I.
1. After carrying on a devastating war in Indochina for many years and creating immense ruin, American imperialism suffered a major defeat in 1975. The failure of the American intervention, brought about by the determined resistance of the Indochinese peoples as well as the rise of antiwar mobilizations and feeling in the United States, reflected the shift taking place in the world relationship of forces to the detriment of imperialism. It helped to accentuate this turn.
The heroic struggle of the Indochinese peoples showed that it was possible to win even against the powerful American army. The deep opposition among the masses to a new war, the social crisis in the United States, as well as the international situation resulting from the imperialist defeat, made it extremely difficult for the American government to resort again to sending large expeditionary forces in to prop up the neocolonial order.
Washington's credibility as the gendarme of the capitalist world was damaged. In these conditions, a crisis of political leadership opened up for the imperialists. The effects of this crisis have made themselves felt in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, in all of southern Africa, in Ethiopia, and most recently in Iran and the Middle East.
In Indochina, the imperialist defeat led to the triumph of a process of permanent revolution throughout the region, in which national liberation and proletarian revolution were combined. This made possible the establishment of new workers states in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In Southeast Asia, and first of all in Thailand, the American defeat promoted the development of liberation struggles and an upsurge of mobilizations of the urban masses and the poor peasants.
The entire system of imperialist domination in eastern Asia that was constructed by Washington in the 1960s and 1970s has been shaken to its foundations. 2. Even before the imperialist defeat, tensions had appeared between the leaderships of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese Communist parties over political, economic, and diplomatic questions as well as the problem of borders. These tensions gradually developed into military confrontations, and led, four years after the victory, to the entry of regular Vietnamese troops into Kampuchea, as well as to the intervention of the Chinese army in Vietnam. The conflicts arising between bureaucratized workers states assumed an unprecedented gravity.
Today, resources that are vitally needed for the social and economic development of the Indochinese countries, which were devastated by the imperialist war, and to meet the fundamental needs of the working masses are being diverted to military ends. The imperialists are pursuing an active counterrevolutionary policy in the region. After some vacillation in the wake of the 1975 defeat, American imperialism has once again stepped up its pressure in eastern Asia. It maintains a strong military presence in South Korea and has beef ed up the Park dictatorship's army. It has given massive support to the Thai regime and more generally to the regimes in the ASEAN countries. It has consolidated its air and naval forces and island bases in the Pacific. It maintains "special" ties with Taiwan. It has mounted an economic blockade of Vietnam.
These measures were designed to halt the processes that were set in motion by the victory of the Vietnamese revolution, whose impact on the working masses of eastern Asia was considerable. They were aimed at containing and crushing as rapidly as possible the anti-imperialist national liberation movements.
On the international level, the ideologues of the bourgeoisie have mounted a vast anticommunist campaign focusing on Cambodia and Vietnam. This campaign was begun as soon as it became clear that the Americans were going to be defeated in Indochina.
It is the duty of the international workers movement to mobilize to defend the Indochinese revolutions, which are being threatened by imperialist maneuvers at the same time as they are being weakened by interbureaucratic conflicts. It is also the duty of the international workers movement to do everything possible to end the military confrontations between bureaucratized workers states, clashes for which the workers and peasants are paying a heavy price in blood. This is another tragic illustration of the price humanity must pay for the delay of the world revolution.
II.
3. In face of the imperialist escalation in Indochina, the Chinese and Soviet leaderships should have continued their material aid, limited as it was, to the Indochinese revolution. To the contrary, after the de feat of the imperialists and the weakening of their capacity for action in Indochina, the Sino-Soviet conflict was to exercise a great weight in the evolution of the situation in the region.
At the root of this conflict—besides the objectively different positions in which the USSR and China stand in relation to imperialism—was the determination of the Soviet bureaucracy to maintain its control over the world Communist movement. This is an essential factor for preserving Stalinist monolithism and for applying the Soviet bureaucracy's policy of peaceful coexistence.
The maintenance of this monolithism was seen by the Soviet leadership as an important factor in assuring the stability of its rule within the Soviet Union. To advance its policy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism, the Soviet bureaucracy needed to tighten its grip on the strategically key are as so as to avoid uncontrolled developments. Faced with the Chinese revolution, whose victory it was unable to prevent and a leadership over which it could not guarantee its control, it opted for isolating and weakening the Chinese workers state. In 1960, this orientation led the USSR to cut off its technical aid to China, to inflict very grave blows on its economy, and to withdraw its military aid, despite the imperialist threat Beijing faced. Then, the Kremlin proceeded to station up to a third of its armed forces along the border with China.
In the context of the imperialists' change in attitude toward Beijing, the Chinese bureaucratic caste has affirmed its own national interests in opposition to the Kremlin. Beset by a grave internal crisis, the Chinese bureaucracy is relying on a policy of peaceful coexistence to meet the needs related to its economic choices, to reestablish a status quo in the region, and to limit as much as possible the repercussions of the victory of the Indochinese revolutions.
Hanoi's aim is not to spur the anti-imperialist struggles in the ASEAN countries. However, the orientation of the Vietnamese leadership—which tends toward de facto unification of Indochina under its control—as well as the links that this leadership has forged with the Soviet bureaucracy, constitute a factor that could endanger the Chinese leadership's plans for this region, which it considers should form part of its own sphere of influence. Unable to establish its control over the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), the Chinese bureaucracy is trying to isolate and weaken the Vietnamese workers state by methods analogous to those that the Soviet bureaucracy used against Beijing-diplomatic isolation, political denunciation, a halt to economic aid, military pressure.
4. Going back before 1975, the Soviet bureaucracy's defense of its own special interests, followed by the same policy on the part of the Chinese bureaucracy, had already forced the Indochinese peoples to pay a heavy price. The 1954 Geneva Accords robbed them of a large part of the victories they won on the battleground against French imperialism. The passivity of the USSR enabled Washington to build up the Diem regime and undertake a new war of aggression. Do ling out its aid with an eye drop per, the Kremlin let the American intervention drag on.
As for Beijing, it, like Moscow, opposed the resumption of the armed resistance in South Vietnam in 1960. Beijing made it easier for Moscow to justify its meager aid to Vietnam by refusing to call publicly for forming a real united front in defense of the Indochinese revolutions. It remained unmoved by the pressure for this brought to bear in 1964 by the VCP, the Japanese and other Asian CPs, as well as by the Cuban leadership. The Soviet leadership, for its part, refused to break in fact with the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia, which was brought to power in 1970 by a CIA-fomented coup, because it was apprehensive about Beijing's influence over the Cambodian CP and even over Sihanouk. Subsequent to the new shifts in the Chinese bureaucracy's international policy that were carried out after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the effects of the combination of peaceful coexistence and the Sino-Soviet conflict made themselves felt more forcefully in Indochina. In July 1971, Nixon was given a public invitation to visit Beijing. In 1972, he met with Mao and then went to Moscow. The isolation of the Indochinese revolution was accentuated at a time when the imperialist military escalation was steadily increasing. Later, the Chinese bureaucracy officially adopted the "theory of three worlds." In the eyes of the Maoist leadership, the USSR became the "main enemy" of China, and therefore—following the logic typical of the bureaucracy—of the peoples of the world.
5. Differences had long ago appeared between the Vietnamese, Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian leaderships. After the victory of the Indochinese revolutions, these differences were placed in a new context. The clashes between the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese regimes developed within the framework of the Sino-Soviet conflict. This was a result of the relationships maintained by Moscow with Vietnam and China with Cambodia, the ruthlessness with which the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies defend their own interests, and the specific ways in which their policy of peaceful coexistence fitted in with the counteroffensive of the imperialists in the region, who had to rely on considerably lesser means of action than they had before their defeat in 1975.
III.
6. Regardless of the weight exercised by the Sino-Soviet conflict in the crisis that is rending the Indochinese peninsula, this crisis cannot be explained simply by interbureaucratic duels taking place in a world from which imperialism is absent. Washington is no passive spectator to the events that are unfolding. It has not failed to see the opportunities for it offered by the worsening of the Sino-Soviet conflict in Asia as well as by the Chinese bureaucracy's policy of peaceful coexistence. 7. A century of colonial and neocolonial rule and almost forty years of war have drained the countries of Indochina. The ecology of the area was profoundly disrupted by the American military escalation. The economic infrastructure has been systematically destroyed. The draft animals essential to agriculture have been decimated. The irrigation network has suffered considerable damage. The human and social cost of this imperialist war is immeasurable. About 600,000 persons are estimated to have died in Cambodia during the five years of American intervention. About 50 percent of the total population of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was forcibly uprooted. The situation that prevailed at the liberation of South Vietnam is an indication. More than 16 percent of the population had been killed or crippled; 56 percent had been left homeless. There were 3.5 million unemployed, with 4.5 million dependents. This gives an idea of the tragic scope of the economic and social problems that faced the Indochinese revolutions in the aftermath of victory. Such a situation could not fail to give rise to social and political tensions within the various countries and on the regional level. This state of affairs, however, was not simply the objective consequence of the imperialist war. It was also the result of a conscious policy. The American imperialists maximized the destruction and slaughter in order to weaken in advance the regimes that were going to come out of the victory of the revolutions that they were failing to crush. After the collapse of their forces in 1975, they continued this policy of strangulation. They set up an economic blockade of the countries of Indochina. They rejected all diplomatic overtures, even though Hanoi dropped all preconditions for normalizing relations with the United States. They stepped up their pressure on Laos through Thailand, helping the Thai generals organize Meo, Lao, and Khmer counterrevolutionary groups. 8. The bogging down of its forces in Indochina and the rise of the antiwar movement in the United States forced Washington to recognize the People's Republic of China and profoundly revise its Asian strategy of "containment and roll back." It laid out a new orientation that took full account of the Chinese bureaucracy's desire to conduct a policy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism. This policy began to be applied with the Kissinger and Nixon visits in 1971 and 1972. This radical change in the orientation of American policy in Asia—which made possible the turn in Chinese foreign policy—has been expressed most recently in the signing of treaties between China and the United States, and China and Japan that included the "antihegemony" clause demanded by Beijing.
American imperialism is not ready to pay the price for its alliance with Beijing of abandoning its policy of peaceful coexistence with Moscow. Peaceful coexistence with the Soviet bureaucracy remains essential in order to maintain insofar as possible the status quo in such important regions as Western Europe, the Mid east, and Latin America. Although the USSR today does not wield decisive weight in eastern Asia, it has shown its good will, for example, by giving assurances to the Thai regime. Washington also accords great political importance to signing strategic arms agreements with the Soviet bureaucracy.
However, the American imperialists are counting primarily on the Chinese bureaucracy to help them shore up the stability of neocolonial rule in eastern Asia, an important region for them both economically and strategically. They need Beijing's agreement to prepare the way for gaining international recognition of the "two Ko re as" and thus freezing the situation on that peninsula; to create a climate favorable to the further rearmament of Japan— which is desired by both the Japanese and American bourgeoisies—to reconsolidate their military forces in the Pacific; to keep their ties with Taiwan from interfering with Sino-American relations; to reassure the ASEAN regimes; to try to close the breach open since 1973 in Thailand; and to weaken and isolate the Indochinese revolutions.
The economic attractiveness of the market opened up by the Deng Xiaoping leadership's orientation for developing China is not sufficient in and of itself to explain the "Chinese option" Washington has taken in its Asian policy. This is all the more evident since the experience of trade agreements in the past between the imperialist powers and the bureaucratized workers states shows the gap between the promises of contracts and their actual fulfillment. It is apt to be revealed all too quickly how relatively modest China's means are for paying. Washington has taken this option primarily out of strategic considerations. For its own political reasons, the Chinese bureaucracy is making deals today with Washington and Tokyo aiming to establish a new status quo in eastern Asia.
9. The American government's policy was shown clearly at the time of the Chinese intervention in Vietnam, which must certainly have been discussed during Deng Xiaoping's visit to the United States in January 1979. Indeed, the attitude that Washington took on the occasion of this intervention contrasted sharply with the one it took in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime by the Vietnamese army and the FUNKSN (Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation), or the stance it took in January 1978 when the Vietnamese-Cambodian conflict came out into the open. The American government did not launch a violent anti-Chinese campaign on the order of the one it had unleashed previously against Vietnam. Instead, it issued belated and timid diplomatic statements calling simply for the withdrawal of Chinese troops from Vietnam and for the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia. It did not cancel the scheduled visit to Beijing by its secretary of commerce and in fact concluded new economic agreements with the Chinese. While the battle was raging, it raised the status of its diplomatic mission in Beijing to that of an embassy.
10. American imperialism is trying to exploit the consequences of the Sino-Soviet conflict in Asia to the fullest in order to strike blows against the Indochinese revolution. It is well aware of the economic, social, and political problems as sail ing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It is trying to aggravate these difficulties so as to choke off the revolutionary processes in the area that were given impetus by its defeat, and to tarnish in the eyes of the masses of Southeast Asia the example given by the struggle of the peoples of Indochina. Imperialism is reacting today to the victory of the Indochinese revolutions in the same way as it has done in the past to all revolutionary victories. It is doing everything it can to make stabilizing the new regimes more difficult. This includes promoting every possible factor of crisis and stepping up counterrevolutionary pressures.
IV.
11. The imperialists are determined to strike back at the liberation struggles of the peoples of Indochina because they saw very early what was really at stake in the process of permanent revolution going on throughout the peninsula. Since the 1940s, the American intervention has been motivated by the following international objectives: 1. To break the momentum of the Asian revolution in Vietnam, where the social mobilizations have been the biggest. 2. To lay the basis in this way for a new offensive against the Chinese revolution. 3. To assure the general conditions for maintaining imperialist order in eastern Asia. It was for these same three objectives that the Kennedy administration decided in the 1960s to begin the murderous escalation of the Second Indochina war. This was part of a vast imperialist offensive unleashed against the advances of the colonial revolution in the aftermath of the victory of the Cuban revolution. The blows of this counterattack fell on Santo Do mingo. Brazil, Indonesia, and the Congo, among other countries.
12. It is considerations of the same sort, in a different international context, that have dictated the policy the imperialists have followed since 1975. The stakes involved in the struggles begun on the Indochinese peninsula were in fact confirmed after the April 1975 victory, which opened the way for the establishment of a workers state in South Vietnam and marked the beginning of a rapid process of unification between the North and South of the country. In southern Vietnam, the bourgeois state disintegrated with the collapse of the Saigon army, which was its backbone. Far from trying to repair and make use of this neocolonial state apparatus, the Vietnamese Communist Party dismantled what remained of it. It immediately banned all the bourgeois political formations and placed the bulk of the military officers and high functionaries of Thieu's army and administration under detention.
In fact, the political and administrative leadership of Vietnam as a whole became one. The North Vietnamese army was fused with the liberation army in the South. A new administrative structure was set up under the direction of the VCP in the form of provisional military administration committees, and then of civilian people's committees. A general administrative reorganization was studied, and the entire country was divided into thirty-five new provinces in February 1976. On this basis, elections for the National Assembly were held on April 25, 1976. The official founding of the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed on July 2, 1976. The economic measures taken in the aftermath of the victory followed the same lines as the administrative, political, and military ones. The state rapidly extended its control over the bulk of the industrial enterprises (whose owners had very often fled), the big plantations, and the imperialist holdings. A state trading network was slowly built up, following the immediate establishment of a state monopoly of foreign trade. The banking system was nationalized. In September 1975, the first measures were taken to bring the monetary systems in the North and South into line.
In southern Vietnam, the old currency was immediately withdrawn from circulation and replaced by a new dong whose value was set at parity with that of the North. Private fortunes, i notably, were brought under the control of the national bank. Priority was given to reviving the agricultural economy, where the agrarian reform was extended. The nationalization measures were carefully kept within limits designed not to upset the small peasant proprietors in the Mekong delta. However, as a result of the nationalization of the plantations and the setting up of "new economic zones," the collectivized and state sector of agriculture was rapidly strengthened. The need for moving ahead to large-scale socialist agricultural production was systematically stressed. Study was quickly begun on a single, central plan for developing the country, dealing with the major branches of indus try and based on these first nationalizations and ex tensions of the state sector. This resulted in the birth of the 1976-1980 five-year plan, which was adopted at the Fourth Congress of the VCP in December 1976 and put into application in 1977. However, the systematic sabotage of the Sino-Vietnamese commercial bourgeoisie blocked the implementation of the measures decided upon by the state in the field of distribution. This had negative repercussions on the rate of collectivization in agriculture as well as on the functioning of the plans in the nationalized industrial sector. This trading bourgeoisie, centered notably in the Cholon district of Saigon, succeeded in limiting the effects of the successive monetary measures taken by the regime by dispersing their holdings and producing counterfeit money. In face of this resistance and these undermining operations, and after three years of growing social and political conflicts, the state decided to nationalize all that remained of the capitalist trading sector and took decisive steps to unify the monetary system.
The process of reunify ing the country was able to get under way immediately after the victory thanks to the measures that were taken to destroy the bourgeois state. It was already incipient in the organization of the liberated are as and of the resistance before April 1975. 13. In view of the region-wide impact of the American defeat, the imperialists looked with disquiet on the reunification of Vietnam, which was now a country of more than 50 million inhabitants with a large and well trained army. It was also disturbed by the policy the Vietnamese leadership was following in Indochina, which was illustrated by the signing in July 1977 of the "treaty of friendship and cooperation" between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Lao People's Democratic Republic, which was officially founded on December 2, 1975.
The situation in Thailand provided another source of worry. The fragility of bourgeois rule in that country was shown by the fall of the dictatorship of Generals Than om and Prapass in October 1973; the opening of a semi democratic period lasting three years during which there was a considerable growth of social and political struggles both in the countryside and the cities; and by a qualitative growth in this period and continuing after the bloody October 1976 coup of the guerrilla forces led by the Thai Communist Party, which is now allied with the Socialist Party. Incapable of resorting again to direct counterrevolutionary military intervention, Washington was no less determined to pursue a policy of "destabilizing" the Indochinese regimes, exploiting the Vietnam-Kampuchea and Vietnam-China conflicts for this purpose. Overall, the imperialist powers followed an orientation close to that of the American government toward the Vietnamese regime.
14. Hanoi has been led by these imperialist pressures, the growing crisis in its relations with Beijing, the economic situation it inherited from the war, and by the additional difficulties brought on by natural calamities to turn more and more exclusively to the USSR and its allies for international support and for economic, technical, and military aid. Vietnam's objective dependence on Moscow has increased. In June 1978 Vietnam became a member of Comecon, and in November it signed a treaty of "friendship and cooperation" with the Soviet Union.
Both Washington and Beijing, each for its own reasons, therefore, had to step up their pressure on Vietnam.
V.
15. The evolution of the situation in Kampuchea after the seizure of power by the Kampuchean Communist Party (KCP) and after the Pol Pot regime adopted the orientation that it did was to add a specific factor of crisis in Indochina.
The revival of mass struggles did not occur in Cambodia until after 1967. This lag did not prevent the main lines of the social process at work in Vietnam and Laos from showing up in Cambodia as well.
In 1963, the KCP leaders began to prepare new guerrilla bases. In 1967, a peasant revolt broke out in the province of Battambang. This provided a new social base for the struggle undertaken by the KCP. The repression sharpened. It was in this context that the Khmer Rouge guerrilla forces began to grow.
The 1970 coup—which marked both the failure of Sihanouk ism and the determination of the U.S. government to stop at nothing to isolate the forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam—along with the entry of U.S. and Saigon troops into the country threw the neocolonial society in Cambodia into crisis. These factors enabled the FUNK (National United Front of Kampuchea), aided by the VCP and the NLF, to expand rapidly. Within the FUNK the KCP extended its influence and won effective leadership, isolating those elements loyal to Prince Sihanouk, who took refuge in Beijing.
On the ground, the peasant struggles assumed a more radical character, and mobilizations against the Lon Nol regime erupted in the cities as well. Alongside the industrial plantations and the large and middle-sized estates, small peasant holdings have been very important in Cambodia. In the are as liberated by the FUNK, usury and the power of the old exploitive administration were broken. Cooperatives sprung up and a radical campaign of collective labor was undertaken. 16. Based on the momentum of the social mobilizations that had impelled the liberation struggle for years, the victory of the FUNK forces in April 1975 opened the way for the establishment of a workers state in Kampuchea. The Lon Nol army collapsed. The political and administrative structures of the bourgeois state were systematically broken up. Sihanouk was put under house arrest. An extensive repression was launched against the administrative and military personnel of the old regime.
Once in power, the KCP leadership abruptly decreed a series of anticapitalist measures. Industry and the plantations were nationalized. Private property was abolished to an unprecedented extent. An authoritarian course was set to collectivize all economic and social life in the country side very rapidly. Commercial and monetary operations were almost completely eliminated. The ties of dependency to imperialism were broken, all foreign in vestments were seized. For a time, the country shut itself off entirely from the outside world, with the exception of the relations it had with China. International trading operations were resumed only very gradually, hesitantly, and under strict governmental controls. The same is true of diplomatic relations.
The economic, social, state, and political bases of capitalism and imperialist domination were destroyed. In the are as of Thailand close to Cambodia, the new state forged ties with the Thai national liberation movement led politically by the Thai Communist Party.
17. The regime was not content with carrying out an unusually brutal repression against the bourgeois forces. Its decrees culminated in the deportation of the majority of the working masses. The population of the capital was totally evacuated in a few days. The same thing happened in other urban centers and in newly liberated villages. The scope, rapidity, and the authoritarian form of these measures cannot be explained simply by immediate pressing needs (the threat of famine after the ending of the U.S. food airlift, on which the are as controlled by the Lon Nol government had become completely dependent after 1970; the overconcentration of refugees in Pnompenh; and the lack, due to the war damage, of a transportation system capable of moving food quickly). These decisions consolidated the KCP's bureaucratic power, destroying the capacity for collective action of the masses who had suffered severely in the preceding five years. This combination of anticapitalist measures and terrorist methods by the government against the masses is reminiscent of the period of forced collectivization in the USSR under Stalin, which resulted in millions of deaths. It also re calls the measures taken against the Baltic peoples in 1939-40.
18. The establishment of a new workers state—with extreme bureaucratic deformations—in Kampuchea can only be understood in the context of the victory of a region-wide process of permanent revolution, in which the historic driving force call for mobilizing against the "foreign danger" was to justify demanding an intense and prolonged exertion by the masses to assure that the needs of production would be met. The autarkic economic orientation of the Pol Pot leadership, which carried the Stalinist policy of "building socialism in one country" to the point of absurdity, led to imposing a terrible burden on the working people in an attempt to "overcome the backwardness of the country." The regime came to depend solely on the army and the KCP apparatus.
The Pol Pot-Saloth Sar leadership's nar-was the Vietnamese revolution. In Cambodia, although an agrarian crisis emerged in the 1960s, it was still limited in scope. The degree of industrialization in the country was particularly low. The urban and rural proletariat, the agrarian semi-proletariat, and the landless peasantry were relatively small and dispersed social layers. Thus, the tempo of the Cambodian revolution was considerably accelerated by the country's integration into a region-wide process of wars and revolutions. 19. The policy of the Pol Pot regime was to have extremely grave consequences both for Kampuchea and for Indochina. Given the prevailing conditions of public health and nutrition, the human cost of the mass deportations was terribly high. Politically and socially atomized, the working masses were plunged into passivity. The government set up a system of forced labor and embarked on a campaign of unbridled nationalism, which rapidly veered toward antiforeignism. It took repressive measures against the Chinese and Vietnamese minorities, which made up a large part of the urban and rural proletariat, as well as of the petty bourgeoisie. The row ly nationalist policy is explained partially by its history. In the early 1960s it gained the leadership of the KCP in opposition to the old "Indochinese" tradition of the Communist movement in Cambodia. Educated in Paris in the 1950s, it drew its own balance sheet of the Geneva Accords, in which the Khmer Communists were denied a voice. Its nationalist orientation was further hardened by the USSR's attitude toward Lon Nol and by a certain number of disagreements with the Vietnamese leadership (over whether it was opportune to resume the armed struggle in 1967 and over the implications for Cambodia of the 1972-73 Paris Accords). Differences emerged within the KCP and even in its leading team and in the army. A policy of physically purging opposition elements was to decimate all those suspected of pro-Vietnamese sympathies. Centers of opposition were to crop up in several regions in 1978.
The policy of the Pol Pot regime endanger ed the bases of the workers state in Cambodia. In the long run, it could only favor the reappearance in force of precapitalist and proimperialist opposition groups linked to the Thai dictatorship. The experience of past forced collectivizations in agriculture have shown how short lived the "positive" results in production are and what kind of a price the workers have to pay for such policies in the medium and long run. For the moment the regime had the advantage that the counterrevolutionary forces were weak, having fallen apart after their 1975 defeat. But the methods of terror used against the masses provided a fertile ground for relaunching counterrevolutionary movements, especially if an opposition ready to defend the social gains of the revolution did not move first.
VI.
20. The Vietnamese-Cambodian conflict was never essentially over border disputes. As early as 1975, it clearly took the form of a political conflict concentrating all the elements of crisis that were brewing in the region in the aftermath of the victory. The policy of the Cambodian bureaucracy tended to deny the objective interests linking the struggles of the three Indochinese people after the victory, interests that had already been demonstrated in their common fight for liberation. It offered an opening for the maneuvers of the imperialists, who were seeking to exploit the tensions among the different Indochinese states. This became evident when Thailand organized a brief blockade of Laos. The Cambodian regime's policy blocked the mechanisms that the Vietnamese government wanted to set up on an all-Indochina level to deal with economic, diplomatic, political, and military matters. Finally, Kampuchea became an important element in the Sino-Vietnamese conflict and therefore in the Sino-Soviet one. 21. Beijing sent increasing aid to Pnompenh, regardless of the different interests and positions dividing the Deng Xiaoping and Pol Pot leaderships. Cambodia became very largely dependent on Chinese financial, diplomatic, and technical aid. The Cambodian army was strengthened through an influx of a very large number of Chinese military advisers. Its arsenal was improved to the point of including a substantial amount of long-range artillery and MIG 19s. The Khmer-Chinese alliance was consummated with the triumphal visit of Pol Pot to Beijing in September 1977, while violent military incidents were breaking out along the Vietnamese border. In 1978, the People's Republic of China continued to beef up Cambodian military potential, while helping to prepare guerrilla bases in the country in case the Pol Pot regime was overthrown.
With its relations with China becoming more antagonistic, Hanoi faced a not inconsiderable military problem. An armed force of about 70,000 men—supplied and trained by China—had been built up on its flank. Although this force was not sufficient to challenge Hanoi's military power, it posed serious problems in a whole region of Vietnam.
In the fall of 1977, Sino-Vietnamese relations took a major new turn for the worse. The growing clashes on the Khmer-Vietnamese border were a clear symptom of this. They fore shadow ed the events of 1978. In the course of 1977, the Vietnamese leadership decided to settle accounts with the Pol Pot regime. To accomplish this, it sent its regular army into Kampuchea in December. In 1978, Beijing seized the nationalization of private commerce, the weight of which fell largely on bourgeois layers of Chinese origin in Saigon-Cholon, as a pretext to launch a vast campaign of political denunciations of the Vietnamese regime. It also officially announced the cessation of economic aid to Vietnam, although in practice it had been halted for months. In 1978, the flight of 160,000 Hoas (Vietnamese of Chinese origin) into China also gave rise to grave tensions along the border. In that year also, the Sino-Japanese treaty was signed and the Sino-American treaty was on its way toward being signed.
22. It was in this context that Hanoi launched a vast offensive into Cambodia in December 1978-January 1979, in which elements of the FUNKSN were incorporated. The Vietnamese army, which included 100,000 troops and some of the best divisions in the regular armed forces, captured Pnompenh within a few weeks and subsequently occupied key positions throughout the country. The Khmer Rouge forces then began guerrilla operations. Since the onset of the border clashes, revolutionary Marxists have clearly opposed a policy that could lead to a military occupation of Cambodia by regular Vietnamese armed forces and the replacement of the Pol Pot leadership by a team totally dependent on the presence of Hanoi's troops. They condemned the Vietnamese intervention.
It would have been a different thing to give material and political support to the development of an opposition to the Pol Pot regime, an opposition that while defending the fundamental gains of the Cambodian revolution would have undertaken to abolish the terror measures of the Pol Pot government. These measures were already gravely endangering some of the gains for which the Cambodian people paid a high price in their struggle for liberation. They threatened, moreover, to smooth the way for future counterrevolutionary operations. No one could remain indifferent to the extreme gravity of the policy being followed by Pnompenh and to the suffering it was inflicting on the Khmer people and on the national minorities.
But to overthrow the Pol Pot regime by means of the power of the Vietnamese regular army was inadmissible. Yet this is exactly what happened. Centers of opposition did, indeed, appear in several regions of Cambodia in 1978, but they remained very weak. The FUNKSN was formed only shortly before the Vietnamese intervention. Given the scope of the purges that had taken place in the ranks of the KCP and the army and the political passivity of the population, the FUNKSN would have needed time to grow. It would have needed time to expand its popular base and demonstrate its capacity to overthrow the Pol Pot regime, relying essentially on its own strength. It was only thus that a Cambodian opposition could have established an autonomous decision-making power as well as concrete political independence vis a-vis the Vietnamese bureaucracy. The Vietnamese intervention ran counter to such a development, as did the policy of the Vietnamese government before the complete breakoff of ties with Pnompenh in December 1977. In fact, while today Hanoi is denouncing the "crimes of Pol Pot," at that time it kept silent about the tragedy being experienced by the Cambodian people. Indeed, for a long time it officially praised the successes of the Pol Pot regime. By combining this political silence and military intervention, Hanoi is playing the game of those forces that want to exploit national feeling in the attempt to restore capitalist and imperialist domination in Cambodia.
23. The assessment made above is not simply a moral one but a political judgment on a question whose importance was understood by Lenin in his time. In his report on the party program, which was presented on March 19,1919, to the Eighth Congress of the Russian CP, he rejected the accusation that the Bolsheviks were tempted to use their army to help overthrow the bourgeoisie in the countries neighboring Russia. It was on the basis of the national question that he rejected such a perspective:
The demarcation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is proceeding in different countries in their own specific ways. Here we must act with utmost caution. We must be particularly cautious with regard to the various nations, for there is nothing worse than lack of confidence on the part of a nation. ... No decree has yet been issued stating that all countries must live according to the Bolshevik revolutionary calendar; and even if it were issued, it would not be observed. We cannot help reckoning with the fact that things there [in Poland] are proceeding in rather a peculiar way, and we cannot say: "Down with the right of nations to self-determination! We grant the right of self-determination only to the working people." . . ." We must decree nothing from Moscow. [Collected Works, vol. 29, pp. 174-75.]
What was true for a bourgeois state shaken by the rise of class struggle is still more true in the case of a workers state. The Vietnamese bureaucracy wanted to force the struggle in Cambodia to follow Hanoi's calendar. This will poison relations between Vietnamese and Khmers, since it is all too obvious that the new regime in Pnompenh is dependent on the support it gets from Hanoi.
In a general sense, the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia has once again sharply posed the question of an Indochinese Socialist Federation. The unity of the Indochinese revolution is a necessity from the standpoint of the objective interests of the masses. It is indispensable for defending and extending the gains of the Vietnamese revolution in the face of imperialist pressure. But to be genuine, such unity must be freely accepted by all the peoples concerned. Real freedom to exercise the right of self-determination must be guaranteed, as well as lasting respect for the rights of the minority peoples. The latter must enjoy equal rights in fact with the majority population. Without such guarantees, the unification of Indochina, even if it takes the form of agreements among formally independent states, will in the long run only work in favor of the strongest state, or rather its bureaucracy—that is, in favor of Vietnam. Only the establishment of a real Federation of United Socialist States of Indochina, fully guaranteeing the right of self-determination, can make possible the achievement of these objectives. The question of the means a leadership adopts to assure respect for the rights of minorities in fact is not a matter of secondary importance. It was not by chance that Lenin made several points on this question in his last writings, after assess ing the ravages wrought by Great Russian chauvinism in Georgia.
He stressed the distinction that had to be made not only between the "nationalism of the oppressor nation and that of the oppressed nation," but also more generally between the "nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation."
In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without no tic ing it. . . . That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or "great nations," as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations, but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice. . . . That is why, in this case, the fundamental interest of proletarian solidarity . . . requires that we never adopt a formal attitude to the national question. . . . [Lenin's Lost Letters and Articles, pp. 19-21]
It is important to recall these lines now. Because the Vietnamese government is claiming that the equality of the Indochinese nations is guaranteed by treaties that link these nations together formally on the basis of their being totally independent states but which in fact set the seal on a tight integration of Laos, the "new" Kampuchea, and Vietnam under Hanoï's control. The Vietnamese leadership is also mounting a huge propaganda campaign to exalt the "four thousand year history" of the "great" Vietnamese nation. Moreover, the pre colonial and colonial history of these countries, as well as the central role of the struggle for national liberation in the Indochinese revolutions, have provided fertile ground for the exacerbation of these nationalisms.
The Vietnamese intervention is tending to reinforce the power of the Vietnamese bureaucracy in Vietnam itself, as well as in Indochina as a whole. It is helping to accentuate the nationalist tendencies and increase the weight of the military elements in the society. It is illusory to hope that the Vietnamese leadership—which in its own country defends a bureaucratic monopoly of information and political decision making and, in rapport with the Soviet bureaucracy, sets its international orientation within the framework of peaceful coexistence—can either stimulate the masses to mobilize to take power directly or establish relations of equality among the peoples and states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Today, no solution favorable to the fundamental interests of the Cambodian workers and peasants is possible in a context dominated by the presence within the country of Vietnamese armed forces. It is necessary to help the Cambodia working people to build councils and mass organizations, to give them food and technical aid, to ensure the arming of the masses. This is necessary to avert a situation in which the indispensable withdrawal of Vietnamese troops could be exploited by the capitalist and imperialist forces, and in order to enable the peoples to defend themselves against any reprisals by the Pol Pot forces. Such an orientation is simply the continuation, in the present situation, of the correct policy for the previous period which consisted of helping the masses and relying on them and their organizations to fight the Pol Pot regime. The Vietnamese intervention in Kampuchea has not removed the threat that China posed on the country's northern border. There, the fact that Hanoi did not limit itself to responding to the attacks of Khmer units but overthrew the Pol Pot regime has enabled the Chinese bureaucracy, as well as American imperialism, to launch a new campaign of denunciations against Vietnam. This campaign, in turn, facilitated the Chinese intervention in February 1979.
VII.
24. The Chinese government used Hanoi's military initiative in Cambodia as a pretext for attacking Vietnam. However, this intervention, as we saw, fits into a broader context that gives it its real meaning and portent. It is a stark illustration of the counterrevolutionary course on which the Chinese bureaucracy has set out in eastern Asia and must be denounced as such.
Beijing has maintained the fiction that this intervention was "limited retaliation" in response to increasing incidents on the Sino-Vietnamese border. But in its scope, the extent of the troops and materiel brought into action, its duration, and the nature of the targets (including a number of urban centers), the Chinese intervention was a real act of war.
The Chinese leadership, move over, has not concealed certain aspects of its counterrevolutionary orientation. It has reproached the imperialist powers for exhibit ing weakness toward "social imperialism" in Africa and the Mid east. It has declared its determination to show greater "firmness" in Southeast Asia, a strategic area owing to the straits linking the Pacific to the Indian ocean. Calling Hanoi an "Asian Cuba," the Chinese leadership has more clearly than ever avowed its determination to weaken the Vietnamese state by every means, including military ones, and to force it to loosen its ties with Moscow.
The considerable importance accorded to this objective today by the Chinese leadership has been confirmed by its decision to intervene in the way it has in Vietnam. Because the Chinese bureaucracy had to pay a not inconsiderable price in order to do this. It gave Vietnam an opportunity to regain the diplomatic initiative with respect to a number of semicolonial countries, most of which di sap proved of Hanoi's intervention in Cambodia. And Beijing did this precisely at a time when its own prestige in the eyes of the national liberation movements had become tarnished. It apparently had to face opposition within the Chinese population, and even within the party and state apparatus. Finally, the operation itself was probably very costly economically in men as well as in materiel. 25. The intervention in Vietnam seems to have produced only very limited immediate results. Hanoi was not forced to throw the bulk of its regular forces into the front lines to contain the thrust by the Chinese troops; nor did it have to call back many of the divisions operating in Cambodia. Beijing can only expect to draw medium-term benefits from such initiatives. But it is well aware of the economic and social price that the Vietnamese regime is going to have to pay to maintain its defenses under conditions of constant military pressure.
The Soviet leadership has made very clear, both through Brezhnev's speech and through its actions, that its priority is to continue its policy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism, that it is not prepared to put its international orientation in question by getting too deeply involved on the side of Vietnam, and that it is following the same course in its relations with the Chinese bureaucracy.
Beijing, therefore, is free to pursue its campaign of attrition against the Vietnamese regime, on the sole condition that it does not go "too far." We have to expect that the Chinese leadership will continue and sharpen its policy aimed at weakening the Vietnamese regime.
VIII.
26. The bourgeois propagandists are on a rampage. They are taking advantage of this occasion to try to make people forget a century of imperialist wars that have cost humanity many tens of millions dead. It would have people believe both that the USSR and its allies may launch an offensive against the imperialist powers and that there is a danger that a third world war may result from the conflicts among the bureaucratized workers states. The primary objective of this campaign is clear. It is to create a climate of opinion among the working masses, above all in the United States, more favorable for justifying the intervention of American armed forces against a new breakthrough of the world revolution. We must systematically expose this propaganda campaign, which conceals an attempt by the imperialists to resume their direct counterrevolutionary activities after the defeat they suffered in Indochina. We must expose the constant danger of world war posed by imperialism.
We must also explain the foundations of the counterrevolutionary policy of the bureaucracy in power in the workers states, whose crimes make the job of the imperialist propagandists easier.
27. The bureaucracies' claim that they can "build socialism" in "their" respective countries and their defense of their own interests as parasitic castes involve a policy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism and the liquidation of any proletarian internationalist perspective. This is what led the Soviet bureaucracy to transform the Communist International from an instrument of the world revolution into a tool of its own diplomatic interests, before finally abolishing it. A chauvinist messianic mystique, the complement of bureaucratic nationalism, provided the justification for the Stalinist leadership's first purges of those who opposed the establishment of its dictatorship in the USSR and the Communist International. It went on, in the same vein, to excommunicate the leaderships brought to power by revolutions that developed against the Kremlin's will. The Yugoslavs were first, followed by the Chinese. The bloody purges that broke the independence of the Communist International and the subsequent dissolution of this organization were the international concomitant of the rise of bureaucratic power in the USSR itself. Since Stalin's condemnation of the Yugoslav "schism" in 1948, the conflicts among bureaucratized workers states have taken graver and graver forms. This process continues today, with the station ing of massive numbers of Soviet troops along the Chinese frontier, with Beijing militarily aiding the army of the Pol Pot regime, with the proliferation of incidents on the Vietnamese-Khmer border, with the moving of large numbers of Vietnamese regular army troops into all of Cambodia, and with the Chinese intervention in Vietnam. The confrontation under way hasan extremely dangerous dynamic, and must be halted at all costs. It has been imposed on the Indochinese and Chinese masses, who were led into bloody clashes, to the detriment of their own interests. It is doing great harm to the international workers movement. It is setting precedents that could have tragic consequences on the Sino-Soviet border or in Eastern Europe when the Soviet bureaucracy's domination of the People's Democracies is once again challenged by the proletariat, or if the Sino-Soviet conflict sharp ens.
28. Care should be taken to avoid making any shortsightedly conjunctural or sectoral judgments on these questions. Nothing could be more dangerous than to yield to the temptations of a false political "realism" that would lead sections of the revolution to try to estimate which of the bureaucracies—Soviet or Chinese—is for the moment "less counterrevolutionary," and to divide the world into "two camps," with the USSR, Vietnam, and Cuba on one side; and the United States and China on the other.
The policies of the Chinese and Soviet bureaucracies reflect the same interests and the same objectives. Both seek to ensure the political monolithism and control in "their" spheres of influence. The aim is to assure the maintenance of the monopoly of power that they exercise in their respective countries, which is the source of their social privileges. They also seek to acquire the means for conducting a policy of peaceful coexistence, by ensuring their ability to play a direct role in the maintenance of the international status quo. Beijing's support for Pinochet is matched by Moscow's for Videla. The Sino-Soviet conflict is not the result of an "economic, expansionist drive" analogous to that exhibited by imperialism. It stems from the determination of each of these bureaucracies to ensure the best political conditions domestically and inter nationally for preserving their social and political monopoly of state power in their own country.
It is the worldwide policies of the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies that have to be assessed. Both are counterrevolutionary. It is the bases themselves of the interbureaucratic conflict between China and the USSR that have to be attacked. Along with exposing the policy of the imperialists, it is necessary to stress the importance of fighting today for political revolution and for establishing governments based on real socialist democracy. Only the political revolution can put an end to the power of the bureaucracy and thus to the conflicts between bureaucratized workers states. In face of the imperialist propaganda, it is necessary to restate that these bureaucratic castes by no means represent socialism. Under real workers and peasants power there will be no more war; nationalism will wane decisively.
IX.
29. The conflicts that have rent Indochina and locked China and Vietnam in confrontation obviously have very grave implications for the masses in Southeast Asia. This is particularly true for Thailand, since this is where the most significant struggle against imperialism in the region is being fought. The victory of the Indochinese revolutions had greatly improved the conditions in which the Thai movement was carrying on its struggle. But today the Thai resistance has felt the full backlash of the Indochinese crisis and the sharpening of the Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Soviet conflicts in eastern Asia. It is threatened with being isolated politically and cut off from mate rial support. Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, and just recently Pnompenh have in turn court ed the Bangkok regime, seeking to get into its diplomatic good graces. The Chinese leadership declares openly that it sees Kriangsak's Thailand as a new "line of defense" in the region against the danger of "hegemony." The Vietnamese leadership is trying at any price to reassure ASEAN in order to break out of the diplomatic isolation to which it has been subjected. Moscow, likewise, is doing the same.
The Thai resistance, which embraces organizations of different political out looks, could become a pawn in the Sino-Vietnamese conflict. It may come under pressure to take a position publicly in support of one of the parties to the dispute (which it has refused so far to do). This would only accentuate the divisions in the Thai resistance and paralyze its capacity for action.
The isolation of the Thai struggle would be all the more grave because American imperialism and the Thai bourgeoisie are going to try to take advantage of the situation to deal severe blows to a movement whose recent successes have worried them. It is the duty of all anti-imperialist activists to actively demonstrate their solidarity with the liberation struggles in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia and to call for a united front of the workers states in defense of these revolutionary fighters.
Such support for the anti-imperialist struggles in Southeast Asia is an essential task that goes hand in hand with defending the Indochinese revolution. The spread of revolution in Thailand and in the region would deal a decisive blow to the imperialist attempt to stifle the Indochinese workers states. More favorable objective conditions would then exist for overcoming the economic, social, and political problems they are experiencing.
In a more general way, new advances of anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggles, especially in the United States and Japan, would have the same effect.
X.
30. It is also the duty of the international workers movement to mobilize in defense of the Indochinese revolutions, which are being threatened by imperialist maneuvers at a time when they have been weakened by interbureaucratic conflicts. In the medium and long term, the Chinese bureaucracy's policy can only run counter to the interests of defending the Chinese workers state, which could find itself being threatened once again as a result of the reinforcement of the imperialist presence in the region.
Washington is not going to rest content today with just trying to stabilize the neocolonial state in Thailand. It is going to expand its military aid to the Thai army considerably. It is to be feared that it will step up its pressure once again on Laos, using the remains of the counterrevolutionary army of the Meo General Vang Pao and the groups now in Thailand that are linked to the former Laotian regime and to the feudal lord shi ps in the southern part of the country. At the same time, the Chinese influence in the north of the country remains considerable.
The reappearance on the international scene of Prince Sihanouk and the appeals he is launching for convening a new international conference on Indochina may give the United States the opportunity to mount a political and diplomatic offensive on the Cambodian question, in conjunction with an attempt to revive the subversive activity of the rightist Khmer Serai groups. The United States is continuing its policy designed to maintain the economic blockade and diplomatic isolation of the Vietnamese revolution. The international workers movement must raise a hue and cry against these pressures that the imperialists are bringing to bear on the Indochinese revolutions and prevent them from becoming worse! It must struggle to get the U.S. blockade of Vietnam ended and to force the powers that bear the responsibility for forty years of devastation and slaughter in the three Indochinese countries to offer them economic aid with no strings attached! It must raise an outcry against the economic blockade of Cambodia, which is threatened with famine! It must demand that the bourgeois governments extend diplomatic recognition to the Indochinese regimes! It must oppose the imperialist propaganda campaign against the Indochinese revolutions and the giving of military support to the Thai dictatorship! It must demand the withdrawal of the American Seventh Fleet from the Pacific and the dismantling of the American bases! In view of the danger of imperialist aggression, which is historically always present, it must call for the formation of a united front of workers states!
31. If a final lesson must be drawn from the recent Indochinese events, in view of the sufferings these peoples continue to endure, it is the urgent need to fight for the revival of real proletarian internationalism and socialist democracy.
The activists of the Fourth International have been engaged in this struggle since their movement was founded in response to the Stalinist degeneration of the first workers state and of the Communist International. In the forty years of history of the workers movement since that time, this fight has lost none of its immediacy; quite the contrary.
This fight is for building a mass revolutionary International, for world revolution, for a federation of socialist united states of the world. April 6, 1979 Nota bene: The crisis rocking the Indochinese peninsula cannot be understood without taking account of the whole series of factors analyzed in the resolution adopted by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International on April 6, 1979. Unless this is done, it is impossible to take a correct overall position with regard to these conflicts.
The January 1978 and January 1979 statements by the United Secretariat obscured the inter locking between the interbureaucratic conflicts and a renewed imperialist offensive, an inter locking that took place in the framework of the policy of peaceful coexistence. They did not sufficiently stress the immediacy of the tasks of defending the Indochinese revolutions against imperialism. The February 1979 statement focusing on the Chinese intervention in Vietnam did not make clear the new political situation existing in Kampuchea and in the region after the entry of the Vietnamese regular army into Kampuchea and the orientation that had then to be assumed by revolutionary Marxists.