Comments on: ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ in retrospect

By: Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:47:34 +0000

Bill Corr – I don’t need to read up on the period, because I remember it! You’re quite right about the Cold War motivation for the policy.

By: Bill Corr

Bill Corr — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:15:11 +0000

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY SEEMS TO BE MY FRIEND FOR THE TIME BEING

Ken MacLeod, the point was in the eyes of people like Reagan and Thatcher – to name just two – the opportunity to punish the appallingly tiresome Muscovite bear and the bear’s junior allies was quite irresistable.

Rather like the Israelis air-dropping arms* to the Yemeni Royalists in the sixties; not because they gave a tinker’s curse precisely which bunch of qat-chomping Yemenis ran Yemen but simply because the Yemeni Royalists were tying Nasser down in a foreign policy adventure the Yemeni Republicans could not win without foreign – Egyptian – help.

I wish I could remember the source, but it is claimed that a loose-lipped State Department staffer justified aid to the KR – against the DRV and the DRV-installed government in PP – on the grounds that “We’re hoping for a better result [against the DRV/NLFSV] this time.”

If you are close to a University with a good archive of, say, back copies of the ‘Economist’ you can read up on the period.

Yes, on ethical grounds it was indeed a sordid story but all-too-sadly understandable.

* Nobody seems to be quite sure whether this tale is 100% true or the sort of fine story which journalists dream up over a bottle of Scotch.

By: skidmarx

skidmarx — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:13:29 +0000

I just don’t see why officically socialising property when it is still in the hands of an elite amounts to a step forward.

By: Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:54:39 +0000

Sure. In Cambodia the ‘benefit’ was mainly in terms of potential. If the Pol Pot regime had been overthrown and replaced by a workers’ state with workers’ control these same property forms could (on the Trotskyist view) have been used in a very different way, rather than for starving and bludgeoning the masses.

Explaining this point in Cambodia is, no doubt, a hard row to hoe.

But seriously, I think the really significant failure of the left in the west was in not making a bigger campaign around the sanctions against Vietnam and against the Heng Samrin regime. The way the US and UK (and China) got stuck in behind the Pol Pot remnants and diplomatically isolating and economically punishing the new regime was just breathtaking. It was part of the same policy as the Western backing of the contras and death squads in Central America, Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, and the mujahedin in Afghanistan. That global White Terror of the 1980s has been too soon ‘forgotten’.

By: skidmarx

skidmarx — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:50:41 +0000

The Cambodian expereience does put quite starkly the question of what benefit to the mass of the population were these “socialized property forms”, and why a “workers’ state” without workers control should be considered preferable to other forms of class economy. It is possible to oppose foreign intervention without defending the economic formation.

By: Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:05:34 +0000

If the logic of the degenerated/deformed workers’ state analysis of DK was that ‘the CPK was to some extent worthy of backing’, it’s remarkable that this ‘recent analysis’ (written in 1982) denounced the CPK as a counter-revolutionary force pursuing a reactionary utopia. The group that wrote it advocated the defence of DK against imperialism (and likewise the defence of Cambodia under the Heng Samrin regime, where this was very much a live issue in the form of British and US backing of the Pol Pot remnants) despite the regime, which they denounced.

Trotsky never equated defence of the socialized property forms with defence of the regime. Lots of his followers (though not these, at least in this pamphlet) have. You seem to be doing the same: saying that this analysis implies some degree of support for the horrors of the Pol Pot regime, and therefore that this analysis must be wrong. No, and no.

By: bill j

bill j — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:38:48 +0000

If you’re looking for a method in Stalin’s slaughter of the 1930s, it seems to me there are two key points.
First the consolidation of his own power within the apparatus. Most people sent to the Gulag were members of the apparatus, but it was only after Kirov was assassinated in 1934 that the Stalin faction took complete control.
Second driving wages down below the necessary physical minimum in order to create a surplus for investment. Hence the massive scale of the Gulags, forced labour camps, which required mass arrests and terror to supply their ever diminishing (due to death) and expanding (due to arrests) work force.
Yvgenia Ginsberg “Into the Whirlwind” describes it from the inside.

By: Bill Corr

Bill Corr — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:01:56 +0000

Talking of Asian Revolutionaries and Stalin, as we were, not many of us – me included until very recently – know about this man …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virendranath_Chattopadhaya

The name reminds one of George Bernard Shaw’s unkind jeering at Tagore as Stupendranath Begorr but Chattopadhaya’s tragic tale ought to be better known.

Who decided to kill him – we know who condemned him – and precisely why was this decision made?

By: Entdinglichung

Entdinglichung — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:03:36 +0000

according to liberal historian Patrick Raszelenberg’s book Die Roten Khmer und der Dritte Indochina-Krieg. Institut für Asienkunde, Hamburg 1995, their ideology was more based on nationalism and the economic theories of the German 19th century economist Friedrich von List than on Maoism

By: Maps

Maps — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:01:46 +0000

It’s actually possible for us to go to the horse’s mouth and study the policy documents of the Khmer Rouge regime, thanks to their publication, in English translation, by American scholars. It’s also possible to read the documents which the Khmer Rouge circulated amongst their low-level cadre, as educational material. Khmer Rouge economic policies owed far more to Eurocentric visions of breakneck industrial expansion than they did to any notion of agrarian communism, and the training texts Khmer Rouge cadre received made almost no mention of Marx. I blogged about this at:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/01/agrarian-communism.html