[The following article is reprinted from the December 31 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Thailand, a country comparable to France in size and population, has been for more than fifteen years the western front of the Indochinese conflicts. It is a country where the American defeat in Indochina and the growth of new social contradictions provoked the outbreak of a major social crisis, which was marked by the student, worker, and peasant struggles of 1973-1976.
At that time the revolutionary movement was dominated by the Communist Party of Thailand and the People's Liberation Army. The PLA was strengthened by the infusion of thousands of urban militants fleeing the cities after the bloody coup in October 1976.
Finally, Thailand today is a country where the left is going through a very difficult period of division and political reevaluation.
Almost all the students who had joined the guerrillas in 1976 have returned to the cities, most of them profoundly disillusioned by the Thai CP and taking advantage of a government
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amnesty.
The mass struggles have still not recovered from the murders of peasant leaders in 1975 and the massacre of students in 1976.*
The People's Liberation Army is now on the defensive, although it has not been destroyed as the regime claims (as always, it likes to count its chickens before they are hatched).
Above all, it is a time of political questioning, especially for that enthusiastic generation that was trained in the mass struggles of the 1970s and then had a head-on collision with the conservatives of the traditional Communist Party apparatus.
Reevaluation
This period of discussion marks the end of the left's unquestioning acceptance of "models," a left that had no real exposure to Marxism except through simplified Maoism.
"We were taught Mao's theory of contradictions, and then the three worlds theory," explains a militant who has returned from the jungle.
"We did not, in fact, even know about the existence of other frameworks of Marxist analysis regarding the international situation and problems of the revolution in countries like ours. Only very recently have several new works been published in the Thai language, opening up the discussion on the notion of the
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outh China Sea transition to socialism, bureaucracy, and the various currents of contemporary Marxism."
Some are beginning to criticize Marxism itself, tempted by liberalism. But the most militant currents are, for the first time in Thailand, carrying out a broad, basic discussion that begins with the experiences of the Communist movement. The classic works of Lenin, which have often been unavailable, are being translated. Ernest Mandel's Introduction to Marxism is now on sale in the bookstores in a Thai translation.
This reevaluation movement has obviously been fostered by the backlash from the present Indochinese crisis, the Chinese-Vietnamese conflict, and the evolution of Chinese foreign policy.
The Communist Party of Thailand had received considerable aid from Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea (after 1975), as well as from China.
Aid cut off
Hanoi, Vientiane, and then Pnompenh (in 1979 after the installation of the Heng Samrin regime) broke off their aid to the Thai CP because it was, in fact, supporting the Khmer Rouge and Peking.
Today Chinese aid has also been reduced to the bare minimum, and the CPT radio station that had broadcast from southern China has been closed.
The cuts had a big impact, especially in the northern and northeastern zones bordering on Indochina, where the CPT had benefited from the use of camps in Laotian and Kampuchean territory.
The Thai left's initial reaction was sharply anti-Vietnamese. This stemmed from the pro- Chinese policy of the Thai CP leadership, the Maoist education the ranks had received, and the invasion of Kampuchea, which seemed to prove that Hanoi had "hegemonist" intentions
*When the Thai military seized power on October 6, 1976, their first move was to try to crush the student movement. Units of airborne, border patrol, marine. riot, and other specialized police surrounded Thammasat University in Bangkok and blanketed the campus with automatic weapons fire for four hours.
The police were aided in their butchery by several thousand armed rightists who attacked students trying to flee the bloodbath. Some students were hanged by the mob. Others were doused in gasoline and burned alive.
More than 3,000 persons, mostly students, were arrested at the university immediately after the attack and throughout Bangkok in the days that followed. (See "Bangkok Police Massacre Student Demonstrators," by Ernest Harsch, Intercontinental Press. October 18, 1976.)
over the entire region. It also stemmed from ignorance about what the Pol Pot regime's policies had really been, and from the general pro- Chinese sentiment of the Thai regime and the Thai ruling classes.
In the past year, however, the tone of the militants one meets in Bangkok and in the provinces has clearly changed. Very few will still defend the Khmer Rouge to any appreciable extent. The discussion has become more basic: what kind of socialism do we want?
The Kampuchean experience and the perception of the depth of the Sino-Indochinese crisis are now playing the same role in Thailand that the discovery of the repressive reality of Stalinism once played in the West. They constitute a sharp warning against bureaucratism.
Absense of program
The warning is taken all the more seriously by the "critical" militants, because they had to confront the absence of democracy in the party at the very time they were convinced of the need to question the CPT's traditional prescription for Thailand: "The jungle leads the village; the countryside encircles the city."
With perhaps a few exceptions, such as in the Phuphan bases, the party apparatus is treating the present political crisis with silence.
"It is practically impossible to criticize the line," notes a former member of the People's Liberation Army, "because the line is never expressed frankly, through well-developed orientation documents. The Political Bureau keeps silent, the Central Committee does not meet, and only brief and cryptic directives come down in the organization."
In fact, there are very few Thai CP docu-
New organizations emerge
The crisis of the Thai revolutionary left has opened up a process of differentiation and division. New organizations are emerging, formed by militants who have recently left the Thai Communist Party. Among them are the Organization of the Democratic Revolution of the Thai People, and the
Preparatory Committee for the Movement of the Democratic Revolution of the Thai people.
The group that played the role of a united front — the Coordinating Committee of Patriotic and Democratic Forces - has lost all substance after the departure of the Socialist Party, the United Socialist Front, and nearly all the individuals who made it up. A group of CP members still maintain the name in order to assert a desire for unity.
It is now difficult to speak of the Thai
Communist Party as a single national political entity. The differences are expressed inside the party itself, and each group, faction, and committee seems to carry out its own policy in its area.
Roundup of students during 1976 massacre.
ments that are signed by a leadership body or by the general secretary. And there are almost no programmatic or orientation documents worthy of the name (a very succinct ten-point program is obviously not designed for use by the membership in determining their activities).
This lack of programmatic documents is surprising, even for Maoist or Stalinist parties. It is probably partially explained by the political and geographic proximity of the Chinese leadership, whose documents have served as guiding texts for the CPT.
But perhaps there is also a deeper reason. In the 1960s the Communist Party of Thailand was reorganized as a jungle party, with a militarist orientation that was in many ways closer to the Latin American "foco" concept than the traditional Chinese and Vietnamese concepts of guerrilla warfare and people's war.
It achieved some considerable successes, especially in outlying areas, where it protected the Montagnard tribes and peasant villages against the exactions of government functionaries and the army.
But the party's political orientation remained "local," without coming together in a national synthesis. The party apparatus never seems to have thought of its intervention in terms of organizing and mobilizing the masses, of central social and democratic slogans to awaken the popular masses who were far from the guerrilla zones of influence.
Changing period
This is partially explained by what Thailand was twenty years ago: a country where popular resistance forces were still by and large localized. But the 1970s saw the blossoming of mass student, worker, and peasant struggles — social and democratic struggles of national scope. The traditional Communist Party apparatus showed itself unable to see this decisive change in the course of peoples' struggles, the Thai kingdom's entry into the era of modern class struggles.
The new generation of activists, on the other hand, came out of these upheavals. Because of this it was impossible to have a dialogue between political generations, even though both viewed themselves as Maoist.
"In my zone," notes a militant who returned from the jungle, "the conflict with the party cadres basically crystallized around how to carry out rural work. Not only did the traditional line ignore the importance of the urban work, of mass struggles in Bangkok, but it also forced us to carry out the village work from the jungle bases. With this orientation, we could not penetrate very far into the plains!
"After a bloody defeat in 1977, we decided on our own to change the orientation, basing ourselves on the lessons of the peasant strug gles of 1974-75, which we had participated in as students.
"We had some real successes, but the apparatus rejected any reevaluation that criticized their activities."
The present crisis of the Thai left was not, therefore, artificially provoked from the outside by regional events. It is jointly fed by the deepgoing problems posed by the Sino-Indochinese conflicts and the CPT's alignment with Peking, and by the present impasse in the party's traditional orientation.
By opening up a discussion on a series of basic questions, the crisis can permit the Thai revolutionary left to consolidate politically. E