For the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) the U.S. aggression in Korea was to be another August 1914 in miniature. Like the Social Democracy under Kautsky, the SWP abandoned its hitherto revolutionary position on the national liberation movements and in defense of the workers’ states. In its next issue, the SWP paper “Militant” characterized the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Syngman Rhee regime as puppets of the larger powers. It thereby renounced revolutionary defense of the national liberation movement of Korea. It did this by taking a so-called “third camp” position of a “plague on both your houses,” a position which Trotsky had vigorously condemned as “the position of the petty bourgeoisie” and a cover for imperialism. He did this in 1939 in a brilliant theoretical exposition against a right-wing group in the SWP which challenged Trotsky on the proletarian class character of the USSR.
The SWP subsequently reversed its position under pressure from some of the leading cadre of the party – who are no longer with them. However, the outlook which motivated the party’s original position on Korea has remained to this day the legacy of the SWP. This outlook, a veiled anti-communist animus, runs like a red thread through all the fundamental positions of the SWP, whether it is their class characterization of the Chinese Revolution, the criticisms of the Vietnam peace treaty, or their defense of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and their ilk under the guise of proletarian democracy.
It should be, therefore, no surprise that the SWP would fall afoul of the Cambodian Revolution, a remarkable development of truly historic proportions which not only defeated the Pentagon-Wall Street colossus, but has undertaken a radical reconstruction of society along democratic, socialist lines.
Their headline in the May 30, 1975, Militant on “The forced evacuation of Cambodia’s cities” aptly sums up the SWP evaluation of the Cambodian Revolution, which, incidentally, is identical with that of the bourgeois view.
The adjective “forced” is a tricky fraudulent one which we should, by this time, be fully acquainted with on the basis of such familiar phrases as “forced busing” and “forced integration,” the stock in trade of the politician and the capitalist press. It is never “forced unemployment,” “forced to be on welfare,” “forced sales taxes.” All this is “voluntary,” supposedly, just as wage slavery itself is characterized as voluntary free labor.
SWP relies on Schanberg article
But to get back to Cambodia. The Militant dishes up the Sydney Schanberg article in the New York Times of May 9, quoting liberally from everything that is slanted, prejudiced, and false – without even including the few facts which he does report. His article is the sole basis for the SWP’s evaluation of the events following the revolutionary takeover in Cambodia.
“A once-throbbing city (Phnom Penh) became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping empty shops. Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there.”
The tone of this quote from Schanberg, repeated in the Militant, clearly harks back to the days when the bourgeois journalists shed crocodile tears about the “dying” cities of Shanghai and Canton, or in earlier days of St. Petersburg and Moscow – and, not so long ago, about the death of the “bustling and light-hearted city of Havana.”
But leave it to the Militant to dwell on this and cry out against the exodus from the city and about a “high cost in human suffering.”
“Why wasn’t it” (the Militant means the “forced” evacuation) “explained to the populace? Why weren’t they given more time? Why weren’t they consulted and brought into the planning? Why were they handled like enemies?”
And earlier they bemoan, “Consider the class composition of the cities and towns. The very thin layer of capitalists, or would-be capitalists, left Cambodia before the collapse of Lon Nol. About 5,000 or 6,000 persons were involved. While a few individual traitors decided to remain and take their chances, they no longer constitute a serious danger. The fact is that the bulk of the city population in Cambodia consists of workers and artisans and their families.”
This is a new slant for the SWP. In the case of China and Vietnam, the SWP violently attacked them for “class collaboration.” But here they chide the Cambodians for presumably treating the workers as “enemies” (for which there is no evidence). And they reduce the Cambodian situation to a few individual traitors and “a very thin layer of capitalists,” as though that was the issue, which was not at all what prompted the Cambodian leaders to carry out the evacuation. Bringing this in is strictly a red herring.
The city of Phnom Penh, until the flood of refugees from the fighting engulfed it in recent years, had 600,000 people. Even with that it was an overcrowded and congested city with little industry and commerce, geared mainly to imperialist needs and the comprador bourgeois class. Aside from all the other ills that befall such a city, it was basically an administrative center and by no means a proletarian citadel, as the militant tries to convey.
That was before Nixon embarked upon his murderous invasion. In the space of a few years, and particularly in the last 2 years, the city population (as Schanberg admits) swelled to over 2 million – about 3 ½ times its original size! With less food! With destruction of municipal facilities! And with death and disease a daily occurrence and fires raging in and around the environs of the city.
How did it get that way?
The merciless saturation bombing and barbarous attacks by the U.S.-Lon Nol clique literally uprooted millions from the countryside and drove them into the cities, particularly Phnom Penh. Out of a population of 7 million Cambodians, 30 percent of them were in Phnom Penh at the time of the revolutionary takeover – without food. And the countryside, where food could be produced, was ravaged by the militarist marauder of the Pentagon.
Evacuation necessary
Does it take too much acumen to know, even without first-hand information, that an evacuation of some dimension would be absolutely necessary? It had to be done, for no other reason than to get the people back to their homes and commence the ordinary day-to-day work to make the country livable again.
Add to this that such a vital necessity as the water purification plant, to which Schanberg referred (even if the Militant didn’t) was damaged. Moreover, a city so vastly congested, with more than 1 ½ million from outside Phnom Penh, was an easy target for bombing. By no stretch of the imagination could the new revolutionary government take for granted that the war was over – witness what happened with the Mayaguez provocation! The city and port of Sihanoukville were severely damaged by the murderous and unprovoked bombings, causing, according to Cambodian officials, “very grave losses in human lives.”
Remember that on the eve of the Christmas bombing, the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong had begun an evacuation.
Finally, it should be added that latest reports state that an orderly return is now in process. Also it should be noted that Ho Chi Minh City, where the surrender was more orderly, is also overcrowded with masses of people uprooted from the countryside and a more limited evacuation is taking place there as well.
But the crux of the SWP’s imperialist apologetics live in its assertion that it was all so very “undemocratic,” and that the people weren’t “consulted” or “brought into the planning.”
National congress met in Phnom Penh
Weren’t they, really? How would the Militant scribes ever have known? Even if they had as much as carefully read the Schanberg report, they would have noticed what literally shines out like a beacon, that, from April 25 to April 27, the new Revolutionary Government convened a special National Congress with over 300 delegates right in Phnom Penh to consider precisely the multitude of questions arising out of the imminent revolutionary takeover. Unquestionably, the issue of whether to evacuate the cities was not only discussed but planned on the basis of the concrete realities of the day. Is it not conceivable that it was explained to the cadres and from them to the people?
The allegation about the evacuation involving “high cost in human suffering” is nothing but a canard, lacking a scintilla of documentary evidence or credible witnesses.
What frightened the bourgeoisie here and its apologists was not the alleged high cost in human suffering of the evacuation, but the possibility that such a swift, innovative plan to reconstruct the devastated country in the spirit of democratic, socialist cooperation might once again, as was done in China, the Soviet Union, and other countries like Cuba, proved the superiority of socialist planned construction over capitalist, imperialist chaos.
Of course it is possible that the evacuation, in light of the military consideration of imminent U.S. attack, might have been hasty. But this is a purely organization, military-technical decision and lends itself to correction most easily. Wholesale lies and exaggerations, without any real proof except one article by Schanberg, are calculated to overshadow the monumental fact of a new, victorious revolution where the leadership has embarked upon a socialist reconstruction course.
Conjure up Stalinism
What motivated the SWP’s article was not, as they say, “concern over the program that is being followed,” which they claim is “not a communist program.” The writer let the cat out of the bag when he lined up the Cambodian Revolution as a “Chinese variant of Stalinist bureaucratism.” The “forced evacuation” the Militant sets up is supposed to conjure up in the mind of the reader the truly forced collectivization of Stalin, which did so much to damage the cause of the Russian Revolution. The purpose of the Militant article is to smear the Cambodian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution as well by claiming that are using the same repression, anti-working class maneuvers employed by Stalin during his tenure. But the historical situation in both those countries as well as the leaderships are altogether different.
Having assumed the evacuation in Cambodia was forced and repressive, the SWP then goes on to find an explanation for this in the pattern of the Cambodian Revolution where, they say, as in China, “the most massive force is composed of rebel peasants. Again as in China, this force created an army in the countryside. The peasant army, in turn, created a command structure.
“Here we find,” says the Militant, “the key element. In former times, the commanders led similar peasant armies against a corrupt, decaying regime. Toppling the old regime and carrying out a number of progressive measures, permitting a new expansion of agriculture, the army command would mark the beginning of a new dynasty.
“This ancient Asian pattern helped shape the revolutionary process that brought Mao to power. In modern times, of course, the command structure of a peasant army created in this way is subject to international influences that block the old pattern from being merely repeated.”
The ruse of Oriental despotism
And so we have it at last. Good old Oriental despotism has, according to the SWP, been reborn in modern times as a Chinese (and Cambodian) “variant of Stalinist bureaucratism.”
What a sly way of trying to discredit the socialist character of the Chinese and Cambodian revolutions! The SWP thinks that by wrapping its offerings in the pages of the New York Times, it can dish out the malodorous theories of Karl Wittfogel, a long-time renegade from communism who first tried to foist the label of “Oriental despotism” on the Russian, and then the Chinese, revolutions. The unfortunate reader who partakes of this heady dish is supposed to put an equal sign between the despotism of Asian feudalism and the struggle of the workers and peasants today.
The SWP pretends to speak in the name of Trotsky, yet this is a garbled, distorted, and completely falsified version of what Trotsky wrote about ancient China, as well as his views of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. Trotsky explained that in ancient feudal times, successive peasant rebellions installed new peasant regimes. But because of the feudal structure of society and the fact that there was no revolutionary working class as there is in the contemporary world, the rebellions were fated to become new dynasties. There was no revolutionary class capable of reconstructing society on a new, higher level.
How different from today, when the proletariat not only exists worldwide but has liberated 35 percent of the world’s people from capitalist rule!
Permanent revolution
The revolutionary overturn in Cambodia is not the result, as the writer of the Militant article claims, of “peasant armies” repeating the “ancient Asian pattern.” Rather it is a confirmation, as he should know well, of Trotsky’s thesis on permanent revolution, which explained how in the epoch of imperialism the bourgeoisies in the oppressed countries are incapable of carrying out the democratic tasks of earlier bourgeois revolutions. Nor can the peasantry alone transform society, as we have said.
Only the proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry, can smash the reactionary rule of the imperialists and their comprador capitalist agents and thoroughly carry through the democratic reforms while at the same time beginning the reorganization of production on a socialist basis.
What we have just seen in Cambodia, to repeat, was not “peasant armies” trapped in an “ancient Asian pattern,” but peasants and workers in a national liberation struggle to smash the vestiges of feudalism, the comprador capitalists, and the imperialists.
The real despots
Of course, all the Asian revolutionary leaders, from Mao, to Ho Chi Minh, to Kim Il Sung, to the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, must of necessity base themselves on the concrete socio-economic and historical conditions of their countries, no less than we must do here. But they are not the inheritors of the “ancient Asian patterns”! No, the heritage of Oriental despotism leads directly to the Chiang Kai-sheks, the Lon Nols, and the General Thieus!
Whatever the exigencies and the vicissitudes of the Cambodian Revolution, and there unquestionably will be many – no real social revolution is immune from errors and false turns – one thing is certain. The new revolutionary regime has brought about a tremendous historic victory. It seems to us, especially in the light of the Mayaguez provocation and the paucity of information which has reached us here in the few short weeks since the revolutionary takeover, that the least we in this country can do is show “a decent respect to the opinions” of that portion of humanity which is embattled Cambodia and its revolutionary leadership.
The Khmer Rouge official who extended “thanks and gratitude to the American people for their contribution to the struggle to free Cambodia from imperialist tutelage” shows that these leaders have more revolutionary internationalism in their fingernails than exists in the entire leadership of the SWP.
Reprinted in the pamphlet From the Pages of Workers World: Articles by Sam Marcy, January-June 1975.
Last updated: 11 May 2026