30.04.1998

National communism and brother No1

Death of Pol Pot

Establishment obituaries have revelled in their portrayal of Pol Pot as the most evil-doing man in the 20th century. His shadowy life is told almost as if it were a modern-day Faustian legend. Pol Pot hated those who oppressed his people. Pol Pot decided to commit himself as a personality to fundamental social change. Pol Pot wanted to make his country a heaven on earth. What foolishness! What egotism! What arrogance! Thankfully, hell on earth is the punishment of both his methods and aspirations. Supposedly a fate reserved for those who give themselves to Marxism. So the story goes.

Such a mystifying and essentially dishonest approach is intellectually barren in explanatory terms, and more to the point, utterly conservative. Nevertheless its very self-satisfaction underscores not only the material triumph of the bourgeoisie over bureaucratic socialism but its claim of moral victory too. In the absence of any perceived alternative, market capitalism, has at the level of common sense, been well and truly established as the natural and right order of things. Tampering with it brings forth chaos. History cannot be cheated ... and will always be revenged.

For the philistine, life appears to confirm it. The labour dictator Stalin tried. In 1928 he uprooted commodity production and launched the first five-year plan and the ‘second revolution’. Ten million died. Mao tried. The ‘great leap forward’ was announced in 1957 and 10 years later the ‘cultural revolution’. Thirty million died. Pol Pot tried. The ‘super great leap forward’ brought economic collapse and disaster in terms of human suffering. Between 1975 and 1979 two million perished from politically imposed starvation, murder and overwork. However the USSR had a population of over 200 million and China nearly a billion. Cambodia on the other hand is a small land which had no more than 8 million people.

Proportionally therefore Pol Potism killed greater numbers than either Stalinism or Maoism. And whereas the monocratic Stalin and Mao regimes spanned decades Pol Pot was in power a mere four years. His terror was far greater both in relative terms and in intensity. There is a final irony. Democratic Kampuchea - “the number one communist state” - is again Cambodia. The USSR is extinct, and most of its various fragments are in the claws of a particularly greedy form of robber capitalism. As to China, Mao would, if he was alive, certainly brand it capitalist. Tragically these countries have plied a course from capitalism to capitalism via the way of a hugely costly and bloody interlude.

As world historic personalities Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin are, to say the least, discredited - their names are nowadays flung about as grievous insults. Despite that the national socialist or national communist phenomenon that spawned them reproduces itself spontaneously. Scottish Militant Labour is after all about to declare for a programme of socialism within the suffocating confines of a breakaway Scotland. It is far from alone. Every ‘official communist’ and ‘revolutionary reformist’ faction and group has a similar perspective for a hardly less constricting Great Britain - including the Socialist Party of Peter Taaffe, Lynn Walsh and Mike Waddington. What is true for this section of the left in Britain is true virtually everywhere else. In countries with well integrated labour movements and stable parliamentary institutions, laying hold of and using the existing state is considered the pinnacle of practical politics. Ask any sober-minded trade unionist. In poor countries however, reformism offers next to nothing apart from the ashes of disappointment. Insurrection can be the only chance to bring a better life for the overwhelming majority.

Either way though, socialism is understood as a series of partial negations of capitalism that comes about through the nationalisation of the means of production, resulting from, alternatively, mundane legislation or a heroic revolution carried through by a party-army elite. Inevitably because of the unrivalled prestige it continues to enjoy - including among certain pro-capitalist academics, economists and journalists - these schemas are dressed up as, or are actually believed to be, Marxism. Objectively nothing could be further from the truth. That is if by Marxism one means the body of revolutionary theory originally developed by Karl Marx, as opposed to the ideas of those who merely happen to call themselves Marxists.

Throughout his life as a communist politician Marx stressed the universal nature of capitalism and the necessity of negating it positively through a universal class and a universal revolution. In other words human freedom - the overriding aim - is possible only on the material foundations of advanced capitalism and the conscious self-activity of the world’s working class. Precisely because of the global existence and metabolism of capital, partial or local negations would either have to spark the whole planet aflame or turn painfully into their opposites.

In 1845 the young Marx and Engels explicitly warned against the illusion of national communism - as wondrously described by a range of utopian thinkers and fierce critics of capitalism. Such a society - albeit in prosaic form - was not unfeasible in the estimation of Marx and Engels. At least for a short period of time. But would, because of its “local” being, be able to do little more than make “want” general, before “all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored” (K Marx, F Engels MECW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p49).

Lenin and the Bolsheviks fully shared this assessment. Every manifesto, programme and action shows that they were committed to world revolution. As a backward, mainly peasant country, Russia was by no means ripe for any sort of full socialism. Yet it was riven with deep social and political contradictions. Tsarism could not rule in the old way. Crucially the working class and peasants refused to be ruled in the old way. That made Russia ready for a proletarian-led revolution. Russia could therefore play a vanguard role in Europe. Expectation became reality in 1917.

However - it hardly needs saying - the Russian spark failed to ignite a wider revolutionary conflagration. In Britain workers were successfully diverted by clause four Labourism. The German revolution was stopped half-way by social democratic betrayal. Russia was left isolated. It began, first with war communism and then with the New Economic Policy, to turn in on itself. The socialist character of the regime became increasingly precarious, relying, as Lenin said, more on the policy and conviction of the Communist Party’s “old guard” than the self-activity of the decimated and declassed proletariat (VI Lenin CW Vol 33, Moscow 1977, p257).

Bureaucratic deformations were unavoidable. Lenin and others fought these negative developments - albeit fitfully, contradictorily and desperately. However, from 1924, as proven by the infamous second edition of his Foundations of Leninism, Stalin consciously adapted to them. He effectively made himself the political expression and champion of bureaucracy and its sectional interests. And it was Stalin and his line of socialism in one country that triumphed in the factional struggle of 1924-27. Isolation became unproblematic. Almost a virility symbol. The ideological-political conditions for social counterrevolution within the revolution were in place. It began with the launch of the first five-year plan in 1928.

The first five-year plan was not the consolidation of so-called proletarian property forms, or the “demonstration” of socialism’s “right to victory” over capitalism, as argued by Leon Trotsky and his epigones (L Trotsky The revolution betrayed New York 1972, p8). Nor was it the birth of bureaucratic state capitalism and the emergence of “capital in its purest form”, as later argued by Tony Cliff (T Cliff State capitalism in Russia London 1974, p169). The residues of positive workers’ control were ruthlessly destroyed, along with all manifestations of commodity production. Stalin and his cohorts presided over the creation of a freak society, where labour power was not sold or brought by enterprises, but had to be delivered to them by law. The bureaucracy could maintain domination only through political methods. There was neither democratic control by the producers nor the blind hand of the market. Caught between moribund capitalism and imminent socialism, the USSR was an ectopic social formation.

Initially bureaucratic socialism seemed to bound from one unfettered success to another - while there was surplus population, dynamism lasted. The five-year plans with their reported target achievements in every branch of production stood in complete contrast to the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 1930s. Moreover, when put to the acid test in the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union was able to survive the onslaught of the German armed forces before rolling them back from the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad all the way to Berlin and unconditional surrender.

The Soviet Union became the model to emulate. Its socialism-in-one-country version of Marxism eclipsed almost entirely the genuine thing (the persecution and mass killing of oppositionists helped). Millions believed in and acted upon it. What gripped people’s minds thus went into shaping the geo-politics of the second half of the 20th century, just as the religious notion of the second coming inspired 11th century crusaders to ‘liberate’ the holy land and found their contrived feudal kingdom of Jerusalem. In other words widely held ideas can themselves become a material force.

Of course, Stalin and his successors wanted to use their Marxism as an ideology to reinforce the subordination of the world communist movement to the diplomacy of the Soviet state. For a time they succeeded. However, as Trotsky brilliantly predicted, national socialism in the USSR justified and spurred others towards the same heresy - the freak form became the ideal. Even by the mid-1930s communist parties were draping themselves in the national flag. To all intents and purposes they followed the footsteps of social democracy along what was imagined to be the national road to socialism. ‘Official communism’ in this way eventually became nationalised in every country.

The British road to socialism relied on a crude objective idealism and inexorably led to passivity: ie automatically voting Labour, fatalism and routine trade union work. In contrast, where the state lacked secure social anchorage, the national road was often used as a stirring call to revolutionary action - China, Vietnam, Korea. A programme prone to extreme voluntarism, given the conviction that some sort of socialism and eventually communism must follow within that country. Hence, in Khmer Rouge ideology, technology was “not a determining factor”. The “determining factors” are “politics, revolutionary people and the revolutionary system” (quoted in B Kiernan, ‘Kampuchea and Stalinism’ in C Mackerras and N Knight [eds] Marxism in Asia London 1985, p233). Overthrowing a weak capitalist state could be achieved if sufficient will was there. Replacing the laws of capitalism - eg, the law of value - with something higher, something superior within the narrow national space was another matter entirely. Whatever the determining subjective will, the determining determinant - ie, objective conditions - are just not sufficient.

Pol Pot has to be put against this broad background. It is vital for explaining not only how a utopian vision of communism in one country was combined with xenophobic nationalism, but why the whole project ended in such horror.

Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in May 1928. His family were well-off peasants who enjoyed connections with the royal court - Pol Pot’s cousin was a palace dancer and became one of the king’s principal wives. After attending high school in the market town of Kompong Cham he gained a prized scholarship to study radio-electricty in Paris. Like so many others university politicised him. Loathing of the French colonialists was combined with a profound admiration of Stalinite bureaucratic socialism. Pol Pot joined the Cambodian section of the French Communist Party. He formed a tight circle of friends who were to stay with him for over 40 years - Ieng Sary, Thiounn Thioeunn, Thiounn Chun, Khieu Samphan and Khieu Ponnary (the latter whom he married on Bastille Day 1956). Contemporaries say that Pol Pot was self-effacing and charming: “he would not have killed a chicken” (B Kiernan The Pol Pot regime New Haven 1996, p11). Nevertheless an introverted national socialism was already evident. Pol Pot was reported to have insisted that “everything should be done on the basis of self-reliance, independence and mastery. The Khmers should do everything on their own” (ibid p12).

There can be no doubt that Pol Pot’s rise to power would never have happened without the Vietnam war and the US decision to destabilise the regime of Prince Sihanouk (though it is impossible to agree with John Pilger that there was some sort of US masterplan to promote Pol Pot). Sihanouk took a neutral position and had the temerity to turn a blind eye to the use the National Liberation Front made of Cambodian territory as a haven and to ferry personnel and equipment from north to south Vietnam. In March 1970 Sihanouk was ousted in a US-inspired coup. Bombing raids increased and in the May of that year president Nixon ordered US and Saigon troops to invade. Cambodia was economically ruined. Millions became refugees and tens of thousands were killed.

Every B-52 carpet bombing raid acted as a recruiting sergeant for Pol Pot’s forces. Up until 1970 the Khmer Rouge had enjoyed little success. Now it gained a mass base amongst the peasantry and the attractiveness of victors. A few years later Pol Pot was to state that the Khmer Rouge

“won without any foreign connection or involvement. We dared to wage a struggle on a stand completely different to the world revolution. The world revolution carries out the struggle with all kinds of massive support - material, economic and financial - from the world’s people. As for us we have waged our revolutionary struggle basically on the principles of independence, sovereignty and self-reliance” (B Kiernan and C Boua Peasants and politics in Kampuchea 1942-1981 London 1982, p223).

This nationalist nonsense is to tear events in Cambodia apart from those in Vietnam. Yet the two countries were organically linked by the anti-imperialist war in which the Vietnamese played the leading part. It is a simple statement of fact that US forces in Cambodia were given a bloody hiding by the Vietnamese. They also liberated a whole swathe of territory in the eastern zone from the pro-US regime of Lon Nol. Nor can it be denied that it was intransigent Vietnamese resistance which forced Nixon to withdrawal the bulk of US forces from Indo-China in 1973. From then on in, the way was open to Pol Pot and year zero.

On April 17 1975 Khmer Rouge troops - wearing black and carrying AK-47s - entered the capital Phnom Penh. The Lon Nol regime had disintegrated. Pol Pot took command and immediately began his national socialist project. There have been all manner of interpretations about the exact socio-economic nature of his Democratic Kampuchea. We will focus on four.

First, its own account. According to the Khmer Rouge by the mid-1970s Democratic Kampuchea was the “number one communist state” (followed by Albania and then China). In 1976 they boasted that Kampuchea was “four to 10 years ahead” of other examples of bureaucratic socialism in Asia, having “leaped” from feudalism “to a socialist society straightaway” (quoted in B Kiernan, D Chandler and C Boua [eds] Pol Pot plans the future New Haven 1988, pp45-46). There was even wild talk of instant communism and the need to dispense with a step-by-step policy of going through socialism.

Second, the ‘official communist’ account. Apart from the requirements of diplomacy, ‘official communism’ celebrates Pol Pot’s coming to power but mourns his “Maoist deviation”. “Pol Pot’s disastrous social policies began to undermine the material and social basis of the Kampuchean revolution” (I Silber Kampuchea: the revolution rescued Oakland 1986, p7). Fundamentally Democratic Kam-puchea is considered an aberrant or deformed socialism - to all intents and purposes an analysis shared by Trotskyites.

Third, the state capitalist account of the Socialist Workers Party. Paul McGarr wants to fit the complex reality of Kampuchea into the state capitalist theory. “The aim” of Pol Pot - copying the USSR and China - “was to ruthlessly exploit the population” in order to build up “military and industrial might to maintain an independent national state”. Such rulers as Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot “used the language of socialism to justify their rule but in reality they were state capitalist, using the state to exploit people in the way every capitalist does”. However, Kampuchea was far poorer than the USSR or China. Consequentially, says comrade McGarr, “the result was even worse”. The “drive to squeeze a surplus from the peasantry in a wrecked economy led to the most horrific exploitation and repression” (Socialist Worker April 25 1998).

Fourth, the account of Michael Vickery. After a detailed study of rural based uprisings, he concludes that in Democratic Kampuchea was a “peasant revolution”, “perhaps the first real one in modern times”. In spite of Pol Pot’s gestures to Marxism “nationalism, populism and peasantism really won out against communism” (M Vickery Cambodia 1977-82 Boston 1984, p290).

The first three very different accounts can be tackled using the same basic line of reasoning. There cannot be capitalism or socialism without the modern working class. Capitalism is not, as comrade McGarr and the SWP suggest, some generic description of an exploitative social relationship. That would make feudalism and slavery examples of capitalism. They were not. Capitalism has a specific history and specific features. Real capitalism is generalised commodity production. Commodity production taken to the point where the labour power of the workers is itself is a commodity. As to socialism it emerges positively from advanced capitalism as the self-liberation of the working class. Socialism begins as a free association of the producers with a national form: ie it begins by the revolutionary overthrow of the existing state. But its content is international: ie, it is the start of the transition from world capitalism to world communism.

If we examine Democratic Kampuchea in this light, it is impossible to maintain the fiction that it was either socialist or capitalist. The first act of the Pol Pot regime was to clear the cities of their populations, including the two million inhabiting Phnom Penh. The small working class was abolished at a stroke. People were told that the Americans were about to bomb them. It was a lie. Pol Pot planned the whole thing. The new society was not to have cities. They ate rice but did not grow it. He considered cities nests of evil and non-Khmer. Phnom Penh had originally grown with French colonialism, Chinese merchants and the bureaucracy of the monarchy. All this was to be swept away. People could be changed, said the Khmer Rouge, but not cities. Pol Pot’s vision of socialism was rural, not urban; peasant, not proletarian.

In Phnom Penh the evacuation began with the fall of the old regime. Those living in the north of the city were forced to trek north. Those in the south had to go south. Those in the east were marched east. All with the object of getting them out of the city as quickly as possible. They were told not to take much with them. “You’ll return in two or three days, as soon as we’ve cleaned up the city,” they were assured (F Ponchaud Cambodia year zero Harmondsworth 1978, p23). So, herded into snaking columns, people - including those who had been lying ill in hospital - set off into the countryside with a few clothes and a little rice. Most were never to return (anyone linked to the Lon Nol regime was rooted out and killed en route).

Phnom Penh became a ghost town. Its population was cut from two million to no more than 20,000 - all of them Khmer Rouge officials and their families. Kampuchea was ruralised. Old class divisions were ended - all rich people and many intellectuals were considered expendable. Virtually the entire population were remade into unpaid agricultural labourers. Money was abolished. The Khmer Rouge made a great show of blowing up the central bank in Phnom Penh. There was illegal barter of products and services. But that hardly amounts to a universal equivalent. Labourers received meagre rations, not wages. Moreover the labourers were unfree. Their hours were long and subject to harsh, military discipline. There was no leisure time. Nor did they have any say over the projects on which they worked.

Labour was subordinated to political power, not capital. There was no production of commodities - the production of goods for sale. Only the production of goods for immediate consumption and crucially the state. Formally everything was in the hands of Angkar - the state and party ‘organisation’. The result was what Ben Kiernan perceptively calls an “indentured agrarian state” (B Kiernan The Pol Pot regime New Haven 1996, p164).

To describe Democratic Kampuchea as socialist is therefore intolerable. To describe it as state capitalist is insupportable.

What about Vickery’s idea of a peasant revolution and peasantism? The thesis has the great virtue of recognising that the Pol Pot regime had a unique anti-urban twist to it. China, Vietnam and North Korea all had revolutions which essentially relied on the rural base surrounding the towns. Nevertheless once in power these party-army regimes did everything they could to develop industry and technical education. Not Democratic Kampuchea. What industry remained was residual - the production of rudimentary medicines, etc. Education virtually ceased. Children were dragooned into work brigades. All they got was a diet of crude propaganda.

Vickery explains the anti-urbanism of the Khmer Rouge in terms of an almost atavistic revenge of rural revolutionaries against traditional urban enemies. It was the “complete peasant revolution”, not the brain of Pol Pot, that caused the horrendous violence of Democratic Kampuchea (M Vickery Cambodia 1975-1982 Boston 1984, p286). In this theory Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership are painted as mere vehicles for the peasants. They were “pulled along” by “the peasant element” in a way that they could not have “either planned or expected” (ibid p289-90).

This not only lets Pol Pot, “brother number one”, off the hook, but is unconvincing. The nature of rural life disorganises peasants. They form a huge mass but cannot enter into close relationships with each other because of the tyranny of distance. The irresistible demands of harvesting and planting drain away any ability to act politically on a national scale. That is why Marx thought that peasants were “incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name” (K Marx The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Moscow 1972, p106). They cannot form or represent themselves as a class. They must be represented by an authority that stands over them as an unlimited force and “sends them rain and sunshine from above”.

Naturally as a guerrilla army the Khmer Rouge - led by urban-trained intellectuals - recruited peasants and organised a rural struggle first against Sihanouk and then Lon Nol. And, as noted already, in the aftermath of the April 1975 revolution virtually the entire population was ruralised. Hand in hand with that, society was divided up into two castes. Democratic Kampuchea “represented” and granted a relatively privileged position to the “base people” or neak moultanh: ie the peasant majority who had lived in insurgent areas for some time before the fall of Lon Nol. The “new people” or neak thmey, those evacuated from the cities or who lived in areas under Lon Nol, made up some 30% of the population. This strata received smaller rations and were generally despised and maltreated. Nevertheless it needs to be emphasised that the Khmer Rouge subjected the rural masses as a whole to a primitive and absolute exploitation - between 1975 and 1979 hours of work increased and rations decreased. Indeed the peasants were de-peasantised by their new masters. They owned no land nor means of production. They worked for Angkar.

Because the Khmer Rouge could not rely on the democratic support and self-activity of the labourers, because there was no spontaneous economic mechanism forcing them to produce a surplus, the state used what were essentially military methods to dominate society. Vietnam was singled out a the “hereditary enemy”. Pol Pot dreamed of a greater Kampuchea which would include north-east Thailand and the Mekong Delta in its entirety. Xenophobic irredentism was presumably supposed to unite and galvanise the masses against the common enemy (minority peoples and those with personal ties with Vietnam were suspect and therefore to be eliminated). From 1977 Kampuchean armed forces began an undeclared border war with Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge regime was in fact a political economy of permanent war.

The population was marshalled into huge work gangs - labour was militarised. At the same time while “proclaiming a communal ideal” the Khmer Rouge “atomised its citizens to assume maximum social control” (B Kiernan The Pol Pot regime New Haven 1996, p167). People were forced to live in thatch huts or barracks, with couples separated from other members of their family and sometimes from each other. There was collective cooking and eating in mess halls. Any complaint was considered an act of treachery - execution was the usual result (children were encouraged to spy and inform on their parents). Hence the peasants were deprived of everything they held dear - land, privacy, family and independently organising their own labour.

Not surprisingly under these conditions the Khmer Rouge found they could trust no one. Not even themselves. The system was a lie and to survive every atomised individual had to lie. Pol Pot saw lies everywhere because there were lies everywhere. Khmer Rouge ideology rationalised the politics of permanent terrorism. Every accident, every shortcoming was explained by sabotage and politically incorrect consciousness. Wrong attitudes and therefore wrong people had to be hunted down and killed.

A popular Khmer Rouge slogan ran: “Spare them, no profit. Remove them, no loss”. In the drive for a “pure society” it was said that “only 1.5 million” young Kampucheans will “be enough”. Many tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands were butchered in cold blood. If Pol Pot had not had been overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, who knows what the eventual death toll would have been? One thing is for certain though. Pol Pot’s barbarism should stand as a chilling warning for all those still enamoured with, or tempted by, national socialism.

Jack Conrad