[For imperialism in IndoChina, the final debacle, after…]

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For imperialism in IndoChina, the final debacle, after years of war, came very swiftly.

On April 17 1975 Phnom Penh fell to the forces of the Communist Party-led Khmer Rouge guerrilla army which had surrounded the city for weeks, squeezing the reactionary military dictatorship of General Lon Nol and his American backers into submission..

Open war The victory marked the end of five years of open war between Lon Nol and the imperialists on the one hand and the Khmer Rouge on the other.

Lon Nol had seized power from the hereditary ruler Prince Sihanouk in March 1970 in a coup directly assisted by the CIA.

The United States had come to view the rule of Sihanouk as a danger in spite of his undoubted anti-communism. During the Vietnam war, and especially after the Tet offensive of 1968, Sihanouk had tried to practice ar opportunistic "neutrality"

Territory

While he did not verbally support the anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam he did connive at the use of Cambodian territory by the forces of North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese NLF.

In domestic politics Sihanouk tried to preserve his credentials for "neutrality" by ruling through a series of class collaborationist coalition governments in which were included both sections of the anti-communist far right and members of the Kampuchean Communist Party.

The presence of its members in the government in the 1960s notwithstanding, the KCP was the victim of systematic repression throughout this period by Sihanouk's army and police since the illegal section of the party was conducting guerrilla warfare in the countryside during most of the period.

Hallmark The class collaborationist politics of the KCP, a hallmark of its Stalinist politics continued to show themselves in the period after the Lon Nol coup.

Be eu.....The KCP joined Sihanouk and his supporters in the Kampuchean National. United Front (FUNK).

Sihanouk was however soon politically marginalised in the front and retired to exile in Beijing (Peking), where he did little apart from banqueting and making broadcasts.

The KCP itself had nominally been a part of the Indochinese Communist Party set up largely by Vietnamese Stalinists in the 1930s.

After World War II the national parties were split.

But the Kampuchean party was virtually buried by the Geneva accords of 1954 which had ended the war with the French imperialists and which recognised the rights of the imperialists in South Vietnam and The agreement was accepted by Moscow:

Peking and also the Vietnamese CP.

The objections of the Kampuchean Stalinists arose not from any principled objection to such deals with the class enemy but rather from an objection to such deals being done on their behalf by the Vietnamese.

From this moment the Kampuchean CP lived out a form of phantom existence as an isolated leadership in exile, dependent on the hospitality of Hanoi.

But in 1960 the KCP in Kampuchea itself was in effect re-founded. The exiles in Hanoi played a part in its refounding but the dominant force were young intellectuals who had returned from France where they had been recruited to Stalinist 'communism'. They had never been part of the old unified Indochinese CP.

Pol Pot This group (which included Pol Pot-then known as Saloth Sar-leng Sary and Khieu Samphan) dominated the party from the beginning and were to increase their control later through periodic purges of the forces in the party who were regarded as ртОVietnamese.

Their position was always a chauvinist one, but their chauvinism had been fuelled by the treacherous and cynical betrayal of Kampuchean interests displayed by Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese Stalinist

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came state TAN MENT ДОБРО П Khmer Rouge troops-liberated Phnom Penh from outside Vietnamese delegation with Brezhnev in Moscow UHE CAN This accord was presented by the Stalinists as a great victory over American imperialism (and indeed welcomed as such by many forces including the then International Majority Tendency of the "Trotskyist' USFI).

The Vietnamese leadership tried very hard to force the same settlement on the Kampuchean CP, which was pressured to enter coalition government with Lon Nol and Sihanouk.

The KCP refused, not for any principled opposition to collaboration with Lon Nol and Sihanouk which they had often enough been ready to carry out before, but because they knew that it would at that stage be a step towards political, and probably literal, suicide.

At this point the Vietnamese cut off material aid to the Khmer Rouge armies -just at a time when, as a result of the Paris accords, the Americans substantially stepped up their bombing of Kampuchea and temporarily reduced that of Vietnam.

This was the moment at which the already very great political and material isolation of the KCP became almost complete.

This experience undoubtedly helped to determine, though not to excuse, the policies which were later followed by the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy.

At this stage in the war (1973 onwards) the KCP already formed the nucleus of a state bureaucracy in the expanding liberated areas.

Repressive

• Some of the exceptionally repressive policies which were later followed were already being developed in order to exercise rigid control over the peasantry in the interests of the Khmer Rouge army.

This control may help to explain some of the mass migration which then began to take place from this time until the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975.

But the main force which drove hundreds of thousands of peasants into the towns was the extreme ferocity of the American bombardment of the rural areas, especially those believed to be under Khmer Rouge control.

The population of Phnom 1 Penh more than trebled in three years.

The effects of the bombings were contradictory. While they terrorised some into flight-thus possibly provoking the Khmer Rouge into squeezing more supplies out of the remaining peasantry-no doubt they also helped to confirm the Khmer Rouge in the eyes of others as the liberators from the ruthless and murdering imperialists.

Real base

Tha Thana Darra Rouge doubtedly obtained some real base of peasant support during this period.

On this they based their success in the war against the imperialist-backed Lon Nol regime.

Victory came very swiftly and was, of course, intimately connected with the sweep through Vietnam of the NLF forces spearheaded by the North Vietnamese regular army.

The imperialists and their puppets fled from Saigon a few days after they had left Phnom Penh.

The Kampuchean capital was taken by the Khmer Rouge from the outside, from the rural areas.

The KCP had played little or no role in the working class and other urban mobilisations which hastened the end of Lon Nol.

The Khmer Rouge armies entered the cities as liberators: but they found many of the factories and other key economic centres occupied by workers over whom they had no control.

The old state apparatus had completely disintegrated and most of its personnel had fled-some clinging desperately to the last American helicopters.

The masses had already spontaneously begun .to organise themselves into committees.

But some sections of the urban masses were either wary of the Khmer Rouge or actually hostile to it, having earlier fled from its rule in the rural areas.

This was the political situation which the KCP found on taking power in Kampuchea.

Isolation Their international political isolation was scarcely less than it had been two years earlier, though the Chinese bureaucracy had opportunistically begun to make overtures to them-seeing them as a possible counterweight to the Vietnamese CP which was closer to the Soviet Union.

But there was no sign that any economic aid would appear from China or anywhere else.

And the productive capacity of Kampuchea itself-one of the most backward economies in the world-had been shattered by the effects of the prolonged war.

Vietnamese puppet Samran The infamous set of policies which the KCP Stalinist bureaucracy unleashed at this point can only be understood in the context of this material and political background.

Otherwise they appear simply as arbitrary policies determined only by the whims of the murderous KCP leaders-or even more improbably, -and as the US SWP explains it) as part of an. perplishpan" masses.

The KCP leaders immediately nationalised not only all the capitalist property which had been seized by workers but also expropriated virtually the whole of the urban petty bourgeoisle.

grotesquely swollen the population of the cities, vere forcibly dispersed to the countryside where agri culture was collectivised and the masses set to work in state farms which have been compared to forced labour campe KCP-ruled state established a total monopoly of international trade and also virtually suppresse the internal market.

Food and other goods Ken by alrea, were discribe and money was virtually abolished.

Savagery

All of this was clearly carried out with exceptional savagery. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of the masses perished. The regime came to rest politically on nothing but its systematic repression.

What did this process amount to? The American SWP leaders argue that it amounted to the establishment of a new reactionary capitalist regime.

They claim that at the culmination of the anti-imperialist upsurge. of 1975 in Indo-China the KCP leadership was able to reestablish a capitalist state after the previous, American backed, capitalist state had been destroyed.

This is a crucial plank in the SWP's argument that the Kampuchean regime was the aggressive weapon of US imperialism against the Vietnamese revolution.

From this premise they conclude that the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea at the end of 1978 was justified and should be supported by revolutionary socialists.

We believe, on the contrary, that what took place in Cambodia in 1975 was the overthrow of the capitalist state apparatus.

This was combined with the nationalisation of all capitalist property and the establishment of state trading; and the forcible demobilisation of 'the masses and the imposition of the rule of a repressive, counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy with a monopoly of political power.

In other words what took place was the creation of a bureaucratically deformed workers' state, a counter-revolutionary workers state or, for short, a Stalinist state.

Kampuchea demonstrated a variant of a process which has taken place in various ways in a whole series of' countries since World War II-in many of the Eastern European buffer countries, in Yugoslavia, in China, in Cuba and most recently in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

This process of creation of bureaucratically deformed workers' states involves a major contradiction.

In those states a progressive event has occurred (capitalism has been destroyed); but this progressive step takes place within an overall development which is reactionary.

It is reactionary in two senses: on the one hand it is based on the usurpation of power by a reactionary and parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy; and this bureaucracy continues both before and after the overturn to operate on a world scale in alliance with imperialism to divide political power on the basis of "peaceful coexistence" or international class collaboration at the expense of the independent interests and organised power of the working class.

In relation to Eastern Europe in the post war period this contradictory process has been described and analysed well by Tim Wohlforth in his important essay The Theory of Structural Assimilation.

In supplementing that analysis, Adam Westoby wrote (in 'Communists' Against Revolution, Folrose Books, pp.100-1):

"If we wished to express the paradox of the last three decades in a nutshell it would be this: that the Stalinist cancer which infested the proletarian social revolution has not been destroyed by the extension of the revolution but, on the contrary, has extended with it.

"Not only that, but Stalinism has made itself the organising instrument of destroying capitalism and forming the post-war workers' states ...

"For three decades two fundamental opposed forces, those of the proletarian social revolution and the bureaucratic political counter-revolution have found themselves coupled together."

Of course, the events in Cambodia were different from those in which Stalinist states were created in other countries-as indeed each of the countries concerned exhibited certain peculiarities.

The peculiarities of the Cambodian variant were:

*The political and economic isolation of the KCP bureaucracy from the overt protection 'of the bureaucracies of more powerful, already established deformed or degenerated workers states (though the creation of a deformed workers state in Cambodia took place in the world framework of the defeat of imperialism and advance of Stalinism in Indo-China).

*The exceptional economic backwardness of Kampuchea to which was added the appalling economic destructiveness of the war.

*The extreme chauvinism and subjective isolation of the Kampuchean Stalinist bureaucracy which was partly provoked by the betrayals already mentioned by the Moscow, Peking and Hanoi bureaucracies.

*The extreme speed with which the (exceptionally extensive) measures of nationalisation followed the overthrow of the old state apparatus.

*The exceptional (but not, as we shall see, unique) brutality with which the measures taken by the bureaucracy were carried out.

But, in our opinion, none of these exceptional aspects of the process alter the fact that a process analogous to those of Eastern Europe, China or Cuba and Vietnam • took place in Kampuchea.

SOURCES

M. Caldwell and Lek Tan. Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War: Monthly Review Press 1973 (useful source on the war until 1972, although very uncritical of Sihanouk).

Stephen Heder, "Kampuchea's Armed Struggle: The origins of an Independent Revolution" Bulletin, of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1979 No. 1 (indispensible source on relations between the KCP and other Stalinist parties).

William Shawcross, 'The Third Indo-China War" . a review article of three books about Kampuchea, New York Review of Books, April 6 1978.

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PRESENT ISRAELI UN . Zone kk-71, LEBANON