun represents not just physical light or energy, but also enlightenment or spiritual wisdom. Its projecting rays symbolize both the spirits emanating from the Father-Creator and the school's "Spiritism of Light and Truth." 70 The words "New Age" inscribed within the sun stand for the inauguration of the end time foretold in the Apocalypse and herald the advent of a "Regenerated World," when the school's new gospel of Light and Truth will be proclaimed to the nations.71 The preface to one of Trincado's major works is dated 15 November 1929, or the twenty-seventh day of the second month of the year 19 in his New Age Calendar.72 That would date the beginning of the New Age on 20 September 1911—the day of his school's founding. The double triangle at the sun's center represents wisdom in the form of cosmic knowledge and self-knowledge. "To talk of Creator, Spirit, and Ether in order to understand the creation, as of Spirit, Soul, and Body to understand man, is [to invoke] the same real Trinity in its two grades or states." 73 Each of these pairs has a mediator, or connecting link, the disincarnate Spirit in the work of cosmic creation and the incarnate Soul in the work of human creation.74 In this cosmology, the self is a microcosm of the universe and a clue to its structure. To know the world, one must know oneself. Sandino, too, invoked this Socratic maxim.75

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The pair of scales attached to an anchor symbolizes justice according to divine law. "Everything reduces to a single commandment: 'Love your brother.'" 76 This is "the only law that governs the universe, the mother of all laws." 77 Besides retribution—for people must pay for their transgressions— justice exacts reparation from the evildoer. "Did you kill? You will give life to your victim. Did you hate? You will love your enemy."78 Because Karma is both a physical and a moral force, "everything enters on the inflexible balance of the law."79 Suspended from the anchor is the star of David. Although traditionally a symbol of Jewish self-identity, it was also the star of Moses.80 But according to Trincado, "Moses did not found a religion or anything resembling one," so that Judaism is a perversion of his Essenic School.81 The error of Freemasonry, Trincado contended, had been to make peace with religion as a veiled form of idolatry. Moses did not make that mistake. In this perspective, the Magnetic-Spiritual School contributed to reviving Moses's secret wisdom of the Orient as transmitted through Persia to the Hebrews.82 Moses's Kabbalah, rather than Hiram's legacy and the symbolism of Solomon's Temple, underlay the teachings of Trincado's school. But this leap backward in time signified for Sandino and for the Magnetic-Spiritual School a leap forward in spiritual enlightenment. Thus, the revival of Moses's Essenic School signified a rupture with the Christian Era, the dawn of a New Age of the Spirit when humanity would learn to know the Father-Creator directly through self-knowledge. It was the New Age Sandino had been waiting for, the promise of his triumph in Nicaragua.

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Conclusion: The Relevance of Sandino's Communism

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hat is there to conclude about Sandino's extremist politics and bizarre philosophy? Having established the nature of his communism through an examination of its sources, one arrives at the most important consideration: its relevance. The purpose of a conclusion is not to launch a detailed investigation, but I can at least chart the way. By the spell of his example, Sandino contributed to making a revolution in his native Nicaragua and to fomenting insurrectionary movements in other Latin American countries. But these movements were not even nominally communist, and some were not even initially socialist. Unlike Sandino, his would-be followers cannot be accused of attempting the impossible. What, then, is the relevance of his seemingly impossible ideal? Relevance has to do with more than application and causal connections. Also relevant are those features of Sandino's syncretism that have reappeared in the politics of his successors independent of any actual influence. One way of establishing the potential importance of Sandino's communism is to show that it was not a passing fantasy or mere historical curiosity; its fundamental message continues to be generated independently by others. Another is to show that, even if hopeless or premature, it is influential because of its side effects. That Marxism is becoming a dead word tells us nothing about the prospects of Sandino's communism. From Marx to Gorbachev, communism has been hampered by elements alien to it within Marxist ideology. Marx's efforts to make communism "scientific" backfired, which explains the renewed interest in his unscientific predecessors. In Eastern Europe there is a movement from Lenin back to Marx, while in the West some of the leading intellectuals on the Left are scrapping Marx's communism for that of his precursors. It now appears that this pre-Marxist legacy, which shaped Sandino's communism, not only survived the Marxist challenge, but also promises to outlive it. As Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit testify in Obsolete Communism, the May

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1968 revolution in France represented a return to a communist tradition that is actually more feasible than Marxism because it does not self-destruct.1 Although Lenin tried to revive this pre-Marxist legacy in the name of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism ended by suppressing it. Unlike his fellow Bolsheviks, he began his political career under the influence of the earlier tradition. With its egalitarian goal that would later become Sandino's and with its anarcho-Blanquist politics wedded to Marxist theory, Leninism in 1917 is a classic example of the fusion of anarchist and authoritarian currents within communism. It belongs in the line of descent beginning with the anarchists during the French Revolution, passing through Babeuf's authoritarian communism, and bifurcating in the Proudhonist and Blanquist currents within the International Workingmen's Association.2 This accounts for the communist label's being applied to both currents. As James Guillaume recalled at the Basel Congress of the International in 1869, the partisans of collective ownership split into two factions: "Those who advocated ownership of collective property by the State were called 'state' or 'authoritarian communists.' Those who advocated ownership of collective property directly by the workers' associations were called 'anti-authoritarian communists' or . . . 'communist anarchists.' " 3 Although these projects are seemingly exclusive, Abraham Guillen runs them together in the hope of ensuring their survival: "In order for working people to defeat their exploiters and oppressors, they must return to the spirit of Babeuf, Blanqui, Bakunin, Lenin, and Durruti"—a mixed bag of authoritarian and anti-authoritarian communists, including "Kropotkin, Trotsky, Mao, Cohn-Bendit, 'Che' Guevara, and Fidel Castro!" 4 A post-Marxist synthesis is in gestation that may put an end to the former exclusiveness and interminable disputes on the Left. We are used to thinking of communism and anarchism as inveterate enemies, but Sandino made them political allies. The millenarian tradition in the West challenges the Gnostic belief in occult wisdom, but Sandino found a place for each in his philosophical pantheon. The materialist premises of communism and anarchism exclude the spiritual concerns of the great religions, but Sandino managed to marry them. He is not alone. Others, too, are discovering that this wedding of incompatibles is more of an asset than a liability. Somoza ridiculed Sandino's intellectual smorgasbord, but sensed that it was politically consequential. Its subversive germs posed a threat to law and order, so he had Sandino killed. A week later, troops of the national guard surrounded Sandino's camp at Wiwili. "The suppression was total, and some three hundred Sandinistas with their wives and children were slain." 5 Sandino's strategy of guerrilla warfare survived the holocaust, although his communist project momentarily got lost in the shuffle. But the communist phoenix dies periodically only to be reborn. Although the FSLN's founders

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misinterpreted Sandino's message, traces survived in the magnum opus of his assassin. Today, fully a half century after Somoza's work appeared, the time has come to restore the rest of Sandino's legacy. More important than its resurrection, the sentiments undergirding Sandino's communism would reappear independently of his influence. In tilting at the U.S. Marines and demanding of his homeland not even a handful of dust for his grave, Sandino showed himself to be an apt disciple of Don Quixote: "Some say I am ridiculous, but I have no reason to be anything else." 6 Some forty years later, Ernesto "Che" Guevara would directly invoke Quixote's example while expressing virtually the same sentiments: "Allow me to say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. . . . Once again, I feel beneath my heels the ribs of Rosinante. I return to the road with my lance under my arm." 7 Until Guevara appeared on the political scene to help revive this revolutionary current, Sandino was the last of the anarcho-Blanquists. That there is a pre-Marxist content essential to understanding Guevara's revolutionary theory is now widely recognized. In the words of one astute commentator, "Guevarism arose as a doctrine paralleling orthodox Marxism-Leninism but never actually locking horns with it." 8 The Czech comrades accused Guevara of being a "new Bakunin." 9 Reasons for the charge of heresy were not hard to find: first, his novel strategy of revolution—the vanguard can create the revolutionary conditions; and second, his skipping of revolutionary stages aimed at the immediate and simultaneous construction of socialism and communism.10 He arrived at this project independently, but, a revival of the anarcho-Blanquist legacy that three decades earlier had found its material embodiment in Sandino, it was far from original. The basis for Guevara's communism, like Sandino's, was the morale required to sustain the insurrectionary group. "Guerrilla struggle meant a kind of communism in microcosm—an environment that suppressed differences and acted as a midwife for the surfacing of the best in man, a community of fellowship in which all performed according to their abilities and shared alike." n That it was not the communism of party bureaucrats is evident from Guevara's slurs against Cuba's new bigwigs, with their beautiful secretaries, Cadillacs, and air conditioning. "Soon they got accustomed to these things; they now preferred keeping doors shut for the sake of air conditioners, keeping the warm Cuban atmosphere outside . . . [with] the crowds of workers." 12 The reforms in Eastern Europe, the precursors of perestroika, also aroused Guevara's ire. The return to a market economy, he complained, only superficially responded to the problems of chronic shortages and low productivity. Worst of all, the reliance on material incentives placed a premium on personal selfishness instead of on group solidarity. "Every day the managers earn

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more. It is enough to look at the latest project in the German Democratic Republic [to appreciate] the increasing importance of the manager's role or, better still, of the emoluments that go with the role." 13 That the revolutionary should resist the temptation to live better than others is not an idea unique to Sandino and Guevara. The same sentiment has resurfaced in the Soviet Union and finds expression in Boris Yeltsin's memoirs. As a candidate for membership in the Politburo, Yeltsin was assigned a luxurious dacha complete with a domestic staff of three cooks, three waitresses, a housemaid, and a master gardener with several assistants. With growing disgust for this blatant indulgence passing for an oasis of communist perfection, Yeltsin did the unthinkable for a party bureaucrat: "As long as no one can build or buy his own dacha, as long as we continue to live in such relative poverty, I refuse to eat caviar followed by sturgeon; I will not race through the streets in a car that can ignore traffic lights. I cannot swallow excellent imported medicines, knowing that my neighbor's wife can't get an aspirin for her child." 14 Yeltsin provides an insider's view of why Stalinism is so hated in Eastern Europe. The most widespread criticism is directed not only against restrictions on human freedom, but also against social inequality. That a pre-Marxist version of communist leveling is endemic among the Soviet peoples is acknowledged even by critics.15 Soaked in the humanism of Germany's cultured elite, Marx did not see fit to place a cap on human needs and their satisfaction under communism, nor could he bring himself to level downward instead of upward. As a result, the new order celebrated by his followers amounts to socialism for the toiling masses and communism for a privileged few. As Yeltsin caustically observes, it would be better if communism were a metaphor for a glorious future instead of a reality, for the needs of those at the top of the party pyramid are so plentiful that so far it has been possible to create real communism only for a few dozen bigshots.16 Unlike Guevara, Yeltsin is a demagogue who acknowledges the appeal of communism at the same time that he questions its feasibility. On the eve of his party's twenty-eighth congress, he proposed that the party change its name from "Communist" to the "Party for Democratic Socialism." For roughly the same reason given by his colleagues in Eastern Europe, it was the fraudulent claim of his party to be building communism that he proposed to trash. In a comparison of Marx's scenario of socialism with actually existing socialism, it became clear to Yeltsin that it was not enough to reform socialism, since the task before his country was to build it.17 But Marx's socialism is a far cry from communism and the egalitarian aspirations on which Yeltsin has built his political career. Even so, these aspirations are surviving the eclipse of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe—the sense in which Sandino's communism survives his

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death. If Sandino lives, it is because his ideas have returned to strike the same sympathetic chord that Yeltsin's do. That they have resurfaced in combination with Marxist theory, as in Guevara's case, does not detract from their continued relevance for the contemporary world. Guevara is a prime example of life after death. "In May 1968, Che's conception of communism would combine with Marcuse's critique of capitalist civilization, with certain features of the Chinese cultural revolution, and with the Trotskyist critique of bureaucracy—a fusion of ingredients that proved to be highly explosive."18 Sandino's case was different because his legacy was suppressed. But now that it is being revived, it, too, is likely to combine with these new communist currents. The anarcho-Blanquism of which Sandino was a latter-day exponent has since given way to its anarcho-Marxist cousin. The brainchild of Abraham Guillen, the Spanish Civil War exile and mentor of urban guerrilla warfare in Argentina and Uruguay, anarcho-Marxism shares with Sandino's communism the same pre-Marxist legacy of a republic of equals to be achieved through a combination of conspiratorial and mass insurrection. "Depending on the mixture and the ingredients, there are different varieties of this social and political philosophy. The most significant and enduring one has combined Marx's historical, economic and political analysis of bourgeois society with Bakunin's critique of bureaucracy and strategy for revolution. Lenin was the first to accomplish this tour de force." 19 Guillen's starting point is anarchism rather than Marxism. Coming as he did from anarchism, Sandino has more in common with Guillen than with other contemporary figures. Until June 1971, when I first interviewed Guillen in Montevideo, he had referred to his theory as neo-Marxism and to his strategy as neoanarchism. Why neo-Marxism? Because a dictatorship of the proletariat "led to the domination of a bureaucracy over the working masses in the U.S.S.R. . . . [and] acts as a fetter or brake on social change, impeding the self-management of socialism." Why neoanarchism? Because the "anarchist theses on 'free municipalities' or 'free communes' represent a return to the Middle Ages and are unsuited to the integration of production and social capital required by the present technological era . . . by the agrovilles of the future, having all the advantages, comforts, productivity and educational resources of the great cities." 20 Thus Marx's theses concerning a dictatorship of the proletariat had lost its force, along with Kropotkin's exaggerated claims concerning life in a free commune. Subsequently, Guillen began using "anarcho-Marxism" to describe his unique synthesis of the thought and action of Marx and Bakunin. As the two most influential "isms" dividing the protagonists of revolution, anarchism and Marxism might continue to be at loggerheads only at their own risk. This called for a synthesis "indispensable in the twentieth century in order to re-

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vitalize Marxism and demystify neo-Stalinism . . . [and] hardly less necessary to overcome the Utopian and unrealistic elements in traditional anarchism: its social moralism, apolitical idealism and economic simplicity," hence Guillen's redefinition of himself as an anarcho-Marxist. "Anarcho-Marxism is the revolutionary science of our epoch: Marxist in its economic conception of capitalism, the contradictions of capitalism and the means of overcoming them; anarchist in its conception of direct democracy, self-managed enterprises and federations of freely associated workers."21 This is not to say that anarcho-Marxists share the same premises or agree on all fundamental points.22 To get to communism, Guillen argues, workers must take over the means of production and install a new system of direct democracy based on Soviets or workers' councils.23 Under the constraints imposed by economic scarcity in backward countries, differential payments may have to be retained as material incentives—unless workers have already acquired an "egalitarian education" and are geared "to practice equality in misery."24 But the fundamental task is to equalize, since one will never reach communism short of equality in both production and distribution.25 It is the anarcho-Marxist's insistence on equal pay as well as equal say that makes Guillen a faithful bearer of the same legacy as Sandino. We see, then, that Sandino's legacy is being borne by persons who have a stronger claim to being his heirs than do today's Sandinistas.26 By the same token, anarcho-Marxists do not consist only of those who adopt the name. No less important to this current than those who converged on Marxism from anarchism are the "left-wing communists" who converged on anarchism from Marxism. These were the council communists trounced by Lenin in his pamphlet " 'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder." One of their early spokesmen, Anton Pannekoek, had been extolled by Lenin in 1917 for some of the same reasons for which Lenin found him wanting in 1920.27 As Pannekoek summarized his group's initial objectives, it is not enough to expropriate capitalists without at the same time dispossessing state functionaries of their control over production, without curbing the power of factory managers, scientific specialists, and supervisors.28 Council communists are credited with having infused into Marxism a strong dose of libertarianism. Speaking as a council communist, Noam Chomsky claims that their interpretation of Marxism "converges on anarchist currents."29 And in the effort to rehabilitate anarchism for Marxists, Daniel Guerin shows that "the constructive ideas of anarchism conserve their vitality, that if they are reexamined and passed through a strainer, they may help contemporary socialist thought to make a new start . . . [by] enriching Marxism."30 Karl Korsch, another council communist, made the same point. Concluding that what survived of Marxism was no longer an adequate theoretical

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expression of the workers' actual interests after World War I, he called for a reevaluation of Marx's precursors—Blanqui, Proudhon, and Bakunin among others—whom he considered to be no less important than Marx.31 "There seems to be good reason, in the search for what is living or may be recalled to life in the present deathly standstill of the revolutionary workers' movement," he wrote in 1938, "to 'return' to that practical and not merely ideological broadmindedness by which the first. . . International Working Men's Association welcomed into its ranks all workers who subscribed to the principle of an independent proletarian class struggle."32 These words might have been uttered by Sandino, who championed a united front free of dogmatic "isms." Korsch further challenged the role of Marxism for delaying the advent of communism. Marxism was faulted because of its unconditional acceptance of economically advanced England as the model of the transition to socialism, and because of its "two-phase theory of the Communist revolution . . . directed in part against Blanqui, and in part against Bakunin," which puts off the real emancipation of the workers to an indefinite future.33 To make a communist revolution, he argued, one has to undo the ideological stranglehold of Marxism and Leninism on the workers. Thus, a half-century before Yeltsin broke with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at its twenty-eighth congress, Korsch penned the following prophetic words: "Our task consists in destroying that dead 'communism' that lives on as a depressing and often idiotic specter . . . sending it to its death and carrying on with double energy today's contemporary and real struggle of the working class"—outside, not inside, the Communist parties.34 Like Sandino, Korsch was well ahead of his time. Council communists acknowledge that in the struggle against the state and bureaucracy, Marxism-Leninism is less effective than anarchism. In Guillen's words, "the struggle against the bureaucratic state, which abuses its powers over the lives of its workers, has to have an anarchist content."35 It is a matter of indifference whether this conclusion is reached by enriching Marxism with anarchism or by enriching anarchism with Marxism. Where does Sandino fit into this picture? Both his original Blanquism and his later alliance with the Comintern suggest that he supported a revolutionary dictatorship as a means of eliminating the oligarchy, abolishing the multiparty system, and establishing communism. It seems that in the course of his struggle in Nicaragua he swapped Blanquism for Leninism, which effectively transformed him from an anarcho-Blanquist into an anarcho-Bolshevik. Like Lenin in 1917, Sandino relied on the organized efforts of workers and peasants to make a revolution. But he did not insist on ideological purity and persistently masked his real intentions by appearing as a populist. As an alternative to Lenin's strategy in 1917, he defended a four-stage strategy of prolonged people's war. Following his antioligarchical and anti-imperialist

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struggle for national liberation, he girded himself for a showdown with the national guard in a struggle to dominate the government. If successful, he planned to impose a revolutionary dictatorship based on the proletariat and peasantry. It would nationalize the land, expropriate big capitalists, and establish a nationwide network of producers' cooperatives. Only then would it begin to target more subtle forms of property. This strategy placed Sandino somewhere between Lenin and the council communists. Sandino's strategy of cooperativization by a revolutionary vanguard shares common ground with the Yugoslav model of workers' self-management.36 Although council governments were cut short in Russia in 1917-1918, in Germany in 1918-1920, and in Spain in 1936-1938, the Yugoslav model promised to survive the ravages of time. Yugoslav communism, however, was never more than token. Forty years after the launching of this council republic, it is still beset by grave inequalities that are finally threatening to destroy it. If property is theft, as Sandino claimed, then so is intellectual property in specialized skills. But the nationalization of intellectual property and the related issue of equal pay have not even appeared on the Yugoslav agenda. As in the Soviet Union, the opening of the League of Communists to careerists led to a failure to live up to its vanguard role in Yugoslavia. At the same time, the scrapping of the revolutionary dictatorship was premature. The democratic process of decision making that replaced it exacted more time and energy than most workers were willing to give, induced them to defer to those who took an active role, and allowed for intimidation by those with superior knowledge. For all of these reasons, and not just ethnic rivalries, the Yugoslav experiment did not live up to its promise. Herein lies the relevance of Sandino's model as protagonized by revolutionaries who have not diluted their egalitarian message or renounced their leadership role. One might add that Marxism is part of the problem. With increasing awareness of its built-in contempt for "crude" or egalitarian communism, revolutionaries have begun to disencumber themselves of the Marxist legacy, which has done more to compromise than to enrich their communism. The prophet of this post-Marxist communism was the Polish revolutionary Waclaw Machajski (1866-1926). Decades after his influence disappeared as a political force in Russia, the label "Makhayevschina" continued to stigmatize communist efforts to level from the top down. Although his starting point was Marxism, Machajski did more than enrich it with a strong dose of anarchism. Once he demystified it, he discarded it altogether. Herein lies the touchstone for distinguishing post-Marxist communists from their anarchoMarxist allies. Virtually unknown in English-speaking countries, Machajski's writings remained inaccessible except in Russian until 1979, fully a half century after his death.37 His communism, like Sandino's, was almost completely ignored

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by revolutionaries in the West. Because he was a Marxist apostate, Marxists wanted nothing to do with him, and because few anarchists are well versed in Marxism, they did not understand his critique of Marxist theory. Banished to Siberia for his revolutionary activities in 1892, Machajski spent the next six years devouring the works of Marx and Engels. It was then that he realized, despite all of Marx's claims of championing the proletariat,' that Marxism had become the ideology of a new privileged class of educated professional and managerial workers hoping to use the proletariat to advance their own interests. By supporting the workers' struggles for higher wages, by dangling before them the ideal of a classless society, by backing up this ideal with an impressive new science called "scientific socialism," this privileged class was able to win the workers' confidence. But as Machajski anticipated, the successful implementation of this science would end up in a privileged meritocracy, with the capitalists being replaced by officeholders. Machajski traced the roots of social democratic opportunism directly to Marx, thus faulting him for being the first major revisionist of communism.38 By "communism" Machajski understood, first, direct ownership and selfmanagement of the means of production, and, second, complete equalization of the incomes of manual and intellectual workers. Although Machajski's communism converged on that of the council communists in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918, he questioned the feasibility of establishing workers' autonomy and equality of pay simultaneously. For centuries, workers had been deprived not only of control over the means of production, but also of the know-how for managing them. As long as they failed to acquire this knowledge, he concluded, they would be condemned to servile toil even under a system of workers' self-management. Meanwhile, Machajski favored the strategy that would be adopted by Sandino, "the general strike, the general insurrection, aimed at a much greater remuneration of manual labor," not just greater, he added, but eventually equal to that of educated workers, so that "all the high salaries in excess of the wages of manual workers are leveled."39 This would pave the way toward equal education for all as a condition of workers' autonomy and the withering away of the state. Since the miserable wages of manual workers contribute to funding the privileges of nonmanual workers, argued Machajski, "the raising of wages is the only way, the only weapon, for getting rid of exploiters of every stripe." ^ But the trade unions legalized by the state are ill-equipped to organize more than partial strikes with limited demands or, at best, a general strike that stops short of undermining the system. Thus, a communist revolution hinges on a clandestine and conspiratorial vanguard geared to launching illegal strikes and promoting insurrection—also a feature of Sandino's strategy. Although the first stage of the revolution would expropriate the bourgeoisie, a general strike followed by a workers' insurrection would then target the

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new class of educated workers. But it is not enough to dispossess educated workers of their high salaries. To prevent communism from self-destructing, Machajski relied on transformed human beings, "a new generation instructed under conditions of equality, the inevitable consequence of equal pay for intellectual and manual labor."41 This scenario of communist revolution effectively stood Marx on his head. For Marx and his followers, the social revolution begins with the appearance of a new mode of production within the womb of the old, followed by the conquest of the state, nominally by workers but actually by their educated leaders and representatives. Machajski argued, on the contrary, that a revolution in the mode of production is conditional on a revolution in the mode of distribution. In fact, the new class of professional and intellectual workers became an economically privileged class long before it seized power in the first anticapitalist revolution of the twentieth century. So manual workers, Machajski concluded, must become the economic equal of intellectual workers prior to revolutionizing the mode of production. Otherwise, without economic equality and the communization of knowledge, the implementation of workers' self-management becomes self-defeating—as in Yugoslavia, where unpopular bureaucrats are still in power. How is Machajski relevant to Sandino's communism? Except for Proudhon, nobody before or since has given such prominence to Sandino's motto, "Property Is Theft." For Machajski, as for Sandino, history is fundamentally a record of pillage rather than of changes in the mode of production.42 For both, the workers' principal goal is equality of income, to be achieved through a workers' conspiracy, general strike, and general insurrection leading to the direct takeover of the means of production and eventually to self-management. As we have seen, Sandino's army of liberation was an auxiliary of his workers' conspiracy. Although Machajski pioneered the critique of Marxism as the ideology of a new class, his conclusions would be arrived at independently by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922- ). With Trotskyism as his starting point, Castoriadis embarked on a critique of social relations of production in Russia that took him through council communism to a post-Marxist communism of his own.43 Why is it, Castoriadis asks, that contemporary Marxists were unable to foresee the struggle for workers' self-management, the extent of the youth revolt, the crisis of traditional family relations, the women's movement, and, more recently, the ecological crisis and its bearing on the struggle for communism? "The reason is, in the first place, that their very conception makes them blind . . . for it directs their sights toward that which is irrelevant."44 To Machajski's critique of bureaucracy and wage inequality, Castoriadis contributes a no-less-devastating exposure of the role Marxists assign to material incentives under socialism. Marxists justify wage differentials on two

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principal grounds: first, as a means of attracting workers to jobs that are physically irksome and disagreeable; second, as a device for overcoming the shortage of trained staff. But in the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, jobs are paid in inverse proportion to their disagreeableness, so that too many rather than too few people compete for the highly skilled ones.45 To compound the problem, wage differentials make it nearly impossible for children of manual laborers to pay to learn the skills about whose scarcity the bureaucracy bitterly complains. "Just one-tenth of the income swallowed up by the bureaucratic parasites would suffice in five years to bring forth a historically unprecedented superabundance of trained staff."46 Instead of remedying the dearth of professional skills, the differentiation of incomes aggravates it. To the Marxist argument that material incentives are needed to raise the productivity of ordinary workers, Castoriadis responds that productivity is no longer a problem of individual output but of the work pace and the informal structure of power of the primary working group. This is a management problem, not a problem of remuneration.47 Sandino, too, placed a premium on nonmaterial incentives, as in the absence of a pay scale for different ranks of soldiers. For Castoriadis, the communist reorganization of society begins with workers' self-management. "The abolition of exploitation is only possible when every separate stratum of directors ceases to exist, for in modern societies it is the division between directors and executants that is at the root of exploitation. . . . [This implies] the dismissal of all managers, and the takeover of the management of all factories by the workers themselves organized into workers' councils."48 This is not a Utopian dream but an extrapolation of the historical creations of the working class from the Paris Commune to the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1938. Sandino's cooperative at Wiwili is an example. To this requirement Castoriadis adds "Absolute Wage Equality."49 With a little enlightenment, workers soon learn that the only economic justification for unequal pay is the recovery of the cost of acquiring specialized training. But these costs are minimal when amortized over a productive life of forty to fifty years and at most would " 'justify,' at the extremes of the wage spectrum, a differential of 2:1 (between sweepers and neurosurgeons)."50 Moreover, the rationale for differentials vanishes when the costs of a professional education are defrayed by society. It follows that communist theory, as well as practice, must return to its preMarxist sources. "All of economic theory has to be reconstructed around what is contained in embryo in the tendency of workers toward equality in pay; the entire theory of production around the informal organization of workers in the factory; all of political theory around the principles embodied in the Soviets and the councils."51 Admittedly, such a reconstruction would go far

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beyond anything Sandino envisioned, but as a theoretical expression of virtually the same political project, it testifies to the continuing relevance of Sandino's communism. I turn next to the relevance of Sandino's philosophical legacy. We have seen how he arrived at anarcho-bolshevism and how his rupture with the Communist International led him to adopt Trincado's rationalistic communism—a philosophy at odds with Marxism. Did this crossover enhance or detract from the relevance of his communism? Trincado died only a year after Sandino. The Magnetic-Spiritual School then came under the direction of socialists. After 1935, the school's doctrines became ossified while their political content degenerated into a mere celebration of Sandino's political project. It was thanks not to the MagneticSpiritual School but to the emergence of a new theology of liberation that a revived millenarian legacy substituted for Sandino's in the 1960s. In response to the Cuban Revolution and the new economics of underdevelopment and dependency in the Third World, theologians infused new breath into their religion by making it relevant to the inhuman conditions of Latin America's workers and peasants. While they reinterpreted the Christian faith out of the experience of the poor, they also helped the poor to overcome their condition of dependence. Their preferential option for the poor focused mainly on reforms rather than on the church's traditional expressions of charity, but there was also a revolutionary current calling on Christians to participate in the insurrectionary struggles sparked by Guevara's followers in Latin America. Because of its strong communist component, the revolutionary current in liberation theology is a contemporary equivalent of and substitute for Sandino's philosophy. Here is another instance of the life after death of Sandino's communism. The protagonist of this revolutionary current was the Colombian priest Camilo Torres (1929-1966). His message to Christians summarizes the fundamentals of his theology and its political implications. Christians must uphold, he urges, the essential foundations of their religion. "In Catholicism the principal one is love for neighbor [a condition of love for G o d ] . . . . In order to be true, this love must search for . . . effective means . . . to take power away from the privileged minority in order to give it to the poor majority. This, done rapidly, is the essence of the revolution. . . . Therefore, the revolution is not only permitted but is obligatory for Christians who must see in it the only effective and complete way to achieve love for all." 52 It follows that the duty of every Christian is to be a revolutionary, and the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. So Torres cast his lot with the Colombian guerrillas and died in combat. In Nicaragua this legacy survives thanks to the independent efforts of Father Ernesto Cardenal and other priests of the Sandinista Revolution. Unlike traditional Christian theology, with its emphasis on an extraterrestrial beyond,

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Cardenal's theology stresses a new birth of the Holy Spirit, which will enable people to experience God's kingdom in their midst. This theme runs throughout his four-volume Gospel in Solentiname, which follows Thomas Merton, his spiritual mentor, in combining Christian millenarianism with the ancient wisdom of the Orient. Deeply rooted in Benedictine monasticism and Joachim's twelfth-century adaptation of the Neoplatonic and Gnostic traditions— the basis of so-called spiritual or Third Testament Christianity—Cardenal infused into liberation theology a strong dose of communism.53 But the enfant terrible of liberation theology and the bete noire of the established church in Latin America is neither Camilo Torres nor Cardenal. It is Mexican iconoclast and former Jesuit Jose Porfirio Miranda. A stringent critic of both Marx and the Marxists, Miranda holds that Marxism is not yet a scientific enterprise but one in the making. Although influenced by Mexican anarchism, he targets not church, state, or capital, but their common denominator in everyday life—the assignment of worth according to rank. As he cites from a footnote to the first chapter of Marx's Capital, "one man is king only because other men behave toward him as subjects."54 Thus, oppressed as well as oppressors, victims as well as victimizers, must share responsibility for the hierarchical ordering of human society. The maximum expression of this bondage and the reference point of Miranda's liberation theology is the "civilized invention called exchange-value . . . the differential table of incomes and wages fixed by custom." 55 But with what objective criterion, he asks, does society establish that one hour at one job is worth two hours at another? There simply is none. Even Marx acknowledged that job ratings and pay differentials are "established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom," to which Engels added, "a process which at this point, in the development of the theory of value, can only be stated but not as yet explained."56 Unlike Marx, Miranda has an explanation. The assignment of values in the marketplace results from ignorance and fraud as well as shortages. "What made possible the accumulation of wealth in a few hands, and still makes it possible, is the table of equivalences, that is, exchange-value. . . . Were it not for ignorance, economic necessity, and civilized fraud, nothing and nobody could have gotten the majority to accept such a distribution of the annual product of all." The fraud at issue is the presumptive equality in the exchange of values, when the rankings assigned by arbitrary opinion and custom reinforce social inequalities. Contrary to Marx, the social relations of distribution underly and explain the relations of production, not conversely. Thus, exchange value is an invention to get people to work, a device for exploiting them in lieu of a direct show of force.57 Miranda's liberation theology was intended as a response to the table of equivalences. Like Trincado, and therefore Sandino, he argues that to accept

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Jesus as our savior means to repudiate deferential treatment in distribution. He, too, decries the official theology of the West as a falsification of the original message of Jesus and his disciples. What Jesus mercilessly and without exception reproved were "differences of wealth in their purest expression . . . the fact that some are rich and others are poor." It is not that the rich will be punished because they disobey the ten commandments; they are evil simply by being rich when others" are poor. What defines a Christian is Jesus's final solution to the social question, his new, or eleventh, commandment to renounce all property as an abomination.58 We have here a hint of Proudhon's and Sandino's "Property is theft." While identifying the communist initiative in the West with the initiative of the early Christians, Miranda defines communism, according to Acts 2 : 4 4 45 and 4:32-35, as conformity to Jesus's new commandment. This is the "same definition that Marx took from Louis Blanc, 'from each according to one's abilities, to each according to one's needs,'" and inspired by the same biblical source. But unlike Marx, Miranda interprets "needs" in their New Testament context as a function of economic necessity rather than of human freedom, with the emphasis on equality rather than self-cultivation. He even takes the equalization of incomes to be the final solution to the problem of evil, interpreted as not just a theological problem but also as a political one.59 Liberation theology in its maverick or revolutionary mold is fundamentally a product of the West. Cardenal is the exception, having enriched his Christianity with traditions stemming from the East, precisely those currents fundamental to Sandino's philosophy of liberation. But there are more representative carriers of Sandino's philosophical message than liberation theology. While the vitality of Sandino's communism has been sapped during the halfcentury since his death, kindred expressions of the same fundamental legacy appear in the writings of other representatives of the new spirituality. Sandino's philosophy has roots in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who revived Joachim's teachings to become the immediate precursor of the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement. While in America the obscure and uncelebrated Andrew Jackson Davis became its first theoretician, under Swedenborg's influence a rival school appeared in France headed by the world-renowned Allan Kardec (1804-1869). 60 Although a devout Christian, Kardec combined the worship of Christ with a doctrine of reincarnation that would become, along with other Eastern motifs, an essential ingredient of the Gnostic revival. "The New Age" has dawned, he proclaimed: "Moses prepared the way: Jesus continued the work; and Spiritism will complete it." 61 As a disciple of Kardec, Trincado spelled out the significance of this terse message: "Even the Decalogue is no longer law, because in the New Age everything reduces to a single commandment: Love your neighbor."62 Already in 1853, in the conviction that communication with disembodied spirits heralded the communist millennium, the eighty-three-year-old Robert

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Owen became the first communist of stature to convert to Swedenborgianism. Later, anarchists would gravitate toward the new spirituality along with socialists of various persuasions.63 It is to their latter-day followers that one must look for the bearers of Sandino's philosophical communism. Sandino's adaptation of the new mind-set shares common ground with the syncretism of the contemporary New Age movement. In the belief that everything is connected to everything else—accuracy would suggest that everything is connected to something else—spokespeople for the New Age movement affirm the essential unity and interdependence of all living things. So one needs to think globally or holistically: "Whether it is mind or body, 'we' or 'they,' subjective or objective, science or religion, male or female, the new world view has to be nonlinear, dynamic, contextual, and systemic . . . a synthesis of oriental, westernized, and 'folk' wisdom."64 The New Age movement sees humankind as embedded in nature, foresees a coming world at peace, and looks on women as the greatest single force for political renewal in an essentially male-based civilization. Taking as their symbol Aquarius, the waterbearer in the ancient zodiac, New Agers would have us believe that "after a dark, violent age, the Piscean [in astrological lore], we are entering a millennium of love and light—in the words of the popular song, 'The Age of Aquarius,' the time of 'the mind's true liberation.' " 6 5 The disreputable features of the New Age movement associated with pop mysticism, tarot cards, faith healing, soul travel, the psychedelic and the Apocalypse countercultures, and the astrological interpretation of history do not detract in any way from the contribution to the peace and women's movements, grass-roots democracy, and ecology by New Age political activists. Their option for a third position between the extremes of capitalism and communism is anything but disreputable. Dubbed the Radical Center, their strategy may be characterized as "neither left nor right but uplifted forward!"66 Yet it is on communism that New Age spirituality and its related "isms" converge when pursued to their limits. How to explain that, when examined in depth, the principal modes of spiritual politics end up in communism? Women's liberation is incomplete unless it frees them from indirect exploitation by other women who, in their capacity as professionals alongside their male counterparts, have replaced property owners and portfolio holders as privileged members of a new class. Ecological reforms are half-hearted if they do not improve the work habitats of human beings, eliminate the differences between wealthy and poor neighborhoods, ensure equal sanitation and health facilities, and provide equal housing and recreational opportunities for all. Grass-roots democracy stops short of its goal without workers' self-management at the point of production and the principle of "one citizen, one vote" in the marketplace. And animal liberation remains unfinished business if it only abolishes animal farms and factories, without also ending the servitude of human beings.

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Under the influence of the New Age movement, a host of new linkages are being made that go beyond the single issues and unrelated concerns of the Old Left. Youthful adulators of Guevara are making common cause with deep ecologists and peace activists while feminists and vegetarians are establishing links with radical social reformers. To these sectors that have a stake in recovering Sandino's communism may be added the radical philosophers who are following in the footsteps of Herbert Marcuse. They have pushed Marxism to its limits by focusing not just on class issues but on related forms of oppression linked to species, race, and gender. Female philosophers are playing a conspicuous role in pushing beyond the prescribed boundaries defined by patriarchal values. Besides giving rise to a new ecofeminist literature, they were the first to explore the connections between Nature interpreted as female and animal liberation as a corollary of vegetarianism.67 Delving deeper, they have underscored the relationship between a matricentric (and organic) worldview and the Gnostic and millenarian movements.68 And though admittedly the exception, their brightest lights do not dismiss communism as incidental to their main concern for women's liberation.69 It is true that Sandino, in common with Che Guevara, Carlos Marighella, and other protagonists of a fundamental change, exhibited patriarchal traits associated with the "deadly hero"—deadly, because the hero must kill in order to save. But unlike them, he almost completely freed himself from what Robin Morgan calls the "genius of patriarchy," the mode of looking at the world as compartmentalized or disconnected: "Intellect severed from emotion '. . . The personal isolated from the political . . . The material ruptured from the spiritual." By its polar opposite, the "genius of feminine thought," Morgan understands "connectivity . . . [as] dangerous to every imaginable status quo, because of its insistence on noticing/' a conscious softening instead of hardening of the sensibilities that the Marxist Left ridicules as "going too far."70 We have seen how Sandino's politics and philosophy were models of "connectivity," and that he, too, distanced himself from the Marxist Left for not going far enough. In Intellectual Foundations I was inexcusably silent about the feminist features of Sandino's thought. Yet his mentor Trincado was, in contemporary parlance, a feminist. "It is enough to be a woman to be superior to man, because she absorbs the character of Nature and is the key to harmony. . . . She has her sex by divine law. If it is not exercised or manifest, somebody is at fault; and that somebody is egoistic, brutal, arrogant, religious man." 71 Trincado's school distinguished itself from the rival Communist International in abjuring violence in favor of peaceful revolution—except for supporting Sandino—and in elevating the feminist values of love, life, and motherhood to a status higher than that of any male accomplishment. His only excuse for patriarchy was a historical one, that patriarchy made feasible larger

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social units than the family and a corresponding extension in the scope of love for other human beings. But with the emergence of monogamy, the father loses his claim to authority over both economic and moral matters. Trincado hailed this loss as being closer to the natural order of things, to a supposedly earlier matriarchal form of society.72 Admittedly, there is more to feminism than Trincado's somewhat dated version. At most, he conceived of patriarchy as male domination alongside the oppression of church, state, and capital, but on a lower rung. Unlike today's radical feminists, he did not perceive it as the common denominator and root of these other forms of oppression. Even so, one should not underestimate the radical implications of Trincado 's feminism. Since the modern family is tarnished by its patriarchal origins, he believed, it requires a complete overhaul. "The word 'father' means lord and boss; and the word 'family', from the Latin famulus, means domestic, servant, slave. That is why 'brother' [or 'sister'] is the only proper appellation among persons for abolishing servitude and slavery, [and why] the title of 'father' must signify neither lord, boss, nor owner, but rather creator."73 Equally significant are Trincado's questions concerning patriarchy: "Would a man accept that a woman should subject him and deprive him of his liberty by taking his patriarchal place? Does man understand that the erroneous education given to woman and the slavery imposed on her is an insult to himself, because it enslaves his mother and the mother of his children? Does he understand that women according to divine and natural law are superior to men, because of the matriarchy and the world view it represents?"74 By accepting Trincado's Gnostic cosmogony, Sandino became committed to its feminist metaphysic, the organic view of nature as essentially female.75 Sandino's millenarianism was rooted in his school's male-oriented Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian sources, but Trincado had infused them with feminist residues under the influence of Gnosticism and its offshoots. A similar fusion of millenarian and Gnostic themes is characteristic of the new feminist spirituality.76 Rudolf Bahro (1935- ) has pursued the revolutionary significance of this new spirituality as far as anybody, thanks to his training as a philosopher and his unwavering commitment to communism. He has also established a number of new linkages vital to Sandino's project. Those linkages, added to his spontaneous regeneration of Sandino's communism, have had a major impact on the West German Green movement. Although Marx described in detail the linkage between capital accumulation and human servitude, he completely missed the connection between capital acccumulation and the exploitation of farm animals. He failed to see the nexus between material incentives and a new bureaucratic mode of exploitation and to appreciate the role of ecology in preparing the advent of a communist society. He passed over the linkage between the waste of natural re-

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sources and the communist objective of releasing humankind from the curse of drudgery. And he underestimated the connection between feminism and a communist future. Thanks to Bahro's move from red to green, these links are now relatively well established. A major spokesman for Green politics in the Federal German Republic, Bahro has become the principal European carrier of the new communism prefigured by the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Although the word spiritual typically suggests transcendence of the material body through the possession of an immortal soul or spirit, it has other purely secular uses. Besides its association with human creativity and its challenge to the pedestrian and banal, it represents the polar opposite of "worldliness." This last mode of spirituality is a feature of Sandino's austere morality, a feature opposed to selfindulgence and the competition for power and privilege. To do away with the institutional structure of oppression, Bahro argues, it is not absolutely necessary to smash it. Speaking for his fellow Greens, he says, "We don't go in and disband something: we allow it to disintegrate by withdrawing our energy from the system as such." 77 In contrast to the conscious or psychic energy sucked up by the institutional order, this released or surplus energy is "spiritual"—which is not to say otherworldly.78 Bahro believes, as Sandino did, that to make a communist revolution one must begin by making an ideological one. To the human will he attributes a role going beyond that usually assigned to it by the pundits of Marxism. "What I mean to say is that there are compelling material reasons for us to think, like Mao Tse-tung, in terms that might normally be considered Utopian or voluntarist." Specifically, Bahro believes that free or surplus energy can become an independent force for social change. Thus, "the position into which we are forced is not, 'historical materialism is false,' but 'the leap into the realm of freedom must be possible even if the logic of the material process does not produce it.' " 7 9 To Bahro's credit, his communism relies on an infusion of spirituality into a new type of political vanguard tempered by libertarianism. In preparing to utilize the historically tried means of mobilizing surplus energy, he turns to the social and psychological experience that, in times of cultural revolution, has been associated with religious movements. Bahro's solution to the social question is the creation of spiritual equilibrium through a "self-managing, self-caring social community . . . the key to institutional security for the experience of the self, what the Buddhists call Karma." 80 This is his way of channeling the free energy available for religious experience into a communist revolution. The word communist, Bahro admits, can be confusing. Some people think of Stalinism, others of Soviet power and worker self-management, still others of Marx's scenario of postcapitalist society. At the risk of being misunderstood, Bahro claims that the Greens in Western Europe are tinged with com-

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munism: "the ecological movement, in its true complexity, ultimately conforms to the communist perspective."81 The movement's holistic premise of the unity of all life and of humanity's embeddedness in nature leads to the spiritual world view one also finds in Gnosticism. As Bahro acknowledges, "I am interested in the forces for cultural revolution that lie, in no small way, in Christ, Buddha, and Lao Tze. Forces that have made history. We need the Gnostic tradition."82 It is unusual for a former Marxist, especially one who still claims to be revolutionary, to attempt a marriage of philosophical materialism and the spiritual traditions of the Orient. But as Bahro envisages the Communist League of the future, it "will be able to formulate a general perspective which goes beyond and reconciles different material [and spiritual] interests." Revolutionaries must learn to mobilize the surplus energy that is not absorbed in the economic sphere, in order to triumph over worldly domination in the cultural sphere. Since exemplary figures like Jesus and Buddha "sought the new man by looking backwards or inwards," we, too, should "find a way for all humans to make the breakthrough that Christ and Buddha made." 83 Bahro's wedding of Marx's historical materialism with the theosophical and apocalyptic traditions exhibits traces of Ernst Bloch's subjectivistic and expressionistic Marxism. Like other dissidents in Eastern Europe, Bahro is indebted to Bloch's philosophy of hope for the notion of the person as a Utopian subject with a futuristic communist gnosis.84 Thanks to Bloch, the word Utopia has lost the pejorative sense assigned to it by Marx and Engels. That the human spirit contains traces of an as-yet-unconscious human destiny, that this destiny is contained in our present experience of social reality, that Utopias reveal to societies the image of their own future, and that the supreme task of philosophy is to reveal this hidden wisdom—these, too, are Blochian themes that have resurfaced in Bahro's writings.85 These themes also provide a philosophical rationale for the fundamental themes in Sandino's intellectual odyssey. Bloch believed that despair is the worst that can befall us while we are alive and that human beings can make the present tolerable only through dreams of a better future.86 For Sandino, this theme was summarized in his slogan "Siempre mas alia." Throughout Eastern Europe, Marxism-Leninism lies in shambles. Meanwhile, Marxism, too, is completing its historical cycle from birth through growth to dissolution.87 What will survive of each is a matter of dispute. It is enough to know that the failure of Marxism-Leninism tells us nothing about the future of communism and Sandino's project in particular. The recent history of the relentless but unsuccessful repression of religion and other expressions of spirituality confirms the age-old adage that we do not live by bread alone. Other impulses transcending the prudent and mundane find expression in the hunger for immortality, the mythology of the beyond, a theology of hope, and human fellowship.88

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The Nicaraguan Revolution shows that liberation theology has more compassion for the proletariat than does Marxist sociology. This suggests that the communist project today has a more reliable ally in Sandino's spirituality than in scientific socialism. Seventy years of party rule in the Soviet Union teaches that communism has been ruined by its associations with Marxism and Stalinism. To Sandino's credit, he broke with both. The collapse of Communist governments in 1989 highlighted not only popular demands for freedom, but also the people's aspirations for equality. Stalinism had become an inveterate obstacle to both. Besides repressive measures against the working class and the purging of its communist vanguard, Marxism-Leninism signified the flowering of Marx's humanism, but restricted to party bureaucrats—the only humanism possible under conditions of generalized poverty. Today the alternative to this discredited ideology involves more than the reemergence of liberalism in Eastern Europe; it also opens the door to Sandino's communism.89 For Marx there could be no emancipation short of abundance. Eliminate poverty, he argued, and you eliminate the war of each against all; create abundance, and exploitation loses its rationale. Meanwhile, he refused to blame exploiters for doing what is natural in a context in which one person's gain is another person's loss. In stark contrast, Sandino denounced exploitation as immoral and a transgression of divine justice as well as human. One must force the gates of heaven, he urged, by bringing about communism now. Toward this objective he prepared to fight the enemy within himself and without. The howling passions of concupiscence and the adverse burden of Karma had to be overcome, in addition to the rule of priests, princes, and proprietors.90 Sandino's communism was moral and spiritual rather than scientific, but it reinforced his soldiers' morale and served a practical purpose by identifying the obstacles to human freedom. Such is the enduring relevance of his ideal. As Lenin formulated the problem, before communism can be introduced, the workers and their political-military vanguard must purge themselves of the egocentric and pernicious habits bequeathed by modern society, habits stemming from the "filthy selfishness and personal gain of a few and the poverty of the many." There can be no future for communism, he warned, as long as "workers are building a new society without themselves having become new people"—a lesson that applies with even greater force to party bureaucrats. In place of hedonistic overtures and appeals to the self-seeking attitudes to which generations of domination have habituated the workers and their vanguards, Lenin recommended self-sacrifice.91 Here lies the touchstone for distinguishing Leninism from Stalinism. Stalin ridiculed the need for ascetic practices under socialism. "Marxian socialism," he wrote in 1934, "means not cutting down individual requirements, but developing them to the utmost, to full bloom . . .the full and all-round satisfac-

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tion of all the requirements of culturally developed working people [read: the Communist vanguard]." 92 In a deliberate effort to revive Marxism within the international communist movement, he substituted Marx's humanism for the asceticism and social leveling preached by Lenin. That this was not the Bolsheviks' original strategy for cleansing themselves of the filth of the Old World is evident from a 1928 memorandum Christian Rakovsky, already in exile because of differences with Stalin, sent his friends. "In the mind of Lenin, and in all our minds, the task of the party leadership was to protect both the party and the working class from the corrupting action of privilege, place and patronage on the part of those in power. . . . We must say frankly, definitely and loudly that the party apparatus has not fulfilled this task, that it has revealed a complete incapacity for its double role of protector and educator."93 As Che Guevara reformulated this lesson some three decades later, "the guerrilla, as a conscious element of the people's vanguard, must exhibit a moral conduct that does credit to him as a real priest of reform . . . to the austerity required by the difficult conditions of war one must add the austerity born of a rigid self-control . . . the guerrilla must be an ascetic." 94 Such was Sandino's view of the model communist. Asked by Belausteguigoitia how social transformation should be brought about, Sandino replied, "Through internal reform. The pressure of the State changes the exterior, the apparent. We believe that. . . each should be a brother and not a wolf [toward his fellow beings]." 95 From his biographer's description, Sandino practiced what he preached. His cultivation of Yoga and other austerities worthy of a "disciple of the Orient" was visible in his countenance. "The repose of his features . . . confirms the impression given by his conversation of a serene and steadfast disposition. . . . Rarely does he gesticulate or modify his serene tone. The impression he gives in his appearance as in his conversation is that of a great spiritual elevation."96 Because of the materialistic premises of their worldview, Marxists of all stripes look askance at spirituality and spurn the role of meditation in disciplining the passions. But in view of the corrupting effects of self-indulgence, communists must overcome their dependence on cultural gratification as well as on material comforts in order to attain their objectives. Nothing less is required against arrogance and greed, the passions on which the privileges of state authority and property feed. Thanks to Bahro and Cardenal, contemporary communists are recovering elements of this ancient perception. In view of this development, one must take exception to the Sandinistas' assessment of Sandino's legacy as relevant mainly to an earlier stage of Western civilization. While conceding that his political thought contained ideas bordering on socialism, they mistakenly assume that those ideas lag behind the Marxist project.97 They have been even less generous in assessing Sandino's philosophical legacy. In their opinion, that legacy is altogether obsolete.98

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But if the de-Marxification of communism has a future, then so has Sandino's political and philosophical legacy. In one form or another, this legacy is due for a revival by the ideological vanguard pushing from socialism toward communism. Far from being outpaced by events, Sandino's syncretism of preMarxist communism and occult counterculture marks a leap into the future. In Nicaragua as in Eastern Europe, one of the most galling features of the new political order was its failure to live up to popular expectations." It was not the ideology of a classless society to which workers and peasants objected, but the material privileges and luxuries to which only party functionaries and nonparty bureaucrats had access. Thus, what happened to the party bigwigs in Eastern Europe had its counterpart in the comandantes' defeat in the February 1990 elections. Does Sandino still have a future in Nicaragua? When Alan Bolt, director of the National Theater, lambasted the bureaucratic tendencies in the FSLN prior to the elections, he was following in the footsteps of his ideal father, Sandino. Remembering a date at a pizzeria with one of the comandantes, he laughed: "We drove up in his fancy car, swept in escorted by his bodyguards, then everyone inside began to yell at him: 'Why are you driving such a nice car and I haven't even got a bicycle? How come the comandantes have so much money?'" What did Bolt make of this experience? To save themselves, he urged the comandantes to embrace the egalitarian and nonconformist part of Sandino that their current picture of him denied.100 If they had heeded his prophetic admonition, they might still be in power in Managua. To the question of what it means to be a revolutionary under the new conditions of democratization in which the FSLN is no longer in power, Tomas Borge concedes that one cannot "be a revolutionary and be immoral, arrogant, conceited . . . [that] a moral renovation of Sandinismo is imperative." 101 This is an admission on the part of the comandantes of the spiritual failings of Sandinismo. "Throughout these years of economic crisis, a whole gamut of Sandinistas sacrificed; others of us, an unconcealable minority, to one degree or another became fond of . . . a contrasting comfort." But Borge's call to strengthen the revolutionary mystique by "marginalizing all traces of opulence" is hedged in by the Marxists' protective clause, "without falling into 'egalitarianism'"—an excuse for the comandantes who became millionaires in office. Owing to arrogance and the uncritical belief in endless progress, Marxists everywhere have fostered the craving for more and more. After centuries of enforced abstinence, ordinary workers are in no mood to do without. But in a world of limited and increasingly depleted resources, the way to communism is not through the maxim that there's nothing too good for the working class. Marxists pride themselves on their realism, but their humanism flies in the face of reality. At least, universal asceticism is compatible with scarcity,

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which cannot be said of leveling upward. For all his spookery, on this score Sandino was more of a realist than Karl Marx. It seems that Marxism-Leninism is the last refuge of scoundrels demanding more than their share. The Marxist credo that human beings are the measure of all things has for a corollary that the most-developed personalities show to the less-developed the image of their own future. This finds expression in the dictum that humanism is fully developed communism.102 But the Marxist marriage of humanism and communism is a union of incompatibles in which one or the other partner must ultimately be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. It forgets that the shining comandantes have a price—differential payments for themselves and for the faceless shadows laboring in the dark. Sandino's political testament consists of a tribute to those faceless shadows in the form of guidelines to communism. Although he anticipated that the whole world would be communized by the year 2000, one does not have to accept his activating ideology and eschatological timetable to appreciate the continuing relevance of his message for the twenty-first century. That message is that there can be no lasting peace without communism—although, for most people, communism is still out of reach. The communist's dilemma is that workers must emancipate themselves or be emancipated by others, when there is little prospect of either one occurring. For the multiple reasons given by authoritarian communists, most workers are unable or unwilling to liberate themselves; and as libertarian communists have repeatedly insisted, the workers' would-be liberators end by establishing a new privileged order. Sandino was fully aware of this predicament. Although history, he believed, had gone from bad to worse, he still had hope—but it was neither the anarchist's faith in the masses nor the MarxistLeninist's trust in a political-military vanguard. In the final analysis, the relevance of Sandino's communism is the relevance of an unlikely ideal. Short of a spiritual vanguard, his communism cannot be used as a blueprint for a future society. What, then, might it be used for? As an expression of hope for a better future, it reveals the imperfections of the City of Man. As an antidote to secular idolatry, it becomes a mirror of human needs. As acute social criticism, it tears away the masks of institutional deceit and blind hypocrisy. As the catalyst of chimerical revolution, it prepares the ground for social reforms. By bringing Marxist-Leninists to power and paving the way toward socialism, it might even make a real revolution—as in Nicaragua.

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his study of Sandino went to press before I had the opportunity to read two books in Sandino's possession that are unavailable through interlibrary loan. The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, holds the only library copy in the United States of Francisco Canadas's El sindicalismo, and the Benjamin Franklin Library of the Regional Cathedra No. 123 of the Magnetic-Spiritual School in San Antonio, Texas, has the only copy north of the border of Joaquin Trincado's El espiritismo en su asiento. Sandino had underscored scattered but revealing passages in Canadas's book and had acknowledged the profound impression made on him by a meticulous study of Trincado's work.1 Now that I have scrutinized each, I am in a position to assess their importance for an understanding of Sandino's communism. That Sandino knew the pitfalls of "possibilism"—the philosophy of the feasible geared to piecemeal reforms and agitation according to the rules of the political game—is evident from his scrutiny of these two books. Canadas's book is important as evidence of Sandino's assimilation of a "final solution" to the social question based on the revolutionary legacy of "Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Berth, and Sorel, above all Sorel." 2 As Cafiadas notes, echoing Sorel, "the concern to extract material concessions from the bourgeoisie is a secondary aspect of syndicalism . . . [subordinate to] the aspiration to replace the entire political, civil, economic, and social organization of the bourgeoisie."3 Trincado's work is important for understanding Sandino because it testifies to the same Sorelian legacy transmitted by Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. Under their influence, he called for a total change, because "world problems have no solution without changing everything."* To this he added the apocalyptic conviction that the Spirit of Truth, until now dormant among the workers, will eventually awaken to "equalize everybody" by establishing the "universal family" without private property, without parasites, autocrats, plutocrats, and religious, national, racial, and male supremacists.5

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Following Sorel, Cafiadas construes communism not as a speculative blueprint of the future but as a movement of working-class solidarity in a "final contest" with the bourgeoisie.6 To solidarity through faith in a general strike he adds fraternization through the activating myth of a pantheistic universal fellowship.7 In doing so, he shares common ground with Trincado's "faith in spiritual solidarity" and the definition of Spiritism as "the solidarity of all spirits." 8 In Trincado's faith in a spiritual dimension of communism, Sandino found still further grounds for a communism of action rather than of speculation. "Faith will come from reasoning transformed into works," wrote Trincado, "the faith that saves, not blind faith, but deeds." 9 Rather than a puerile faith, his hope in a sudden apocalyptic overturn was based on self-knowledge and a philosophy of history culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution and its transforming influence. As an alternative to a Platonic vision of a perfect society or a rationally articulated model of human perfection, a Sorelian-type "willto-deliverance" lies at the root of Trincado's communism.10 In testimony to Sorel's influence, Trincado also espouses an "ethic of the producers"—work in common without hierarchies of rank or reward—as the regulating principle of the universal commune.11 "The law of the Creator is work, obligatory but productive . . . [because] there is no other law of progress than work." 12 The outcome would be a workers', not a consumers', paradise. As Sorel articulated the workers' "will-to-deliverance," a communist regime would fulfill the expectations of ordinary workers, "who alone go on strike'*—as contrasted with educated workers, "foremen, clerks, engineers, etc. . . . [belonging to] the administrative group." 13 Sorel imagined it as a society without masters, modeled on the solidarity of the family, the example of women, and on love and sacrifice for the weak and helpless in place of organized selfishness.14 I found a vivid testimony to this regenerative communism at the home of Daniel Lizcano, celador of the Regional Cathedra No. 123. On the walls of his study I saw pictures of Ricardo Flores Magon and Che Guevara alongside that of Sandino. One of the striking features of Utopian thought is its fixation "on the end regardless of the means, a feature of leftist Communists censurecTl by Lenin in " 'Left-Wing' Communism—An Infantile Disorder,"15 but not at-Ji all characteristic of the pragmatism of the three mentioned revolutionaries. A Mexican immigrant in the cotton fields of Texas during the 1920s and 1930s, Lizcano was drawn to the Magnetic-Spiritual School not only by its final goal, "the Commune, without private property and without frontiers," but also by its support for the Mexican Revolution and for Sandino's national liberation struggle in Nicaragua.16 A convert to the school's and Trincado's activating faith, Sandino, too, believed in the principle of "all for all, nothing one's own, but everything in common."17 Committed to Proudhon's thesis that property is theft, he found

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support for it in Trincado's belief that property is against divine law, against love of neighbor, against human solidarity. At the same time, his faith in a final solution to the social question took the form of actions guided by an astute sense of social reality and the limits of the possible. Because he buttressed his revolutionary extremism with a Machiavellian strategy that was testimony to his revolutionary patience, in practice, his communism was anything but Utopian. Sandino was motivated by an apocalyptic faith rather than by a Utopian vision of the future. As Sorel acknowledges, "sectarians whose religious exaltation was fed by apocalyptic myths were none the less very practical."18 Whereas myths are expressions of enthusiasm and a determination to act that cannot be refuted, Utopias are the "work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount of good and evil it contains." Thus, "myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, [whereas] the effect of Utopias has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system."19 Although Sandino's communism may be used as a model for exposing the ills of contemporary society, he predicated it on a final contest between the forces of good and evil. Such an awe-inspiring vision of total regeneration, Sorel argues, "must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense." 20 Thus, what is relevant about Sandino's communism is not the enchanting picture Trincado paints of the universal commune, a picture devoid of the details that would make it a Utopia, but the enthusiasm it creates for a complete change. Sandino pursued what the Sandinistas suspect was a mad chimera, but without it there would have been no Sandinistas to make the Nicaraguan Revolution. Utopias are spelled out because they are intended for discussion, not disguised and camouflaged, as was Sandino's unlikely ideal. Because communism barely figures in his writings and is completely overshadowed by his patriotic and anti-imperialist tenets and concern for social reform, it is an unknown quantity in the literature about Sandino.

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andino is a household name in Nicaragua, but few have any inkling of what he stood for. Because the Sandinistas have settled for appearances, neither Sandino's politics nor his philosophy is depicted as even remotely communist. Although his communist legacy survives, it is only as a specter. Not until 1974 was the first systematic anthology of Sandino's writings published under the editorship of Nicaraguan novelist (later vice-president) Sergio Ramirez. Entitled El pensamiento vivo de Sandino, it went through six editions from 1974 through 1980—all published from neighboring Costa Rica. The fifth and sixth editions contained 161 entries, enlarged to 192 documents in the first Nicaraguan edition published in 1981. In 1984 a second Nicaraguan edition appeared, which contained 261 selections plus several unnumbered documents in the appendix. In the original preface, Ramirez promises the reader "an integral vision of what constitutes the living thought of General Augusto Cesar Sandino." l In fact, he follows the example set by Aleman and Selser of suppressing Sandino's correspondence with the Magnetic-Spiritual School. The two most important letters to Trincado, dated 22 June 1931 and 12 November 1932, were originally published in the school's journal La Balanza.2 There can be no question about their authenticity, nor about two related letters, to Gen. Pedro Altamirano on 3 February 1931, and Col. Abraham Rivera that same month.3 Concerned with the transmigration of souls from other planets and successive reincarnations on this one, these letters were evidently too provocative to have formed part of the integral vision Ramirez wished to present to the public. It is understandable that the Sandinistas should have wanted Sandino to appear in a favorable light. But it is one thing to be selective through a fault of omission and another thing to tamper with the original documents. To Ramirez's and the Sandinistas' discredit, even the 1981 and 1984 editions published in Nicaragua contain two partially censored letters without the usual

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ellipses showing where the excisions were made. Thus the reader is given the false impression that Sandino's writings are complete and uncensored. At issue is not just a few missing lines. In the letter to Abraham Rivera (22 February 1931) there are as many as eleven missing paragraphs.4 Even more disturbing, in the letter to Jose Hilario Chavarria (12 May 1931) the contents are so butchered that one is left with only eighteen paragraphs of the original fifty.5 In this butchered version the last piece is reproduced in an English translation in Karl Bermann's Sandino without Frontiers, published as recently as 1988, without acknowledgment of the cuts.6 Ironically, Bermann sent me a complimentary copy acknowledging his debt to my book on Nicaragua, where I give three pages to discussing this controversial letter. After observing that it provides the best single statement of the political content of Sandino's theosophy, I note that "Ramirez does not include the full text in his anthology, possibly because its fantasies raise doubts concerning Sandino's rationality."7 Sandino's spiritual politics was rooted in Trincado's Filosofia austera rational.* Yet neither Ramirez nor Bermann has examined Trincado's major work as a clue to understanding Sandino. Damaging politically, their oversight perpetuates the false impression that Sandino was not a communist. The struggle for communism, Sandino believed, is divinely sanctioned. To the Marxist argument about material self-interest—proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains—his letter to Hilario Chavarria added an argument about spiritual self-interest. Thus, it is not God's will that some should lord it over others, that there should be priests, bankers, and rulers, any more than it is in the interest of proletarians. So important is this last letter as an example of Sandino's spiritual politics that, despite its share of silliness, I take this opportunity to translate the missing thirty-two paragraphs. This terrestrial globe that we inhabit has existed for 123 million centuries, 55 million centuries since the earth gave birth to the moon. Ten million centuries later humans appeared on earth, so that we have existed on this planet 45 million centuries. Humans were born of the fifth essence of nature on earth. A tree enclosed the fifth essence. From it the spirits who had received their judgment on coming of age, the same that had been exiled from other planets (NEPTUNE), took on human bodies. However, all the animal instincts are found in humans, and these are antagonistic to one another as long as people do not recognize their trinity. Hence the inclination for them to prefer what is agreeable to their own bodies rather than what is useful to all. This unruly appetite produced injustice among the people inhabiting the earth, and since then matters have lost their importance.

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When people began to understand they would die and asked why, they began to fear and to believe that something surely existed superior to themselves and to everything they saw. People considered they should entrust the most intelligent individual with investigating those things, and support with their labors whoever became investigators. Of course, the original idea was noble. But it happened that, when the investigator died, everything he had been able to accumulate in reward for his investigations he left to his family. After that came the privileged classes and the complete overturn of human life on earth, thereby creating private property. The first thieves on earth were those who today are called Priests. The second thieves were those who today are called Soldiers. It was natural that the man first entrusted with the investigations should have need of others to protect his interests and keep guard over what he had amassed. A Missionary Spirit was born who found in the rivers some bright grains of gold, which he considered a discovery. And it was natural that he displayed them to the person in charge of the cult, that is, the investigations. This man was called Peris. The priests held that the discovery was their own. The soldiers, which is to say the priests' guards, claimed a part for themselves. This was the motive for the unfolding revolution, the first that occurred on earth. In view of the disaster caused by his discovery, Peris was obliged to flee to other regions. But a missionary is a missionary, and wherever he went he always found grains of gold. And he came to rest in the place that today bears his name and is known in Europe by the name of Persia. Later, Peris joined forces with Fulo in Egypt. Fulo was the discoverer of fire, and between the two of them they melted the gold. From them was born a doctrine that would later be called KRISHNA. After these happenings 29 Missionary Spirits arrived on earth who were not exiles. They were headed by Adam and Eve. Adam was born of the priest and Eve of the soldier. These events occurred only 58 centuries ago. ThQn other things occurred of which the Catholic Bible speaks mystifyingly. In today's city of Hyderabad, India, Adam and Eve became incarnate. It was in Antioch ten years after Jesus that the Christian Church was founded. Christ is danger, because in this form it appeared to Jacob in a dream. Saul, or rather Paul, as he is known, fought against Moses in the Red Sea.

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Afterward, when Stephen the disciple of Jesus was stoned to death, the police agent Saul found a script in Stephen's pockets to which has been given the name of GOSPEL. Saul, or rather Paul, also wanted to preach human fraternity because he had learned about it from his master Gamaliel, then from John the Solitary known as the Baptist, and later from the mouth of the revolutionary communist Jesus of Nazareth, who stirred up trouble in his harangues with priests, bankers, and rulers. On March 22, under the military leadership of Prince Ur, Jesus with 20,000 men waged open warfare against the bankers of Jerusalem. Then came Paul, who is the selfsame Spirit of AITEKES, Pharoah's son-in-law, known today under the name of Saint Paul. It was in Antioch that Paul founded the Christian Church ten years after Jesus's death. A Council of Jesus's Apostles existed in Mesopotamia, presided over by his mother, Mary, and the Apostle John, who later became James of Galicia in Spain. The Council of the Apostles caught the attention of Paul, who was obliged to recognize it and to unite with Peter, who could never get along harmoniously with Paul. In view of all this, we are obliged to Jesus for the concept of liberty. The Catholic religion was the work of Emmanuel I, or rather Hildebrand, also known as Saint Gregory. When the wicked learned that masters and slaves are the same in the eyes of love, or rather God, they tried to impose obstacles on human progress. In other times, political authority had been inherited. But after Jesus, who preached liberty, many things happened until the advent of the name LIBERAL, meaning freedom of ideas. Liberals were called heretics, because they used freedom of thought to discover the reality of things. Humble people, who before or even in that epoch were the masters' slaves, were responsible for those happenings. The rulers, who thrived on bombastic titles, were obliged to organize among the same humble and ignorant folk a party that would preserve slavery. For the same reason, they gave it the name of CONSERVATIVE to counteract the freedom of ideas, or rather the Liberals. What is shocking about these passages is not only their outrageous and preposterous claims, but also their lack of any unifying thread. In view of their semiliteracy, repetitiveness, obscurity, and sheer fantasy, one can sympathize with Ramirez's decision to ban them from his anthology. Yet every one of these disjointed utterances reproduces a major theme from Trincado's Filosofia austera rational.9Because Sandino presents those themes

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in compressed form and out of context, they are unintelligible to the ordinary reader. I racked my brains for five years in an effort to make sense of this seeming nonsense, until the current director of the Magnetic-Spiritual School gave me a copy of his father's magnum opus and I finally came to grips with Sandino's meaning. In the letter's compressed statement of communist spirituality, Sandino provides a philosophical superstructure for the revolutionary communism he camouflaged as liberalism. Just as the Bible cannot be taken literally, so neither can Sandino. An allegorical interpretation is required to penetrate his meaning. Such an interpretation reveals the following: that the earth is a purgatory means it must be redeemed; that people are slaves of bodily appetites means that the redeemers must become steeled against self-indulgence; that the enemies of humanity consist of priests, soldiers, and bankers calls for a war against them; that religious cults and churches have perpetuated this state of affairs indicates they must be abolished; that humankind will be judged when it comes of age tells us that communism is inevitable; and that Jesus was not the Christ but a revolutionary communist suggests that we should imitate his example. Indeed, it was Sandino's mentor who convinced him that one should not follow Christ, as in Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ, but Jesus, as in the Society of Jesus.10 Trincado assigned the "most brilliant page of human regeneration" to Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, the cofounders with six others of the Society of Jesus in 1534. Together, they "formed a real material and spiritual body, physical and metaphysical, of which Xavier is the spirit, Loyola the soul, and their six companions the corpus . . . , dedicated to the goal (brutally speaking) of the death of Christ-God." n In Trincado's pantheon of master spirits, Xavier is a reincarnation of Seth, the "Investigator." Xavier was not only the greatest missionary of all in spreading the Decalogue to India, China, and Japan, but also the Spirit of Truth itself, the "master of master Spirits," who master-minded the plan of creation and later came to redeem the human race.12 In the history of humankind, this reincarnation of the Anti-Christ among the Jesuits was the "greatest mystery of all." As a collective manifestation of the Spirit of Truth, the founders of Jesuitism adopted a name signifying that their society was "neither Christian nor Catholic, but rather of Jesus, i.e., anti-Christian, anti-Catholic, and therefore the genuine representative of the Anti-Christ . . . for the purpose of the definitive judgment of the world and the establishment of the Universal Commune." The Jesuits dedicated themselves not only to spreading the latest scientific knowledge, but also to regenerating the world through communism—as in Paraguay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where they established communes among the Guarani Indians. Moreover, even the decadent Society of Jesus, infected as it became

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through cohabitation with the church, performed a major service in undermining the papacy from within.13 Historically, the Jesuits were behind the creation of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. As a young man Trincado had, from November 1883 to April 1885, been a novice at a Jesuit monastery near Zaragosa, where he was instructed by Father Cervos in Loyola's Spiritual Exercises.14 There he learned how to discipline his passions and to regulate his life, so that no decision might be made under the influence of any inordinate worldly attachment. What defines a Jesuit is membership not in the historical society of Jesus, he believed, but in the invisible society of adepts who, " 'in accepting its [original] statutes, rules, and secret or internal doctrines, cannot be anything but Jesuits.'" In effect, he became a spiritual Jesuit and remained one for the rest of his life. In his own words and with a burst of pride, "I am neither a Christian nor a Catholic . . . and, because of my knowledge, am qualified to be General of the Society of Jesus!" 15 Here in a nutshell is Sandino's rationale for human regeneration and the world overturned. Ironically, Jesus is its central figure. But the Sandinistas are uncomfortable with it and have deliberately suppressed it. Sandino's letter should not have been excised for a variety of reasons. First, it is an important clue to his communism. If the comandantes had understood it, they would not have dismissed Sandino's ideology as a mere forerunner of Sandinismo instead of its potential successor. Second, the odds are against communism's being on the historical agenda. Consequently, Sandino had to rely on nonrational beliefs to mobilize support for his project. Third, the reliance on the nostrums the Sandinistas ridicule paid off in practice by revitalizing Sandino's ailing cause. Thus, the high point of his military campaigns occurred after the Mexican Communist Party and the Communist International deserted him, when he traded off their scientific socialism for the communism of the Magnetic-Spiritual School. Finally, it is not just Sandino's bizarre credo that the Sandinistas have tried to bury, but also the corresponding impulses in each of us that undergird a communist revolution. That the Sandinistas have not understood Sandino's message is hardly surprising. They have a vested interest in keeping his illuminated politics submerged. Besides stripping his thought of its unscientific baggage, they have reduced his contemporary relevance to the defense of Nicaraguan sovereignty, popular democracy, and economic reforms. Intellectually, their patronizing attitude toward his philosophical ingenuousness is tantamount to dismissing him and purveying a sanitized image of their hero's ideology. The alternative to this unhistorical Sandino is the effort to reinstate his writings and decipher their symbolism—a sine qua non of recovering the spirit and substance of his communism.

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Notes

Introduction: Understanding Sandino's Legacy 1. Donald C. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, pp. 8-22. 2. See Anastasio Somoza Garcia, El verdadero Sandino, o el Calvario de las Segovias, pp. 83-84; Joaquin Trincado, "Cesar Augusto Sandino: con la bandera de la U.H.A.O.," p. 36; and idem, El espiritismo estudiado, pp. 176-182. 3. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 154-165, 177-180, 227-242. 4. Gregorio Selser, Sandino, general de hombres libres, p. 162. All references to this work are to the abbreviated Mexican edition. 5. For the standard interpretation of Sandino as basically a national liberation hero, see John A. Booth's account in The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution, pp. 42, 145, 237; and Jeane Kirkpatrick's twin addresses, "The Betrayal of Sandino," in The Reagan Phenomenon and Other Speeches on Foreign Policy, pp. 196, 204. 6. See Humberto Ortega Saavedra, §0 anos de lucha sandinista, pp. 18-22, 61-65; Jaime Wheelock Roman, Imperialismo y dictadura, pp. 120-124; and Sergio Ramirez, "The Relevance of Sandino's Thought," pp. 332-339. 7. Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair, pp. 52-53. 8. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 14, 19, 24-29, 49-50. 9. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 157-166. See also Augusto Cesar Sandino, El pensamiento vivo de Sandino, 1984 ed., pp. 2:25-39, 69-72, 132-135. Unless otherwise indicated, all other references to this work will be to the 1980 edition. The translations are mine. 10. Robert Edgar Conrad, ed. and trans., Sandino: The Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot, p. xx. 11. Ibid., pp. 17-18, n. 39. 12. Jose Roman, Maldito pais, pp. 87-88, 137; Somoza, Sandino, p. 259. 13. Roman, Maldito pais, p. 137; and Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., pp. 2:362-363. 14. Cited by Selser, Sandino, p. 190. 15. Cited by Somoza, Sandino, p. 83. 16. Ibid., pp. 205-207, 209-210, 227-228. For the matricentric focus of the

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Notes to Pages 4-11

Magnetic-Spiritual School, see Joaquin Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 638 n. 2, 639 n. 3, 674, 684-685, 695, 705-707. 17. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 287. On the role of Islam, see Joaquin Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 204, 213-216; and on Jesus as a revolutionary communist, Somoza, Sandino, p. 229. 18. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 306. The appellation is from Trincado, El espiritismo estudiado, pp. 10, 178. 19. Reproduced in La Balanza, journal of the Magnetic-Spiritual School 1, no. 2 (15 Jan. 1933): 8, and 3, no. 52 (15 Feb. 1935): 36. 20. The citation is from Gen. Jose Maria Moncada's account in Somoza, Sandino, pp. 83-84. I hereby correct the error in Intellectual Foundations, pp. 42-43, of mistaking Nicaragua's national emblem in this photograph for the red and black. 21. Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Declaracion de principios, p. 1; and "General Cesar Augusto Sandino," p. 1. 22. Trincado, El espiritismo estudiado, p. 177. 23. Rius, El hermano Sandino, pp. 130-134, 136; and Sandino's letters to Joaquin Trincado on 5 August and 12 November 1932, La Balanza 1, no. 1 and no. 4 (1933). 24. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, pp. 79, 81. 25. Ibid., pp. 82-83. 26. Ibid., p. 6. 27. Ibid., p. 51. 28. Ibid., p. 76. 29. Ibid., pp. 76, 104, 106. 30. Ibid., p. 83. 31. Ibid., p. 76. 32. Ibid., p. 77. 33. Ibid., p. 74. See "Babeuf's Defense "(From the Trial at Vendome, February-May 1797), pp. 66-67. 34. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," p. 473. 35. Karl Marx, "The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850," p. 592. 36. Ibid., pp. 592-593. 37. Somoza, Sandino, p. 83. 38. Proudhon, What Is Property, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, p. 392. For the role of Divine Justice in Sandino's thought, see El pensamiento vivo, pp. 166, 168, 177. 39. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 134. 40. Ibid., p. 147. 41. Marx and Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," pp. 484-485. 42. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 27, 531, 738-739. 43. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 49, 50, 52. 44. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 653. 45. Ibid., p. 761. 46. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan/' p. 333. 47. Somoza, Sandino, p. 229; Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 292-293. 48. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, p. 3:2580. 49. James Webb, The Occult Underground, p. 12. 50. Ibid., p. 361.

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Notes to Pages II-IJ

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51. Ibid., pp. 7, 295-296. 52. Ibid., p. 12.

53. James Webb, The Occult Establishment, p. 9. 54. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, pp. 3-4, 87. 55. Ibid., pp. 83-85, 96-98, 102-104, 106, 109-110. 56. Ibid., pp. 39, 103. 57. Ibid., p. 100. 58. Ibid., p. 97. 59. Webb, The Occult Establishment, p. 10. 60. Webb, The Occult Underground, p. 360. 61. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 13, 42. 62. David Poole, ed., Land and Liberty: Anarchist Influences in the Mexican Revolution, p. 79. 63. Ibid. 64. See the entry under "New Thought" in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, p. 2:2523; and Elliot Miller, A Crash Course on the New Age Movement, p. 15. 65. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, p. 2:2523. 66. Webb, The Occult Underground, p. 93. 67. Ibid., pp. 100, 101. 68. See Gustav Le Bon, Enseignemenets psychologiques de la guerre europeene, p. 164. 69. Trincado, El espiritismo estudiado, pp. 7-8; idem, Filosofia austera racional, PP. 531-533. 70. Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Declaracion de principios, p. 1. 71. Joseph Stalin, "Report on the Work of the Central Committee to the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (26 January 1934), P- 342. 72. Ibid., p. 344. 73. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 761. 74. Abraham Guillen, Economia autogestionaria: las bases del desarrollo economico de la sociedad libertaria, p. 124. For a detailed account of Spanish communism during the Civil War, see the chapter on self-managed enterprises in idem, Economia libertaria, alternativa para un mundo en crisis, pp. 86-123. 75. Guillen, Economia autogestionaria, p. 24. 76. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 297. 1. Red and Black 1. Cited by Michael Massing, "Who Are the Sandinistas?" p. 53. 2. Douglas Payne, The Democratic Mask: The Consolidation of the Sandinista Revolution, pp. 45-46. 3. Tomas Borge, La paciente impaciencia, p. 134, from the statutes of the New Nicaragua movement. 4. Massing, "Who Are the Sandinistas?" p. 55. 5. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., pp. 2:362-363. 6. Borge, La paciente impaciencia, pp. 134-135.

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7. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, pp. 49-50. 8. Ibid., pp. 15, 17. 9. See "Babeuf's Defense (From the Trial at Vendome)," pp. 58, 61-67. 10. George H. Benham, "The Story of the Red Flag: Its Origin, Ancient and Present Place in the History of the World," p. 10, from the 1848 "Speech of Men with Red Flag." 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 4. 13. Ibid. For Benham's source, see C. Osborne Ward, The Ancient Lowly, pp. 1: 465-467. 14. Ibid., pp. 1:466, 2:52. 15. Ibid., pp. 1:464, 467, 2:392 n. 104; and Benham, "The Story of the Red Flag," p. 7. 16. Benham, "The Story of the Red Flag," p. 5. 17. Ibid., p. 6. 18. Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, pp. 97, 166-167. 19. Ibid., pp. 15, 165-166; and Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, p. 15 8. 20. Sjoo and Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, pp. 16, 166. 21. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, pp. xvi-xvii, xix. 22. Ibid., pp. xix-xx, 306, 321. 23. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia, p. 358. 24. Sjoo and Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 16. 25. Corrine Jacker, The Black Flag of Anarchy, p. 91. 26. Paul Avrich, The Hay market Tragedy, p. 66. 27. Ibid., pp. 59-60. 28. Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 57; and Paul Eltzbacher, Anarchism, p. 89. 29. Mikhail Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, pp. 62, 118, 380; and Robert Hunter, Violence and the Labor Movement, pp. 4 - 5 . 30. Avrich, The Hay market Tragedy, p. 75. 31. Ibid., p. 63. 32. Ibid., pp. 75-76. 33. Ibid., pp. 144, 146. 34. Ibid., p. 145. 35. Ibid., p. 82. 36. Sandino, Elpensamimento vivo, pp. 216, 226. 37. Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 144. 38. Letter dated 29 April 1928, cited by Macaulay in The Sandino Affair, p. 119. 39. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, pp. 221, 238. 40. Ibid., p. 290. 41. Karl Bermann, ed., Sandino without Frontiers, p. 82. 42. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:360. 43. Ibid., pp. 2:364, 366. 44. Ibid., pp. 2:360, 362-363. 45. Irving L. Horowitz, ed., The Anarchists, pp. 44-47.

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Notes to Pages 23-28 46. Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, pp. 273-274, 276. 47. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas ments, p. 34. 48. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 268, 272. 49. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 87. 50. Bermann, Sandino, pp. 49-50. 51. Cited by Somoza, Sandino, p. 84. 52. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, p. 295. 53. Luis Araiza, Historia del movimiento obrero mexicano, p. 3:8o. 54. Ibid., pp. 3:80-81. 55. Ibid., p. 3:84. 56. Salomon de la Selva, "Sandino," p. 64. 57. Ibid., p. 54. 58. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 155-156. 59. John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, pp. 156-157, 160, 173-174, 177, 183. 60. Ibid., pp. 16-17. 61. Ibid. 62. Leonard Krimerman and Lewis Perry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy, also Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 271. 63. Rudolf Rocker, "Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism," p. 187. 64. Petr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, as cited by Woodcock,

191

and Move-

1860-1931,

p. 350. See

Anarchism,

p. 204.

65. Alexander Berkman, Now and After: The A.B.C. of Anarchist Communism, pp. 196-197. 66. Ibid., pp. 36-337. 67. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 372. 68. Ibid., p. 371. 69. Ibid., p. 384. 70. Ibid. 71. Cited by Eltzbacher, Anarchism, p. 115, from Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread. 72. Nomad, Apostles, pp. 19-20. 73. Cited by Eltzbacher, Anarchism, p. 115, from Kropotkin, L'Anarchie dans revolution socialiste. 74. Ibid. 75. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 387. 76. Cited by Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, p. 9. 77. Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 319. 78. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, pp. 350-351. 79. By then Sandino was familiar with Trincado's account of the comuneros in Filosofia austera racional, pp. 150-151, 223, and idem, "Los extremos se tocan" pp. 180-181, 326-327. 80. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 527-530. 81. Ibid., pp. 524-525. 82. Ibid., p. 529. 83. Ibid., p. 155.

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84. Ibid., pp. 155-156. 85. Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 388 n. 86. Michael Bakunin, "To the International Workingmen's Association of Locle and Chaux-de-Fonds," p. 336. 87. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 168. 88. Bakunin, "To the International Workingmen's Association of Locle and Chauxde-Fonds," p. 334. 89. Ibid., p. 335. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., p. 336. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., pp. 336-337. 94. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, pp. 6-8, 118, 178. 95. Bermann, Sandino, p. 105; and Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 297. 96. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 287; repeated on p. 308. 97. Ibid., p. 209; see also p. 233 and Bermann, Sandino, pp. 82-83. 2. Property Is Theft 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Somoza, Sandino, p. 83. Ibid., pp. 83-84. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 39. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 293. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 294. Augusto Cesar Sandino, Escritos literarios y documentos desconocidos, p. 67. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 50.

10. Ibid., p. 221. 11. Ibid., pp. 2 2 3 - 2 2 4 .

12. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1981 ed., p. 294. 13. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 168. 14. Robert L. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon, p. 229. 15. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 286. 16. Ibid., p. 292. 17. Ibid., p. 254. 18. Ibid., 1984 ed., p. 2:364. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 1980 ed., p. 291. 21. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 177. 22. Ibid., pp. 176, 197, 207. 23. Ibid., p. 59. 24. Ibid., p. 131. 25. Ibid., p. 133. 26. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:364. 27. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 134.

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Notes to Pages 33-37 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. P- 13530. Ibid. 3i. Ibid. • P. 137. 32. Ibid. , p. 136. 33. Ibid. .p.138. 34- Ibid. . P. 145. 35- Ibid. . P- 147. 36. Ibid. , p. 140. 37. Ibid. , p. 150. 38. Ibid. , p. 146. 39- Ibid. ,p. 151. 40. Ibid.:, p. 150. 41. Ibid.:. P. 197. 42. Ibid.,. p. 145. 43- Ibid.:, pp. 253-256. 44- Ibid.;. P- 258. 45. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The German Ideology," p. 162. 46. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 306. 47. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 248-249. 48. Ibid., pp. 250, 251. 49- Ibid., p. 248. 50. Ibid., p. 250. 51. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," pp. 82-83. 52. See Friedrich Engels, "Versus the Anarchists." 53. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 259-260. 54- Ibid., p. 251. 55- Philippe Buonarroti, Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality, pp. 293-428. 56. Ibid., footnote, p. 90. 57. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 138. 58. Ibid., p. 267. 59- Sylvain Marechal, "Manifesto of the Equals," pp. 52, 53. 60. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 36. 61. "Babeufs Defense," pp. 65-66, 69. 62. Ibid., pp. 65-66. 63. A Dictionary of the Social Sciences, p. 113. 64. Buonarroti, Babeufs Conspiracy, pp. 10-15. 65. Ibid., footnote, p. 32. 66. Ibid., p. 20. 67. Cited by Nesta Webster, The French Revolution, p. 492. 68. Buonarroti, Babeufs Conspiracy, pp. 69-70; see also p. 72. 69. Ibid., p. 90. 70. Webster, The French Revolution, pp. 496-497; quotation from Augustin Barruel, Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire dujacobinisme. 71. Ibid., pp. 20-21; quotation from John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy. 72. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 100, 138, 268-272, 361. 73. Cited by Barruel, Memoires, pp. 3:24-25.

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Notes to Pages 38-43

74. Ibid., p. 3:93. 75. Alan B. Spitzer, The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui, p. 89. 76. Auguste Blanqui, "The Man Who Makes the Soup Should Get To Eat It," pp. 193, 194. 77. Ibid., p. 194. 78. Ibid., p. 198. 79. Friedrich Engels, "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent," p. 3:399. 80. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 168, 286, 292; Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 223, 263, 269, 271-272, 294, 297. 81. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 297; Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 234-235. 82. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 306. 83. Carleton Beals, Great Guerrilla Warriors, p. 78; Ramon de Belausteguigoitia, Con Sandino en Nicaragua, p. 88. 84. Araiza, Historia, p. 4:160. 85. Ibid., pp. 3:31-32. 86. Carlos Fonseca, Long Live Sandino, p. 98. 87. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," pp. 484-485. 88. Beals, Great Guerrilla Warriors, p. 90. 89. Cited by Somoza, Sandino, p. 228. 90. Ibid., p. 229. See also Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 116-121. 91. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 59; and "Babeuf's Defense," p. 70. 92. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 65, 74-77. 93. Karl Marx, "The Grundrisse," p. 284. 94. Karl Marx, Capital, p. 1:195. 95. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 138. 96. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 222. 3. People's War, People's Army 1. Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army, pp. 41 A, 76-78. 2. Bakunin, The Political Philosophy ofBakunin, pp. 384-385. 3. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, pp. 188-189, emphasis deleted. 4. Ibid., pp. 65-67. 5. Ibid., pp. 56-57. 6. Alfonso Alexander M., "Notas para la historia de Nicaragua," La Balanza 1, no. 3 (3 February 1933): 10. 7. Selser, Sandino, p. 190. 8. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, pp. 316-317, 318, 319. 9. Ibid., p. 379. 10. Ibid., p. 323, emphasis deleted. 11. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 202-203. 12. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, p. 383. 13. Ibid., p. 320. 14. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 214. 15. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 199.

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Notes to Pages 43-51

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16. Ibid. 17. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, p. 320. 18. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, pp. 220, 222. 19. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, p. 323. 20. Ibid., p. 322. 21. Ibid., p. 380. 22. Ibid., p. 317. 23. Ibid., p. 320. 24. Antonio Diaz Soto y Gama, La revolucion agraria del sur y Emiliano Zapata su caudillo, pp. 2 0 3 - 2 0 4 . 25. James D. Cockcroft, Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, and the State, p. 113. 26. Armando Bartra, ed., "Regeneration" 1900-1918: la corriente mas radical de la revolucion mexicana de 1910 a traves de superiodico de combate, p. 52. 27. Maraboto, Sandino ante el coloso, pp. 9 - 1 0 . 28. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, p. 92. 29. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 2 9 0 - 2 9 2 . 30. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, pp. 9 2 - 9 3 . 31. Araiza, Historia, pp. 4 : 8 4 - 8 7 . 32. Macaulay, The Sandino Affair, p. 52. 33. Araiza, Historia, pp. 4:156, 160. 34. Ibid., p. 4:15735. Ibid., p. 4:160. 36. Rosendo Salazar, Historia de las luchas proletarias de Mexico, 1923 a 1926, pp. 1 : 9 7 - 1 9 2 . My account of the major strikes in the Tampico area follows Salazar. 37. Ibid., pp. 1:188-190. 38. Ibid., p. 1:63. 39. Carleton Beals, Great Guerrilla Warriors, p. 78. 40. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:360. 41. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, pp. 1 1 2 - 1 1 4 . 42. Ibid., p. 118. See also Araiza, Historia, pp. 3 : 2 3 - 2 5 . 43. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, p. 161. 44. Diego Abad de Santillan, Ricardo Flores Magon: el apostol de la revolucion mexicana, p. 108. 45. Ibid., p. 115. For Flores Magon's letter of 19 September 1921, see pp. 116-117. 46. Bartra, "Regeneration," pp. 174-175. 47. Poole, Land and Liberty, pp. 128-134. 48. Bartra, "Regeneration," p. 327. 49. Ibid., pp. 3 2 6 - 3 2 7 . 50. Errico Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life & Ideas, p. 211; and Woodcock, Anarchism, pp. 3 4 8 - 3 5 1 . 51. Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 341. 52. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, pp. 183-184. 53. Woodcock, Anarchism, pp. 340, 342. 54. Ibid., p. 337. 55. Ibid., p. 267.

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Notes to Pages 51-60

56. Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868-1936, p. 156,n 3. 57. Malatesta, Malatesta, pp. 187-188, 189, 197. 58. Ibid., pp. 134-13559. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, pp. 19, 23, 25, 115. 60. Poole, Land and Liberty, pp. 105, 128. 61. Ibid., p. 143; and Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, p. 214. 62. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, p. 370. 63. Ibid., p. 367. 64. Ibid., pp. 355, 357. 65. Ibid., p. 367. 66. Ibid., p. 323. 67. Ibid., p. 317. 68. Ibid., p. 376. 69. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 199. 70. Ibid., pp. 204, 205. 71. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, p. 375. 72. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 184. 73. Ibid., p. 184. 74. Ibid., p. 198. 75. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 87-90. 76. Mikhail Bakunin, Selected Writings, pp. 91-92. 77. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 214. 4. The Conspiratorial Vanguard 1. Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince and Other Works, p. 149. 2. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: FHippo Michele Buonarroti (1761-1837), p. 40. 3. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 62. 4. Ibid., pp. 182-185. 5. Fonseca, Long Live Sandino, p. 95. 6. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, p. 84. 7. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 180. 8. Bartra, "Regeneration," p. 326. 9. Woodcock, Anarchism, pp. 337-338. 10. Malatesta, Malatesta, pp. 163-164. 11. Bartra, "Regeneration," p. 268. 12. Blanqui, "The Man Who Makes the Soup," p. 196. 13. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 222. 14. Bermann, Sandino, p. 91. 15. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, p. 90. 16. Bartra, "Regeneration," pp. 246, 248, 296. 17. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 54. 18. Malatesta, Malatesta, p. 208. 19. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, pp. 154-155. 20. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 183.

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Notes to Pages 60-67

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21. Bakunin, Selected Writings, pp. 86-87; Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 182.

22. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 183. 23. Ibid., pp. 187-188. 24. Bakunin, Selected Writings, p. 92. 25. Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists, p. 50. 26. Ibid., pp. 12-16, 22-31. 27. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 62. 28. Ibid., p. 70. 29. Ibid., pp. 193-194, 296. 30. Heleno Sana, El anarquismo de Proudhon a Cohn-Bendit, p. 106. 31. Samuel Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection, p. 10. 32. Ibid., p. 11. 33. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, pp. 27-28. 34. The following account is based on ibid., p. 29. 35. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 217. 36. Ibid., p. 221. 37. Ibid., p. 300. 38. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:364. 39. Ibid., pp. 2:362-363. 40. Bermann, Sandino, p. 91. 41. Ibid., p. 101. 42. Ibid., p. 103. 43. Belausteguigoitia, Sandino, pp. 130, 132. 44. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 213-214. 45. Macaulay, Sandino, p. 214. 46. Belausteguigoitia, Sandino, pp. 145-146. 47. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 135-136. 48. Macaulay, Sandino, p. 57. 49. Ibid., pp. 158, 226. 50. See the correspondence between Pavletich and Mariategui in Jose Carlos Mariategui, Correspondencia (igi^-igso), pp. 2:608, 615. 51. Gregorio Gilbert, Junto a Sandino, pp. 131-137. 52. Ibid., pp. 140-143. 53. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, pp. 26, 29-30, 184. See also Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 115. 54. J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies, p. 222. 55. Ibid., p. 234. See also R. B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist, pp. 202-203. 56. Roberts, Secret Societies, pp. 234-235. 57. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, pp. 31, 35, 46, 49-50, 67-68, 73. 58. Arthur Lehning, From Buonarroti to Bakunin, p. 37. 59. Eisenstein, Buonarroti, p. 36. 60. Roberts, Secret Societies, p. 266. 61. Lehning, From Buonarroti to Bakunin, pp. 43-46. 62. Ibid., pp.46, 49. 63. Roberts, Secret Societies, pp. 267, 324.

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198

Notes to Pages 6j- JJ

64. Ibid., pp. 341-344. 65. Ibid., pp. 324, 358. 66. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 322. 5. The Comintern Connection 1. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:26. 2. Ibid., p. 2:27. 3. Macaulay, Sandino, p. 113. 4. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:27. 5. Ibid., pp. 2:30, 31. 6. Ibid., p. 2:31. 7. Ibid., p. 2:33. 8. Ibid., p. 2:34. 9. Ibid., pp. 2:35,36. 10. Ibid., p. 2:39. 11. Ibid., p. 2:38. 12. Mariategui, Correspondencia (1915-1930), pp. 2:608, 615. 13. Esteban Pavletich, "La revolution mexicana, £ revolution socialista?" part II: 34-36. 14. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:69. 15. Ibid., 1980 ed. p. 180. 16. Eduardo Crawley, Dictators Never Die: A Portrait of Nicaragua and the Somoza Dynasty, p. 67. 17. Ibid. 18. Rodolfo Cerda, Sandino, elAPRA y la Internacional Comunista, p. 102. 19. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed. p. 2:366. 20. Ibid., p. 2:364. 21. Ibid., p. 2:133. 22. Ibid., pp. 2:134 n. 3, 135; see also pp. 2:62-63. 23. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 156, 157. 24. Ibid., 158, 160, 161. 25. Ibid., p. 163. 26. Ibid., p. 164. 27. V. I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution," pp. 395-396. 28. Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International, p. 168. 29. Ibid. 30. Jose Roman, Maldito pais, p. 132. 31. On Lenin's Blanquist political origins and continuing Blanquist convictions, see N. V. Volsky, Encounters with Lenin, pp. 26, 67-68, 73-75; and Albert L. Weeks, The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev, pp. 4 - 8 , 176-184. 32. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Socialist Revolutions, pp. 2 : 2 - 3 . 33. V.I. Lenin, "Marxism and Insurrection," pp. 407-408. On Lenin's selfidentification as a "Jacobin" or Blanquist, see his "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy

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Notes to Pages 77-81

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in the Democratic Revolution," p. 132; and Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, pp. 55-56. 34. Harding, Lenin's Political Thought, p. 2:145. 35. Ibid., pp. 2 : 3 - 5 , 3IO-32736. lipid., p. 2:6. 37. V. I. Lenin, "Socialism and War," p. 195. 38. V. I. Lenin, "April Theses," pp. 297, 298. 39. Lenin, "State and Revolution," p. 352. 40. Cited by Abraham Guillen, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, p. 95. 41. Ibid. 42. Harding, Lenin's Political Thought, p. 2:201. 43. Marcel Liebman, Laprueba delpoder, pp. 248, 252. 44. Harding, Lenin's Political Thought, p. 2:139. 45. Cited by Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 213. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p. 212. 48. Ibid., p. 322. 49. Lenin, "State and Revolution," pp. 352-353. 50. Ibid., p. 347. 51. Ibid., 347-348. 52. Ibid., pp. 380, 395. 53. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, p. 263. 54. Ibid., pp. 180-181. 55. V. I. Lenin, " 'Left-Wing' Communism—An Infantile Disorder," p. 560. 56. Ibid., pp. 566-567. 57. Ibid., p. 570. 58. Ibid., pp. 580-582. 59. Ibid., p. 587. 60. Ibid., pp.610, 611. 61. Ibid., p. 613. 62. Borkenau, World Communism, pp. 161-163, 191-193. 63. V. I. Lenin, "The Symptoms of a Revolutionary Situation." 64. Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, P. i:55. 65. Sandino, Escritos literarios, p. 77. 66. Ibid., p. 88. 67. V. I. Lenin, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism," pp. 244-245. 68. Ibid., p. 223. 69. Ibid., p. 270. 70. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 117-121. 71. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:67. 72. Lenin, "Imperialism," pp. 271-274. 73. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:90. 74. Lenin, "Imperialism," pp. 257-259. 75. Karl Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Program," pp. 530-531. 76. Lenin, "State and Revolution," pp. 378, 381-383.

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Notes to Pages 81 -89

77. Ibid., p. 378. 78. "Program of the Communist Party of Russia," p. 393. 79. "New Introduction" by Sidney Heitman, in N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p. xi. 80. In writing disparagingly of the "dictatorship of Lenin and Trotsky" in 1921, Ricardo Flores Magon revised his initial estimate of the Bolsheviks as the vanguard of world revolution. However, he continued to advocate collaboration with "revolutionary Marxists who do not travel the electoral road." See his Epistolario revolucionario e intimo, pp. 1:47, 51, and 2:44-45. 81. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, pp. 290-291. 82. Having defined himself as a "Leninist" on the basis of his widely circulated Foundations of Leninism (1924), Stalin also tried to earn a reputation as a major exponent of Marxism in his 1938 essay, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism," hence the new banner of "Marxism-Leninism," officially adopted and given currency in his March 1939 report to the party's Eighteenth Congress. See Joseph Stalin, Selected Writings, pp. 406,417-418, 465 -488. 83. Ibid., pp. 206-207. 84. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, pp. 294, 309, 318-319. 85. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, pp. 131-141. See also Christian Rakovsky's 1928 circular letter, written during exile, cited by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 1 o 1 -102. 6. The Flag of Many Colors 1. Trincado, "Cesar Augusto Sandino," p. 36. 2. In my original description of this flag, I misleadingly listed these colors in reverse order from the hoist down. See Intellectual Foundations, pp. 42-43. 3. Bermann, Sandino, p. 72. Bermann conjectures that (pp. 72-73^) there was only one flag for both the Latin American Alliance and the Hispano-American Oceanic Union. 4. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 239-240. 5. See Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, p. 114. 6. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 763-764; and idem, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 12, 376. 7. Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists, pp. 130-131. 8. Joaquin Trincado, Los cinco amores, p. 146. 9. Joaquin Trincado, El primer rayo de luz, p. 10. 10. Ibid., p. 47; and idem., El espiritismo estudiado, p. 281. 11. Trincado, Los cinco amores, p. 146. 12. Juan Trincado Riglos in his note to the second edition of Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. xiv. See also pp. xxii and 331. 13. Ibid., pp. 635,649. 14. Ibid., pp. xix, xx. 15. Ibid., p. 9. 16. Ibid., p. 635. 17. Rius, El hermano Sandino, p. 108. 18. See Somoza, Sandino, pp. 239-240.

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Notes to Pages 89-95 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

201

Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 652-654. Trincado, Los cinco amores, p. 175. Ibid., p. 378. Ibid., pp. 379, 381, 383, 384, 401-402. Ibid., p. 419. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 13-14. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 1:39i. Reproduced in La Balanza, 2, no. 34 (15 May 1934): 20. Rius, El hermano Sandino, pp. 129-131. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 200, 239. La Balanza, 1, no. 4 (15 February 1933): 23. Interview with Juan Trincado Riglos, Buenos Aires, 6 April 1985. Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Reglamento interno,

pp. 1 1 - 1 2 .

32. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 205-210. 33. La Balanza 2, no. 34 (15 May 1934): 20. 34. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 306; Trincado, El espiritismo estudiado, pp. 10, 178. 35. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 158, 178, 191. 36. Ibid., 1984 ed., pp. 1:204-205. 37. Ibid., p. 2:254; Somoza, Sandino, p. 238. 38. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 32, 410. 39. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 191. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 235. 42. Somoza, Sandino, p. 529. 43. See Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, except for the missing letter to Altamirano (3 February 1931), two missing letters to Rivera (February and 21 February 1931), and the excised letters to Rivera (22 February 1931) and to Jose Hilario Chavarria (12 May 1931) in Somoza, Sandino, pp. 200-201, 202-203, 205-206, 208-210, 227-231. 44. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 214. 45. Interview with Juan Trincado Riglos, Buenos Aires, 12 March 1985. 46. Ibid. 47. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 268. 48. Ibid., p. 364. 49. Ibid., pp. 9-14. 50. Ibid., pp. 366-367. 51. Ibid., p. 353. 52. Ibid., pp. 11, 364. 53. Ibid., p. 326. 54. Ibid., p. 343. 55. Ibid., pp. 181, 188. 56. Ibid., p. 182. 57. Ibid.,pp. 11-13,417-418; Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 170, 172. 58. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 99, 182. See also Genesis 28:4, 14, and Isaiah 48:1.

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Notes to Pages 95 -100

59. Ibid., p. 99. 60. Ibid., pp. 176-177. 61. Ibid., pp. 147-151. 62. Ibid., pp. 172, 173. 63. Ibid., pp. 98-99, 102-104. 64. Augusto Cesar Sandino, Manifiesto a los pueblos de la tierra y en particular al de Nicaragua, pp. 2 - 3 . 65. Ibid., pp. 4, 7, 9, 22-23. 66. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 173-174. 67. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 172. 68. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 153. 69. Ibid., pp. 326-327; and idem, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 150-151, 223. 70. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 150-151. 71. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 180. 72. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 150-151; and "Los extremos se tocan," p. 182. 73. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 176-177; idem, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 150-151. 74. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 177, 180. 75. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, pp. 87, 297. 76. Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Reglamento interno, P-3377. Ibid. 78. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:198. 79. Ibid., p. 2:58. 80. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 239-240. 81. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 138. 82. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 527-529. 83. Ibid., pp. 527, 529. 84. Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Declaracion deprincipios, p. 1. 85. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 252. 86. Ibid., p. 224, emphasis mine. 87. Trincado, Los cinco amores, pp. 381, 392-393; Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Declaracion de principios, p. 5. 88. Trincado, Los cinco amores, pp. 152-154. 89. Ibid., p. 160. 90. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 251-254. 91. Ibid., pp. 254-255. 92. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 137-140, 250-251. 93. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 341. 94. Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Declaracion de principios, p. 4. 95. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 343. 96. Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, Declaracion de principios, p. 1. 97. Ibid., pp. 2 - 3 .

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Notes to Pages 100-106

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98. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 536. For a complete clarification of the "Principles," see pp. 536-549. 99. Ibid., pp. 11, 27; and idem, El espiritismo estudiado, pp. n o - 1 1 3 , 141. 100. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 27n. 101. Manly R Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, p. 139. 102. Ibid., p. 144; and Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia, pp. 188, 866. 103. Walker, The Woman s Encyclopedia, p. 951. 104. Ibid., pp. 44, 866-867, 1043. 105. Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 89. 106. Joaquin Trincado, El primer rayo de luz, pp. 45-46. 107. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline, pp. 115-116, from the Sepher Yetzirah, pp. 4:6, 9. 108. See illustration facing pp. 145, 146, Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline. 109. Roman, Maldito pais, p. 88. n o . Trincado, El espiritismo estudiado, p. 113. For an explanation of "golden fraternity," see Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline, p. 139. 7. God Punishes Proprietors 1. Belausteguigoitia, Sandino, p. 165. 2. Ibid., pp. 164-165. 3. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, pp. 313-316. 4. Ibid., p. 214. 5. Ibid., pp. 205-206. 6. Ibid., p. 214. 7. Ibid., p. 238. 8. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, p. 62. 9. Ibid., p. 115. 10. Ibid., p. 62. 11. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 209; Somoza, Sandino, pp. 210, 227-228. 12. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 286. 13. Ibid., pp. 204-206. 14. Ibid., p. 87. 15. Ibid., pp. 217, 218. 16. See the portions of the excised letter to Rivera in Somoza, Sandino, pp. 209210. See also Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 322-324. 17. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 292. 18. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 333. 19. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 221. See also Rousseau, The Social Contract, pp. 3-4. 20. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 223, 225 n.; Rousseau, The Social Contract, pp. 220-221, 231-235, 249-254. 21. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 237. 22. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 274. 23. Ibid., pp.273, 392. 24. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice, pp. 33, 35.

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25. Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 51-52. 26. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice, pp. 229, 230, 236. 27. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, p. 168; see also the 1984 ed., p. 11360. 28. Ibid., 1980 ed., p. 213; and Proudhon, What Is Property, pp. 49-50. 29. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 306. 30. Ricardo Flores Magon, "Carta a Nicolas T. Bernal" (3 August 1921), Antologia, pp. 123-124. See also Flores Magon's letter to Irene Benton (2 May 1922), pp. 125-127.

31. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 39. 32. Ibid., pp. 50, 52. 33. Ibid., pp. 46-47. 34. Ibid., p. 53. 35. Ibid., pp. 50-51. 36. Ibid., p. 271. 37. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 206. 38. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 20, 322-324. 39. Sana, El anarquismo, p. 40. 40. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 252-253. 41. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 249. 42. Ibid., pp. 138, 249. See also Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice, pp. 194-195, 323. 43. "Babeuf's Defense," pp. 61-62. 44. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf, p. 199; quoted from a letter by Germain to his former secretary dated 22 July 1795. On the influence of the Illuminati on Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals, see Roberts, Secret Societies, p. 235. 45. Eisenstein, Buonarroti, p. 36; and Roberts, Secret Societies, pp. 264-266. 46. Lehning, From Buonarroti to Bakunin, pp. 45, 46. See also Roberts, Secret Societies, p. 264. 47. Buonarroti, Babeuf s Conspiracy, p. 10. 48. Ibid., p. 57 n. 49. Ibid., p. 184 n. 50. Ibid., p. 183. 51. Ibid., p. 186 n. 52. Rousseau, The Social Contract, pp. 49-50, 23-27, 281-282. 53. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti, p. 10. 54. Ibid., p. 11. See also Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, pp. 87, 92. 55. Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, pp. 92-93. 56. Ibid., p. 85. 57. Ibid., p. 87. 58. Eisenstein, Buonarroti, p. 45. 59. Ibid. 60. George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism, p. 275, n 11. 61. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution, p. 23. 62. Angel Maria de Lera, La masoneria que vuelve, p. 124. 63. Engels, "Program of Social Reform on the Continent," p. 31407. 64. Ibid., p. 3:399.

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Notes to Pages iii-ng

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65. Ibid., p. 3:407. 66. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., pp. 1:69-70. 67. Ibid., p. 2:498. 68. Ibid., p. 1:69. 69. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 53. 70. Somoza, Sandino, p. 200. 71. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., pp. 1:163, 166, 167. 72. Ibid., pp. 1:152, 153-154, 156. 73. Ibid., pp. 1:169-170, 183, 195-196, 219. 74. Ibid., 1980 ed., p. 122. 75. Ibid. 76. Macaulay, Sandino, p. 57. 77. William Kingsland, The Gnosis or Ancient Wisdom in the Christian Scriptures, pp. 24-25, 104. 78. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 80, 81. 79. Ibid., 1984 ed., p. 1:180. 80. Beals, Great Guerrilla Warriors, p. 90. 81. Ibid. 82. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., pp. 1:199-200. 83. Bermann, Sandino, p. 85. 84. Ibid. 85. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 288. 86. Proudhon, What Is Property, p. 414. 87. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 286. 8. Pursuing the Millennium 1. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 233. 2. Elmer T. Clark, The Small Sects in America, pp. 18-19, 21. 3. Carleton Beals, Banana Gold, p. 265. 4. Macaulay, Sandino, p. 53. 5. Clark, Small Sects, p. 30. 6. Somoza, Sandino, p. 202; Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 289. 7. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, p. 1:56. For the following descriptive summary, see also Frank S. Mead, Handbook of Denominations in the United States, pp. 15-18, and Clark, Small Sects, pp. 43-56. 8. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements, p. 21. 9. Friedrich Engels, "The Peasant War in Germany," pp. 423-424. 10. Cohn, Millennium, pp. 99-101. 11. Ibid., p. 4. 12. Ibid., pp. 2 1 - 2 2 .

13. 14. 15. 16.

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Clark, Small Sects, p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 202, 205-206, 228-230. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 214.

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17. Ibid., p. 287; Somoza, Sandino, p. 229. 18. Bermann, Sandino, p. 86. 19. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 362. 20. Ibid., p. 388. 21. Ibid., p. 347. 22. Ibid., pp. 11, 366. 23. Trincado, Los cinco amores, pp. 396-398. The five preceding epochs of world history may be summarized as the Age of Tribes, the Age of Cities, the Coming of the Adamic Race, and the Ages of Abraham and Moses. Although partial to the wisdom of the Orient, Trincado assigned key roles to the biblical figures in his soteriology. 24. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan" pp. 157, 173, 180-181, 230, 344, 367, 376. 25. Ibid., pp. 168-169, 180-181; Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 138-140. 26. Somoza, Sandino, p. 229. 27. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 168. 28. Ibid. 29. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 141. 30. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 168. 31. Ibid., p. 169. 32. Ibid., p. 411. 33. For the following summary, see ibid., pp. 345-346. 34. Ibid., p. 163. 35. Ibid., p. 169. For the identification of Christ as the secret name of Satan, see pp. 154, 166, 229, 349. 36. Ibid., p. 346. 37. Ibid., p. 367. 38. Ibid., p. 349. 39. Ibid., pp. 395-396, 397. 40. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., pp. 2:198, 303-304. 41. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 651. 42. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 391, 392. 43. Ibid., p. 352. 44. Ibid., pp. 349-350. For the meaning of "666," see also pp. 229, 359, and Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 118, 127, 162, 805. 45. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 114-115, 123, 125-127; and idem, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 145, 163-166. 46. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 154. 47. Somoza, Sandino, p. 229. 48. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 123. 49. Ibid., p. 118. 50. Ibid., p. 92. 51. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 286-287. 52. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 204. 53. K. S. Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, pp. 7:469-470. 54. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 213.

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Notes to Pages 125-130

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55. Ibid., pp. 214-216. 56. Ibid., pp. 216-218. 57. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, p. 50. 58. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 24. 59. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, 1984 ed., p. 2:175. 60. Ibid., 1980 ed., p. 289. 61. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 220, 225, 763, 768-772; idem, "Los extremos se tocan," pp.326, 364; Joaquin Trincado, "1934—Febrero 22—1935," P. 359. The Scriptures Unveiled 1. Trincado, Filosofia, pp. 26, 74. 2. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 191. 3. Ibid., p. 286. 4. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. v; Somoza, Sandino, p. 205. 5. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 286. 6. Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement, pp. 26, 28. 7. Helene P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, pp. 1:325, 326, 329. 8. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, p. 2:1653. 9. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, p. 2:399. 10. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia, p. 951. 11. Ibid., pp. 374, 951. 12. Interview at the headquarters of the Magnetic-Spiritual School, Buenos Aires, March 1985. 13. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 74-75, 792-793. 14. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, p. 1:147. 15. The Theosophical Movement 1875-1925: A History and a Survey, p. 20. 16. Interview with Juan Trincado Riglos, Buenos Aires, March 1985. 17. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, pp. 1:72-73. 18. Macaulay, Sandino, p. 57. See also Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," P- 237. 19. Kingsland, The Gnosis or Ancient Wisdom in the Christian Scriptures, p. 79. 20. Ibid., p. 106. 21. Helene P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, p. 2:38; see also p. 1:573. 22. Kingsland, The Gnosis, p. 107. 23. Diane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, p. 128. 24. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia, p. 343. 25. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 695-696. 26. Ibid., pp. 638-639, 674, 686. 27. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline, pp. 44-45, 47. 28. Sjoo and Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, pp. 235-236; Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia, pp. 74, 961-962. 29. Kingsland, The Gnosis, p. 75.

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Notes to Pages 130-136

30. Ibid., pp.94, 97 n. 1. 31. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 129-130. 32. Ibid., p. 27. 33. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, p. 306. 34. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, pp. 32, 33. 35. Ibid., p. 44. 36. Ibid., p. 45. 37. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 215, 217. The same questions provide the focus of Ernst Bloch's interpretation of Marxism as a futuristic gnosis: "Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" (The Principle of Hope, p. 1:3). 38. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 289. 39. Selser, Sandino (1979 ed.), p. 200. 40. Macaulay, Sandino, p. 53. 41. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 1 n.i. 42. See Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 285. 43. Beals, Great Guerrilla Warriors, p. 78. 44. Steven Rosen, Food for the Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions, P- 72. 45. Ibid., p. 90. 46. Cited by Macaulay, Sandino, p. 57. 47. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 287. 48. Ibid., p. 209. 49. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 26-28. 50. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 293. 51. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. xix-xxi. 52. Kingsland, The Gnosis, pp. 101-102. 53. Ibid., p. 91. 54. Ibid., pp. 140, 143, 165-166. 55. C. W. King, The Gnostics and Their Remains, p. 96. 56. Kingsland, The Gnosis, p. 82. 57. Ibid. 58. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 26, 124-130. 59. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 287. 60. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 227-228. 61. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrines, p. 1:91. 62. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 16. 63. Ibid., p. 22. 64. Ibid., p. 19. 65. Ibid., p. 17. 66. Ibid., pp. 1, n.i, 12, 19; idem, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 59, 62-63. 67. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 157. See also Somoza, Sandino, pp. 227-228. 68. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 157. 69. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 56, 179-180. 70. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 24, 85.

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Notes to Pages 136-145 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

209

Ibid., pp. 41-48, 85, 116-117; idem, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 68-70. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 116-117. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 137, 142. Ibid., pp. 142, 174, 290, 351. Ibid., p. v. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 28, 134-136. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 78-82. Ibid., pp. 70-71, 79. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 28, 134-136. Ibid., pp. 114-115, 117-119. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 135-136. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 169-173. Ibid., p. 199; idem, Filosofia austera racional, p. 764. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 15, 195. Somoza, Sandino, p. 229. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 85, 87. Somoza, Sandino, p. 205. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 135. Somoza, Sandino, p. 229. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, pp. 225-226. See Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 55, 322-324. Ibid., pp. 224-225. Ibid., pp. 362-363.

10. From Solomon's Temple to Moses's Kabbalah 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1871, 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Gilbert, Junto a Sandino, p. 265. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 173. "Nota biografica del maestro fundador," p. 4. Lera, La masoneria, p. 17, cited by Lera. Mikhail Bakunin, From out of the Dustbin: Bakunin's Basic Writings, 1869p. 64. Araiza, Historia, pp. 4:12; 1:118. Bakunin, From out of the Dustbin, p. 170. Ibid. Lera, La masoneria, p. 46. See also Webb, Occult Underground, p. 225. Webb, Occult Underground, p. 225.

11. Ibid., p. 222.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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Lera, La masoneria, p. 49. Ibid., pp. 72-73, 74-75. Ibid., pp. 42-43. Ibid., pp. 34, 40. Webster, Secret Societies, pp. 107-108. Lera, La masoneria, p. 24.

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Notes to Pages 145-152

18. Ibid., pp. 24-27. 19. Ibid., p. 26. 20. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 1-2, 14-17, 20-21, 92-113. 21. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 194. 22. Webster, Secret Societies, p. 100. 23. Robison, Conspiracy, pp. 57-58, 60, 63. 24. Webster, Secret Societies, p. 156. 25. Ibid., p. 49. 26. Ibid., pp. 62-63. 27. Ibid., pp. 55-56. 28. Ibid, p. 66. 29. Ibid., pp. 66-69. 30. Ibid., p. 16. 31. Ibid., p. 164. 32. Ibid., p. 147. 33. Webb, Occult Underground, p. 224. 34. Webster, Secret Societies, p. 97. 35. Ibid., pp. 97, 119. 36. Roman, Malditopais, pp. 87-88. 37. Webb, Occult Underground, pp. 225-226. 38. Lera, La masoneria, p. 35. 39. Webb, Occult Underground, pp. 225, 226. 40. Robison, Conspiracy, pp. 63-64; see also pp. 88-89. 41. Webster, Secret Societies, p. 211. 42. Ibid., p. 231. 43. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 214. 44. Webster, Secret Societies, pp. 165-166. 45. Ibid., p. 166. 46. Ibid., p. 167. 47. Ibid., p. 169. 48. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 27 n. 49. Ibid., pp. 26, 27 n. 50. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline, p. 154. 51. Ibid., illustration on pp. 144 -145. 52. Ibid., p. 153. See also Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 27 n. 27, 462. 53. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline, pp. 47, 159. 54. Ibid. For the pair of scales in the Hermetic symbolism transmitted by the Rosicrucians, see the figure of the goddess Isis facing pp. 44-45. 55. Trincado, El primer rayo de luz, pp.45, 52; idem, El espiritismo estudiado, p. 19. 56. Trincado, El primer rayo de luz, p. 46. 57. Trincado, Los cinco amores, pp. 396-398. 58. Webster, Secret Societies, pp. 1 0 9 - n o . 59. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 26-27. 60. Ibid., pp. 76-77, 83. 61. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline, p. 133. 62. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 27.

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Notes to Pages 152 -158

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63. Ibid., pp. 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 .

64. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 68, 76. 65. Ibid., pp. 202, 224, 323, 332, 336-337, 399-400. See also idem, El espiritismo estudiado, pp. 63-64. The complete text is cited in Joaquin Trincado's Codigo de amor universal, pp. 1-3. 66. Somoza, Sandino, p. 200, emphasis mine. 67. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 44-45. 68. Somoza, Sandino, p. 240; and Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 202, 224, 323, 332, 336-337, 399-400. 69. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, p. 289. 70. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 27, 536. 71. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 231-232. 72. Ibid., pp. 12, 16. 73. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 176. 74. Ibid., p. 730. 75. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 228; Somoza, Sandino, p. 228. 76. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 231. 77. Ibid., p. 30. 78. Ibid., p. 237. 79. Ibid., pp. 401-402. 80. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 76-77. 81. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 165. 82. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 28-29, 808. Conclusion: The Relevance of Sandino's Communism 1. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, p. 16. 2. Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution, pp. 2:487-492, 579-581. 3. Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 156. 4. Abraham Guillen, Estrategia de la guerrilla urbana, pp. 148, 160. 5. Claribel Alegria and D. J. Flakoll, Nicaragua: la revolucion sandinista (18551979), p. 105. 6. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 292. 7. Ernesto Guevara, Obras 1957-1967, pp. 2:382, 693. 8. Hartmut Ramm, The Marxism of Regis Debray: Between Lenin and Guevara, p. 62. For a detailed discussion of Guevara's anarchism, see ibid., pp. 21-25, 140-144; Daniel James, Che Guevara: A Biography, pp. 308-314, 347; and Donald C. Hodges and Abraham Guillen, Revaloracion de la guerrilla urbana, pp. 17-18, 58-66. 9. Ernesto Che Guevara, El diario del Che en Bolivia, p. 254, entry for July 24, 1967. 10. Donald C. Hodges, The Legacy of Che Guevara: A Documentary Study, p. 58. 11. Ernesto Che Guevara, Che: Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara, p. 35. 12. Ibid., p. 408. 13. Cited by Michael Lowy, El pensamiento del Che Guevara, p. 72. 14. Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain: An Autobiography, p. 168.

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Notes to Pages 158-165

15. "Our political life," writes Nikolai Shmeliov, a Soviet radical economist and leading supporter of a market economy, "has one sad feature: the most pronounced are leveling trends, born out of the ideology of equality of all in poverty." Cited by Leon Aron, "Waiting for Yeltsin," The National Interest, p. 43. 16. Yeltsin, Against the Grain, p. 157. 17. Ibid., p. 170. 18. Lowy, Che Guevara, p. 137. 19. Donald C. Hodges, "Introduction" to Abraham Guillen, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla: The Revolutionary Writings of Abraham Guillen, p. 34. 20. Guillen, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, pp. 74-75. From Guillen's unpublished ms., "Neo-marxismo y action directa" (1972). 21. Ibid., p. 74. 22. Hodges, "Introduction," pp. 43-55. 23. Guillen, Economia autogestionaria, pp. 52-53. 24. Ibid., pp. 128, 158. 25. Ibid., pp. 127, 232. 26. See the Appendix. 27. Lenin, "The State and Revolution," pp. 391-395. 28. Noam Chomsky, "Nota sobre el anarquismo," p. 137. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 142, from Daniel Guerin, Ni Dieu, ni maitre. 31. Karl Korsch, Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory, p. 281. 32. Ibid., p. 193. 33. Ibid., p. 282. 34. Ibid., pp. 62-63, cited by Kellner in his introduction. 35. Guillen, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, p. 76. 36. See Abraham Guillen on the affinity between anarcho-Marxism, council communism, and the Yugoslav model of self-management, Democracia directa: autogestion y socialismo, pp. 99-112, 138-140, 152-156, and idem, Socialismo de autogestion: de la Utopia a la realidad, pp. 144-147, 185-195, 210, 217-223. 37. See "The Saga of Waclaw Machajski" in Max Nomad, Aspects of Revolt, pp. 96-117. A few extracts from Machajski were translated by Nomad under the title "On the Expropriation of the Capitalists," in The Making of Society. Jan Waclav Makhaiski, Le socialisme des intellectuels, a French anthology of his works, appeared in 1979. 38. For Machajski's criticism of Marx's materialist interpretation of history, see Makhaiski, Le socialisme des intellectuels, pp. 152-163, 178-186, 203-211, and the editor's comments, pp. 17-21, 26-27, 39 _ 4°39. Ibid., pp. 185, 186. See also p. 218. 40. Ibid., p. 213. 41. Ibid., p. 232. 42. Ibid., pp. 156-15943. Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, pp. 1:296-297, 2:97100, 327-328. 44. Ibid., p. 2:328. 45. Ibid., pp. 1:149-150. 46. Ibid., p. 1:152.

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Notes to Pages 165-171

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47. Ibid., p. 1:301. 48. Ibid., pp. 2:149, l5149. Ibid., p. 2:126. 50. Ibid., pp. 1:146-148, 2:126. 51. Ibid., p. 2:214. 52. German Guzman, Camilo Torres, p. 291. 53. See Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, pp. 280-282, 285-287. 54. Jose Porfirio Miranda, Marx en Mexico: plusvalia y politica, p. 42. 55. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 56. Marx, Capital, p. 1:52; Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, p. 273. 57. Miranda, Marx en Mexico, pp. 80-82, 84-85, 99-105. 58. Jose Porfirio Miranda, Comunismo en la Biblia, pp. 26, 42, 45-46, 47-48, 49, 80. The biblical reference is to Mark 10:21, 25. 59. Ibid., pp. 15-16, 79-80; and idem, Marx en Mexico, p. 83. 60. Webb, Occult Underground, pp. 26-32, 33-34. 61. Allan Kardec, El evangelio segun el espiritismo, pp. 39-40. 62. Trincado, "Los extremos se tocan," p. 231. 63. Webb, Occult Underground, pp. 32, 124, 351-359. 64. Hazel Henderson, The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics, pp. 12, 384. See also Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra, Green Politics, pp. 53-55. 65. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the ig8os, p. 9. See also Miller, A Crash Course, pp. 15-16, 23-25. 66. Henderson, Politics of the Solar Age, pp. 24, 354 n., 356, 386; and Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, pp. 228-229. 67. See in particular Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation, pp. 177-178; and idem, GynlEcology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, pp. 9 - 1 1 ; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, pp. xv-xvii, 293-294; and Andree Collard with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild: Man's Violence against Animals and the Earth, pp. 7 - 8 , 96-98, 136-142. 68. Merchant, The Death of Nature, pp. 1-41, 69-70, 77, 79-83, 121-124, 197-198. 69. The most outstanding exception is that of the Spanish anarcho-communist and minister of health in the Largo Caballero government, Federica Montseny (1905- ). See Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern, eds., European Women on the Left, pp. 125, 127, 1 3 0 - 1 3 1 .

70. Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism, pp. 51-84, 219.

71. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 695. 72. Ibid., p. 638, n.2. 73. Ibid., p. 639, n.3. 74. Ibid., p. 674. 75. For Sandino's cosmogonical writings depicting the Father-Creator as if it were a Mother-Earth goddess, see Somoza, Sandino, pp. 207, 209-210, 227-228. 76. Merchant, The Death of Nature, pp. 17-18, 26-27, 79, 123, 197-198; and Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, pp. 132-136, 140-151.

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Notes to Pages 172-179

77. Rudolf Bahro, From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review, p. 177. 78. Ibid., pp. 148-149. 79. Ibid., pp. 115, 148. 80. Ibid., pp. 221, 223. 81. Ibid., p. 121.

82. Cited by Spretnak and Capra, Green Politics, p. 56. 83. Bahro, From Red to Green, pp. 149, 216. 84. Ibid., pp. 115, 235. 85. See Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp. 2:472-583. 86. Ibid., pp. 1:4-5,77-99. 87. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth, and Dissolution, pp. 3:450-530. 88. Jacob Needleman, The New Religions, pp. xv-xvi. 89. Sandino, Elpensamiento vivo, p. 140. 90. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 498-499. 91. Harding, Lenin's Political Thought, pp. 2:223, 225. 92. Stalin, Selected Writings, p. 347. 93. Cited by Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 101. 94. Ernesto Guevara, Escritos y discursos, pp. 1:^1-^2. 95. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 295. 96. Ibid., p. 285. 97. Ramirez, "The Relevance of Sandino's Thought," p. 132; Fonseca, Long Live Sandino, p. 98. 98. Sergio Ramirez, "Analisis historico-social del movimiento sandinista desde el origen hasta la maduracion," pp. 14-15. 99. See Ronald Radosh, "Pluralism: The Appearance and the Reality," p. 10. For a discussion of the issues raised by the privileges of the Nicaraguan nomenklatura, see also Donald C. Hodges, "The F.S.L.N.: A Hidden Agenda?" pp. 13-16. 100. Joan Peters, "The Long March of Alan Bolt," pp. 855-857. 101. "Borge: Sandinistas Must Adopt 'Critical Spirit,'" The Guardian (15 August I99)> P- 18. 102. Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," p. 84. Postscript 1. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 155-156; and Rius, El hermano Sandino, p. 108. 2. Canadas, El sindicalismo, p. 11, in the prologue by the Spanish anarchist Angel Pestana. For Cafiadas's final solution to the social question, see pp. 20, 27-28, 64, 82, 122. 3. Ibid., pp. 82, 121. For Cafiadas's source, see Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 189, 194. 4. Joaquin Trincado, El espiritismo en su asiento, p. 19. 5. Ibid., pp. 121, 193-234. 6. Canadas, El sindicalismo, pp. 20, 80-81, i n ff. On Sorel's "final contest," see Reflections on Violence, p. 189. 7. Canadas, El sindicalismo, pp. 34-35, 84-86, 115 ff.

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Notes to Pages 179-186 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

215

Trincado, El espiritismo en su asiento, pp. 87, 293. Ibid., p. 100. See Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 41-43, 60. Ibid., pp. 241-278; and Trincado, El espiritismo en su asiento, p. 122. Trincado, El espiritismo en su asiento, pp. 118, 120. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 150. Ibid., pp. 253, 261-264. Lenin, " 'Left-Wing' Communism—An Infantile Disorder," pp. 565-596. Trincado, El espiritismo en su asiento, p. 9. Ibid., p. 232. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 142, n. 10. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 144.

Appendix: Sandino's Suppressed Legacy 1. Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, p. 1. 2. See Somoza, Sandino, pp. 238-240, for Sandino's letter of 22 June 1931; and La Balanza 1, no. 4 (15 February 1933), p. 23, for his letter of 12 November 1932. 3. Also reproduced by Somoza, Sandino, pp. 200-202, 205-206. 4. Compare the truncated version in Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 217-218, with the untampered version in Somoza, Sandino, pp. 208-210. 5. For the excised version, see Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, pp. 225-226; for the complete version, Somoza, Sandino, pp. 227-231. 6. Bermann, Sandino, pp. 91-92. 7. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations, p. 63. 8. Ibid. 9. See note 239 to my discussion of the missing paragraphs in Sandino's letter to Jose Hilario Chavarria, ibid., p. 308; and Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp.85, 102-105, 112-121, 172-173. 10. Trincado, Los cinco amores, pp. 188-189; idem, El espiritismo estudiado, p. 124; and idem, El primer rayo de luz, p. 100. 11. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, p. 156. 12. Ibid., pp. 14, 84-85, 158; idem, "Los extremos se tocan," pp. 185-188; and idem, El primer rayo de luz, p. 100; and idem, El espiritismo estudiado, p. 57, nn. 1, 3. 13. Trincado, Filosofia austera racional, pp. 156-159. 14. Trincado, El primer rayo de luz, p. 328; and Marco Tulio Cifuentes, "Joaquin Trincado Matheo," p. 51. 15. Trincado, El primer rayo de luz, pp. 328, 329.

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Index

ABC of Communism, The (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky), 81-82 Abiff, Hiram, 143, 144, 148, 154 Abraham, 96, 101, 124, 138, 150, 152, 153 abundance, dependence of communism on,174 Adam (first man), 119, 122, 124, 134, 135, 136, 138, 144, 152, 183 agricultural cooperatives: cultivation of redistributed land, 46; organization of, 31 agriculture, forced collectivization of, 76 alchemy, 150-151 Aleman Bolaiios, Gustavo, 1, 57, 72, 90, 141, 181 Altamirano, Gen. Pedro, 93, 126, 153, 181 American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 6 anarchism: on abolition of state, 78-79; admixture with authoritarian strategy, 44 > 45 > 59 > 60; alliance with Comintern, 75-76; antagonism toward religion, 104-105; in communist tradition, 6-7, 8, 30; compatibility with communism, 38-39, 156; concealment as liberalism, 57; despotism as enemy of, 35; educational program of, 88; expulsion from First International, 60-61; identification with egalitarianism, 36; influence on Leninism, 7 7 -

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79, 156; legal, 79; links to revolutionary Freemasonry, 111, 141; and mass insurrection strategy, 50-54; and Mexican labor movement, 24; millenarian influence in, 118; modern, origins of, 37; political faith of, 177; Sandino's cooperation with, 5; and spiritual communism, viii; and spiritual movements, 169; in struggle against state, 161; support among the masses for, 58; symbols for, 17, 21, 23, 28; vanguard organizations of, 59-60, 61, 62 Anarchist International, 4, 60-61 anarcho-Blanquism, 156, 157, 159, 161 anarcho-communism: opposition to authoritarianism, 3; principles of, 2 5 26; Sandino's cooperation with, 5; in Sandino's ideology, 2, 3; symbols of, 23, 24 anarcho-Marxism, 159-160, 162 anarcho-syndicalism: alliance with Comintern, 75-76; educational activities of, 49-50; forms of salutation of, 92; organization of Tampico workers, 46-47; as philosophy of total change, 178; as prelude to universal commune, 94; principles of, 25-26; Sandino's cooperation with, 5; in Sandino's ideology, 2, 3, 4, 29; strategy of, 26-27, 5°J symbols of, 22-23; m Tampico strikes, 47-49 animal liberation, 169, 170, 171

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Anti-Christ, 136, 185 anti-imperialism: of labor movement, 47; in North America, 97; Sandino's, origin of, 48-49; vs. strategy of socialist struggle, 73; symbols for, 22 Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas, 68, 69 Apocalypse, the, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 133, 136, 138, 139, 153, 169 Areopagites, 11, 66, 67, 109 Armageddon, battle of, 94, 104, 123, 134 atheism, as inspiration for revolution, 125 Autonomous Army of Central America, 27, 93, 98 Babeuf, Francois Noel (Gracchus), 3, 7 - 8 , 11, 39, 71, 81, 115, 156; affiliation with Freemasonry, 111; Biblical justification of communism, 108, 109, i n ; concept of equality, 36-37, 38; and conspiratorial tradition, 65-66; statement of social question, 28-29; trial of, 108 Bahro, Rudolf, 171-173, 175 Bakunin, Mikhail, 3, 9, 24, 25, 49, 51, 58, 81, 156, 157, 161, 178; affiliation with Freemasonry, 111, 141; antagonism toward religion, 104-105; and conspiratorial tradition, 56-57, 65, 67; contribution to anarcho-Marxism, 159; expulsion from First International, 60-61; influence of Rousseau on, 109-110; on invisible dictatorship, 61-62; and Leninism, 77, 78, 79, 82; on liberty and equality, 23; on mass insurrection, 52-54; on organizing for class war, 42-44; on people's war, 41, 42; on political organization of workers, 43, 44, 53; on revolutionary Freemasonry, 142; on revolutionary symbolism, 20; on social question, 28, 29; on solidarity, 142; vanguard organizations of, 59-60, 61, 62, 64; on world revolution, 54-55

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bankers: as enemies of humanity, 81, 94, 95, 97, J 22, 185; as thieves, 40 Beals, Carleton, 1, 39, 40, 49, 113, 116, 132 Belausteguigoitia, Ramon de, xiv, 22, 24, 31, 39, 63-64, 103, 105, 114, 132, 153, 175 Bible, the: depiction of end times, 117118, 119, 120; individual books of, 95, 104, 106, 108, n o , 117-118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 134, 135, 136, 143, 148, 150, 168; kinship with other holy writings, 126-127; philosophical keys to, 152; prophecies concerning Satanic trinity, 124, 125; revolutionary texts of, 103, 104, 105, 108, n o , i n ; secrets of, 109, 113, I 33~i34, 136-140, 185; secret testament of Abraham in the aprocryphal books of, 152; as source of ancient wisdom, 111-112 B lack International, 20-21 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 3, 8, 9, 36, 53, 81, 156, 161; affiliation with Freemasonry, i n ; concept of equality, 38; and conspiratorial tradition, 56-57, 58, 59, 65, 67; vanguard organizations of, 61, 62, 64, 67 Blanquism, 7, 8, 21, 59, 60, 80; links to revolutionary Freemasonry, 111; Russian, 76-77, 78, 79, 82, 156 Blavatsky, Madame Helene R, 12-13; on messenger spirits, 129-130; secret doctrine of, 127-129 Bloch, Ernst, 173 Bolivar, Simon, 1, 49, 57, 93, 134 Bolshevik (Russian) Revolution, 9-10, 71-72, 75, 76, 78, 179; and conspiratorial tradition, 67; dead end of, 14; spread of, 80 bourgeoisie: confrontation with working class, 28-29, 42-43, 44, 179; expropriation of, 163-164; premature engagement of workers against, 44; replacement of, 178; revolutionary, 142 Brahmanism, 128, 135, 145 Buddha, x, 134, 145-146, 147, 173

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Index Buddhism, 128, 135 Bukharin, Nikolai, 75, 77, 81-82 Buonarroti, Filippo, 3, 29, 39, 81, 115; Biblical justification of communism, 108, 109-110, 111; concept of equality, 36-37, 38; conspiratorial strategy of, 65-67; and conspiratorial tradition, 56; and secret Masonic lodges, no, i n Canadas, Francisco, 28, 178, 179 capital: in collectivized economy, 3 1 32; definition of, 32, 38; ownership of, 32, 34 capitalism: crisis of, vii; destruction of, 21; impending collapse of, 70-71; monopoly stage of, 80-81; retribution against, 104; third way between communism and, 169 Carbonari (secret society), i i o - i n Cardenal, Ernesto, x, 14, 166-167, 168, 175 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 164-166 Catholic church: abolition of, 37; ban on Freemasonry, 143; founding of, 123, 124, 137-138, 184; fundamental belief of, 166; holy wars of, 122; idols of, 136; Sandino's affiliation with, 113-114; in Satanic trinity, 123, 125; Spanish resistance to, 95, 96; spiritual revolt against, 13; struggle of free thought against, 94-95 celibacy, 121, 122, 123 Central American Commun(e)(ards), 27, 43, 45, 79, 132 Charbonnerie (secret society), n o , i n Chavarria, Jose Hilario, 40, 93, 182184 Chinese Revolution (1911), 9 - 1 o Christ: crucifixion of, 124; cult of, 136, 137-138; identification with evil, 123-124, 125, 183; invention of, 123; as killer of Jesus, 136; meaning of, 121, 137, 139; obliteration of, 139; reign of, 120, 121, 122; thwarting of, 124 Christianity: end of, 120, 124, 125; ex-

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pectation of spiritual world-crisis, 117; founding of, 123, 137-138, 183, 184; and Gnosticism, 130, 131, 134; holy wars of, 122; identification with the poor, 166; Masonic principles of, 144-145, 146, 147; moral revolution of, 107; persecution of, 117, 144145; rejection by Rosicrucians, 149; rejection of female god, 130; rivalry with Islam, 124; secret doctrine of, n o , 113; social impulse of, vii; strategic alliance with Marxism, viii-ix; symbolism of, 20; worldly power of, 120-121

Church of the New Jerusalem, 10 cinco amores: etica y sociologid, Los (Trincado), xiii 89 Civil War, Nicaraguan (1926-1927), 22, 24, 30; Sandino's strategy in, 45-46, 50 civil wars: awakening of populace by, 54; transformation into revolutionary wars, 45-46, 50 class consciousness, and message of Christ, x class struggle, 27 class war: emancipation through, 41, 42; organizing for, 42-44 Columbus, Christopher, 94, 95, 96, 102 Committee for the Salvation of France, 43 Committee for the Social Revolution, 58, 60 Committee of Public Safety, 45, 65 communards: political alliance of, 27; of Spain, 27, 96, 102 communes: vs. collectives, 13-14; in Leninist ideology, 77; and modern technology, 159; organization of economic life around, 27; in organization of people's army, 45; of Paraguay, 185 communism: and abundance vs. austerity, 174-177; anarchist tradition in, 6-7, 8, 30; attainment of, 160, 161; compatibility with anarchism, 38-39, 156; conspiratorial tradition in, 5 6 57, 66-67; contemporary relevance of, 14, 155, 175-176, 177; dual tra-

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Index

ditions of, 6-9; educational program of, 88; equation with fraternity, 9 8 100; fusion of anarchist and authoritarian currents within, 156; future of, 173-174, 176; ideological ruin of, 174; incompatibility with humanism, 177; liberation theology as expression of, 166, 167, 168; libertarian vs. authoritarian, 3; links to revolutionary Freemasonry, i n , 141, 143; in Mexican revolutionary ideology, 6; millenarian influence in, 118; occult foundation of, 1, 2, 5, 11, 12, 13; as philosophy of total change, 178-179, 180; and political compromises, 7 9 80; principles of cooperative labor, 32-34, 81-82; rationalism in, 3 4 35» 39 > 9°» J 66; realization of, by party elites, 158, 174; revolutionary, 7 - 8 , 37; Sandino's interpretation of, 2-6, 8-9, 13, 14, 29; Sandino's sources for, 24-25, 29, 36, 37-38; spiritual basis of, 8-9; spiritual justification for, 108-112; as spiritual mission, 92-93; and spiritual movements, 168-169, 170; spread of, 9-10, 80; support among the masses for, 58; survival of Marxist challenge by> 155-156; symbols for, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28, 29; as system of radical equality, 36-38, 39; third way between capitalism and, 169; training for, 27; vanguard organizations of, 61, 62; "vulgar" equality in, 35, 36, 162, 176 —, spiritual: diagnosis of Marx's shortcomings, 171-172; ecological perspective of, 172-173; reconciliation of material interests with, 173; social transformation under, 172, 173; tradition of, vii-viii Communist International (Comintern), 2 - 3 , 9, 14, 46, 47, 92; abandonment of united front, 70, 71; acceptance of violence by, 170; advocacy of proletarian dictatorship, 70, 71; alliance with anarchists, 75-76; analysis of

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modern imperialism, 70-71; assistance to Sandino's army, 68-70; differences with Sandino over strategy, 73; dogmatism of, 75; Fifth Congress, 68; founding of, 80; influence in Defending Army, 64; and Leninist principles, 76-79, 82-83; a n d principle of equal pay, 82; Sandino's association with, 4, 56, 71, 72, 161; Sandino's split with, 4, 8, 83, 166, 186; Seventh Congress, 68; Sixth Congress, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75; Third Congress, 68; in united front, 68-70 Communist League, 61, 173 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 8, 9, 29, 39, 61 Communist Party, Mexican: abandonment of Defending Army by, 70; accusations of betrayal against Sandino, 73-75; and labor movement, 47; repression against, 72, 73; Sandino's relations with, 2, 3, 56; Sandino's split with, 68, 186 Communist Party, Peru, 71 Communist Party, Russian, 75, 78; economic policy of, 81, 82; Eighth Congress, 81; fraudulent claims of, 158; toleration of corruption by, 175; Twenty-eighth Congress, 158, 161; Twenty-second Congress, 82 community, ideal of, 7 community of goods, 7 - 8 , 37, 38 Confucius, 134, 136, 147 Congress of Latin American Communist Parties, 71 consciousness: altered states of, 12; evolution of, 129 Conservative Party, 58; abolition of, 63; in civil war, 22, 24; political ambitions of, 57; and preservation of slavery, 184; violation of constitution, 103 conspiracy, dependence of revolution on, 56-57, 61, 62, 65-67, 163, 164 Conspiracy of Equals, 28, 36-37, 56, 65, 66 Constitution, Nicaraguan, 54, 56, 103 Constitutionalist Army, 103

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Index consumption, relationship to labor, 90, 98-99, 151 cooperative labor, principles of, 32-34, 37, 81-82 cooperatives, organization of economy as, 31-32, 73, 162 council communism, 160-161, 162, 163, 164 counterculture, occult, 10-13 Creation, 129, 151, 153 Crusades, the, 122, 146, 147, 151 Cuban Revolution, 2, 166 deadly hero, 170 death's-head, 23-24 Declaration of Principles (MagneticSpiritual School), 98-100 Defending Army of National Sovereignty, 20, 27, 29, 43, 91, 138; archives of, 141, 147; Comintern assistance to, 68-70; communication of Sandino's spiritual views to, 119, 133, 153; comradeship of, 63-64; divine mission of, 104, 120; forms of salutation in, 92-93; God's protection of, 112-114, 117, 119; as heir to Biblical struggle, 96; internal structure of, 56, 60, 62, 64; objectives of, 64-65, 98; Sandino's leadership in, 64; spiritual motivation for, 125; terms of demobilization, 104; as vanguard, 56, 58, 104 deism, 143 democracy: direct, 160; grass-roots, 169; profession of, in revolutionary societies, 66 de Molay, Jacques, 147-148 despotism: as enemy of anarchism, 35; of patriarchy, 130; replacement by reason, 107-108 Diccionario enciclopedico de la masoneria, 141-142, 143-144 dictatorship: invisible, 61-62; revolutionary, 62-63, 73, 78> 161, 162 dictatorship of the proletariat, 47; bureaucratic, 79; bureaucratic domination under, 159; in Leninist ideology,

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77; replacement of imperialism with, 70,71 direct action, 47, 49 Dragon Christ, 120, 122, 123 ecology: crisis of, 164; deep, 170; importance to communist society, 171172 economic struggle, symbols for, 22-23 Egypt, 137, 183; deities of, 128; legends of, 144; scriptures of, 127-128; transmission of Masonry through, 144, 146 Emmanuel I, Pope, 137, 138, 184 end time: Adventist view of, 117-118, 119; date for, 117, 119-120; signs of, 120, 123 Engels, Friedrich, 7, 8, 61, 163, 173; on compatibility of communism and anarchism, 38-39; objection to Biblical justification of communism, 111; as revolutionary hero, 17; study of millenarianism, 118; on theory of value, 167 England: Masonry in, 142, 143, 144; as model for socialists, 161; Roman conquest of, 19; settlement of North America by, 95; in WWI, 122 environmental movement, 169, 170, 173 equality: association of justice with, 30; in communes, 13-14; compatibility with conditions of scarcity, 176-177; as divine principle, 1 0 8 - n o ; and economic rewards, 32-34, 36, 37, 81-82; establishment of, 37-38; as final solution, 28; as goal of communism, 7 - 8 , 14, 39, 156, 158-159, 160, 178; as Masonic principle, 142, 144-145; meaning for anarchocommunists, 25-26; in occult philosophy, 11; relationship to liberty, 23; symbols for, 18, 23; "vulgar," 35, 36, 162, 176 equal values, exchange of, 40 espiritismo en su asiento, El (Trincado), 89, 178 espiritismo estudiado, El (Trincado), 89

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Essenic School, 141, 147, 151, 152, 154 Europe: anarchist movement in, 51; Establishment culture of, 10-11; Masonic organizations of, 142-143; revolutionary era in, 11; symbolism of, 19, 20; wars of religion of, 122 —, Eastern: aspirations for equality in, !58-i59; collapse of communist governments in, 174; dead end of communism in, 14, 173; interest in Marx in, 155; reforms in, 157-158; social inequality in, 158, 176 Eve (first woman), 135, 136, 138, 183 evil: cause of, 122, 125; epic struggle against good, 116-117, 180; overthrow of, 118; symbols for, 21 extremos se tocan, Los (Trincado), 89, 136,153 factory takeovers, 51-52 false prophet, 123, 125, 136, 138 family: crisis of, 164; patriarchal distortion of, 171 Farabundo Marti, Agustin, 4, 64, 74; affiliation with Freemasonry, 141; differences with Sandino over strategy, 73, 76; as Sandino's liaison with Comintern, 71 Father-Creator, 4, 100, 101, 108, 114, 119, 121, 122-123, 133, 135, 139, 145, 152, 153, 154 feminism: communism as endpoint of, 169; connection to communist society, 172; connectivity of, 170; in Sandino's ideology, 4, 170, 171; spiritual sources of, 128; Trincado's philosophy of, 170-171 Ferrer Guardia, Francisco, 88, 90, i n Filosofia austera racional (Trincado), xiii, 9, 89, 100, 128, 182, 184-185 Final Judgment, 119, 121, 134; armed struggle as prelude to, 104; punishment of proprietors at, 115; settlement of accounts at, 139 final solution to the social problem: communism as, 178-179; limits of the possible on, 180; renunciation of

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property as, 168; as revolutionary objective, 28-29; symbols for, 17, 20, 28 finance capital, and imperialism, 80-81 First International, 25, 28, 53, 142; expulsion of anarchists from, 60-61; political vanguard within, 58, 59-60 First International Anti-Imperialist Congress (1928), 69 Florence Congress (1876), 23 Flores Magon, Ricardo, 3, 9, 23, 47, 81, 179; Bakuninist influence on, 61; on concealment of political intentions, 57-58; and mass insurrection strategy, 50-51, 52; on occultism, 12; precepts of justice, 107; on working class vanguard, 59; and Zapata, 45 Fludd, Robert, 148, 149, 150 Force and Brain (Fuerza y Cerebro— labor organization), 47 France: anarcho-syndicalism in, 22; communards of, 27; conspiratorial tradition in, 65, 67; and European wars, 122; occultism in, 10, 37, 168; Prussian invasion of, 41, 54; revolutionary Freemasonry in, n o , i n , 142, 143; revolutionary unrest in, viii, 155156; rise of communism in, 38 Franco-Prussian War, 41, 43, 51, 54, 77 fraternity: equation of communism with, 98-100; as Masonic principle, 142, 144-145; spiritual dimension of, 179; symbols for, 18, 19, 23, 27 fraud: in assignment of exchange values, 167; concealment of political intentions through, 57; in warfare, 56 Free Life (Vida Libre—labor organization), 47 Freemasonry, 7, 10, 11, 37, 132; concept of God, 108; degrees of, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150; deritualized, 153; derivative nature of, 147; fundamental creed of, 143; grand legend of, 144; historical sources for, 141; impact of Reformation on, 143-144; infiltration by Rosicrucians, 149; membership of, 143, 144; objectives of, 141-142; or-

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Index ganization of, 142; origins of, 142, 144-146; political ideology of, 142143; revolutionary, 108-109, 110I I I , 141, 142, 143; and revolutionary societies, 66; ritualism of, 149; Sandino's affiliation with, 141, 146, 147; secret doctrine of, n o , 146, 147154; spread of, 142, 143; symbols of, 100

French Revolution (1789), 7, 9, 19, 28, 3°> 37 > 5°\ 94, 156; and communism, 71; and occultism, 11 -12; regime engendered by, 45; spawning of conspiratorial tradition by, 65; symbolism of, 17-18 French Revolution (1848), 18, 28, 29 General Confederation of Workers (CGT), 6, 25, 39, 44, 61; alliance with Comintern, 76; educational activities of, 49-50; fourth national congress of, 49; political debate within, 24; principles of, 47; revolutionary strategy of, 52; strength of, in Tampico, 46; and Tampico strikes, 48,49 General Will, 18, 109 Germany: conspiratorial tradition in, 67; council government in, 162, 163; emancipation of Slavs from, 41; environmental movement in, 171, 172; managerial elite of, 158; revolutionary Freemasonry in, 143; in WWI, 122 Germinal (labor organization), 47 Gilbert, Gregorio, 54, 64-65 Gnosticism, 1, 10, 12, 13, 101, 127, 128, 167, 168, 173; compatibility with millenarianism, 133-135, 138140, 156; legends of, 144; matricentrismof, 130, 170, 171; mysteries of, 130; revival of, 149; schools of, 130-131; secret knowledge of, 133, J 36, 137, 149, 153; secret organizations of, 129-130; self-awareness in, 131-132, 133 God: existence of, 107-108; female aspect of, 128, 130; incompatibility

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with liberty, 104-105; name of, 150; presence in humanity, 106-107; presence in universe, 105, 108; property as offense against, 105; protection of revolutionaries, 112-114, 119; punishment of proprietors by, 105-106, 107, 109, i n , 115; regeneration of spirit by, 151; retribution against injustice by, 104; world as emanation of, 129 Golden Calf, 95-96, 97, 122 golden rule, 107 Gonzalez, Constantino, 74-75 good, epic struggle against evil, 116117, 180 Grand Firmament (revolutionary directorate), 67 Grand Lodge of England, 142, 143, 149, 151 Grand Masonic Lodge of Yucatan, 141 Grand Rosicrucian Alchemical Formula, 102, 151 Greece, ancient: symbolism of, 1 8 19, 101; transmission of Masonry through, 144, 146 Green movement, 171, 172-173 Gregory VII, Pope (Hildebrand), 120121, 123, 125, 138, 184 Group in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan Labor Movement, 92, 112 Grupo Cultural "Ricardo Flores Magon," 25 Guevara, Ernesto (Che), 156, 166, 170, . 179; endorsement of self-sacrifice, 175; on market reforms, 157-158; as revolutionary hero, 17; revolutionary theory of, 157, 159; romanticism of, 157 Guillen, Abraham, 156, 159-160, 161 Hands Off Nicaragua Committee, 68, 69-70, 75 Haya de la Torre, Victor Raul, 6 Hell: purpose of, 139; symbols for, 20 Hermetica, The, 127-128 Hermeticism, 101, 127-128 Hexagram, 151

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Hinduism, 88, i n , 116, 124, 127, 129, 135 Hispanic America: as promised land, 95, 96-97, 102; Spanish colonization of, 96-97; struggle with North America, 95-96, 97 Hispano-American Oceanic Union (U.H.A.O.), 2, 5, 6, 87, 88; founding of, 94-95; and Spanish heritage, 96-97; symbols of, 96, 98, 100, 102 Holy Spirit, new birth of, 167 hope: as basis for human future, 173; grounds for, 177, 179 House of the World Laborer (Casa del Obrero Mundial), 4, 6, 22, 23, 25, 39, 44, 47, 49, 52, 63, 88 Huasteca Petroleum Company, 48-49 humanism: as alternative to asceticism, 175; incompatibility with communism, 177; incompatibility with conditions of scarcity, 176; in MarxistLeninist system, 174 humankind, three ages of, 145 Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 26 idolatry: and Christ cult, 137; as enemy of humanity, 136 Illuminati, n , 147; and conspiratorial tradition, 65, 66, 67; doctrine of equality, 37-38, 1 0 9 - n o ; link to millenarianism, 118; and revolutionary Masonry, 108, 109, i n , 143; secret doctrine of, n o , 149 Illuminism, 149-150 imperialism: agents of, 72; class war against, 42; and finance capital, 80-81; impending collapse of, 7 0 71; popular support for, in North America, 97-98; replacement with proletarian dictatorship, 70, 71; symbols of, 95-96; united front against, 68-70, 72 "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (Lenin), 80-81 India, 124, 185; as birthplace of human race, 135; calendar of, 145; establishment of Masonry in, 144; scriptures

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of, 127, 128; social divisions of, 145; symbolism of, 19, 20, 101; transmission of Masonry through, 145, 146 Indo-Americanism, revolutionary, 42 Industrial Petroleum Workers of Tampico, 47 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 25, 47, 75-76 inner light: authority of, 126; salvation through, 135 Inquisition, the, 96, 122, 143, 146, 147, 149 insurrection: awakening of, 52-53; causes of, 52; in class war, 43, 44; comradeship in, 157; as revolutionary strategy, 20, 27, 50-54, 163-164; role of vanguards in, 58, 59-60; symbols for, 22, 23 International Association of Workers (AIT), 26 International Brotherhood (International Revolutionary Association), 60, 62, 64 International Working Men's Association (IWMA), 20-21, 42, 44, 58, 60-61, 76, 142,156, 161 International Working People's Association, 21 Isis-Hathor, 128, 130, 144, 146 Isis £/m>e//e£?(Blavatsky), 127, 128 Islam, 4, 120, 124-125 Israelites, struggle with Canaanites, 95-96 Italy: anarchist movement in, 51; conspiratorial tradition in, 65, 67; insurrectionary strategy for, 58; liberation of, 93; revolutionary Freemasonry in, IIO-III

Jacob, 95, 96, 121, 123, 136, 137, 138-139, 152, 183 Jacobins, 18, 37; links to revolutionary Freemasonry, i n ; objectives of, 28; political regime of, 45; religious credo of, 109; Russian descendants of, 76-77; strategy of, 66 James (brother of Jesus), 95, 136, 137

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Index Jerusalem, 141, 144, 146, 147, 150, 184, 185 Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 149, 185-186 Jesus (Christ), x, 10, 94, 134, 150, 173, 183; as adept of Moses, 147, 148; association with communist doctrine, 109; crucifixion of, 101, 114, 124, 136; and differences of wealth, 167168; identification with the Christ, 138; and Masonic principles, 146; moral revolution of, 107, 108, n o ; as one among the great teachers, 119, 124, 125, 147; opposition to the Christ, 123-124, 125; personhood of, 121; repudiation by church, 122; return of, 13, 117-118, 119, 120, 125; as revolutionary model, 4, 8, 40, 104, 115, 184, 185-186; secret doctrine of, n o ; symbolic meaning of, 12; as threat to existing order, 106, 108 Jews: admission to Rosicrucianism, 150; Kaballah of, 148, 151, 153; legends of, 144; millenarianism of, 133-134; mysteries of, 150; persecution of, 117, 118, 144; spread of Masonry with, 146 Joachim of Floris, 118, 167, 168 John the Baptist, 123, 124, 184 Judgment of Liquidation, 106, 139 justice: as antecedent of law, 31; as application of reason, 31; association with equality, 30; defense by violence, 56, 58, 104; and divine punishment, 106; existence for oppressed, 107; exploitation as violation of, 174; as Masonic principle, 142; as physical law, 133, 154; presence in human soul, 106; right as function of, 31, 107; triumph of, 107-108, 112, 114, 115, 119, 120, 139; and universal commune, 100 Kabbalah, 88, 100, 101-102, 128, 131, 141,143,148,149,150,151-154 Kabbalism, 127, 128, 141, 148, 149, 150 Kardec, Allan, 129, 168

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Karma, law of, 106, 113, 121, 128, 129, 172, 174; final deliverance from, 132; observance of, 133; realization of justice through, 139, 153, 154; redemption within, 135 Kingdom of God, x, 109, 116, 126 Knights Templars, 147-148, 149, 150 Korsch, Karl, 160-161 Kronstadt mutiny, 76 Kropotkin, Petr, 9, 23, 36, 44, 49, 156, 159, 178; legal anarchism of, 79; political philosophy of, 25-26, 29 labor: cooperative, 32-34, 37, 81-82; ethic of, 179; relationship to consumption, 90, 98-99, 151; social division of, 32; symbols for, 18-19 Laborde, Herman, 69-70, 71, 73, 74, 80 land: redistribution of, 46; seizure by peasants, 53~54, 59 Latin American Alliance, 87 Latin American Confederation, 87 Latin American Confederation of Labor, 42, 53, 56 law, rule of: defense of, 103-104; justice as antecedent of, 31 LawsofManu, 108, 132, 135, 145, 146 Lenin, V. L, 8, 9, 65, 88, 155, 160, 179; analysis of imperialism, 80-81; anarchist influence on, 77-79, 156; and Blanquist tradition, 76-77, 78, 79, 82, 156; and communist alliance with anarchists, 75; and conspiratorial tradition, 67; endorsement of selfsacrifice, 174, 175; on equality of pay, 81; and founding of Comintern, 80; on political compromises, 79-80; as revolutionary hero, 17; revolutionary strategy of, 161, 162; synthesis of Marx and Bakunin by, 159 "Letters to a Frenchman" (Bakunin), 41 levelism, confusion with equality, 36 liberalism: concealment of anarchism as, 57; profession of, in revolutionary societies, 66; view of justice, 31 Liberal Party, 58; abolition of, 63; and

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Index

agrarian reform, 46; in civil war, 22, 24, 30; defense of Constitution, 103; and elections of 1928, 54; and freedom of thought, 184; political ambitions of, 57; recognition of treaties with U.S., 104; Sandino's identification with, 113; in united front, 69, 70, 72 liberation theology: analytical errors of, ix; compassion of, 174; fusion with Marxism, 90; Nicaragua as home of, x; revolutionary currents in, 166-168; strategic alliances of, viii-ix liberty: as divine principle, n o ; establishment of, 37; human aspiration for, viii; incompatibility of God with, 104-105; as Masonic principle, 142; relationship to equality, 23; symbols for, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 98 light: God's gift of, 152; symbols of, 1 0 1 - 1 0 2 , 153

"Light and Truth Manifesto" (Sandino), 91, 104, 114, 119, 120, 126 Lodge Theodore of Good Counsel, 147 Lorenzo, Anselmo, 49, i n , 141 Machado, Gustavo, 68-69, 70 Machaj ski, Waclaw, 162 -164 Machjavelli, Niccolo, 56, 149, 180 magic, Kabbalah's rules of, 152 Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune, 1, 2, 6, 87, 185; appearance of, 12; austere rational philosophy of, 9, 13, 132; belief in moral revolution, 108; communist principle of, 98-100, 186; conditions for membership, 91; curriculum of, 88-90; degrees in, 147; deterioration of, 166; doctrinal differences/similarities with Theosophy, 126, 128-129; doctrine of salvation, 135; final goal of, 179; forms of salutation of, 92; founding of, 88, 93, 153; fundamental tenets of, 133, 153; and Hispanic-North American struggle, 95; identification with Rosicrucianism, 100-102, 149, 150, 151; influence on Sandino's poli-

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tics, 5, 92-93; inspiration by Masonic occult wisdom, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154; intellectual borrowings of, 116; Jesuit influence on, 186; promised land of, 96-97; repudiation of violence, 125; revival of Spiritism by, 131; Sandino's affiliation with, 4, 5, 10, 90-91, 132; Sandino's correspondence with, 181; scriptural interpretation of, 133, 134, 136-140; successors to, 172; symbols of, 151, 153-154 Malatesta, Errico, 9, 23, 49; on concealment of political intentions, 57-58; and mass insurrection, 50-52; vanguard organizations of, 59, 60 managerial/professional class: economic rewards for, 81, 82, 157-158; ending control overproduction, 160, 165; expropriation of, 163-164; failure in vanguard role, 162; Marxism as protector of, 163, 164 Manifesto of Equals (Marechal), 36 "Manifesto to the Capitalists" (Sandino), 104 "Manifesto to the City and Country Workers of Nicaragua and of All Latin America" (Sandino), 72 Manifesto to the Peoples of the Earth and in Particular to Those of Nicaragua (Sandino), 95-96 Marechal, Sylvain, 7, 8, n , 36, 141 Marines, U.S., 133; departure from Nicaragua, 54, 63, 73, 91; looting of churches, 113; retribution against, 21-22; Sandino's campaign against, 6, 13, 29, 68-69, IG3> ll7> IJ 9> 125, 132, 157 market system, 157-158 Martinez Pasqualis, 149 Marx, Karl, viii, 3, 7, 24, 25, 34, 53, 54, 61, 163, 173, 178; on abundance as precondition for emancipation, 174; on assignment of exchange values, 167; contribution to anarcho-Marxism, 159; critique of crude communism, 35; and dictatorship of the proletariat,

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Index 79; on distribution of wealth, 168; on exchange of equal values, 40; ideology of, 8; impeding of communism by, 155; neglect of ecological issues, 171-172; objection to spiritual justification of communism, 111; as revolutionary hero, 17; on wage differentials, 81 Marxism, 7; on abolition of state, 78-79; analysis of capitalism, 81; bankruptcy of, 13, 14, 160-161, 173; contrast with Leninism, 78; fusion with liberation theology, 90; as ideology of privileged class, 163, 164; impeding of communism by, 161, 162, 174; justification of wage differentials, 164-165; legal, 79; material interests of, 182; myopia of, 164; and ownership of property, 25-26, 39; principle of economic rewards, 99; satisfaction of desires under, 174175, 176-177; social inequality under, 158, 176, 177; and "soft" sensibilities, 170; strategic alliance with Christianity, viii-ix; stretching limits of, 170; subjectivist, 173; supersession by traditional communism, 155156; symbols for, 17, 24; view of capital, 31-32 Marxism-Leninism: bankruptcy of, 14, 161, 173; demise of, vii, 158-159; and equality, 13-14; opposition to wage equalization, 82; and ownership of property, 25-26; political faith of, 177; realization of humanism under, 174; as refuge for selfishness, 177; suppression of pre-Marxist tradition, 156 Master Spirit of Truth, 135-136, 152 meditation: practical purposes of, 132; role in discipline, 175; self-awareness through, 131, 132 messenger spirits, 129-130, 134, 153 Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), 6, 23, 44, 47, 49, 52; internal structure of, 58-59, 60; and mass insurrection strategy, 50-51; program for workers

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and peasants, 46; as vanguard, 58-59 Mexican Revolution, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 25, 27, 52, 73, 93, 179; communist perspective on, 71-72; as inspiration to Nicaraguan workers, 46; Masonic influence in, 142; political regime of, 44-45; prelude to, 50-51; as prelude to universal commune, 94 Mexican Student Congress (1930), 81 Mexico: anarcho-communism in, 23, 25; anarcho-syndicalism in, 22-23, 25> 46-47, 49-50; conspiratorial tradition in, 67; diplomatic relations with Soviet Union, 73; labor mobilization in, 47-49, 52; labor movement in, 24, 44, 46-47; occultism in, 12; representation of Defending Army in, 68-69; revolutionary exiles in, 6; revolutionary Freemasonry in, 142; Sandino's education in, 5, 6, 9, 10, 22, 25, 89-91, 92, 112, 116, 132; Sandino's negotiations with, 7 2 73, 80 millenarianism, 1, 10, 12, 13; appeal to oppressed, 119; compatibility with Gnosticism, 133-135, 138-140, 156; expectations of, 116; influence on secular revolutionary movements, 118; matricentrism of, 170, 171; as motivation for revolutionary war, 125; revival in liberation theology, 166, 167; sources for, 153 millennium: creation of new earth following, 118; inauguration of, 117, 153; of love and light, 169; MagneticSpiritual School's doctrine of, 125; Satanic, 120 Miller, William, 117 Miranda, Jose Porfirio, 167-168 missionary spirits, 93, 135-136, 138, 139, 152, 183 Mohammed (Mahomet), 4, 115, 124 monarchy: parasitism of, 90; symbols for, 17-18 Moncada, Gen. Jose Maria, xiv, 4, 22, 23-24, 39, 57; conduct of civil war by, 45; knowledge of Sandino's phi-

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losophy, 30, 46; as traitor to liberalism, 69 Morelos commune, 45 Moses, 8, 106, 108, 115, 124, 134, 144, 168; Kaballah of, 88, 131, 141, 148, 149, 150, 151-154; as lawgiver, 123, 136; promised land of, 95; reincarnations of, 137; school of, 141, 146, 147, 152, 154; victory at Red Sea, 137, 138, 183 Most, Johann, 20, 21 Mother Earth Goddess, 4, 19, 20, 101, 128, 130 Mother Law of communism, 98-99 mutualism, 30-31; economic principles of, 32-34; teaching of, 89-90 myths, animation of action by, 180 National Confederation of Work (CNT), 26,47,61,75 National Guard (Nicaragua), 28; and electoral system, 104; murder of Sandino's followers, 156; Sandino's campaign against, 13, 162 nationalism: in Mexican revolutionary ideology, 6; in Sandino's ideology, 1-2, 5-6, 57; symbols for, 17, 21, 22, 23, 29 national liberation, wars of: terms of Comintern support for, 71; transformation into revolutionary war, 4 1 42,54 neoanarchism, 159 neo-Marxism, 159 Neoplatonism, 12, 127, 128, 149, 167 neo-Stalinism, 160 New Age movement (1970s-1980s), 12, 169-170 New Age of the Spirit, 5, 153, 154, 168 New Nicaragua movement, 17 New Thought movement, 12 Nicaragua: as capital of liberation theology, x; in Central American federation, 27; provisional government for, 69, 70; relevance of Sandino for, 14, 155, 177; revolution in, 177, 180; so-

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cial inequality in, 176; sovereignty of, 21, 22, 29, 54, 98, 186 Nicaraguan Federation of Labor, 24, 27 nobility, the: as parasites, 90; symbols for, 19 North America: popular support for imperialism in, 97-98; struggle with Hispanic America, 95-96, 97 occult philosophy, in Sandino's ideology, 1, 2, 5. See also under name of specific philosophy (e.g., Theosophy) occult underground, 10-13 oppressed, the: cosmic analogy to struggle of, 116-117; dependence on divine intervention, 119; overthrow of evil by, 118 Order of Elus Cohens (Elected Priests), 149 Order of the Illuminati, 37, 143 Owen, Robert, 108, 168-169 pantheism, 12, 13, 105, 106, 127, 129, 132, 149, 179 Paracelsus, Philippus Aureolus, 101, 127, 148, 151 Paraclete (third person of Trinity), 118 Parajon, Gen. Francisco, 24, 27 parasitism, 90, 94, 99 Paredes, Jose de, 64, 72 Paris Commune, 18, 27, 41, 43, 45, 75, 77, 79, 165 patriarchy: despotism of, 130; distortion of family by, 171; justification of, 170-171; as root of all oppressions, 171; spiritual challenge to, 128, 170 patriotism: as means to communism, 2, 6; revolutionary potential of, 54; in Sandino's ideology, 1-2, 57; supersession of, 89 Paul, St., 123, 125, 136, 137, 138, 183, 184 Pavletich, Esteban, 64, 71-72, 74 peasants: incorporation into people's army, 46, 53-54; mobilization of, 103; organization into cooperatives,

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Index 31; political awareness of, 63; seizure of land by, 53-54, 59; vesting of political power in, 63 pensamiento vivo de Sandino, El (Sandino), 181-182 people's army: insurrection by, 50-54; meaning of, 41, 42; organization of, 45-46 people's war: asceticism in, 175; legal justification of, 103-104; meaning of, 41-42; prolonged, 161-162; spiritual justification for, 104, 125; transformation of civil war into, 45-46, 50; transformation of war of national liberation into, 41-42, 54 Perfectibilists, the (revolutionary society), 66 Pittsburgh Manifesto, 21 Pius IX, Pope, 136, 137, 138 "Plan for the Realization of Bolivar's Ultimate Dream" (Sandino), 87 Plotinus, 127, 129, 130 political parties, abolition of, 63 pope: cult of, 136; infallibility of, 138 populism: in Mexican revolutionary ideology, 6; in Sandino's ideology, 1, 161 possibilism, 178, 180 poverty, realization of communism under conditions of, 174 Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 81-82 priesthood: celibacy of, 121; as enemy of humanity, 185; as parasites, 90, 94; symbols for, 19; as thieves, 40, 183 private property: abolition of, 10, 2 5 26, 32, 37, 38, 66, 118, 123, 178, 179; confiscation of, 94, 162; definition of, 38; disruption of human kinship by, 99; expertise as, 34; and justice, 30; origins of, 183; ownership of, 40; privilege as foundation of, 175; punishment of owners of, 105106, 107, 109, i n , 115; renunciation of, 168; Sandino's contempt for, 105; as theft, 8, 10, 30, 34, 36, 38, 3 9 40, 99, 105, 106, 164, 179-180; as

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violation of divine law, 105, 179-180 procreation, law of, 121 -122 production: ending control of functionaries over, 160; intangible factors of, 34; integration with social capital, 159; ownership of means of, 13; revolutionizing mode of, 164; and social relations of distribution, 164, 167; technical management of, 27; worker control of, 163, 169 productivity, determinants of, 165 propaganda of the deed, 20, 51 property: collective ownership of, 156; ownership of, 25-26, 40 Protestant Reformation, viii, 117, 143144, 146 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 3, 8-9, 10, 25,49,56,58,59, 105, 115, 156, 161, 164, 168, 178, 179; affiliation with Freemasonry, i n , 141; definition of theft, 34, 40; importance of, 38-39; intellectual influences on, 36-37, 38, 109-110; on knowledge of God, 107; on liberty and equality, 23; on nature of God, 106-107, 108; on nature of justice, 30, 31; precepts of justice, 107; on principles of cooperative labor, 32-34, 81, 98, 99; on punishment of proprietors, 106, 107, i n ; rationalist communism of, 3 4 35, 39; rejection of crude communism by, 35-36; on triumph of justice, 107-108 Provincial Cathedra No. 40, "Light and Truth," 90, 91, 97, 100 Pythagoras, 8, 11, 143, 146 race war, 41-42 Ramirez, Sergio, 181, 182, 184 rational austerity, 9; contribution to Sandino's communism, 90; courses in, 89; fundamental questions of, 131; occult roots of, 10, 13; origins of, 132; spirituality of, 172 rationalism, critical vs. occult, 11 Rationalist Schools, 49, 88, 90

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Index

reason: collective, 106-107; as inner light, 126; justice as application of, 31; as Masonic principle, 142, 143; reign of, 107-108; reinforcement by justice, 107; silencing by Inquisition, 146; transformation into works, 179 red and black flag: ancestry of, 17-21; as emblem of labor movement, 47, 49; as emblem of universal commune, 98; meaning for communists, 26; meaning for Sandinistas, 17; meaning forSandino, 17, 21-24, 27-28, 29 Red Brothers (labor organization), 47 Red International, 20 Red Trade Union International, 53 Regional Confederation of Mexican Laborers (CROM), 46, 48, 49 reincarnation, 93, 113, 115, 121, 126, 128, 129, 168, 181; interpretation of scripture in light of, 136-138; of missionary spirits, 135-136; realization of justice through, 139 religion: abolition of, 37, 118, 185; reconciliation with science, 126, 128; in Satanic trinity, 123, 125 Republic of Equals, 14, 17, 18, 159 Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas, 7, 8, 11 resurrection(s): in the flesh, 139, 140; spiritual, 134; two, 117-118, 121 retribution: as revolutionary tactic, 21-22, 104; symbols for, 21 revolution: as Christian obligation, 166; dependence on conspiracy, 56-57, 61, 62, 65-67, 163, 164; God's protection of, 112-114; objectives of, 17, 26, 28-29, 39; anc* political awareness of masses, 57-58; political organization of, 42, 43-44; as purification, 112; role of vanguard in spreading, 80; social vs. political, 24; strategy of, 27, 45-46, 50-54, 157. 161-162, 163-164, 172, 173; symbols for, 18, 20; tactics of, 21-22, 28, 104; vanguard organizations of, 59-60, 61, 62; worldwide scope of, 54-55

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Revolutionary Convention (Mexico), 44-45 right, as function of justice, 31, 107 Rivera, Col. Abraham, 63, 93, 181, 182 Robespierre, Maximilien, 65, 109, 115 Rome, ancient: eclipse of Masonry in, 146; persecution of Christians, 117, 144-145; persecution of Jews, 144; symbolism of, 18-19, 101; transmission of Masonry to, 144 Rosenkreutz, Christian, 101, 148 Rosicrucianism, 127, 128, 147; degrees of, 149-150; doctrinal sources in Kabbalah, 151 -154; identification of Magnetic-Spiritual School with, 100-102, 148, 149, 150, 151; origins of, 148; secret doctrine of, 148, 149, 150-151; Theosophy as offshoot of, 126 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 18, 37, 38; doctrine of equality, 109-110; on social contract, 105; spiritual doctrine of, 109 Saccas, Ammonius, 127 saints, cult of, 136 salvation, collective vs. individual, 134-135 Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN): achievements of, ix; bureaucratic tendencies in, 176; censorship of Sandino's writings by, 2, 181-182, 186; defeat in 1990 elections, 176; errors of, ix-x; misinterpretation of Sandino by, 156-157; misjudgment of Sandino's relevance, 2, 175-176, 180; revolutionary heroes of, 17; strategic alliances of, viii-ix; symbolism of, 17; unease over Sandino's spiritualism, x, 2 Sandino, Augusto Cesar: as anarchoBolshevik, 161; assassination of, 156; contemporary relevance of, 14, 155, 175-176, 177; disposition of, 175; education of, 5, 6, 9, 10, 22, 25, 89-91, 92, 112, 116, 132; ideology

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Index of, 1-6, 8-10, 13, 14; image as national liberator, 1-2, 3, 4, 57; influence of occult underground on, 10, 11, 12, 13; name, variations of, 6; political traditions influencing, 6-9; published writings of, 181-182; as revolutionary hero, 17; spiritual ancestry of, 138; spiritual vision of, xii San Martin, Jose de, 49 Satanic millennium, 120 Satanic trinity, 123-124, 125 science, reconciliation with religion, 126, 128 scientific socialism, 24, 163, 174, 186 scientists, economic rewards for, 33-34 Second Coming, 109, 117-118, 119, 120, 125 Second International, 75 Secret Alliance (of Social Democracy), 60 Secret Doctrine, The (Blavatsky), 127 Secret Wisdom of the Rosicrucians, 126 self-knowledge, 89, 129, 131-132, 133, 135, 143, 153, 154 self-mastery, 88-89 Seth, 135, 136, 137, 146, 185 Seventh-Day Adventism, 10, 12; beginnings of, 117; belief in epic struggle of good and evil, 116-117; belief in human corruption, 119; and prophecy of Second Coming, 117-118, 119; social concerns of, 116 sexuality, curbing of, 121-122 sindicalismo, El (Cafiadas), 28, 178 skills, specialized: costs of, 165; as grounds for superior economic rewards, 32, 33-34; ownership of, 34 "Social, La" (clandestine society), 52 Social Circle (revolutionary society), 11 social contract, establishment of property by, 105 social democrats: common cause with communists, 76; opportunism of, 163; rupture with communists, 75, 76-77 socialism: as bridge to communism, 99; economic rewards under, 32, 34,

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243

164-165; scientific, 24, 163, 174, 186; and spiritual movements, 169; symbols for, 22, 24, 28 Society of the Families, 62 Society of the Seasons, 61, 62, 64 Socrates, 89, 134, 136, 147, 153 soldiers: as enemies of humanity, 185; as thieves, 40, 183 Solomon's Temple, 148; cult of, 141, 143, 154; restoration of, 144 Somoza Garcia, Anastasio, xiv, 57; and assassination of Sandino, 156; on Sandino's communism, 2 - 3 , 9 , x57 Sophia, 101, 128, 134 Sorel, Georges, 178, 179, 180 Soviets: administration of, 75; in democratic dictatorship, 70; direct democracy through, 160; transfer of state power to, 77 Soviet Union: bureaucratic domination in, 159; communism in, 13-14; council government in, 162, 163; diplomatic relations with Mexico, 73; party rule in, 174; persecution of anarchists in, 76; social inequality in, 158; symbolism of, 18; view of Sandinistas, ix; wage scales in, 165 Spain, 137; anarchist movement in, 51, 61; anarcho-syndicalism in, 22, 26; Bakuninist cells in, 60; colonization by, 96-97; communards of, 27, 96, 102; conspiratorial tradition in, 67; council government in, 162; and European wars, 122; libertarian communism in, 25; resistance to false religion, 95, 96; revolutionary Freemasonry in, 142; Roman conquest of, 19; unification of Central America with, 98 Spiritism, 10, 112, 129, 131, 132, 146, 149, 150, 179 Spanish Revolution, 14, 165 spirit(s): brotherhood of humanity in, 133, 139; communication with, 168; destiny of, 173; evolution of, 129, 132; regeneration of, 151; struggle of,

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Index

J

5 2 , x 53; survival of bodily death, 126 spiritual: communism, vii, viii; heritage of revolt, 13; Marxist rejection of the, J 73> 175; secular meaning of, 172, world view, xii Spiritualism, 1,2, 10, 11, 112, 127, 150, 168 spiritual masters, 126, 128-129, J34> 136, 138 Stalin, Joseph, 75; on communes, 1 3 14; forced collectivization of agriculture, 76; opposition to wage equalization, 82; on satisfaction of desires, 174-175 Stalinism, 158; impeding of communism by, 174 state, the: abolition of, 37, 42, 53, 62, 78-79, 118; ending control over production, 160; inequality under, 3 7 38; ownership of property by, 156; privilege as foundation of, 175; as protector of inequality, 35; seizure in the name of workers, 164; struggle against, 161; transfer of power of, to Soviets, 77 Strickten Observanz (Strict Disciplinarians), 147 strikes: insurrectionary, 51-52, 53; in Mexican oil fields, 47-49, 52; as revolutionary strategy, 163-164, 179; symbols for, 22-23; against Tampico electrical industry, 47; as war, 41, 42-43 Sublime Perfect Masters, 66, 67, 109, no surplus energy, mobilization of, 172, 173 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 10, 150, 168 talent: as capital, 34, 38; as grounds for superior economic rewards, 33-34, 36; ownership of, 34 Tampico, Mexico, 12, 25, 39, 116, 132, 141; labor mobilization in, 47-49, 52; labor movement in, 46-47 theft: categories of, 34, 40; property as,

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8, 10, 30, 34, 36, 38, 39-40, 99, 105, 106, 164, 179-180; as violation of divine law, 106 Theosophical Society, 12-13, 127, 129, 130 Theosophy, 1, 2, 10, 112, 182; compatibility with millenarianism, 133-134; holy writings of, 126-127; as offshoot of Rosicrucianism, 126; origins of, 127, 131; as path of deliverance, 133; revival of, 149; secret doctrine of, 127-129; secret organizations of, 129-130; social concerns of, 12-13, 116, 129; spiritual beliefs of, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132 Third International, 47, 68 Third Testament Christianity, 118, 167 Third World: revolutions in, n ; underdevelopment in, 166 "Three Stones, The" metaphor (Weishaupt), 37-38 Torres, Camilo, 166, 167 trade unions: as class traitors, 72; forms of salutation in, 92; imperialist ideology in, 81; limitations of, 163; organization of economic life around, 26-27, 2 8 ; in revolutionary struggle, 50, 51; in Tampico strikes, 47-49 treaties, legitimacy of, 103-104 Trincado, Joaquin, xiii, 4, 5, 14, 91, 107, 167, 168, 182, 184-185; affiliation with Freemasonry, 141; austere rational philosophy of, 9, 10, 13; communism of, 93-94, 98-100, 166, 179; curriculum of, 89; death of, 166; dedication to revolutionary Jesus, 185-186; on derivative nature of Freemasonry, 147; doctrinal differences/similarities with Theosophy, 126, 128-129; doctrine of salvation, I 35~ I 36; educational objectives of, 88; education of, 186; on end time, 119-120; on establishment of universal commune, 92; feminism of, 170171; founding of Magnetic-Spiritual School by, 88, 93; on fundamental questions, 131; on Hispanic-North

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Index American struggle, 95; identification with Rosicrucianism, 100-102, 148, 150, 151; on Islam, 124-125; on lawgivers, 135, 136; on law of procreation, 121-122; millenarian scenario of, 125; on moral revolution, 108; mutualism of, 89-90; on patriarchal despotism, 130; on power of Christendom, 120-121; on property, 105, 179-180; on punishment of proprietors, 105-106, 111; recapitulation of human history, 122-123; repudiation of violence, 125, 170; Sandino's correspondence with, 181; on Satanic trinity, 123-124; on schools of Gnosticism, 130-131; scriptural interpretations of, 134, 135, 136-140; on secret Kabbalah, 151, 152, 153, 154; on sources of philosophical wisdom, 146-147; on Spanish history, 96; spiritual ancestry of, 136-137; on spread of communism, 9-10; on total social transformation, 178; on wars of religion, 122 Trincado Riglos, Juan, 87, 128 Trotsky, Leon, 6, 75, 83, 156, 159 Turcios, Froylan, 54, 57, 69, 112, 113 understanding, moral qualifications for, 89 united front: Comintern abandonment of, 70, 71; dispensing with "isms" through, 161; and necessity of political compromises, 79-80; Sandino's double-dealing regarding, 72; as strategy against imperialism, 6 8 70, 72 United States of Latin America, 87, 98 universal commune: development in New World, 96-97; enchantment of, 180; establishment of, 87, 88, 92, 120, 123, 151, 185; first government of, 98; incompatibility with patriarchy, 130; love for, 89; Mexican Revolution as prelude to, 94; microcosm of, in Nicaragua, 91-92; proclamation by Spanish communards, 96; pro-

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creation of, 121; proprietorship in, 94, 105; reign of, before end time, 119; symbols of, 98, 102; work ethic of, 179 universe: creation of, 151; interconnectedness of, 169; knowledge of, 153; presence of God in, 105, 108; tripartite nature of, 127 Utopias, vii, x; animation of reform by, 180; final goal of, 179; as image of future, 173 Valentinus, 131, 135 vanguards: as Biblical chosen people, 104; comradeship within, 63-64; cooperativization of economy by, 162; creation of revolutionary conditions, 157; internal structure of, 56, 58-59, 60, 61, 62, 64; invisibility of, 56, 61-62; repudiation of selfishness by, 174, 175; role in insurrections, 58, 59-60; role in revolutionary struggle, 44; role of personal leadership in, 64; satisfaction of desires of, 174-175; spread of revolution by, 80; in worker organizations, 44 —, spiritual: overthrow of evil by, 118; redemption of humanity by, 119, 134, 135; responsibility for human progress, 135-136 Vedas (Hindu scriptures), i n , 137138, 145 vegetarianism, 10, 132-133, 170 Villa, Francisco (Pancho), 44, 93-94 wages: differentials in, 81, 164-165; equalization of, 82, 163, 164, 165, 168; as function of capacity and performance, 32, 82; inequality of, as theft, 34; role of custom in fixing, 167; in system of cooperative labor, 32-33, 81-82 Wall Street bankers, 81, 94, 95, 97, 122 war(s): causes of, 121, 139; dependence on fraud, 56; of religion, 122; transformation of, 41 wealth: accumulations of, 167; common

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Index

ownership of, 25-26; differences of, 168 Weishaupt, Adam, 11, 66, 147, 148; doctrine of equality, 37-38, n o ; on secret doctrine, n o ; use of secret doctrines, 149 What Is Property (Proudhon), 8, 30, 38-39, 106 Wiwili agricultural cooperative, 30-31, 156, 165 women: enslavement of, 171; natural spirituality of, 170, 171; transformative role of, 169 women's movement, 164, 169 workers: awakening of, 52-53; collective ownership of property by, 156; confrontation with bourgeoisie, 2 8 29, 42-43, 44, 179; corruption of, 175; dilemma of emancipation of, 177; enemies of, 49; incorporation into people's army, 46, 51-52, 53; material interests of, 182; nonsectarian movement of, 161; organizations of {see trade unions); political

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awareness of, 57-58, 63; political organization of, 42, 43, 44, 53; politicized minority of, 59; premature engagement against bourgeoisie, 44; repudiation of selfishness by, 174; satisfaction of desires of, 176, 179; selfmanagement of, 77, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 169; vesting of political power in, 63 World Anti-Imperialist League, 74 World War I, 10, 12, 46, 75, 77, 79, 94, 120, 122, 123, 125

Yeltsin, Boris, 158, 159, 161 Yoga, 112, 132, 175 Zapata, Emiliano, 44, 45, 71 Zepeda, Dr. Pedro, 73-74; conflict with Mexican Communists, 74-75; as international representative of Defending Army, 70; as Nicaragua's provisional president, 69, 70 Zoroaster, 101, 131, 143, 145, 146, 150 Zoroastrianism, 88, i n , 116-117, 128

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