Southeast Asia: History, Economy, Policy opens on a hymn. "For a quarter of a century," its first page declares, "progressive people throughout the world have been following developments in Vietnam, a courageous country which is waging a grim and just struggle against imperialism." The chapter is called "Invincible Vietnam," and the book that follows is a country-by-country survey of the region at the moment of maximum heat: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, each treated in turn by an unnamed hand, the whole issued in English by Progress Publishers in 1972 and carrying no editor's name, no list of contributors, only the imprint and the standing invitation on the last page to send comments to Zubovsky Boulevard. It is a collective product of the Soviet Orientalist establishment — the Institute of Oriental Studies and its neighbours — assembled for export, and it should be read as what it is: the case the Soviet state wished to put, in the language of international circulation, about a region where its case was being tested to destruction.
The date on the spine is, for once, the date of the argument. The latest events the book records are from the middle of 1971 — the three million tons of bombs dropped on Laos "from May 1964 to August 1971," the seven-point proposal introduced by Nguyen Thi Binh "at the 119th meeting on July 1, 1971." This is a book finished in late 1971 or early 1972, before the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, before the Paris Accords of January 1973, at a point where the outcome in Indochina was still in the balance and the Soviet Union was pouring economic and military aid into North Vietnam. Its purpose was double. Outward, it was ammunition: a documented indictment of American and colonial conduct in Southeast Asia, for readers in the West and the non-aligned world. Inward to the doctrine, it was a demonstration — proof that the Soviet model of anti-colonial advance worked, offered at the very moment when, a few hundred miles south of Hanoi, that model had produced the worst single defeat the world communist movement suffered between the Spanish war and the fall of the Wall.
The theory that organises every chapter is rarely named but never absent. It is the doctrine of the national-liberation movement and the non-capitalist path of development — the Soviet strategy for the former colonial world as it stood in the Brezhnev years. In its schema the revolution in a backward, colonial or newly independent country proceeds in two stages. First comes the national-democratic revolution, in which the working class, the peasantry and the "progressive" or "national" bourgeoisie form a bloc against imperialism and feudal reaction; only later, and only after the anti-imperialist tasks are complete, is the socialist revolution to be posed. In the interval a country may be steered onto a "non-capitalist path" — advancing toward socialism while bypassing the stage of capitalist development, under the wing of the socialist camp and the guidance, where it exists, of a Communist party or a friendly "revolutionary democracy." The doctrine is a direct descendant of the Comintern's "bloc of four classes" of the 1920s, and its decisive practical injunction is that the workers' movement must subordinate its own independent aims, for a whole historical stage, to an alliance with a section of the propertied classes.
The book applies this with a clear conscience and shows exactly what it means in practice. Burma is the purest case. There the army seizes power in March 1962 — "the people took no part in the coup," the text concedes — and yet the coup "cannot be assessed simply as a military putsch." General Ne Win's Revolutionary Council "began to steer the country along a new road of development," and its declaration, the Burmese Way to Socialism, is presented as evidence that "the Burmese Army... still included influential patriotic and revolutionary forces." A military junta becomes a vehicle of socialism because it is anti-imperialist and adopts the right vocabulary; the class character of the state is read off its foreign policy. The same logic praises Sukarno's "guided democracy" and the NASAKOM front in Indonesia, and treats Cambodia's Sihanouk, Laos's neutralist princes, and the "revolutionary democrat" Aung San as the natural partners of the Left. The question the doctrine forbids itself to ask is whether a movement that hands the leadership of the revolution to such partners retains the power to protect itself when the partnership turns. The book was written, and this is its tragedy, in the shadow of the country where that question had already been answered in blood.
The Indonesian chapter is the most important thing in this book, and the most revealing. In 1965 the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was the largest Communist party in the world outside the states that were already ruled by one — more than three million members, the book says, "which guided the activities of multi-million mass organisations." Within months of the events of September–October 1965 it had ceased to exist, its cadre and its peasant base slaughtered in one of the great massacres of the century.
To its credit the book does not pretend the massacre did not happen. It records that "by mid-October the country had become a scene of an extensive campaign of terrorism against the Communists," and that "More than 300,000 Communists, including D.N. Aidit, Njoto, Lukman and other Central Committee members, were brutally assassinated." But the figure is the floor of the estimates, not the truth. Serious historical scholarship — from the early studies through to the reckoning that produced Indonesia's own 2016 tribunal — puts the dead at between half a million and more than a million. The book gives the smallest number that could be called honest, and it gives it in the passive voice: the Communists "were brutally assassinated," by no one the sentence names. The generals who organised the killing, the Muslim militias who carried much of it out, and the Western governments that watched with satisfaction are, at the moment of the killing itself, absent from the grammar.
More telling than the undercount is the explanation. The book cannot say the strategy was wrong, because the strategy was the doctrine, and so it reaches for two other culprits. The first is Peking. Through 1963–65, we read, the PKI leadership drifted toward the Maoists, attacked the CPSU as "modern revisionism," and was "spurred... towards further Right- and Left-wing opportunist blunders"; Sukarno proclaimed a "Djakarta-Peking axis." The second is the adventurism of the September 30 movement itself — a "palace conspiracy, which was to take place without the support of the masses and which was aimed at individuals." Both charges shift the weight of the catastrophe onto the PKI's China connection and onto a botched putsch, and away from the years of class collaboration that the doctrine had prescribed.
Yet the book cannot fully suppress the real story, and in two passages it tells the truth against itself. It records that the PKI had accepted a "co-operation cabinet" of "all major parties, including the Communist Party," and that its Central Committee had endorsed Sukarno's programme on the ground that "democracy should be expanded for the people and restricted for their enemies" — the language of a party that has made a bourgeois nationalist the arbiter of who its enemies are. And it records the decisive surrender: "in December 1964, the Communist Party leadership gave in to pressure from the Government and certain political parties and promised to settle all matters connected with agrarian relations in a peaceful way. In effect this was a fundamental and very serious concession to exploiters in the countryside, at the expense of the toiling peasants." That is the whole disaster in one sentence — a mass revolutionary party disarming the peasant struggle at the very moment the landlords and the army were preparing to strike — and the book, having written it, walks past it to blame Peking.
The Fourth International had named the cause, precisely and contemporaneously, in the documents of its Eighth World Congress, printed in the SWP's International Socialist Review in the spring of 1966 — months after the killing, not decades. The PKI, it wrote, "has been collaborating for some years up to the governmental level with the wing of the national bourgeoisie represented by Sukarno. Such a policy, inspired by the concept of a democratic stage of the revolution in which it will be necessary to collaborate with the so-called national bourgeoisie, has resulted in the party deliberately not trying to take advantage of the revolutionary crisis." The strategy of stages, the coalition with Sukarno, the braking of the mass movement, the imprisonment of the workers within "Nasakom" — this, and not the September 30 adventure and not the quarrel with Peking, "paved the way to the bitter defeat suffered by the biggest Communist party in the capitalist world." And the reply makes the point the book most needs buried: the Sukarno alliance was not a Chinese deviation at all. The PKI pursued it "even before the beginning of the Sino-Soviet conflict, in agreement just as much with the Soviet leadership as the Chinese, both of which were eager to reach an alliance with Sukarno." The line that destroyed the PKI was the common property of Moscow and Peking. Assigning it to Peking alone, as this book does, is not analysis; it is the Sino-Soviet split rewriting the history of a graveyard. The Fourth International weighed the result without euphemism: "The crushing of the Indonesian Communist Party represents an even greater victory for imperialism and setback to the colonial revolution than the counterrevolutionary coup d'etat in Brazil in April 1964." The book grieves the dead; it will not examine the doctrine that led them to the pit, because it is still recommending that doctrine to every other country in the volume.
There is a second Indonesia in this book, and it is Vietnam in 1945. The volume's longest chapter narrates the August Revolution almost day by day — the People's Congress of August 16, the victory in Hanoi on August 19, the abdication of Bao Dai, and then, in a single line, the moment the revolution "swept victorious into Saigon in South Vietnam." Of what happened in Saigon in those weeks, the book says nothing, and the silence is not casual. Search its whole length and the name Trotsky does not occur once; neither does Ta Thu Thau, nor La Lutte, nor any hint that the Vietnamese revolutionary movement of the 1930s contained a large indigenous current that took the socialist revolution seriously and was destroyed for it.
The facts are not obscure; they are recorded by the movement's own survivors — the Saigon historian Ngo Van above all — and were reported in the Fourth International's press across four decades. In the 1930s Saigon possessed one of the strongest Trotskyist movements anywhere in the colonial world. Around Ta Thu Thau and the newspaper La Lutte ("The Struggle"), Trotskyists and Communists cooperated for several years in a united front that at moments outpolled the Stalinists in the city's municipal elections and had a serious base among its workers. Then, in the autumn of 1945, as the August Revolution unfolded and the Trotskyists pressed to arm the workers' committees and carry the revolution past its bourgeois-democratic limits, the Viet Minh turned on them and killed them. Ta Thu Thau — who had spent much of the previous decade in French prisons — was seized in the central provinces and shot. He was one of hundreds.
This is not a charge invented by later critics. The Fourth International named the murders as they became known and mourned Ta Thu Thau as one of its own. Its International Executive Committee, in an appeal "Against the War in Indo-China!" printed in Fourth International in June 1947, sent its "fraternal greetings to the courageous fighters of Viet-Nam" and, in the same breath, recorded that the Indo-Chinese section "on the morrow of the country's 'Liberation' and at the very beginning of the Indochinese revolution, was deprived by the criminal hands of Stalin's GPU of many of its leading elements, among them the heroic figure of comrade Ta-Thu-Thau." The appeal closed by calling on the section to continue its struggle "both against French imperialism and against all betrayal of the revolution from within by the Stalinist agents, leading the Viet Minh." That the Vietnamese revolution the book celebrates was, at its very starting point, purchased in part with the blood of Vietnamese revolutionaries murdered by the party this book praises is exactly the kind of fact a survey of "History, Economy, Policy" exists to erase. The reader who wants the fuller record will find it in Ngo Van's own history of the period and in the documentary collection Revolutionary History (vol. 3, no. 2, 1990); it is set out at length in this series' companion introductions to Divilkovsky and Ognetov's The Road to Victory and Kobelev's Ho Chi Minh, both of which are silent on Ta Thu Thau in exactly the way this book is silent.
None of this touches the reality that the book was written to expose, and on that reality it is often a serviceable and even a valuable witness. The crimes it documents were real, the aggression it charges was committed, and a critical reader gains nothing by pretending otherwise.
The account of French colonial rule in Vietnam is accurate in its essentials: the conquest "by the beginning of the 1880s, after thirty years of resistance," and the deliberate fracturing of the country under the "usual policy of 'divide and rule'," splitting it "into three parts: Tonkin (northern part), Annam (central part) and Chochin-China (southern part)." The book's ledger of American conduct in South Vietnam is grim and, in its broad lines, supported by the historical record: the wrecking of the Geneva settlement, the installation of Ngo Dinh Diem, and a machinery of repression under which, "by 1960, as a result of repressions, 200,000 patriots had been killed in South Vietnam, about 800,000 were wounded or crippled by torture and some 400,000 were languishing in more than a thousand prisons and concentration camps." On Laos the book delivers the single most useful figure it holds: "From May 1964 to August 1971 US Air Force dropped 3,000,000 tons of bombs on Laos" — a tonnage that would later be confirmed as making Laos, per head, the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare.
The economic chapters, where the doctrine's demands press least hard, are the strongest in the volume. On post-1965 Indonesia the book is precise and damning about the terms of the counter-revolution's economic surrender to the West: the return of nationalised property "to the United States, British and Dutch monopolies," the legislation of December 1966 and December 1967 opening the country to foreign capital and foreign banks, the formation in 1966 of the creditors' "Tokyo Consortium," and the result — "By the end of May 1970, the Indonesian Government had allowed foreigners to invest a total of $1,339,900,000 in the Indonesian economy," almost 80 per cent of it in extractive industries "yielding raw materials and foodstuffs which are in short supply in the developed capitalist countries." The book's note that the rupiah "depreciated by 100,000 times in relation to the dollar from 1950 to 1967, which is a world record in inflation," and its account of the cabirs, the "capitalist-bureaucrats" who enriched themselves on the nationalised enterprises, are genuine contributions: a Marxist analysis of how a state sector without workers' control becomes a trough for a new bourgeoisie. Here the Soviet Orientalists were doing real work, and it holds up.
What defeats the book is not its facts but its theory, and the theory it needs and never states by name is the one the Soviet tradition spent forty years suppressing: the theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky had put the colonial case in the second thesis of The Permanent Revolution (1930) in terms that read as though addressed to this volume across the decades: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The claim was not that the democratic and socialist tasks could be legislated apart in advance; it was that they could not — that a movement which subordinates the working class to the "progressive" bourgeoisie for a whole stage forfeits the one force capable of carrying the anti-imperialist revolution through, and delivers its own base, disarmed, to the reaction.
Southeast Asia between 1945 and 1972 was the doctrine's laboratory, and it returned the verdict permanent revolution had predicted. In Saigon in 1945 the movement that pressed to carry the revolution beyond its bourgeois limits was physically eliminated. In Djakarta in 1965 the largest Communist party in the non-socialist world, having spent a decade holding the masses "prisoner to 'Nasakom'" and having promised the landlords to settle the land question "in a peaceful way," was annihilated in a season. This book records both catastrophes — the second at length, the first not at all — and in both it looks everywhere for the cause except the strategy it is still selling. That is the reason to reprint it. It is a clear, confident, documented statement of the Soviet doctrine of the national-liberation movement, offered in 1972 as settled Leninism, by authors who had before them the freshest and most terrible evidence of where that doctrine led and who could not permit themselves to see it. Read it for its facts, which are often good, and against its theory, which the graves it steps over had already refuted.