One of the distinctive features of Khmer Communism from the 1960s (rural insurgency and the preparation for all-out war) is that it was largely unexpressed to most people its proponents had control and influence over, except for those rank and file poor peasant cadres deemed reliable enough to enter some form of political education. Changes under them occurred very noticably, but people not versed in foreign ideologies didn’t really know why. A sensitive and shy bunch those Pol Potists. During the Democratic Kampuchea period, the tattered maquisards turned wielders of state power still insisted on this hush-hush approach to dealing with those outside the Organisation. Their Chinese friends eventually managed to persuade them to open up a little and reveal themselves at least partially to an outside world (I’ve said that somewhere before). A Chinese delegation was present at that famous 1977 Communist Party Congress in which Pol made that long speech, broadcast by Radio Phnom Penh, in which he largely talked a load of bollocks, and showed the influence of the French Communist Party by using embarrassingly stilted language. He also produced a simplified analysis of Cambodia’s history, usefully superimposing upon the Cambodian situation a schema containing various stages of class conflict as if he was trying to nail diarrhoea to a wall. Here is Serge Thion from his article on the DK Black Paper, called The Ingratitude of the Crocodiles:
How should we understand Cambodian society? Is it composed of classes? Which ones? This is a vast subject on which to reflect. What we know of the Cambodian communists’ class analysis, most of which comes from Pol Pot’s major speech of September 30, 1977, which made public the existence of the CPK, is appallingly weak. It uses the Soviet schema of the 1930s, which was mechanically adopted by other Asian communists before and after World War II, but which is even more simplified and rigidified in its Cambodian version. Eighty-five percent of the country is made up of poor and medium-poor peasants. The exploiting classes constitute the rest, but they include a lot of patriots who joined the revolution. This is the 1975-78 version; we do not know what the 1960 version was like. But, when one knows how this kind of sociological analysis can be used to justify the party line, especially when it is in power, we can imagine that the discussion must have been charming — and a long way from Marx.
Cutting the feet to fit the shoes, trying to apply a poor outdated class analysis to a Cambodian reality, of which they weren’t really sure of themselves.
You see, all was not well in Democratic Kampuchea, among those in the know, and correspondingly felt by those who weren’t. Shit rolls downhill as the old saying goes. Pressurised DK regional administrations covered up their failures to the central government, which was expecting rapid achievement of the impossible. An angry and impatient central government was training and then sending out much more purer peasant cadres to the underperforming zones, obedient teenage boys and girls, to supervise the smooth operation of the Party meat grinder. I guess the choice to provide a surplus of rice for development needs or starvation was a bit of a toughie, when your mates would be summoned to long indefinite meetings with a displeased Angkar. Imposing strict uniformity in order to (in theory) equalise distribution doesn’t mean much when you have little to distribute. I suppose in relation to the title of this post is controversy over the ‘real’ or correct year of the Party’s founding, hinted at in the above Thion quote. If you were a studious cadre aware of your movement’s history, then which one? If not the clandestine Phnom Penh ‘meeting at the railway station’ in 1960, then perhaps you’d have thought the anniversary would really be the 26th, from the founding, in 1951, of the proto-Bolshevist Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party with Vietnamese guidance (ugh, you can hear those hammers and sickles clanging in the background). But instead of putting up the birthday balloons and sprinkling confetti around the cooperative, you probably would’ve kept your trap shut about it. Until put to the rack, and then you’d have said anything, even if you didn’t believe it, and they didn’t really believe it either. Still, interesting footage though.
I have a copy of an unofficial translation of the said speech, delivered at the Congress, published by a small radical American press (Liberator Press) in the 1970s, and translated by the ‘Group of Kampuchean Residents in America.’ It’s rubbish, the translation, but overall it’s an interesting piece nevertheless. A curio. The same Chicago-based and I think now defunct press also produced a booklet documenting a solidarity visit made by American David Kline, who came back impressed by what he saw of DK, similar to the now-repentant Swede and drippy middle class fool Gunnar Bergstrom. I’ll post up both to this blog, when time allows.
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Great footage. This has to be one of the most consistently interesting sites on the Internets, although admittedly my definition of ‘interesting’ isn’t shared by everyone.
Where was the congress held? I assume the superb Khmer-Modernist setting was one of Vann Molyvann’s buildings – the best thing to emerge from the Sangkum era, surely (especially the startling 1964 Olympic Stadium, which provided the KR with a handy setting to spray bits of the Khmer Republic functionaries around in 1975).
Back to more conventional ideological discussions: I think patterns of land ownership in Cambodia were always a problem for its homegrown communist thinkers when considering questions of class. That eighty-five per cent of the peasantry, for the most part, owned at least some land, if not a great deal of it. Hence the fact that Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan stressed the issue of peasant debt, rather than land ownership, in their analyses….it must have initially been rather mortifying to these idealistic young thinkers when they realised that not only was the Cambodian situation vastly different to the orthodox class analyses they’d been presented with, back in France and in Tou Samouth’s Class Struggle for Beginners classes, but that it wasn’t even that similar to the situation in Vietnam.
On the other hand, it seems as if the initial confusion may have been rapidly overcome with a sense of liberation, a growing confidence that the unique conditions of Cambodia, and of Khmer history, could achieve something no other communist regime had managed in history in a vastly compressed timescale. This was, of course, where all the problems started.
Even Nuon Chea doesn’t look very convinced in that piece of film.
Thanks for the compliment. The content found in this blog is admittedly very niche, so it’s good that it can attract some interest from a small audience, and importantly provoke intelligent discussion on what is posted here.
Ah, yes, Tou Samouth.
Whatever happened to him? His disappearance, and likely murder in 1962, was probably the work of Sihanouk’s security police. It’s been speculated that he was offed by people associated with the young French-educated upstarts, allowing Sar to move up in the Party. I’m not so sure about this however. As has been discussed elsewhere here, Sihanouk was stamping down hard on political opposition. And it was in 1963 that the Party organisation decided to leave for the maquis, with another wave occurring in 1967 when, aside from a fear of assassination or being screwed over by a Military Tribunal or similar on fake charges, only to be imprisoned or killed anyway, rural rebellion against Lon Nol’s heavy-handedness seemed to suggest to some that revolution was in the air.
As for the venue of the 1977 Party Congress, I’m not exactly sure, but think it was held at the Pochentong airfield.
With regard to the class analysis of the Khmer Communists, then you’ve hit the nail on the head when you talk about land ownership. Their vulgar schema to explain some materially determined stages, logically passing by way of revolutions from one to the next, with ‘communism’ as the culmination (which all countries, no matter their history or societies are fated to pass) didn’t adequately explain why most peasants in Cambodia, except for the very poorest, owned at least some of the land on which they lived and worked. It wasn’t landlordism (or a placing of that into some European feudal context and being irrelevant anyway), which was a problem for them, but heavy indebtedness, taxation and usury, the main source of which was the towns. Even their stage of capitalism before the transition to their own constructive ’socialist’ stage was flawed, as although some principle industries in the country were undergoing the requisite changes, by way of foreign importation, this did not affect most of the peasant population in a thorough manner. A proletariat did exist, but was very small and scattered. The most developed of them, as a working class, weren’t Khmer, but in fact Vietnamese, brought in to work the rubber plantations. And if politically motivated weren’t supporting the Khmers, but the North Vietnamese or NLF. So for a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ organisation searching for a phantom working class, then their constituency was pretty much thin on the ground. Turning to the peasantry was the only route available for change, and the Maoist influence must have been particularly attractive to them, but even that was oversimplified, the result being the removal of the working class component completely. There developed a belief that class consciousness, a ‘correct’ one by way of mobilisation of the population and the steering of it by the Party, could be forged no matter the economic status of the individual. Even the Cambodian elite didn’t behave like a bourgeoisie, in fact weren’t one — their urban bases were merely a drain on the countryside. The towns didn’t create wealth, but consumed it. By the late 1960s there was a proto-capitalist elite squeezing as much surplus from the countryside as was possible, behaving like they had always done. If not using this for luxury consumption, then much was not reinvested for further capitalist development but spent on Paris real estate or other such things. There was not yet a full shift of corresponding patterns of behaviour at the top, and at the bottom was a small group of uninfluencial Communists thinking of ways in which they could convince a mass of labouring people that they were suffering a form of oppression that had not yet reached them.
Before I go, on the subject of land ownership among the peasants, the American bombing which devastated the Cambodian countryside destroyed the conditions that had sustained this set-up among many of them, making it much easier for the KR (as well as being oriented to the poorest) to influence their placing into the forced cooperative system, and which would be later used to try and thrust the country into the modern world.
I think you’re probably right about Samouth. It seems far more likely that, if there was any ‘internal’ party connection in his death, it was probably through the involvement of individuals working as agents for Lon Nol and Sihanouk – perhaps why, as mentioned in Kiernan’s sources for How Pol Pot…, a regional official was later fingered by the internal security apparatus. This would certainly have made it easy enough to circumvent Samouth’s bodyguard (usually cited as the reason Pol Pot must have been responsible). The fact that Sihanouk was in the middle of his most aggressive period of political manouvering at the time seems to reinforce this, as you say. Why would Pol Pot’s circle have fled to the maquis if they had carried out the only prominent murder of a communist cadre themselves?
In the final Thayer interviews with Pol Pot – the same one in which he’s happy enough to admit to having Son Sen shot – he explicitly denied being responsible for Tou Samouth’s death. I think in this case he was probably telling the truth. Samouth, given his long ICP connections, would surely have been of more use alive at this point.
The bombing is vitally important in the evolution of the KR societal model, yet it’s downplayed surprisingly often – no doubt for political reasons. A few western commentators had the presence of mind to suggest this at the time (without going as far as Chomsky and blaming most of the ‘excess deaths’ in 1970-79 on it). I don’t know whether you’ve read Shawcross’s Sideshow, which first came out in 1979, but he stresses the likely impact of the bombing on infrastructure and rural communities (as well as its psychological effects on the KR troops, especially those thrown into the 1973 attack on the capital, who would have been forced to advance under fearsome carpet-bombing).
William Shawcross produced a decent critique of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s After the Cataclysm, in that a fair few of the journalists who’d covered the war and witnessed some of its horrors when documenting them, wanted it to be over and had at least some support for the rural rebels, when comparing what little they really knew of the Khmer Communists’ political evolution to the disgusting corruption of the Khmer Republic. Among other things this involved Lon Nol’s forces sending under-fed children barely taller than the guns they carried into battle against the KR, doped up on potent marijuana, while venal officers (if you could call them that) were living it up on American financial aid in the capital, spending the wages of phantom soldiers on gambling or visits to brothels amply supplied with hungry peasant girl refugees. It appears that rather than be part of a well-oiled anti-Communist propaganda machine, they didn’t really want to believe that something very wrong was happening in Communist-ruled Kampuchea until faced with overwhelming evidence. There was plenty of reporting on the DK regime, and its aftermath, which was lazy sensationalist rubbish however.
Philip Short gives an indication of the possible effects of this military ‘rule of thumb’ you’ve alluded to: That combat units can only sustain a certain amount of losses until irreversible psychological damage of the combatants is done. In his Anatomy, he gives brief mention to the experiences of two all-female Khmer Rouge battalions which suffered sixty percent losses. How many troops make up a battalion, 400-600? I suppose it depends on the size of an army, but they must have seen some serious fighting. Utterly horrific. And as you say, the failed 1973 KR offensive on the capital, which apart from being launched in the wet season, was halted by the intense bombing which blew many to smithereens, not just at the fronts, but the rear.
The rural devastation from carpet bombing speeded up the process of the KR imposing a model of strict communalisaton in peasant villages, transforming them into ‘cooperatives.’ But the leadership, apart from at times losing control of bodily functions in the nether regions, upon hearing the roar of B-52 bombers approaching their hideouts to create a moonscape of the surrounding land, largely didn’t suffer what the young peasant conscripts had to go through. Their extreme tendencies had other origins. And I guess this is where trying to sort out their intellectual, ideological influences becomes important. As well as from having to survive the police repression of the Sangkum, and suspicion of and resentment towards the Vietnamese.
Brilliant video, as always.
The place from the video is indeed near Pochentong airport.
Ah, thank you for that. The congress hall looks like a hangar. Outside, the large rectangular concrete slabs look like the sort used for runways.
Hi Pineapple, I love the discussion on your site very thought provoking. You said you have a translated copy of the infamous Pol Pot speech… is this scanned and/or available for sharing?
Yes, I have a paper copy translated into the English language. The translation isn’t so good, but then it’s still an interesting piece. I did have it scanned, but I lost the PDF copy I made of it. I will be scanning another copy at some point and posting it up here for people to download if they so wish. I just haven’t got the time right now, and importantly I need to buy a new scanner, as my last one broke down. The old video footage above show’s Pol Pot making the speech at the Congress. Thanks for visiting this blog, and I’m glad to know it’s of interest to people. It makes it worthwhile carrying on with this little project.
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