Different positions have arisen inside the Fourth International over the appreciation and political attitude towards the military conflicts that have occurred in Southeast Asia since December 1978. While these disagreements seem to center around what attitude one should adopt towards the invasion of Kampuchea (Cambodia) by the Vietnamese regular armed forces (there has been a unanimous condemnation of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam), their political implications with regard to further developments in relation to armed conflicts between ruling bureaucracies in workers states are not clear. This is potentially dangerous especially because of the possibility of armed struggle between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Moreover, the underlying theoretical questions are of such importance (and, in one case, of such novelty) that a thorough discussion of them has become unavoidable. In the present article, we deal essentially with positions expressed in Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor I. Was Pol Pot's Cambodia a Workers State (Albeit Extremely Bureaucratized and Despotic)?
Articles by comrades Mary-Alice Waters, Fred Feldman, and Steve Clark in Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor try to justify the critical support given to the invasion of Kampuchea by the regular Vietnamese army on the basis of the argument that that country was not a workers state, and that, instead, the Pol Pot regime was "a capitalist counterrevolutionary government that threatened the Vietnamese revolution." The historical analogies then immediately come to mind: Georgia, Finland.
More generally, in a military conflict between a workers state and a bourgeois state, revolutionary Marxists support the first against the latter, because of the need to preserve the superior socioeconomic system against the restoration of capitalism. This remains uppermost, regardless of the degree of bureaucratization which characterizes the given workers state. This has been the common programmatic attitude of the Fourth International since the experiences gained in 1939-40. Nothing, in our eyes, justifies any modification of this position.
Comrades Mary-Alice Waters, Fred Feldman, and Steve Clark base their case largely on the hypothesis that Pol Pot's Kampuchean regime was not a workers state. We reject that hypothesis as being contrary both to facts and to Marxist theory.
A civil war started in Kampuchea in April-May 1967 when the leaders of the Kampuchean Communist Party left Pnompenh to organize a guerrilla war against the bourgeois regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, that regime launched severe repression against communists and other left-wingers, and after the outbreak of spontaneous peasant revolts of Samlaut in the Battambang area, where landlords had tried to impose the payment of rent upon peasants who had had the free use of the land for centuries.?
This civil war broadened considerably when the massive United States air attacks and invasion of Cambodia unfolded in 1970, and after the coup by Lon Nol (Sihanouk's former military commander). It was closely intertwined with the civil wars in Vietnam and Laos, and with the war of national liberation by the Vietnamese masses against U.S. imperialism, culminating finally in the overthrow of the Lon Nol regime by the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. While the Vietnamese CP-led forces played an important role in assisting the Khmer Rouge in this civil war, especially by thwarting several offensives against them by the U.S. impe rialist forces and the South Vietnamese and Cambodian counterrevolutionaries, the Cambodian CP jealously defended its autonomy and operated in a manner which was more and more independent of Hanoi. This was demonstrated, inter alia, by the way in which it tried to destroy all the elements of the bourgeois state and of the capitalist class in one stroke after its April 1975 victory.
Against the advice of both Hanoi and Peking-the advice of Moscow was no longer listened to, especially after the Kremlin maintained relations with the Lon Nol regime while the latter was butchering Cambodian communists, workers, students, intellectuals and peasants by the thousand—the leaders of the Cambodian CP tried to introduce a "radical social revolution in all fields" in the shortest possible time (to use the formula with which the present rulers of Kampuchea describe the Pol Pot regime*).
A big part of the participants in the bourgeois state apparatus were physically eliminated (apart from those who escaped abroad). The great majority of the bourgeoisie down to the lower middle classes suffered the same fate. The urban population was dispersed. Private property and/or use of the land was severely restricted, if not radically suppressed. Peasants who had been the prototype of individual farming in Southeast Asia for centuries were forced into rigid collective farming (cooperatives):
Replacing a system in which farming had been essentially a family undertaking, the production solidarity groups became the basic unit of agricultural work. They were in turn organized into 30,000 agricultural cooperatives. Although the peasants cultivate small gardens for their fruit and vegetables, today private property in land basically does not exist.!
François Ponchaud indicates that beginning in October 1975, all means of production were collectivized in the cooperatives. In addition, beginning in December 1975, state farms were being created.
The radicalism (or ultraleftist adventurism) of the Pol Pot regime went as far as virtually suppressing all forms of trade and money. Only the barest remnants of barter continued.
Kampuchea's economy and society had already been wrecked by the barbaric imperialist bombing and other acts of war. It was estimated that in the densely populated area around Pompenh alone, the monthly equivalent of seven Hiroshima-type atomic bombs had been rained down by U.S. bombers in the six months ending in August 1973. The consequent disruption of agriculture and food production was catastrophic.
An unpublished International Monetary Fund study estimated that at the end of 1974, the total cultivated paddy land had been reduced by 75 percent and that paddy production in the Khmer Republic (i.e., those areas not liberated by the Khmer Rouge at that time) had fallen from an annual level of 3.8 million tons to only 493,000 tons. But even the latter figure is considered to be exaggerated by pro-Khmer Rouge sources. Massive starvation, malnutrition, and epidemics were rampant. Many of the deaths attributed, first by imperialist propaganda and later by Hanoi and Moscow, to Pol Pot atrocities were in fact due to the barbaric acts of imperialism and its local stooges.
But it is also obvious that the adventuristic policies followed by the Pol Pot faction greatly contributed to the price paid in terms of human suffering for the change of regime in Kampuchea. Moreover, this policy made it impossible to quickly repair the damage caused by the imperialist destruction. The national economy and the very fabric of elementary social division of labor was disrupted further by the inhuman means by which private property was suppressed. Transport, medical supplies, hospitals, and a large part of the educational system were not only disruptedthey entirely collapsed for a whole period. The repression was extended against whole social groups including women and children. The victims of state terrorism certainly have to be measured in terms of hundreds of thousands.
The obvious parallel which comes to mind is the severity, scope, and extreme terrorism of Stalin's forced collectivization in the Soviet Union, summed up in his formula of "suppressing the kulaks as a class." The human toll exacted by this crime-not to speak of the long-term results in misery and shortage of certain foodstuffs in the Soviet Union-was immeasurable. Khrushchev estimated that during that period and the ensuing purges in the 1930s, Stalin and his henchmen killed 12 million people, while uncounted additional millions were deported. If anything, these figures underestimate the gruesome reality.
But it is one thing to say that an inhuman despot used barbaric methods-which we, of course, condemn fully and without reser vation, and which are unable to further the building of a classless socialist society-in order to suppress private property. It is something else again to present this despot as a "counterrevolutionary capitalist." Unless we go over to the camp of the state capitalists or bureaucratic collectivists, we must recognize that the crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy against the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union had neither the purpose nor the objective effect of restoring capitalism or establishing a new class rule. It operated within the framework of a postcapitalist societya society in transition between capitalism and socialism; i.e, a workers state. What is true for Stalin's terror is true for Pol Pot's terror too.
This is not in the first place a question of speculation but one of judging facts. If it is true that the bourgeois state apparatus was utterly smashed in Kampuchea (probably more totally so than in any previous social revolution®); if it is true that not only the bourgeoisie but that even the peasantry was expropriated; if it is true that no remnant whatsoever of capitalist property and production relations can be found in the Kampuchea of 1976, 1977, or 1978—then it is just impossible to refer to the Pol Pot regime or government as capitalist. A capitalist government or a bourgeois state which utterly destroys capitalism is an absurdity within the framework of the Marxist theory of classes and of the state. It is a concept which is in contradiction with all the basic elements of historical materialism.
One could argue that, because Kampuchea was an extremely backward country and because both the basic classes of capitalist society-the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie-were present only in a near-embryonic form, the classical criteria for establishing the class nature of the state can only be applied with great difficulty, reservations, and constant reference to the historic background and specificity of Kampuchean society. We fully agree. The tragedy of the Kampuchean revolution is an extreme and grotesque distortion of the tragedy of Stalinism reflected through extreme backwardness. But it is a distorted repetition of Stalinism, not of bourgeois counterrevolution. Any false judgment on this matter will have serious consequences for one's analysis of the Soviet Union and other bureaucratically degenerated or severely deformed workers states too.
Presumably, in the minds of some comrades, the question of the class nature of the Pol Pot regime and of the Kampuchean state under that regime has been obscured by their not considering the problem of the class nature of the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy, and not studying its relation to the working class and to the bourgeoi sie in that light.
The idea that that bureaucracy could in any way be compared to the bureaucracy of the Asian mode of production type of society is correctly rejected by comrades Feldman and Clark. We are living in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not in the early Middle Ages. But in the same context, the idea that the working class was totally suppressed and that to defend the concept that Kampuchea is a workers state means having a workers state without a working class, has to be rejected as equally absurd.
No contemporary state, not to speak of a contemporary economy, could exist or survive without airports, telecommunications, railroads, highways, port facilities (if it has an outlet to the sea, as Kampuchea has), repair shops, power stations, arms maintenance depots, a minimum of cement and other building-material production, a minimum of textile production, and some industrial production of agricultural implements. All this implies not only the existence but even the expansion of an industrial labor force. To present matters as though Pol Pot and his henchmen deliberately wanted to destroy the industrial proletariat or had actually destroyed them in Kampuchea is just nonsense.
In fact, as comrades Feldman and Clark themselves correctly state, the Kampuchean CP was intent upon industrialization, be it of a special type: i.e., in a special relationship with agriculture (an idea borrowed not from bourgeois ideologues, incidentally, but from Mao Zedong). Its number two leader, leng Sary, stated that in so many words before the General Assembly of the United Nations.
According to Hildebrand and Porter, who are apologists for the Pol Pot regime and whose information therefore should be treated with caution, 100,000 people had been allowed to return to Pnompenh by the end of 1975, part of whom were working in factories. By the beginning of 1976, nearly 100 factories around the country are said to have resumed production.7 Other sources cite much lower figures. According to the October 13, 1978, Far Eastern Economic Review, Pol Pot told a Japanese delegation that the population of Pompenh had already increased to 200,000 and was intended to grow to 400,000.
Ponchaud provides similar information, insisting especially on the role of the communication and transportation workers.® The Yugoslav CP journalist Slavko Stovic, who visited Kampuchea in 1978, reports that 220,000 people were living in the Pompenh suburbs.
So the question boils down to this: what kind of industry was the Pol Pot bureaucracy starting to rebuild? A capitalist one or a noncapitalist one? This is not only a question of nationalization or non-nationalization of the initial industry. It is a question of the entire socioeconomic context.
Does this nationalization and industrialization maintain or lead to a revival of private property, private capital accumulation, the birth of a new capitalist class? Are the bureaucrats administering this industry accumulating private fortunes (be it through corruption, theft, or black market operations)? Certainly CP bureaucrats of Stalinist persuasion and origin could do that. The question is: did they do that in Kampuchea? Comrades Feldman, Clark, and Mary Alice Waters don't bring forward a shred of evidence to support that hypothesis. The fact that "forced labor is exploited" is no more proof of the existence or survival of capitalism in Kampuchea than it was in the Soviet Union. The question is: does it lead to capitalist property and production relations, to generalized commodity production? No proof can be brought forward to substantiate such an assertion.
Therefore, it follows unavoidably that we are faced not with a capitalist, bourgeois, or "precapitalist" state bureaucracy, but with a bureaucracy tied to the working class not only through its (granted: extremely distorted) ideology, but also and especially through its specific form of remuneration and its basic relation to the means of production and ownership of property. We know that it is unpalatable to consider despots of the Pol Pot type as being in some way tied to the working class. But, frankly speaking, was it more palatable to consider Stalin's, Yezhov's, and Beria's bureaucracy as an extremely degenerated part of a workers state bureaucracy? Justifiable moral revulsion should not stand in the way of arriving at correct scientific definitions. Let us recall that the Kampuchea CP never did abandon its programmatic statements in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat, building communism, the leading role of the working class, and the need for international solidarity with workers of all countries.
In "A Short Guide for the Application of Party Statutes, published in 1975, the "long-range goal of the party" is stated as follows: "To lead the people in creating a socialist revolution and a communist society in Kampuchea. ..:
In the Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea adopted January 5, 1976, the first two articles state:
"Article 1. ... The State of Kampuchea is the state of the workers, peasants, and all other toiling layers of Kampuchea.
"Article 2. All important means of production are the collective property of the people's state and the collective property of the common people...
Furthermore, Article 12 states: "Every worker is master of his factory."
A pamphlet published in August 1973 by the Khmer Rouge stated that "the working class forms the vanguard" of all the "patriotic forces" engaged in the war; that it "has become a class fully capable of leading the revolutionary national and popular war of liberation to victory." The same pamphlet states that "the revolutionary struggle of the people of Kampuchea is an integral part of the struggle of the workers and toilers of all the countries of the world, including those of the United States, against capitalist, neocolonialist, and imperialist oppression and exploitation. The workers, toilers, and people of Kampuchea have always shown a firm and active internationalist spirit. They have always firmly supported the struggles of the workers, toilers, and people of the world, including those of the USA, and manifested their militant solidarity with them."
On September 10, 1976, on the occasion of the death of Mao, Pol Pot exalted the dictatorship of the proletariat as the heritage of "Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung."
All humbug and propaganda? Possibly. But doesn't the content of the propaganda tell us something about the class nature of the Kampuchean bureaucracy? Possibly petty-bourgeois demagogues could repeat such language. But can they implement it? And weren't these statements implemented to an important extent in Kampuchea?
The grave contradictions that face those who deny that the Pol Pot bureaucracy is an extreme form of a degenerated workingclass bureaucracy-an extreme example of the degeneration of a Communist party of Stalinist origins-are graphically expressed in the official statements of the most violent opponents of the Pol Pot bureaucracy, the very people who toppled them from power. Here is what they have to say about the Pol Pot clique:
A complex situation emerged: on the one hand, cooperation between Vietnamese and Kampuchean revolutionists [sic] continued; but on the other hand, the Vietnamese felt that the attitude of the revolutionary leadership of Kampuchea had changed.
As late as September 1976, the official Hanoi propaganda organ Le Courrier du Vietnam published an interview with Pol Pot, in which the revolutionary achievements of his regime and its deep ties with the revolutionary masses were celebrated. In fact, some form of collaboration between the Kampuchean and Vietnamese CP leaderships lasted for two and a half years after the April 1975 victory. The above-quoted 1979 pamphlet goes on to add that in September 1977 a chauvinist tendency definitely triumphed within the Kampuchean Communist Party.
But yet the founding declaration of the FUNSK, published in the same pamphlet, calls the Pol Pot faction "militarists, reactionary tyrants" and even "slaveowners" (esclavagistes). We know, of course, that in the Stalinist tradition communists of different factions can rapidly become "counterrevolutionaries" and even "fascists" as soon as the slightest deviation from the "general line" appears.
But comrades Mary-Alice Waters, Fred Feldman, and Steve Clark are faced with the same difficulty. The founders of the Khmer Rouge were obviously communists of Stalinist persuasion in their origins, members of the Indochinese and French CPs. When they broke with the Norodom Sihanouk regime, they were still communists, weren't they? When they organized and led to victory the guerrilla war, in close collaboration with the Vietnamese CP, they were still communist bureaucrats, weren't they? When did they become a "new bourgeoisie gestating in the state apparatus"? After the occupation of Pnompenh and other large towns? But that occupation coincided with a radical suppression of private property! A Stalinist turned into a capitalist (a fascist capitalist, for that, for seldom was there a more terrorist "capitalist" government than the Pol Pot one, if you want to characterize it as bourgeois) by ... radically suppressing capitalist property and production relations: Isn't that a bit hard to swallow for a Trotskyist?
II. What Are the Criteria for Defining a Workers State?
We said: Kampuchea is a border case, given the extreme backwardness of the country, compounded by the catastrophie results of the American bombing and the ensuing disruption of economic and social life. In and by itself, a difference on the exact definition of the Pol Pot regime and the class nature of the state under that regime wouldn't be so serious, if it were not combined with the question of what criteria one uses in order to determine the class nature of a state. It is the use of wrong criteria which makes the position defended by comrades Mary-Alice Waters, Fred Feldman, and Steve Clark so potentially dangerous. For these have obvious implications with regard to our assessment of the class nature of many other workers states, and even with regard to our basic positions towards the class nature of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
Let us first succinctly restate what has been the unchanged majority position of the Fourth International on this subject for at least a quarter of a century. A workers state exists when and if the previously existing bourgeois state machine has been smashed, the existing bourgeois class has lost its political and economic power, and when the economy based upon new production and property relations, of a noncapitalist nature, evolves according to laws of motion that are not those discovered by Marx in Capital as being characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.
This implies:
a. That we do not accept the possibility for any state to exist in the epoch of imperialism (i.e., in the world in which we are living in this last quarter of the twentieth century) which would be neither a bourgeois nor a workers state or some hybrid combination of both; b. That we do not accept the possibility that in backward countries, semifeudal or large-scale property in land, exploitation of peasants through trade, banking, usury, etc., could be suppressed—i.e., that a radical agrarian revolution could take place-within the framework of a bourgeois state and with a capitalist ruling class.
c. That we do not accept that any bourgeois state could exist without the presence of a ruling bourgeois class, even if it is a weak one, whose existence and character has to be empirically proven in terms of the definitions given by Marx; d. That we do not accept that capitalism can exist without private property, without generalized commodity production, and without the economy being governed by the laws of motion of that mode of production as laid bare by Marx.
Theses (a) and (b) flow directly from the theory of permanent revolution as formulated by Trotsky himself. Theses (c) and (d) follow from the overall analysis of capitalism by Marx. And from theses (a), (b), (c), and (d), it follows that where a radical agrarian revolution has occurred, where the existing bourgeoisie has lost state power and is no more a ruling class, where private property has been essentially suppressed, where the economy obviously does not operate any more on the basis of capitalist production and property relations and does not function any more according to the laws of motion of capitalism, a workers state has come into being, independently of the conditions under which this has occurred.
While it is true that there is, historically, a unity between the destruction of state power of the capitalist class, the disappearance of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class, and the suppression of private property and capitalist relations of production, there is no necessary synchronization between these processes. The Marxist tradition is clear on this subject. It starts with the Communist Manifesto itself:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, ie., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."
The idea defended by comrades Waters, Clark, and Feldman that a workers state comes into existence only after the final abolition of the last remnants of private property in the means of production is completely alien to that tradition. This is strikingly confirmed by Trotsky's report to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern:
It is perfectly obvious that from the economic standpoint the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is justified to the extend that the workers' state is able to organize the exploitation of enterprises upon new beginnings. The wholesale, overall nationalization which we carried through in 1917-18 was completely out of harmony with the condition I have just now outlined. The organizational potentialities of the workers' state lagged far behind total nationalization. ... Indeed, had we been able to enter the arena of socialist development after the victory of the revolution in Europe.. we could have tranquilly taken hold only of the large-scale enterprises, leaving the middle-sized and small ones to exist for a while on the private capitalist basis. . . .
The Waters/Feldman/Clark hypothesis includes an insurmountable contradiction from the point of view of the Marxist theory of the state. If the state is an instrument to uphold the rule of a given social class, how can it be used for the overthrow of that very class rule? For it is under the given state power, and with the use of the given state apparatus, that the later total abolition of private property takes place.
In Russia, to take the first example, no change in the structure of the state or in the nature of state power took place after the October 1917 revolution. If one argues that this state remained a bourgeois state until capitalist property was completely abolished in the autumn of 1918—why not until the abolition of the NEP in 1928?—then it was a bourgeois state that abolished the economic power of the bourgeoisie, an absurd proposition if there ever was one.
The same remarks apply to case of China. Comrades Feldman and Clark claim that the Chinese state remained bourgeois after the proclamation of the Chinese People's Republic in October 1949. But leaving aside the fact that one will not find a single Chinese capitalist who believes that he remained in power in 1950 or 1951 in his country, the extension of land reform and the generalized nationalizations of the subsequent years were obviously realized by the state power (the army, the government, the administration, the state apparatus) established in October 1949 How could a bourgeois state be used to abolish capitalism? Under the "pressure of the masses'"? Under the "compulsion" of imperialist pressure? Aren't those the very revisionist theses of the Social Democrats, the Stalinists since 1935, and the Eurocommunists?
In order not to succumb to the temptations of "Trotskyism," Mao himself-like comrades Feldman and Clark-continued to deny that the dictatorship of the proletariat was established in China in October 1949, as it had been in Russia in October 1917. For that purpose, and in order to avoid the absurd thesis of the survival of a bourgeois state in China between 1949 and 1953, he had to uphold the equally revisionist theory of a state of the socalled "new democracy," part bourgeois and part working-class. Do comrades Feldman and Clark prefer the same way out, instead of recognizing the obvious-ie., that the destruction of the bourgeois state leads to the establishment of a workers state, even if private property is not completely and immediately abolished?
It is true that history has presented us with short phases of transition in which the question of which class really rules society is not clearly answerable. Periods of dual power are an example of this. But in each case, the class nature of the surviving state apparatus does not allow any doubt: it remains bourgeois. Therefore, it has to be rapidly abolished, lest the working class loses again the elements of class rule it is beginning to assemble.
One could assume that a similar short phase of transition occurred in Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation (we are not referring to Yugoslavia) in the years 1946-47. But the real relationship of forces was rapidly revealed. Without great difficulty, the occupying forces eliminated the surviving elements of bourgeois power essentially by military-bureaucratic means.
Comrades Feldman, Clark, and Mary Alice Waters completely eliminated this elementary analysis of class power and the class nature of the state, in order to reduce the whole question-at least in all those cases where a proletarian revolution did not take the classical form of the Paris Commune or the October Revolutionto a single criterion:
•.. the nationalization of property is not by itself sufficient to establish a workers state. The intervention of the workers-the only force in modern society capable of establishing and maintaining a progressive economic structure-is needed.
The nationalizations in Kampuchea came about not through mobilizations of the working class-even limited and controlled ones-but following the Khmer Rouge's crushing of the urban workers.
The expropriation of the capitalists by the workers, and the transformation of industry into public property, creates the possibility for the coordination of the means of production under a national (and ultimately international) economic plan."
The formula "The nationalization of property is not enough to establish a workers state. The intervention of the workers is needed," can have a double meaning. Consistent with the method of historical materialism, it is a working hypothesis. It means: We assume that without the intervention of the workers, nationalization of property is not enough to destroy bourgeois class rule, because this will then grow again and again, like the heads of Hydra, whatever the blows you use to try to chop it off. This hypothesis has then to be tested by factual analysis. It has been tested in Eastern Europe, not to speak of Kampuchea. No bourgeois class, no private property revived, although "workers mobilizations" in most cases were nonexistent or extremely marginal. Although the abolition of capitalism occurred essentially through military-bureaucratic means, capitalism was indeed abolished.
But without the rigorous application of the method of historical materialism this same formula becomes a dogmatic schema: when the nationalizations do not occur through mobilizations of the working class, when the capitalists do not become expropriated by the workers, then, by definition, capitalism continues to rule, even if there are no capitalists, no capitalist laws of motion, no capital, and no money. A capitalism without capitalists, without capital, and without money: the whole of Marx goes out of the window! We could then have two countries with identical property relations, identical relations of production, identical socio-economic systems, and identical laws of motion, the first of which would be a workers state and the second of which would be a bourgeois state, merely because of the historical conditions under which these identical systems had been established. Surely, for a Marxist, the origins of property relations are less important than their contents.
Once one accepts the utterly revisionist idea that one can have a capitalist state without capitalists, without a ruling capitalist class, without capitalist property and production relations, and without the economy obeying the laws of motion of capitalism, then 99 percent of the traditional Marxist case against the various theories of state capitalism-commencing with those of the Mensheviks and the Social Democrats, throughout those of the Bordighists, C.L.R. James, and Tony Cliff, up to those of the Maoists and Bettelheim-collapses. The miserable remnants of that case then hang on the single thin thread of the "origins" of nationalizations and on them alone. The razor-sharp factional minds of the state capitalists will find no difficulty in cutting through that thread.
If Pol Pot has squeezed "extreme capitalist accumulation" of the "forced collectivization of the Kampuchean peasantry," didn't Stalin do likewise with the forced collectivization of the Russian peasants, which was an otherwise large and bloody affair? What then remains of the noncapitalist nature of the Russian state and economy after that "extreme capitalist accumulation" that occurred in Russia in 1929-1934? If in order to have a workers state one needs to have the bourgeoisie expropriated by the workers, how can one then have a workers state in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and North Korea where, by no stretch of the imagination, could these expropriations be interpreted as having been carried out by the workers themselves (a few street demonstrations by rigidly controlled workers in support of these expropriations are obviously something less than expropriations by the workers)? Ironically, a case could be stated in favor of the thesis that in Kampuchea there were actually more mass mobilizations against the capitalists and landlords than in most of the Eastern European countries. Feldman and Clark themselves furnish some of the material that proves this.
Powerful mass mobilizations took place in Kampuchea against bourgeois rule in 1974-75 (including a general strike in Pnompenh in 1974). Again, the mass mobilizations, especially of the poor peasants, were rather important after the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, as Feldman-Clark themselves admit. Indeed, the setting up of many of the agricultural cooperatives was done through mass mobilization.
Already before final victory, in the liberated zones, the KCP leadership had "apparently skipped directly into more advanced stages of collectivization. "19 The dynamic went in that direction, coinciding with the emergence of pre-state structures of a clearly noncapitalist nature. But after that came forced collectivization and mass deportations, obviously without the participation and against the wishes of the overwhelming mass of the toilers (as it was in Russia and other workers states).
But these two first waves of mass mobilizations are not enough for comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters to "prove" the existence of a workers state; the forced collectivization, on the other hand, is enough to disprove this existence. A sad case of dogmatic schematism in which these comrades have become trapped. For isn't it obvious that the first two waves of mobilizations were more than sufficient to destroy the bourgeois state, the capitalist property relations, and the existence of bourgeois class rule, so that Kampuchea thereby became a workers state? And that the forced collectivization and deportations were criminal policies applied by the ruling bureaucracy within the framework of the already existing workers state, as they had been in Russia under Stalin? From the above irony flows a supreme paradox. Under Pol Pot, comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters argue, there was a "counterrevolutionary bourgeois government" engaged in "extreme capitalist accumulation." The Vietnamese liberators then presumably introduced a workers state under Heng Samrin. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review of March 2, 1979, Samrin granted an interview to the Finnish-based Professor Kaarle Nordenstreng. of the International Organization of Journalists, on February 3, 1979. According to the Hong Kong weekly:
The discussion touched also on the shattered economy: he said heavy industry would be state-owned, but so far as handicrafts and other small industries were concerned, private entrepreneurs would be allowed to operate, though under state guidance.
Now, to turn from a policy of forced collectivization or extreme terroristie "war communism" to a policy of the NEP-type, probably makes sense under the conditions prevailing in Kampuchea today. We tend to approve such a turn—but this, of course, can only be understood within the framework of an already existing workers state. But to identify, as some do, the transition from 100 percent collective ownership to 75 or 60 percent collective ownership, i.e., a rather large-scale restoration of private property, as the transition from a bourgeois state to workers state... this is beyond reason, at least as reason is practiced by Marxists.
Here we already see the possible-and dangerous!-implications of comrades Feldman and Clark's amazing statement: "The Kampuchean working class had no stake whatever [!] in the nationalization of property, carried out without its participation, by the petty bourgeoisie in the Angkar."2 Do they perhaps have some stake in the restoration of private property?
Comrades Feldman and Clark put a lot of stress in their argumentation on "precedents." They quote essentially three categories of these: Trotsky's well-known letter of 1932, concerning the possible clash between peasant armies and the urban proletariat in China; what actually occurred in China in 1948- 1950; and what occurred in countries like Egypt, Burma, Mozambique, and Angola.
We have already dealt with China 1948-51. No amount of sophistry can camouflage the fact that state power passed in that period from one social class to another, that the Chinese capitalists lost their political and economic power (which does not necessarily imply that they have to lose all their private property—as a matter of fact they haven't to this very day), that this power passed into the hands of the Maoist bureaucracy, which was (and remains) a working-class bureaucracy, and that all the rest concerns policies (often treacherous, anti-working-class ones, granted, but so were Stalin's!) within the bureaucratized workers state established in October 1949.
The hypothesis formulated in Trotsky's 1932 letter concerns a very specific case of class conflict, which comrades Feldman/ Clark eliminate from their reference: the conflict between a working class wanting to abolish capitalist property and a peasantry intent upon defending it (at least defending its own private property). The general framework of Trotsky's letter clearly establishes this. He writes of the opposition between socialization and private splitting up of property, the possible integration of the upper strata of the peasant armies into the bourgeoisie, and about large proprietors possibly emanating from the peasant wars.?1 How could the author of the theory of permanent revolution have argued otherwise, i.e., suddenly have turned against the very key premise of that theory-that incapacity of the peasantry to play a historically independent role from either the working class or the bourgeoisie?
But in the case of Kampuchea there is no evidence that the Khmer Rouge in any way defended private property against the workers' wishes for collectivization. Even the thesis of a "peasant army" (not in the sense of social composition but in terms of the objective social function of that army) becomes utterly preposterous in light of the evidence, confirmed by Feldman/Clark, that that army crushed the peasants as it did the workers (perhaps even more so). So the Khmer Rouge army was not a "peasant army" but the army of the bureaucracy. So we are back where we started: the question of the class nature of the Pol Pot bureaucracy.
The analogy with Egypt, Burma, Syria, Mozambique, and Angola is even more revealing. In none of these countries was private property ever abolished or constitutionally forbidden.
What were nationalized in most cases were the industrial, banking, wholesale trading, and large transport companies, sometimes even while leaving imperialist property intact. But these were from the start only a relatively small part of the national economy, given the backwardness of these countries. Private use of rural and urban land was limited but never abolished. It had been the main base of capitalist fortunes before the "revolution." It remained the main base for these after the political overturns.
A capitalist class never disappeared—only its internal articulations (the relationship of forces between its different components) altered. The large nationalized sectors therefore acted as huge breeding grounds for private capital accumulation. Huge private fortune reappeared and grew-not in the least because many capitalists received large scale compensation for the nationalization of their properties. The stock exchange continued to function in Egypt throughout the Nasser period. It was therefore just a question of time before the "private sector" (not a petty peasant sector, but a large capitalist one) would reassert itself in a powerful manner-among other things because of "encourage ment" received through symbiosis with imperialist countries and imperialist firms. This is what occurred in Egypt under Sadat. This is what will occur tomorrow in Mozambique and Angola if no social revolution destroys the bourgeoisie as a class. This is occurring in Burma and Syria right now.
But precisely in Kampuchea, as in all other workers states, this has not occurred and cannot occur without a social counterrevolution. This is precisely one of the key indicators of the class nature of the state and the ruling bureaucracy. It can steal, plunder, undermine, betray, whatever you will. But its privileges remain in the realm of standard of living, of consumer goods, and not in the accumulation of private fortunes and the private appropriation of the means of production. What is "accumulated" by the state are use values in the form of means of productionnot exchange value embodied in commodities and money.
One could argue that the time that elapsed between the establishment of the Pol Pot regime and its overthrow was too short to allow final judgment on this question. Even if this is granted, there can be no doubt about the direction in which things were going: not in the direction of a restoration but in that of a suppression of private property.
Sections of the bureaucracy can become a nucleus of a new capitalist class (as they could in the Soviet Union as well), intent upon private capital accumulation, upon defending independent firms, enterprises, and capitals in competition with others. This has occurred in Egypt, Burma, and Syria, and will occur in Angola and Mozambique. It hasn't occurred in Kampuchea any more than it has occurred in Vietnam, North Korea, Romania, Hungary, or Poland. This is the way one can concretely note the difference between a bourgeois and a workers bureaucracy, between a bourgeois state with a large nationalized sector and a workers state even with a not unimportant private sector. In the first case, the socioeconomic dynamic is towards the revival and strengthening of private property and the bourgeois class. In the second case, the socioeconomic dynamic is towards their elimination and disappearance (or marginalization).
III. The Concrete Context and Concatenation of the Interbureaucratic Conflicts and the Revolutionary Process in Asia and on a World Scale
The most dangerous aspect of the argumentation of comrades Feldman, Clark, and Mary Alice Waters is that in their attempt to justify the invasion of Kampuchea by the regular Vietnamese army, they tend at several points to get carried away from the initial "principled" position ("we support a bureaucratized workers state against a bourgeois one") to a conjunctural, impressionistic type of analysis which comes dangerously close to justifying that invasion even if one considers Kampuchea a workers state.
The implications of such arguments are ominous. They could lead one tomorrow to justify, under similar conjunctural circumstances, an attack by the Soviet Union against China, or an occupation by the Soviet army and its satellites of Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, or North Korea. It is not by accident that the governments of these five workers states were hostile to Viet nam's action against Kampuchea. Anybody who believes that they took this position because they are "stooges of imperialism" had better think again. What they were really saying was that they condemned Hanoi's action in Kampuchea because they didn't want to suffer the same treatment: "We say Kampuchea but we mean ourselves."
Comrades Feldman, Clark, and Waters correctly draw a distinction between the reasons that, from the point of view of objective Marxist analysis, explain the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968, and the reasons that explain Vietnam's invasion of Kampuchea in December 1978-January 1979. There was certainly nothing of a political antibureaucratic revolution unfolding in Kampuchea which Hanoi feared wanted to crush-this in contrast to the Czechoslovakian situation in 1968, where there was an unfolding antibureaucratic movement which the Kremlin did fear and did want to crush.
But it is one thing to register that objective difference, and quite another thing to fail to note how this parallel is being made in the inner circles of the bureaucracy themselves. The Far Eastern Economic Review writes in its February 23, 1979 issue:
Sources said that immediately after the open breach between Pompenh and Hanoi (which had occurred in December 1977) the Soviet leaders urged a swift Czechoslovak-type operation to remove Pol Pot from power.
In the light of such formulas it is easy to understand the worries of the above-named next potential victims of the doctrine of "limited sovereignty." We are astonished that comrades Feldman, Clark, and Waters seem to be completely impervious to these fears. Their analysis becomes even more worrying when one reads formulas like those in the following:
In reality, the Vietnamese rulers acted neither out of imperialist ambitions nor from a desire to spread socialist revolution beyond their borders. Their goal was the narrow one of protecting Vietnamese borders against a tightening ring of military foes. Their great fear was the emergence on the Indochinese peninsula of an anti-Vietnamese regime in Cambodia closely linked to Peking with increasing prospects for ties to imperialism, including possible military ties...
... the military encirclement and economic and diplomatic blockade of Vietnam by U.S. imperialism continues in force.
Under these circumstances, the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and China-and the growing hostility by both to Vietnam-may well have contributed to convincing Hanoi that decisive action was needed to break the diplomatic and military noose it felt tightening around its neck.
The Vietnamese rulers threw major military forces into the drive against Pol Pot's regime because they felt the tightening encirclement and the potential for eventual military probes by imperialism.
The invasion of Vietnam by troops of the People's Republic of China is the bitter fruit of a counterrevolutionary deal between U.S. imperialism and the Stalinist Peking bureaucracy.
Given the difficulties standing in the way of direct U.S. military intervention, Washington has enlisted the help of the Stalinist regime in Peking, which, in return for diplomatic recognition and the promise of major economic aid, has invaded Vietnam and launched a large-scale border war:
Peking's aim is not to conquer Vietnam, but to force Vietnam to withdraw from Kampuchea-that is, to do Washington's bidding.
What is grave about this kind of analysis is that it could be so easily repeated in other cases, in other parts of the world. If Peking is not acting for its own interests against the Vietnamese bureaucracy but in support of Washington's counterrevolutionary drive, couldn't one tomorrow explain that, after all, in its conflict with Moscow it is also starting to act as Washington's cat's-paw? And couldn't a preventive strike by Moscow against Peking then be interpreted as an act of justifiable self-defense by a workers state against the main imperialist power, which is threatening it ("encircling it") with the aid of the Deng Xiaoping gang?
If the establishment of an "anti-Vietnamese regime" in Kampuchea could put a "tightening ring of military foes" around the Vietnamese borders, couldn't the establishment of an "anti-Soviet Union regime" in Belgrade (e.g., after Tito's death), "with increasing prospects for ties with imperialism" put a "tightening ring of military foes" around the Soviet Union, and thereby justify a preventive military strike to "protect its borders"? Indeed, didn't Moscow claim that Dubcek threatened to establish an "anti-Soviet regime" in Prague, too? Wouldn't such a terrible occurrence justify measures of self-defense, including invasion, on behalf of the Kremlin?
And what about China? Didn't the Soviet Union-"in return for major economic aid" (actually granted on a much larger scale by imperialism than that promised to Peking)-realize a huge military build-up on the Chinese border, in order to further Washington's aim of rolling back the Chinese revolution? Don't there remain a couple of imperialist strongholds-South Korea and Taiwan—as a "potential for eventual military probes by imperialism'"? Didn't Hanoi's line-up with Moscow make Peking feel "the diplomatic and military noose tightening around its neck," thereby "convincing Peking that decisive action was needed to break" that noose?
In fact, if the international discussion produced nothing more than assurances from comrades Feldman, Clark, and Waters that they don't for a minute follow that kind of reasoning-which would "objectively" imply capitulation before the Stalinist bureaucracy and a covering up for its diplomatic and military maneuvers designed to reestablish its control over those workers states which have escaped its clutches—we would already be quite satisfied.
In order to justify their ready-made schemas, comrades Feldman, Clark, and Waters have to engage in quite a bit of rewriting of history. They present the chain of events that led to the current military conflicts in Southeast Asia in a way that has scarcely more than an accidental correspondence with history. Contrary to the assertion of comrades Feldman, Clark, and Waters, South Vietnam became a workers state, if not after the capture of Saigon by the armed revolutionary forces, then certainly at the moment of the formal unification of North and South Vietnam into a single state. It is simply impossible to pretend that the bourgeoisie remained in power in South Vietnam until the expropriation of the Chinese merchants of Cholon in spring 1978, when the two parts of the country had been united for more than two years. How can one have a single state that is both a workers state and a bourgeois one?
As early as December 1975, Courier du Vietnam published the speech of a leading member of the Vietnamese CP, which stated categorically:
The South should not wait till all the tasks of the national, democratic, popular revolution have been accomplished before starting to solve the tasks of the socialist revolution and the building of socialism. It should, on the contrary, exploit all the favorable conditions and experiences of the North in order to begin immediately with the tasks of the new stage.
In September 1976, a unified central economic Five-Year Plan was introduced for the 1976-1980 period for all the thirty-five provinces of North and South Vietnam, covering all major branches of industry 26 Was that unified plan, which began to be implemented in the beginning of 1977, not proof of the existence of a single workers state in the whole of Vietnam? Can one involve a "capitalist" economy and a "bourgeois state" in unified planning with a workers state and nationalized industry?
Contrary to the assertions of comrades Feldman/Clark/ Waters, it was Kampuchea, and not Vietnam, that, for at least three years, had been the main target of an international hate campaign, a campaign that has had hardly any parallel since the Spanish Civil War, if not since the October Revolution. The campaign against Vietnam was much milder at least until late 1978.
Again, contrary to the assertions of comrades Feldman/Clark/ Waters, it was not Kampuchea but Vietnam, and especially Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, that made numerous openings to international and U.S. imperialism. It went so far as to apply for membership of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. In spring 1977, Hanoi "promulgated a foreign-investment code which was both liberal and flexible, providing for joint enterprises and wholly-owned foreign projects in export-orientated industries, plus generous tax concessions and the right to repatriate profits."
In fact, some mild measures of international capitalist aid in favor of Vietnam were decided and implemented—e.g., by Japan, France, and Sweden-while they never were in favor of Kampuchea. It is true that these measures were generally too limited and that they were suspended after Vietnam's invasion of Kampuchea. 2 But this is certainly no proof that imperialism had been systematically courting and using the Pol Pot regime against the Vietnamese revolution.
Contrary to the assertions of comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters, there was no new revolutionary upsurge by the South Vietnamese masses in 1978 seen as a threat by the counterrevolutionary Pol Pot regime or even by the Chinese bureaucracy. If anything, the South Vietnamese mass movement was and remains on a downward and not on an upward trend. The political activity of the South Vietnamese masses is certainly more limited than that of the Chinese masses. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the poor food situation, the scandalous corruption, the drafting of youth into the army and even with the invasion of Kampuchea. According to many sources (see among others the Far Eastern Economic Review of January 19, 1979), the morale of the southern Vietnamese troops in Kampuchea is low. There have even been desertions from the army.
Contrary to the assertions of comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters, Peking did not act on the command of or as a cat's-paw for Washington in Vietnam, but essentially for its own purposesthose of endeavoring to establish its zone of influence over all the Asian workers states and of preventing the Kremlin from gaining a stronghold on its southern borders. And while it is true that imperialism has tried to use this conflict for its own purposes—as it did with the Stalin-Tito rift, the Khrushchev-Mao rift, or the Brezhnev-Dubcek rift-this does not imply that such an exploitation represents the exclusive or even the main aspect of these conflicts. And contrary to the assertions of comrades Feldman/ Clark/Waters, Hanoi didn't act in Kampuchea because it was being "encircled" by Pol Pot's "intrigues" with imperialism, but because it wanted an Indochinese federation under its own bureaucratic hegemony.
A good case can be made for the thesis that the possibilities of imperialist and capitalist intrigues and maneuvers in Kampuchea using the Thai dictatorship are not mainly the cause but the consequence of the Vietnamese invasion of that country—as is the increased possibility of a return to power of Norodom Sihanouk.
For sure, imperialism hasn't given up the goal of containing the Indochinese revolution, or even of rolling it back in its weakest sectors, Laos and Kampuchea. It maintains a mighty navy in the neighborhood for that purpose. It maintains military bases in Taiwan, South Korea, and elsewhere. It builds up the military strength of the Thai dictatorship and other reactionary ASEAN power regimes. It finances reactionary-i.e., procapitalistguerrillas in Laos and Kampuchea. It organized a successful blockade of Laos in 1976-77, which arrived at the point where Vientiane had to be supported by a Hanoi-Moscow airlift in order not to be completely cut off from vital supplies. (This blockade was subsequently abandoned.) In all these maneuvers, it needs the backing of Peking's "peaceful coexistence" policy, which it received in exchange for the modus vivendi arrived at through the Kissinger-Nixon visits. But imperialism acts mainly through its own instruments, not through Peking and certainly not through Pol Pot.
So, contrary to the analysis of comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters, if there is a certain connivance between the Chinese bureaucracy and Tokyo and Washington in East Asia-which has to be seen in the context of such "secondary contradictions" as Moscow's consistent courting of the Taipei counterrevolutionary clique-nothing has changed in the basic aspect of the world situation, which is the consistent pursuing of mutual peaceful coexistence and collaboration by Moscow and Washington on a world scale. One just has to consider their close collaboration in maintaining the status quo in Europe and the Middle East, to name only two key areas of the world.
So from a world view, there is no difference between Moscow's and Peking's counterrevolutionary policy today. There is no reason to feel that imperialism is more "lenient" and "understanding" towards one than towards the other, or that it is looking for an overall alliance with Peking against Moscow. Both counterre volutionary bureaucracies are major obstacles on the road to a victorious world revolution. In no way do they have a substantially different relationship with world revolution and world imperialism.
If one examines the stages through which the Pol Pot regime acquired its extreme nationalist and isolationist attitudes, one has to enumerate all the traumatic shocks that the Kampuchean communist bureaucrats received from their supposed allies. They were ignominiously abandoned and ignored at the Geneva talks by Moscow and Peking. They were a second time abandoned by Moscow when the Kremlin lined up with Lon Nol against them in 1960. They were a third time nearly thwarted when, in 1973, during the Paris peace talks, Hanoi (probably with the tacit support of Peking, although this is not proven) tried to impose upon them a coalition government with their deadly enemy, Lon Nol. Moreover, Hanoi cut down their aid and abandoned them to the B-52 bombings, in retaliation for their refusal to succumb to that pressure.29 The Kremlin even went as far as abstaining in the United Nations on the question of their admission to that body.
All this does not justify the nationalist, even racist anti-Vietnamese political course they pursued afterwards. But at least it explains it by reasons more credible than their allegediy "bourgeois" nature and their "intention" ... to build capitalism in Kampuchea. A "workers state"' trying to impose upon the Kampuchean "capitalists" a coalition government with the bourgeoisie, and the "capitalists" rejecting this with indignation and disgust-this is a bit hard to swallow!
It was the fiercely nationalistic and anti-Vietnamese attitude and campaign of the Pol Pot regime that led to the open break of December 1977. Pol Pot suddenly cut off diplomatic relations with Hanoi and publicly accused them of preparing an invasion of Kampuchea."' It was this breaking of all ties, in addition to the closer links of Pompenh with Peking, and all their military implications, that made the Vietnamese leadership consider toppling Pol Pot and installing a new Kampuchean leadership and control over a de facto Indochinese federation-of the same type as the Vietnamese established in Laos. And it was from then on that the logic leading to the invasion of December 1978-January 1979 unfolded, the border incidents and imperialist intrigues playing a secondary role in this infernal logic.
Certainly there was tremendous discontent in Kampuchea with the Pol Pot regime, and there were successive incipient attempts at uprisings against it. Certainly it would have been in order for the Vietnamese CP to support popular moves that expressed the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Kampuchean workers and peasants. By that method, a genuine new leadership of the Kampuchean CP could have become crystallized, which, while tainted by its Stalinist origins and still heavily bent towards later bureaucratization, could have at least played a role similar to that of the Nagy leadership in Hungary or the Dubcek leadership in Czechoslovakia, i.e., open the road for genuine mass mobilizations and thereby to a genuine political revolution.
But this is not at all what happened in Kampuchea. A military build-up by the regular Vietnamese army occurred starting in spring 1978.32 The Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation (FUNSK) was established only in December 1979, on the very eve of the blitzkrieg that led the crack armored divisions within a fortnight to Pnompenh, Battambang, and a takeover of all the cities of the country. Nobody can be so naive as to assert that this was only "fraternal help to an unfolding popular uprising." It was a full-scale military invasion, marginally supported by a few local forces.
Indeed, the Kampuchean masses, already dazed and atomized by the successive blows they received from the murderous attacks of imperialism first, the inhuman Pol Pot terror later, were so disoriented by the foreign invasion that even today, three months later, the newly installed regime in Pnompenh encounters great difficulties in building a normal administration-not to speak of mobilizing large-scale mass support. And the historical enmity between the "Vietnamese invaders" and "Kampuchean patriots," on which the Pol Pot faction can now fully play, provides the political basis upon which the latter can organize its guerrilla forces. This fight against the new masters ruling in Pnompenh could become a long fight indeed, thus providing many openings for imperialist and counterrevolutionary intrigue. But again, this is mainly a result of the invasion and not the cause.
Likewise, the Vietnamese leadership seriously miscalculated (as did comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters) the possibility, not to say the probability, that the Chinese would take its Kampuchean adventure as a pretext for a large-scale military attack against Vietnam. As late as December 1978, "Hanoi [was] confident that China will not attack Vietnam militarily over Cambodia.... According to Hanoi-based diplomatic sources the Vietnamese leaders are supremely confident that the Soviet-Vietnam friendship treaty and the ever-present Soviet build-up on China's northern border will prove a solid deterrent to any Chinese plan to intervene."
Well, it didn't. One should equally express doubts as to whether Peking's "supreme confidence" that Moscow will not retaliate militarily against the Chinese invasion of Vietnam is all that well-founded either. And the conclusion is obvious: these successive adventuristic moves are utterly irresponsible from the point of view of the interests of the workers and peasants of Southeast Asia. They are utterly contrary to the cause of extending the Indochinese revolution.
As late as January 23, 1978, comrade Michael Baumann, writing in Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, correctly stated: "... the armed conflict between Hanoi and Phnompenh plays into the hands of the imperialist propagandists." Comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters would have been well-advised to stick to that line of reasoning.
If one wants to judge the real potential dynamics of the victorious Indochinese revolution, one has to look at the neighboring capitalist countries, in the first place Thailand, Malaysia, the other so-called ASEAN states, and Burma. One has then to note soberly that in the period following the victory of the Indochinese revolution in 1975, Moscow, Peking, Hanoi and Pnompenh did everything possible to calm fears lest the famous domino theory come true in Southeast Asia. All the ruling bureaucracies tried to ingratiate themselves with the Thai dictatorship and "normalize" their relations with it. And if the objective effect of the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea can be judged in the light of this factor, it is clear that the situation of the Thai guerrillas has seriously deteriorated and not become any better due to the sudden popping up of a "new workers state" in Kampuchea. Perhaps this alleged new workers state didn't pop up at this time, then, after all, but instead an existing workers state became rather weakened as a result of the prolonged guerrilla war that the invasion has triggered off, and that now enables imperialist and bourgeois counterrevolution to reenter the game?
To round out the complexity of the real situation in Southeast Asia and in Indochina-a situation that doesn't correspond to the preconceived schemas of comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters at all-the semifascist Khmer Serai guerrillas—i.e., the real counterrevolutionaries in Kampuchea, the followers of ex-dictator Lon Nol-have just published a communiqué in which they make a positive judgment on the Vietnamese invasion and the newly installed FUNSK regime. Their uppermost goal is to eliminate the remnants of the Pol Pot forces and to reestablish a bourgeois state in alliance with Sihanouk. On the battlefield things are not always what they seem to be for those addicted to the method of mechanically turning some imperialist propaganda upside down.
IV. Are Wars Between Bureaucratized Workers States Possible and What Should Our Attitude Be Towards Them?
In the February 19, 1979, issue of Intercontinental Press/Inprecor comrade Mary-Alice Waters sternly denied the possibility of any wars between bureaucratized workers states:
The danger is not a Chinese invasion of Vietnam, but the imperialist maneuvers that Peking is helping to cover up. ...
If the Peking bureaucrats were angling for an opportunity to back up their ally Pol Pot by a military offensive against Vietnam, that would have been the time-not four weeks later. ...
Of course, Peking's military build-up along Vietnam's border does create a danger of sporadic [!] outbreaks between Chinese and Vietnamese troops. But this is not the source of the war threat in Indochina today. . . .
Our spotlight must be on the Thailand-Kampuchea border, not the Vietnam-China border.
Hardly has the ink dried on that issue of Intercontinental Press/Inprecor than the war did break out-not on the Thailand-Kampuchea border but indeed, contrary to comrade Waters's expectations, on the Vietnam-China border.
One could, of course, withdraw to the lame defense of saying that there has been no war between Chinese and Vietnamese workers states—only "border incidents" (as one can cover up the war between the Kampuchean and Vietnamese bureaucracies by denying that Kampuchea was a workers state). But such a line of defense only constitutes an unacceptable concession to the callous disregard for the lives of tens of thousands of workers and peasants by the ruling bureaucracies, lives lost not for the sake of liberation from exploitation and oppression, not for the sake of a struggle against capitalism and imperialism, but for the sake of fractions of the bureaucracies seeking to avoid "encirclement" (by other fractions of the bureaucracy), "teaching them lessons," "punishing criminal aggressors," and other nauseous "war aims"-taken straight out of the armory of absolutist, semifeudal, colonialist, and imperialist diplomacy. We have to say it loud and clear: these wars are criminal, irresponsible, and counterrevolutionary enterprises. They only help imperialism. The life of not a single soldier, worker, or peasant should be sacrificed for the particularistic, narrow and nationalist goals of self-aggrandizement of any faction of the bureaucracy, whichever it is.
We quote from comrade Waters's article not for the purpose of scoring cheap debating points. Nobody inside the Fourth International foresaw wars between bureaucratized workers states, i.e., between ruling bureaucracies, a long time ago. We are faced with one of the most unforeseen turns of world events in the last decades. We have the responsibility to the vanguard of the international working class, and to the whole international labor movement, to explain them and to take a clear and unequivocal stand towards them.
There is, of course, full agreement inside the Fourth International on four basic concepts, which remain unchanged throughout and after the tragic events in Southeast Asia.
First, the basic danger of a world war does not spring from any of the economic or social "laws of motion" of the bureaucratized workers states, but from the irrepressible trend towards world expansion by capital, especially capital in the imperialist epoch. As long as imperialist capital survives in any major industrial country, it will not give up its drive toward dominating the world, towards reincorporating into its sphere of direct exploitation those countries that have escaped this through victorious social revolutions, and towards crushing the toilers of those countries who are currently engaged in trying to achieve social revolutions. This is and will be the only source of potential world war in the epoch opened by the end of World War II.
Second, the danger of a third world war is not imminent. In order to qualitatively increase its power to commit aggression-up to a full-scale attack against the USSR, Eastern Europe and the People's Republic of China-imperialism must first radically alter the political relationship of forces inside the metropolitan imperialist powers, i.e., it must first inflict a crushing defeat on the world proletariat. As long as this has not occurred, it is unable to impose upon them the madness of the risk of the nuclear annihilation of mankind.
Third, there is no basic economic reason for wars between bureaucratized workers states. True, the ruling bureaucracy, always eager to increase its power and material privileges, can profit from plundering foreign countries if it succeeds in including them in its sphere of influence without endangering "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism on a global scale, i.e., through a modus vivendi with world imperialism. But this is in no way structurally linked to the nature of the workers states' economies. The plundering of East Germany stopped by and large after the workers uprising of July 1953. Cuba is not plundered but subsidized by the Soviet bureaucracy—as is, increasingly, Czechoslovakia, since the 1968-69 "normalization." We have great doubts whether Peking "plundered" Kampuchea or is intent upon "plundering" Vietnam. And while the Vietnamese, desperately short of rice this year, might enviously eye the good rice harvest in Kampuchea, if their troops get bogged down by Kampuchean Khmer Rouge guerrillas, they will find that they most probably have to subsidize their new Pnompenh allies, rather than "plunder" them.
It is preposterous to believe that China needs "colonies to exploit," when it is desperately lacking the resources to exploit 80 percent of the natural resources known on its own native soil. It is likewise unproven that the Soviet bureaucracy wants to "colonize" China, when it does not even have the means to exploit the resources of its own Far Eastern Siberian territories and is inviting Japanese, German, French, and North American capital to assist in this vast endeavor.
Fourth, the inability of imperialism to launch at present a fullscale war of reconquest against the workers states does not imply its inability to try to destabilize them, to try to erode their strength, so that it can achieve a comeback in all those countries where the new social system is still relatively young and weak. It is certainly trying to do so in Indochina. It especially does not imply an inability to try to stop the spread of social revolution internationally.
If there is agreement on these four basic points, how can one then explain the danger of wars between bureaucratized workers states, or more correctly the danger of wars between the ruling bureaucracies of these countries? How is this danger correlated to the struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist forces on a world scale?
We believe that this war danger can no longer be denied in light of unmistakably military conflicts between Vietnam and Kampuchea and, between China and Vietnam, and the real threat of a military confrontation between the Soviet bureaucracy and the Chinese bureaucracy. We have to try to explain these wars within the framework of the traditional revolutionary Marxist analysis of the specific social nature of the bureaucracies ruling in these countries. We believe that we are perfectly able to do so, without threatening to upset the inner cohesion and consistency of Marxist theory in general and that of the workers states bureaucracies in particular.
The roots of these potential conflicts are political and not socioeconomic. Or rather: their economic roots lie in the special way in which the hardened bureaucratic layers ruling these countries can guarantee and maintain the material privileges they enjoy. The guarantee and reproduction of these material privileges depend upon the exercise of a monopoly of political and social power by the bureaucracy. Any serious challenge to that monopoly, any form of public political "pluralism," even of an interbureaucratic nature, inevitably hastens the political awakening of the masses, which, as the examples of Hungary and Czechoslovakia most clearly show, could shatter the very basis of the bureaucracy's privileges in a short period of time.
Stalin embodied this principle of the monopoly of power-of monolithism-in the clearest, most consistent, and radical way. That is why he suppressed all political differentiation not only within the CPSU but within the Comintern as well. When the power of the Soviet bureaucracy spilled over the prewar frontiers of the Soviet Union into the so-called "people's democracies," he had to extend this very same principle of monolithism throughout these newly established workers states, including the one that had not been created through military-bureaucratic actions and manipulation by the Kremlin but through a genuine popular revolution, be it a bureaucratically controlled one-Yugoslavia. It was this drive (and not the fear of the effects upon the Soviet Union of a nonexistent mass movement in Yugoslavia in early 1948) that was the basis for the Stalin-Tito rift of 1948. A similar need for monolithism explains the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet conflict in 1959.
Any form of autonomous political and ideological development in any workers state, independent of the immediate level of mass mobilizations there, is seen as a threat by the Kremlin to its rule, including to its rule in the Soviet Union. Any form of autonomous political and ideological development in any Asian workers state is likewise seen by Peking as a threat to its rule, ultimately inside China too. And any development of political and ideological autonomy in any Indochinese or neighboring country is likewise seen by Hanoi as a threat to its rule, including over Vietnam. In this, and in nothing else, lie the objective political roots of potential wars between bureaucratized workers states.
As long as the Soviet Union was the only existing workers state, Stalin could impose a servile obedient leadership upon any Communist Party, most often by direct diktat from Moscow, through a combination of corruption, regressive selection of leading cadres, and blackmail threatening public denunciation and its disastrous political and organizational consequences for a whole period. Later, threats and the open use of physical terror and murder were added to this in a number of cases.
When a certain number of Communist parties of Stalinist origin were installed in positions of state power after World War II, these methods were insufficient, given the qualitatively increased material resources at the disposal of each "national" bureaucracy. The Kremlin now had to resort to more direct methods of political control: military occupation; control over the "national" repressive apparatus, especially the army, the secret police, and a network of informers; control over a key number of special economic pressure points; and the imposition of policies upon the "national" bureaucracies that would leave them without any serious popular basis in their own country, thus making them very much dependent upon the military "protection" of the very "fraternal country."
These methods were, to different degrees, successful in most of those countries where the ruling bureaucracies had been installed in power through the Kremlin's military strength itself (the two most outstanding exceptions being North Korea and Romania). They were generally unsuccessful in those countries where, from the beginning, the "national" bureaucracy disposed of an autonomous material, political, and social power, having conquered power on the crest of a genuine popular mass social revolution, be it a bureaucratically controlled and manipulated one—Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam. Again, this is the root of the Tito-Stalin and the Mao-Khrushchev rifts, of the Vietnam-China conflict, and, why not, of the future Vietnam-USSR conflict.
We know that the ideological root of this process of disintegration of the Stalinist monolith—of the world crisis of Stalinism-is the theory of socialism in one country, and the closely related phenomenon of national-communist messianism ("our" country and "our" country alone—or in the first place-is the true bastion of world revolution). In that sense, our movement was theoretically and politically prepared through decades of struggle against these petty-bourgeois nationalist deviations from Marxism to understand the deeper reasons for political conflicts between different fractions of the bureaucracy spilling over into conflicts at state level between ruling bureaucracies. The overall correct positions that we adopted at the outbreak of the Stalin-Tito rift and of the Sino-Soviet conflict should help us to understand the dynamic of these state conflicts, leading up to wars between bureaucratized workers states. But we have to understand that these nationalist deviations from Marxism have material, social roots as well.
The methods used by Stalin in order to try to bring Tito's Yugoslavia to its knees were the typical methods of great-power bullying: economic blockade; concentration of big military forces on Yugoslavia's frontiers; a huge propaganda barrage inciting parts of the bureaucracy (especially in the army and police) to subvert the Tito apparatus. The purpose was the overthrow of the Tito leadership and the installation at the head of the Yugoslav CP of a faction subservient to the Kremlin.
The Tito leadership, being itself a bureaucracy and not a genuine representative of the Yugoslav proletariat, reacted in a typical—be it audacious-manner by trying to enlarge its popular basis, abolishing forced collectivization of the peasantry, establishing workers self-management in the factories, enlarging the scope of the workers' standard of living and civil liberties (with many limitations, of course, for it wanted to retain its own monopoly of political power at all costs!), and at the same time maneuvering with imperialist and other bourgeois forces at the international level, and making not a few treacherous concessions to these hostile class forces (e.g., the support of the imperialist war in Korea).
A similar analysis can be made of the spilling over of the Mao-Khrushchev politico-ideological dispute into a full-scale conflict at state level. The Kremlin organized an economic blockade of China at the very moment when the Chinese economy was in a desperate state after the failure of the second round of Mao's "great leap forward," and at a time when the imperialist blockade of China was still in full swing. It refused all military support (especially a nuclear "umbrella") to China when the Pentagon was still busy considering how to "nuke the Chinks." It compounded its counterrevolutionary sins by concentrating more than half a million troops on the Sino-Soviet border in Central Asia-indeed, more soldiers than it keeps in Eastern Europe!-including those armed with nuclear warheads directed at the nuclear bases of the People's Republic of China, at its Manchurian industrial centers, at the capital city of Peking, and at the metropolitan area of Shanghai.
The Chinese bureaucrats, caught between both threats upon their power base, reacted in a typical bureaucratic pragmatic manner. First, they withdrew to the line of "supporting oneself by one's own forces," i.e., rationalizing the desperate isolation they found themselves in. Simultaneously, they kept an equal distance from both "super-powers," engaging in "super-revolutionary" rhetoric. At the same time, they were looking for serious openings. The openings did not come from the Kremlin and its satellites. They came first from the European and Japanese imperialists, on the commercial and economic front. Then they came from Washington, through prudent moves of military disentanglement.
Peking responded enthusiastically, ready to sacrifice the Vietnamese revolution in exchange for these openings. The similarities to Stalin's attitudes, and Khrushchev's, under analogous circumstances, are too striking not to conclude that what was involved here was not some special deviation of the Chinese rulers, but general characteristics of the bureaucratic caste as such.
With hindsight we should have understood, at least from the middle 1960s, that a potential war danger was inherent in this transposition of the interbureaucratic conflicts to state levels and the use of all the classical paraphernalia of great-power diplomacy in these conflicts. But what is true is the fact that the actual transformation of this potential threat into actual wars marks a new stage in the degeneration of the bureaucracy.
With hindsight too, the military invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 can be seen as testing grounds of that tendency, although neither of them evolved into full-scale wars of the Vietnam-Kampuchea or China-Vietnam type. And obviously, while we understand this war danger today much better, we have to stress that, at least at the present level of the world relationship of forces, these will be limited wars (which does not necessarily mean that they can't take the form of long-term guerrilla wars) compared to the wars occasioned by long-term structural economic conflict of interests, e.g., interimperialist conflicts, colonial wars of conquest, national wars of liberation, or wars between different social systems (imperialism versus workers states).
There is no basic social reason why the Chinese leadership should be "allied to U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union." Its needs of modernization could be at least partially satisfied by the Soviet Union as much as by imperialism. In playing one against the other-as they already have with different imperialist powers-the Chinese bureaucrats would minimize costs of credits and maximize gains. Furthermore, modernization through cooperation with imperialism alone will impose increasing financial burdens upon the Chinese workers state, which, like the example of Eastern Europe and especially that of Yugoslavia show, have to be stopped at a certain ceiling lest they disrupt the planned economy as such. When that ceiling is reached, there arises a genuine material pressure in favor of "dividing the burden" between Moscow, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Wall Street. This is what happened in Yugoslavia. This is what happened in Poland and Hungary. It will happen in Peking too ... if the Kremlin wants it to happen.
From this line of analysis there flows a decisive political conclusion. The Fourth International is opposed to wars between bureaucratized workers states. It considers them utterly reactionary and irresponsible. They only help imperialism and hinder the cause of world revolution. They are against the interests of the international working class and against the cause of the liberation of oppressed semicolonial and colonial peoples. We are against the invasion of Kampuchea by the regular Vietnamese army. We are against the invasion of Vietnam by the Chinese army. We are against any attack upon Chinese territory by the Soviet army and its satellites. We say: fight in common against imperialism and capitalism, not against workers and peasants of other workers states! And we add: if and when the workers and poor peasants of these countries will have the real political power to decide over war and peace, such wars will never happen again!
Certainly, the defense of the Vietnamese revolution is today one of the key tasks of the Fourth International. The question is: how, and by what means? We are convinced that the invasion of Kampuchea did not help but rather undermined that defense. There is no "liberal humanitarianism" nor an atom of "petty-bourgeois pacifism" behind this principled stand. (Although, to repeat it again, we find it morally repulsive and contrary to the elementary needs of raising working-class consciousness to identify legitimate concern for the lives of Kampuchean, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Soviet workers and peasants, a refusal to see these lives sacrificed for the sake of sordid interbureaucratic squabbles, with "liberal humanitarianism.")
We are neither opposed to armed mass insurrection, nor to wars of national liberation, nor to fraternal aid-including military aid-by a victorious revolution to the rising workers and peasants of other countries. Our opposition to wars between bureaucratized workers states is based upon a correct understanding of the very nature of the hardened bureaucratic castes engaged in these wars, of their relations with world revolution and the world proletariat.
We reject out of hand the idea that any faction of the bureaucracy in any way whatsoever has the "historical" mission or "objective function" to "centralize" the interests of the so-called "socialist camp," i.e., the bureaucratized workers states in their totality, in confrontation with the imperialist and capitalist forces either regionally or globally. The whole historical record, on which our analysis of the bureaucracy is based, proves precisely the opposite. Each of these factions of the bureaucracy-the Kremlin one as much as the Peking one, and, alas, also the Hanoi one-systematically sacrifice the general interests of the world proletariat and the oppressed peoples, the general interests of world revolution, to the particularist narrow conservative self-interests of defending its own power and privileges, regardless of what happens elsewhere.
In fact, the Soviet bureaucracy as well as the Chinese bureaucracy, the Vietnamese leadership as well as the Pol Pot one, are conducting the conflict ideologically in the narrowest terms: whipping up chauvinistic-if not racialist-hatred against "the Mongols," "the Viets," "the Han," and so on. With this despicable nationalism is combined a callous celebration of the "tens of thousands of Chinks," of the "Viet aggressors," "exterminated" in the war, without a single consideration for the fact that workers are shooting workers, peasants are shooting peasants, and none are shooting imperialists, capitalists, or landlords. To see only clever statecraft, or diabolical maneuvers by imperialism, behind this scandalous spectacle is just covering up for Stalinism. Behind this are the ultimate fruits of the petty-bourgeois nationalist poison of "socialism in one country."
We likewise reject out of hand any conjunctural approach to the question, which consists in pointing out that "in a given situation" a given bureaucracy is "objectively" more (or less) counterrevolutionary than another one. Such impressionistic considerations not only are condemned to be bypassed by events from one day to another. (Remember the theoreticians who drew all kinds of conclusions from the temporary alliance between Stalin and Hitler!) They sin profoundly by subordinating the structural similarities between all workers states to considerations based upon conjunctural practices. Any serious blow against the People's Republic of China today would be a blow against a workers state, i.e., a blow for the restoration of capitalism in China, and not a blow against "an ally of U.S. imperialism." The same is true of any serious blow against any workers state without exception.
It is not very smart to mentally rearrange one's analysis of the world situation around the bizarre proposition that Washington's main purpose today is to "roll back" the Indochinese revolution out of Kampuchea. It seems rather obvious that the strategic goals of keeping control over Middle East oil, preventing a socialist revolution in Western Europe, and maintaining Latin America under its domination, loom much larger in its eyes. But in order to further these key goals, it needs close collaboration with the Kremlin much more than with Peking-which can't deliver any goods in these areas. Why should Washington deliberately jeopardize its own vital interests by ganging up with Peking against Moscow, merely for the purpose of reconquering the Kampuchean market?
As for the Kremlin, its propaganda machine is running along the following lines: You dirty Chinese hegemonists, you are undermining détente, you are trying to collaborate with Washington in order to prevent us from better collaborating with Washington. And you Western governments, your sending arms to the Chinese is stupid because in the long run they will be used against you.35 All of this is a far cry from a world situation allegedly dominated by U.S. imperialism's frantic attempts to go on to the offensive with Chinese help against the Vietnamese revolution.
In fact, most bourgeois analysts insist that Washington is giving preference to the SALT II treaty with Moscow, over and above any benefit it could obtain from the interbureaucratic conflict in Southeast Asia and from closer links with Peking.36 And the bourgeois governments of the ASEAN countries, while satisfied because the dynamic of the Indochinese revolution is weakened by these conflicts, are worried as much by the Chinese military buildup as by the Vietnamese one.37 They have good reasons for this-and a sound class instinct. For, independently from conjunctural alignments and realignments, the class nature of the various states (and armies) will decisive in the long run in determining their role in world politics.
More generally, imperialism can and will try to use the interbureaucratic conflicts to gain advantages and to change the relationship of forces and stop the spread of revolution. But its basic historical goal remains not to weaken Moscow against Peking or vice versa, but to restore capitalism. For that purpose, the class nature of all the workers states remains a formidable obstacle, regardless of their conjunctural opportunist and treacherous maneuvers.
Much has been made of the fact that Washington knew about Peking's attack against Vietnam beforehand, and either gave the green light enthusiastically, or failed to give the red light, or was so divided in its reactions that Deng could feel encouraged to act.38 But these speculations of what really went on in Washington during Deng's visit or in Peking during Blumenthal's trip are largely beside the point. Everybody in the Fourth International agrees on two positions: After its grave defeat in 1975, U.S. imperialism is, for the time being, unable to intervene directly in Indochina. It can only seek to reenter the scene by exploiting the conflicts between the Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Kampuchean leaderships.
The differences revolve around the following two points: Did the Vietnamese intervention in Kampuchea and the Chinese intervention in Vietnam facilitate these imperialist maneuvers? We answer yes in each case and have strong evidence in support of this analysis. Comrades Feldman/Clark/Waters answer "no" in the first, and "yes" in the second one. But the evidence for the "no" is very shaky, to say the least.
And the bigger difference is whether in the China-Vietnam conflict Peking acts basically for imperialism-whether Stalin acted for imperialism by attacking Tito, whether Tito acted for imperialism by resisting Stalin, whether the same judgment can be made about the Khrushchev-Mao conflicts, which imperialism could and did exploit, but which they neither generated nor controlled.
We especially reject any "lesser evil" policy as applied to various shades and fractions of the bureaucracies. Inasmuch as we are dealing with countries in which the bureaucratic rule has become hardened and institutionalized—i.e., can only be removed by a political revolution-no bureaucratic caste of another workers state can seriously be seen as being able to further, not to say initiate, such a political revolution. This is politically and socially inconceivable. It would be identical to expecting it to commit suicide. The task of overthrowing each of these privileged bureaucracies is a task to be solved by the workers and poor peasants of each of these countries, not through an invasion by a foreign regular army.
Finally, the question of our principled opposition to any invasion of any bureaucratized workers state by the army of another bureaucratized workers state is closely linked to a correct understanding of the uneven historic, economic, social, political, and cultural development between different workers states, i.e., of the dangerous dynamics of the national question after the victory of socialist revolutions, a dynamic which revolutionary Marxists have not yet fully understood and mastered.
How can one forget that China was for more than a century a semicolony, plundered, dismembered, and humiliated by imperialist powers, among which Lenin explicitly included tsarist Russia? How can one forget that the Chinese empire for nearly 2,000 years tried to subjugate the smaller country of Vietnam? How can one forget that Vietnamese emperors in turn threatened the independence of even smaller Kampuchea through repeated aggression and wars of conquest for many centuries? To believe that it is sufficient to realize a socialist revolution—while maintaining huge differences in standard of living and levels of economic development between different workers states—for all the suspicions, the ideological and political consequences of these centuries-old situations to disappear as through magic from the consciousness of millions of people little-versed in Marxism, is to believe in miracles. It is much preferable to be a bit more realistic, to take these suspicions into consideration and to carefully abstain from any act that could stimulate new and long-lasting waves of nationalism. Be it only for this reason, we have to condemn both invasions out of hand!
Lenin, we must note, understood that aspect of the question perfectly. Already in his report on the new Party Program in 1918 he stated categorically that the workers state had to grant self-determination (i.e., independence) even to countries remaining under bourgeois rule, if by acting otherwise the class differentiation between the bourgeoisie and the workers would become obscured and slowed down as a result of nationalism in these countries. And in the final codicil to his Testament he stated:
A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, 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 noticing it.
That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or "great" nations, as they are called... must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inquality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality with obtains in actual practice. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question. ...
. . . the harm that can result to our state from a lack of unification between the national apparatuses and the Russian apparatus is infinitely less than that which will be done not only to us, but to the whole International, and to the hundreds of millions of the peoples of Asia, which is destined to follow us on to the stage of history in the near future. It would be unpardonable opportunism if, on the eve of the debut of the East, just as it is awakening, we undermined our prestige with its peoples, even if only by the slightest crudity or injustice towards our own non-Russian nationalities.
In the interest of world revolution and of defending the international solidarity of toilers, we had better take these warnings of Lenin deeply to heart!
The only exception to the above-stated general rule that we could visualize today would be a situation of full-scale general war of imperialism against the workers states. If in such a situation—in which the survival of the workers states as such would be immediately threatened—one or two of the ruling bureaucracies allied themselves militarily to imperialism, operations by the armies of the other workers states on the territories of these countries would then be justified. But even in that case, all the above-mentioned considerations should be taken into consideration—especially the fact that we would call upon the workers of these few countries to themselves overthrow the treacherous bureaucrats ruling them. The victory of such a political revolution would be a thousand times preferable to a foreign invasion and occupation-even in the framework of world war-which would have numerous negative consequences for the survival of the workers state as such.
We must add that we still believe such an eventuality to be extremely unlikely-and that we completely refuse to identify a situation of "preventive moves in view of a potential war danger" (which might exist for half a century or more!) with a situation of an actual world war.
Imperialism makes a lot of political and ideological capital out of the recent crimes of the bureaucracies in Southeast Asia. It will make even more capital out of them tomorrow. It will try to utterly confuse and disorient the international working class and the freedom fighters in the semicolonies by shouting at the top of its many voices-some well-paid, some rather eloquent, some reaching deep into the organized labor movement-that events have shown that Marx was wrong when he thought that wars would disappear with capitalism; that Lenin was wrong when he had written into the first constitution of the Soviet Union that war was structurally tied to capitalism and, likewise, peace to socialism; that Marxism and proletarian internationalism are bankrupt when armies marching under the Red Flag with the hammer and sickle are fighting each other.
We have to answer that imperialist offensive head-on. We have to denounce its hypocrisy and diversionist character. Compared to the victims of the past and present imperialist wars, the tragic victims of what is happening in Southeast Asia are and will remain a tiny minority. Compared with the threats that the existence of imperialism poses for the very survival of humanity, the interbureaucratic military conflicts remain a secondary aspect of world development.
But we cannot answer the imperialist propaganda machine adequately by denying or minimizing the extent of the bureaucracy's crimes. The analogy with the bourgeois "human rights offensive" is eloquent here. Any line of defense against that offensive of the type "imperialism is really responsible for all that" or "you are exaggerating the extent of the slave-labor camps in the USSR under Stalin" was condemned to collapse sooner or later. It actually helped the imperialist propaganda machine. We have to look reality squarely in the face. We have to speak out what is. Only the truth is revolutionary.
The truth is that the wars started by the different bureaucracies in Asia are unspeakable crimes of the bureaucracy against the working class and socialism that have to be condemned as such. They have to be explained as having nothing to do with socialism, like the Moscow Trials had nothing to do with socialism. Not Marx, or Lenin, or socialist revolutions are responsible for these wars, but the privileged bureaucracies that, in the last analysis, are the results of the survival of capitalism on an international scale and have to be overthrown by political revolutions.
What stands vindicated in the light of these bloody events is not the hypocritical stance of blood-smeared imperialism, but the principled struggle of the Left Opposition, of the Fourth International against the bureaucracy, against "socialism in one country," against petty-bourgeois nationalism, for proletarian internationalism, for world revolution and socialist democracy, for a united front of all workers states against imperialism. This is the only principled line of defense. It is also, in the long run, the only effective one.
March 15, 1979
Notes
1. Militant, February 23, 1979.
2. Malcolm Caldwell and Lek Tan, Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 157-167; and François Ponchaud, Cambodia Year Zero (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 183-184. Ponchaud indicates that to avoid arrest, two KCP leaders, Ieng Sary and Son Sen, had already gone underground in 1963.
3. See "Declaration of Foundation of the FUNSK" in Le Conflit Vietnam- Kampuchea (Hanoi, 1979).
4. George C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), pp. 71-72.
5. Ponchaud, pp. 113-114.
6. Comrades Feldman and Clark quote Ponchaud's book extensively. But they do not quote his conclusion on this key question: "On 17 April 1975 a society collapsed; another is now being born from the fierce drive of a revolution which is incontestably the most radical ever to take place in so short a time' (p. 214).
7. Hildebrand and Porter, Pp. 90-91.
8. Ponchaud, pp. 101-103.
9. Questions Actuelles du Socialisme, October 1978.
10. These quotes are taken from the Appendix to the French edition of Ponchaud's book. Cambodge Année Zéro (Paris: Juilliard, 1977), pp. 238, 241.
11. "La Classe Ouvrière et les Travailleurs du Kampuchea dans la Guerre Révolutionnaire de Libération Nationale et Populaire," pp. 3-4.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. Ponchaud, p. 136.
14. "Le Conflit Vietnam-Kampuchea" (Hanoi, 1979), p. 8. Emphasis added.
15. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), p. 33. Emphasis added.
16. "Report on the New Soviet Economic Policy and the Perspectives of the World Revolution," in The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 2 (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), p. 226.
17. Fred Feldman and Steve Clark, "Pol Pot Regime-Was It a Workers State?," Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, February 26, 1979, p.183. Emphasis in original.
18. Ibid., p. 184.
19. Communist Party Power in Kampuchea, p. 18.
20. Feldman and Clark, p. 183.
21. Leon Trotsky on China (New York: Pathfinder, 1976), pp. 524. 526-7.
22. Fred Feldman, "Behind Fall of Pol Pot Regime," Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor, January 22, 1979, pp. 28-29, 31.
23. Mary-Alice Waters, "Hands Off Vietnam!" Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, February 26, 1979, p. 163.
24. Ibid., p. 162.
25. Gus Horowitz, "What Washington Is After," Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, March 5, 1979, p. 196.
26. Courrier. du Vietnam, October 1976.
27. Far Eastern Economic Review, February 2, 1979, p. 17.
28. This aid was continued in the case of Japan (Le Monde, March 3, 1979), whose imperialist government also publicly condemned the Chinese invasion of Vietnam as "unjustified."
29. See Patrice de Beer, "Vietnam: Tensions Internes et Rupture d'Equilibre," Le Monde Diplomatique, February 1979.
30. Ponchaud, p. 192.
31. Bogdan Szaikowski, ed., Documents in Communist Affairs 1977 (University College Cardiff Press, 1977), p. 165.
32. See the article by Slavko Stavic in Questions Actuelles du Socialisme, October 1978, quoted above.
33. Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1978, p. 17.
34. Le Matin de Paris, March 5, 1979
35. On this last point, see Izvestia, December 12, 1978.
36. International Herald Tribune, February 1, 1979; Financial Times, February 28, 1979.
37. Le Figaro, March 12, 1979.
38. Die Zeit, March 2, 1979; Washington Post, February 19, 1979.
39. V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Lenin's Fight Against Stalinism (New York: Pathfinder, 1975), pp. 135, 137-38.