The above photograph was taken in 1974, and shows poor peasant soldiers belonging to an all-female Khmer Rouge battalion. Marching in Indian File down a dusty road in their Chinese army caps and checked krama, they were possibly on their way to help lay siege to the old royal capital, Oudong. These women first came to my attention when reading Philip Short’s biography of Pol Pot, Anatomy of a Nightmare, briefly mentioning two battalions which suffered sixty percent losses during the war. An indication of just how horrific the fighting was. In a way, the war had freed those women from traditional gender roles, but although after victory soldiers including women were beneficiaries of preferential treatment, the new state power would simply harness many for use as launderers, cooks and carers of the young, sick and elderly.
These women were also immortalised on new banknotes printed in China for the new Communist government, but after high-level Party debate were rejected by the new regime as unneeded and irrelevant to the organisational and societal model they chose, and which had originated in the shift towards a harsh ‘war communism’ inside the liberated zones during the conflict. After they’d won, and viewing agriculture as a path to modernisation, this was to be applied countrywide as the model on which their new and industrialising economy would be based and operate.
Forgive me, in that it’s clichéd to talk of Khmer Rouge ideological animosity towards urban life, but it’s centrally important to understanding their political outlook. The political intolerance and terror of the Sangkum years had pushed leftists away from any meaningful mainstream political activity, forced them to make radical choices and out into the countryside where they would prepare for violent confrontation. And with the sharp polarising effect the later civil war had on Cambodian society, whereby the towns became beleaguered fortresses surrounded and then strangled by a bomb-hardened enemy, urban life represented nothing less than hostile. With a back-to-front quasi-Marxist analysis, the towns belonged to the exploiting classes (from which several of the Khmer Rouge leadership had come) with their foreign and corrupting influences, seen as a corrosive danger if pure troops and cadres remained inside the towns for too long. These places represented the extortion of surplus in all its multiformed ways, and money was all part and parcel of this repulsive state of affairs. To prevent the peasants from swallowing the “sugar-coated bullet of the bourgeoisie” most were to exert productive energies in the rural areas, which would be the seedbed from which a new society would eventually grow. There was a moderate albeit weaker tendency among them, and the ill-fated and opinionated Danton of the Cambodian Revolution, Hou Yuon, had early-on predicted disaster from the decision to empty urban areas and given its uneven success, send their populations to the Khmer Communists’ inadequate and involuntary ‘cooperative’ system. As well as arguing against the idea of abolishing money, increasingly seen as a practicable choice given the withdrawal of the Khmer Republic currency wherever that government lost effective administrative control during the war.
Philip Short quoted the blunt and boorish Ta Mok (later known as The Butcher), on this tendency during the Party debate over money and a wage system, and which he says Pol Pot found persuasive:
The state is an organism whose purpose is to maintain the power of one class by exercising dictatorship over others in all domains. … But the State is also an instrument that creates a privileged social stratum which, as it develops, becomes cut off from the proletariat and from labour. This has happened, for example, in the Soviet Union … and [to some extent] in [North] Korea and in China. In conformity with Marxist-Leninist principles, it is necessary to … reduce progressively this defect which is the State until it is extinguished completely, giving place to [a system of] self-management of factories by the proletariat and of agriculture by the peasants. The privileged upper stratum will then disappear altogether.
Up to now, the fact we do not use money has greatly reduced private property and thus has promoted the overall trend towards the collective. If we start using money again, it will bring back sentiments of private property and drive the individual away from the collective. Money is an instrument which creates privilege and power. Those who possess it can use it to bribe cadres … [and] to undermine our system. If we allow sentiments of private property to develop, little by little people’s thoughts will turn only to ways of amassing private property … If we take that route, the in one year, or 10 or 20 years, what will become of our Cambodian society which up to now is so clean?
This tendency won out. Plans for reorganising the National Bank were scrapped. Withdrawn from a trial area, the need or use of this money, or indeed any, was formerly abolished in 1976. The image of the battalion troops is seen on the half riel note below.
In 1978, a team of sceptical Yugoslav journalists visited Democratic Kampuchea, and were treated to a question and answer session with the Comrade General Secretary himself. When questioned on the decision to empty urban areas and the abolishment of money here’s what Pol Pot had to say:
Question four: we have witnessed that your cities are deserted today. Can you explain the aim of this operation? Why have you abolished the role of money, the system of monthly wages, and the trade network? Is this a temporary trend in the social changes and revolutionary transformations in your society, or is it a model society that you are trying to create on a long term basis?
Answer: There are many reasons for the evacuation of inhabitants from Phnom Penh and other cities. First, there is the economic consideration – the question of providing food for millions or hundreds of thousands of people in each city. When we examined this problem, we saw that it was beyond our capability. It would be impossible for us to feed so many millions of townspeople. To take these people to the countryside and relocate them in co-operatives would be a good solution, as the co-operatives had ricefields and other means of production at their disposal. We have co-operatives which are willing to have the townspeople live and work with them. The co-operatives own cattle, buffaloes and all other means of production in common. Our strength is in the countryside; our weakness is in the cities. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that we had to ask the people to go and live in the countryside in order to solve the food problem. If would could solve the problem of food supplies, tile people would gain confidence in us. Staying in the cities meant starvation. A hungry people would not believe in the revolution.
This is the economic reason. However, in addition to the economic reason, there was also the problem of defending the country and maintaining national security. Before liberation, we learned about the plan of US imperialism and its lackeys. The latter cooked up a plan in preparation for their defeat. According to this plan, after our victory and our entry in Phnom Penh, they would agitate (Cambodian: kraluk) against us inside the capital in all fields – economic, military and political – in an attempt to overthrow our revolution. Therefore, taking this situation into consideration, we decided to evacuate the people from the cities and relocate them in the rural co-operatives so that we could solve the food problem and become the first to smash the US imperialist plan, preventing them from attacking us when we entered Phnom Penh.
Thus, this action was not preplanned. It was the realization that a food shortage was imminent and that there was a need to solve the problem of food for the people, as well as the realization that there was a plan by US lackeys to attack us, that prompted us to evacuate the cities.
As for the question of money, the role of money, salaries and the commercial system, it can be explained as follows: In 1970-71 we managed to liberate 75 to 80% of the country. During that period we had our political and military power. However, we did not wield any economic power. The economy was in the hands of the landlords and the capitalists. These people received everything that was produced, because they had the money to do so. We decided that in the liberated zone the people should sell their rice to the revolutionary administration at the rate of 30 riels per 12/kg bushel. However, the landlords and merchants offered from 100 to 200 riels for each 12/kg bushel of rice and resold it to Lon Nol. At that time we had nothing. The people suffered badly from a shortage of food. So did the army. As a result, the national liberation war was badly affected.
After examining this situation, we decided to organize and set up co-operatives, so that these co-operatives of the collective masses could control the economy and production in the countryside and distribute what was produced within co-operatives, among co-operatives from co-operatives to the State and from the State to the co-operatives. In this way, we could control agricultural production and solve the problem of livelihood for the people. The people, in turn, could offer their sons and daughters for service in the army for the attack against the enemy.
As the co-operatives started providing support for each other and bartering their produce with each other, the role of money became increasingly less important. In 1972 the role of money was fading out. In 1973, money lost much of its importance. In 1974, it became non-existent in 80% of the liberated zone. Immediately before liberation, only the State spent money in purchasing goods outside the liberated zone for the support of the liberated zone under its control. With such experience, we asked the mass opinion on the matter and were told that money was useless as everything was traded on a barter system within the co-operatives. Therefore, in the liberated zone at the time – which represented more than 90% of the territory and was inhabited by almost 6,000,000 people – we completely solved this problem. When the people left the cities they all received the support of the co-operatives. Therefore we have ceased to use money up to the present.
What will happen in this respect in the future? It is up to the people, if the people want to use money again, we will use money again, if they see that is it not necessary, it is up to them. Therefore, the future will be decided on the basis of practicality. This is why we told you that we do not have a blueprint or a ready-made model. It all depends on the experience of the revolutionary mass movement. We will learn from this experience while it is being implemented.
The suspension of the wage system also has its precedent. In the successive revolutionary movements and particularly during the national liberation war, neither our cadres nor combatants received wages, nor did our people. Before liberation, when we controlled 90% of the country, about 6,000,000 people were accustomed to this practice. In other words, our cadres, combatants and about 6,000,000 of our people did not receive any pay. This became a tradition. Moreover, the truth is that in the past the majority of the people received no wage at all; only functionaries did. Thus, having got used to this, the people who left Phnom Penh went straight into the co-operatives while the local cadres, army cadres, army combatants or workers were treated the same as they were during
the war.We hold that we must avoid causing any burden to the people and keep money mainly for financing national construction and defence efforts. And the future? The future is completely up to the actual situation of the time and the will of the
people.The commercial network is under the control of the State and the co-operatives which work together. The State collects the produce of the co-operatives and distributes it inside the country or exports it, and the State imports goods to be distributed throughout the country. This is the method which has been implemented so far. This method is also one of our wartime traditions.
The future also depends on the actual situation. That is to say, we do not take the present system as a permanent one. Neither is it a transitional one. We have been practising this method in accordance with the actual situation. In the future, we will also stick to the actual situation. The determining factor is the people.
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If anyone is interested, then I’ve found the full text of the interview Pol Pot had with the Yugoslav journalists in 1978. It can be accessed by clicking here.
Abolishing money system was smart, without money there could not be capital created, I listened not so long ago speeches of Lenin and was surprised when he mentioned the main enemy – capital, he specified it in several places. So abolishing money meant abolishing of capital. Officials of PRK also received their salaries in rations, were provided with dwellings, they undoubtedly were more honest in that period than in later years. I don’t see how abolishing money could harm economy, the equivalent of 1 kg. Of rice could serve as a main exchange rate, with nationalization of gold nobody would store bags of rice in their home and even in this case 10 50 kg. Bags would equal to 300 dollars. With state managing and providing the dwellings to people, there could not be a situation when one family would occupy one single villa or 2-3 stories shophouse, so no storage area would
be available to those who wanted to recreate capital.
Also the failing of revolution was of course eradicating illiteracy, there’s no point for Pol Pot to stress otherwise. Anyways they had nothing to read in cooperatives, since no printed press was in plan for them. It was revolution’s shortcoming, even in Soviet Union where they suppressed learning of the languages and spread of a Western printed press. If socialist literature was weak it had to be strengthened and improved, I remember that after October revolution socialist culture was indeed strong with many original painters, writers who took the side of revolution provided Soviet Russia with their works. Socialist paintings were indeed good and progressive, but they soured bad when they started to follow neo-classical Stalin style. The same goes with poetry,- who would turn for influence from the West when Westerners themselves came inspired to Soviet Russia ? DK should’ve had more liberal approach to their culture by allowing to exist free book flow from the West and other counties to their cooperatives.
It did harm the economy, which had already been ruined through years of war, and when in the context of their policy of partial autarky. As well as viewing it as a short cut to socialist relations, the decision had a lot to do with their own forced changes in the countryside, which was all they knew regarding radical organisation in practice. The cooperative system developed during wartime and was structured into a form of War Communism, if it can be called that, but differing to the one seen during the Russian Civil War. The need to base all production on meeting military objectives saw this discarding of money within the cooperative system, but not outside of it. With the post-war emphasis on developmental ambitions and the rice production plan, as much land as possible was needed to be put to rice cultivation or transformed for the purposes of irrigating rice growing areas, and to realise this wartime practices were carried over into peacetime and expanded, with the cooperative system then filled with urban evacuees providing a massive pool of human labour power. It is interesting to speculate on whether the DK regime would reintroduce a monetary form of commodity exchange , once the centralisation drive had been completed, and the intra-party terror used for realising this had run its course, the infrastructure development (despite the horrendous loss of life in its building) had stabilised the food situation, and Chinese political support had strengthened the DK regime and made Vietnamese military intervention, as an option for settling differences, increasingly difficult. It is intriguing, because evidence suggests that given the irrationalism of some of the Pol Pot line, industrialisation was the aim, and had it occurred then as the country developed, presumably, so too would its links with trade networks both in the old Communist world bloc and the capitalist. Personally I don’t believe that they would have managed to create a self-contained full-blown ‘communism’ within national boundaries. DK would have perhaps become a relatively modern industrialised state by Third World standards, with an official and approximated Marxist-Leninist ideology, protected by China, and with a re-characterisation of the regime as transitionally socialist. As the Khmer Rouge came to power as a movement partly predicated on violence, and came to know but never admitted, you can’t make a society ‘socialist’ simply by force, or government decree.
If I remember correctly, it was Vickery who gave a clear rationale for emptying the cities and this was backed up by an earlier paper by Thai Marxists who recommended such a policy. The cities (Vickery said) could not sustain themselves and there were too many in the population of the cities devoted to supporting the bourgeoisie. In short they had become parasites, drawing on the efforts of the food growing countryside.
In addition, the Phnom Penh population had grown massively to around 2 million people and again this could not be sustained by the agricultural output of a country shattered by war and US bombing.
Yes he did. He was referring to the problems of capitalist change by way of foreign importation into peasant societies, and the non-socialist Blueprint in his book Cambodia 1975-1982. But despite similarities of both societies, which were pointed to, the blueprint was with regard to a situation where no devastating war had ruined a considerable amount of infrastructure and had shattered pre-existing society. And didn’t use a Marxist-Leninist framework of development.
The peasant refugees who made up the bulk of Phnom Penh’s wartime population wanted to return to their homes after the war, and many did, despite being evacuated to the various areas beyond the city controlled by the Khmer Rouge zonal forces, and their evacuation to these areas was determined by which sector of the city they were in at the time of April 17 1975, and from where the zonal forces entered the city to secure the surrender.
I would be hesitant of talking about a Cambodian bourgeoisie. If anything, in the years leading up to the war certain sections of the country’s elite had ambitions for a capitalist transformation of Cambodian society, but they were more accurately proto-capitalist, as Vickery points out. Change was not thorough, and this is why with keeping in mind the approximated Marxism-Leninism of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and that they believed they had entered the socialist transition stage, it wasn’t. You can see this with them in 1977 publicly, and incorrectly, superimposing the old orthodox five-phase mode of societal evolution on Cambodia, more appropriate to Europe, and which did not explain such an important thing as the fact that Cambodian society wasn’t feudal prior to the tentative capitalist change that occurred. I’m not a Marxist-Leninist by the way.
“I’m not a Marxist-Leninist by the way.” That’s a nice catch phrase you’ve got!
I should have used ‘well-to-do’ rather than ‘bourgeoisie’ and I wasn’t just referring to the Cambodian non-producing population, but also the diplomats, journalists, academics, etc, of the foreigners in the capital.
From what I have gathered, the colonial structure in Cambodia was (generally speaking): French as rulers, Vietnamese as administrators, Chinese as merchants and usurers, Khmer as workers. I have no idea who controlled the means of production in the later Sihanouk and the Republic years.
This is a great website, well done.
‘ That’s a nice catch phrase you’ve got!’
Well, maybe I should put up a disclaimer. I’ve had a few come here thinking this is a pro-Khmer Communist site.
On the structure of Cambodian society you’re on the right track, but firstly if you were to talk of workers, as in an industrial working class, then this as a social phenomenon was pretty much thin on the ground. The majority of Khmer people were peasant farmers. French colonialism not only encouraged educated Vietnamese to migrate into the country to occupy the lower levels of the civil administration, but also Vietnamese workers to engage with what little industrial labour there was in the towns, and to work on the rubber plantations. For the Khmer Communists this wasn’t a constituency which was going to offer support, seen as if they were politically motivated towards the left, then they supported the Communists in Hanoi, or the NLF. Chasing a phantom Khmer working class would be a foolish thing to do, and so CPK voluntarism had to somehow base the revolution on the peasantry. That is, using a Leninist model of development in order to transform ‘backward ‘ Cambodia into a modern industrialised and ‘socialist’ country.
On the subject of academics or ‘intellectuals,’ then in a Cambodian context this is quite different to Europe. Here is the first chapter of Vickery’s book which goes into how urban Cambodia operated, before and during the war.
“These were the people — spoiled, pretentious, contentious, status-conscious at worst, or at best simply soft, intriguing, addicted to city comforts and despising peasant life — who faced the communist exodus order on 17 April 1975. For them the mere fact of leaving an urban existence with its foreign orientation and unrealistic expectations to return to the land would have been a horror, and a horror compounded by their position on the receiving end of orders issued by illiterate peasants. On the whole they cared little or nothing for the problems of the other half of their countrymen, and would have been quite content to have all the rural rebels bombed away by American planes. Even having seen the damage done to the country during the war they seem to exclude it from their thoughts, almost never mention it unless asked, and then seem astonished that anyone would take interest in what happened in the rural areas before they arrived there in 1975.”
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