Most of the volumes in this series are Soviet books about other people's revolutions: institute monographs, written in Moscow, explaining to a foreign readership what Marxism-Leninism teaches. This one is different. Revolution in Laos: Practice and Prospects is a primary document. Its author, Kaysone Phomvihane, was the founding General Secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) and, from 2 December 1975, Prime Minister of the newly proclaimed People's Democratic Republic of Laos. The book gathers three of his reports — a historical narrative, "The Long Road to Victory"; a set of eight theoretical "Lessons to Be Drawn"; and a five-part statement on "building socialist Laos" — and presents them, through the Soviet political publishing house Politizdat, as the authoritative self-account of one of the smallest and poorest states ever to declare for socialism. It is not a book to be caught in falsifications about 1917 or the Moscow Trials, because it is not about them. It is a leader of a governing party explaining what his revolution did and where he intends to take it. That makes the questions to ask of it different, and in some ways sharper: not "does he distort the historical record," but "what does his own theory commit him to, what does his own account leave out, and can the categories he wields against his enemies ever be turned toward his own new state."
The date of the argument is 1979, not the 1981 of the spine. The English translation is copyright Progress 1981; the Russian original is Politizdat 1980; but the reports themselves must be read by the latest events they refer to, and those events are late. The third and most theoretical report cites the resolution of the LPRP's Fourth Central Committee Plenum of February 1977 and the national Party conference of January 1978, and then goes further: it hails "the achievements of the people of Kampuchea who, under the United Front for National Salvation, within a short period smashed the forces of the reactionary clique of Pol Pot–Ieng Sary and liberated the whole country" — that is, the Vietnamese invasion that installed the People's Republic of Kampuchea in January 1979 — and it "strongly condemn[s] the Chinese government for unleashing a war of aggression against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," the border war of February–March 1979. This is a book of 1979, finalised at the moment the Third Indochina War split the communist world, and it takes its side unambiguously. Politizdat's decision to give it export circulation the following year is itself a statement: with China lost to "Maoism" and Vietnam and Laos bound to Moscow, the Soviet Union was presenting the Lao revolution as a showcase — a peasant nation of perhaps three million people passing directly to socialism under Soviet and Vietnamese guidance, a living proof of the doctrine Soviet theory called the "non-capitalist path of development." The biographical facts above are drawn from the book's own author-note, which also records that Kaysone was born in Savannakhet in 1920, was educated in Hanoi at a lycée and the law faculty of the university there, and headed LPRP delegations to the 22nd, 24th and 25th Congresses of the CPSU. Where this introduction gives a title or a date for Kaysone, it comes from that note or from the reports themselves.
The liberation struggle this book narrates was real, protracted, and waged against overwhelming force, and any criticism that forgets this forfeits the right to be heard. Part One is a partisan account — every setback is another's treachery, every leader "wise" — but the spine of it is fact. The French did conquer Laos at the end of the nineteenth century and rule it as a fragment of an Indochina governed for the benefit of Paris; the Japanese did occupy it; a thirty-year armed struggle, from the declaration of independence on 12 October 1945 through the Geneva settlements of 1954 and 1962 to the seizure of power in 1975, did take place, and it was won by Lao fighters who began, in Kaysone's own honest phrase, "from scratch, relying on our own strength and potential," with "antiquated guns and handmade weapons." Above all, the American war on Laos was exactly the crime the book says it was. Kaysone is right that "on 17 May 1964, the US Air Force first bombed the liberated areas," right that Washington ran the country through "thousands of their military advisors who actually exercised control over the activity of the Vientiane administration," right that under Nixon the enemy waged "an unprecedentedly barbaric and inhuman war of annihilation against large, densely populated areas of the liberated zone." A reader who came to this book knowing nothing of Laos would learn a true and terrible thing: that a small agrarian nation survived one of the most concentrated bombing campaigns in the history of warfare and emerged with its revolution intact. The aspiration that runs through Part Three — to lift a country of subsistence farmers, "extremely backward farming at the mercy of the elements," out of what Kaysone calls the "feudal and prefeudal forms of exploitation" — is a serious and honourable one. None of what follows is a denial of any of that.
The organising idea of the book, and the point on which the anti-Stalinist tradition has the sharpest reply, is stated in the author-note before Kaysone has said a word: the Party, it explains, "successfully resolved the tasks of the national democratic stage of the revolution" and is now "laying the foundations of a socialist society bypassing the stage of capitalist development." The revolution comes in two stages. First a "national democratic revolution," completed on 2 December 1975 — the moment, as the Introduction puts it, of "the victorious consummation of the national democratic and the beginning of the socialist revolution in our country." Then a socialist revolution, reaching socialism without passing through capitalism. Kaysone traces the schema to the Party's own founding line and quotes the political programme of the LPRP's Second Congress of 1972 for its most exact formulation: "once the people's national democratic revolution has been brought about, the conditions are created on a countrywide scale for the direct transition to socialism bypassing the capitalist stage of development." The Second Congress, he says elsewhere, "defined its paramount task as follows: 'The conditions necessary for a direct transition to socialism bypassing the capitalist stage of development must be established.'"
This is not an idiosyncrasy of the Lao revolution. It is the central theoretical claim of the tradition this series exists to examine — the theory of stages, in its late Soviet colonial dress. The whole quarrel between Trotsky and his opponents, from 1905 onward, turned on precisely this: whether the revolution in a backward country must pass through a discrete "bourgeois-democratic" stage before the question of socialism could be posed, or whether, as the theory of permanent revolution held, the democratic and socialist tasks interpenetrate and can be carried through only by the proletariat taking power. Trotsky put the colonial case in the second thesis of The Permanent Revolution (1930) in terms that read as though written against this book: "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 point of the theory was not that stages could be legislated in advance but that they could not.
Kaysone's book is, in effect, the stages theory carried through to its administrative conclusion, and it even preserves the old formula Trotsky spent a lifetime contesting. During the national-democratic revolution, he writes, the organs of people's power "in effect, exercised the dictatorship of the workers and peasants under the leadership of the Party"; only "after this revolution was accomplished" did the state "get down to carrying out the historical tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat." The "dictatorship of the workers and peasants," succeeded at a later stage by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" — this is Lenin's pre-1917 slogan of "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," the very formula whose transformation into an impassable barrier between stages Trotsky diagnosed as the theoretical root of the Stalinist policy in China and Spain. The difficulty is not verbal. In a country where, on Kaysone's own repeated admission, "the working class was weak" to the point of near-non-existence and "all our revolutionary organisations and forces consisted chiefly of peasants," a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a dictatorship exercised in the name of a class that barely exists, by a party that identifies itself with that class by fiat. Permanent revolution was, among other things, the warning that this substitution — party for class, stage for struggle — does not dissolve the problem of who actually rules; it conceals it. That warning is the hinge of the reflexive question this book cannot answer, and we return to it below.
The reader should also see that "bypassing the capitalist stage of development" is not Lao coinage but Soviet doctrine, the export theory of "socialist orientation" applied from Aden to Angola. A sibling volume in this series, the Academy of Sciences' USSR and Countries of Africa (1980), builds its entire case on the same "non-capitalist road," the claim that petty-bourgeois or peasant states — its "socialist-oriented" regimes — could reach socialism without a capitalist stage provided they took the Soviet Union for their guide and model. Kaysone reproduces the doctrine almost word for word when he writes of nations that, "having broken the fetters of colonial slavery, they are continuing their bitter struggle... to achieve social reform in non-capitalist development." The same theory answered by the same text: whether a state can be steered to socialism from above, by a vanguard standing in for an absent proletariat and a foreign power supplying the model, is the question permanent revolution posed, and this book presents the affirmative as settled fact.
A theory that makes a prediction can be tested against what followed, and this one now can be, in a way it could not when Progress sent the book abroad. Half of Kaysone's schema came true, and the half that did should be granted without grudging. The national-democratic stage was no fiction: independence from France was won, the monarchy and the feudal-comprador order it crowned were swept away, a country long carved into fiefs and split in two by war was unified under a single state, and the land was taken from the great proprietors and given to those who worked it. On the tasks it had already accomplished the book records real history; the framework named those immediate tasks correctly and the movement carried them out. That is what raises it above propaganda.
The other half — the "direct transition to socialism bypassing the capitalist stage of development" that the Second Congress had set as the "paramount task" — did not arrive. The attempt was made: an agricultural collectivisation drive was launched in 1978, and it met the answer such drives have always met from a peasantry just handed the land — resistance, the slaughter of livestock rather than its surrender, flight across the Thai border — so that within a year or two it was quietly suspended. The economy stagnated through the early 1980s. And then, at its Fourth Congress in November 1986, the very party that had proclaimed the socialist revolution adopted the New Economic Mechanism (chin thanakan mai, "new economic management"): prices freed, cooperatives dissolved, private trade and enterprise licensed, and by 1988 a foreign-investment law among the most liberal in the region. It reintroduced, by deliberate policy, precisely the market and capitalist relations the book had said Laos would leap over. This was not a Lao aberration but the regional pattern — the same turn Vietnam took as doi moi in December 1986 and the Soviet Union as perestroika — and the Fourth International's press followed it as it happened. Writing in International Viewpoint in March 1991, Pierre Rousset described the Vietnamese "key formulae of doi moi (renewal) and tu duy moi (new thought)" as an "economic liberalization" that had freed prices, courted foreign capital and split the society between the traders and peasants who gained by it and the wage-earners whose incomes it eroded — a portrait that fits Vientiane as closely as Hanoi, for Laos moved in step.
This is the verdict, and it falls exactly where permanent revolution said it would. A backward, war-ruined, overwhelmingly peasant country, isolated and led by a party standing in for a proletariat that barely existed, could not vault into socialism by the will of its cadres; the plan could not simply abolish the market. Trotsky had put the general point in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): "Money cannot be arbitrarily 'abolished'," and the transitional epoch "does not mean a cutting down of trade, but, on the contrary, its extraordinary extension." The Fourth International restated the argument in the 1980s, in the debate between Ernest Mandel and Alec Nove over market and plan (Quatrième Internationale no. 28, April–June 1988) — a general theoretical reckoning, not a word of it about Laos, but joined at exactly the moment the bureaucratic states were reaching for the market en masse. What actually happened to Laos was not a transition to socialism bypassing capitalism. It was a bureaucratic party, its political monopoly wholly unbroken, presiding within a decade of the "beginning of the socialist revolution" over the reintroduction of capitalist relations. The book was right about the stage it had finished and wrong about the stage it foretold, and its wrongness took the very shape the reply had named in advance.
The seventh of Kaysone's "Lessons" is titled "Combining Ardent Patriotism with Genuine Proletarian Internationalism," and it is where the book's most consequential silence is not a silence at all but a transfiguration. The plain facts, most of them supplied by the book itself, are these. Kaysone joined the Communist Party of Indochina in 1949. That party — founded, he writes, by Ho Chi Minh in 1930 — led the revolutions of all three Indochinese countries under, in his own words, "the single leadership of one Party," until its Second Congress in 1951 resolved that each country should form a party of its own; the LPRP, constituted in 1955, was "the successor to the splendid cause of the Communist Party of Indochina in Laos." The military record is equally frank: the decisive offensives of the 1950s were carried out by Lao forces "supported by Vietnamese volunteers," and the victories of the 1970s came "with the close cooperation and broad support of the army and people of fraternal Vietnam." The relationship Kaysone describes is one of "perfect unity of the two parties in their political outlook," a bond he calls, twice, a "special relationship" and "special relations" — "the special relations and splendid militant alliance between Laos and Vietnam, seeing in this an essential factor of victory."
Presented as internationalism, this is also a description of dependence, and the events of 1979 show how little independent room the "special relationship" left. On the two questions that divided the entire communist movement — the fate of Kampuchea and the quarrel with China — Laos took Hanoi's position exactly and without visible deliberation: endorsing the Vietnamese overthrow of the Khmer Rouge as a liberation "saving the people from extinction," condemning China's invasion of Vietnam as a "war of aggression," breaking with a neighbour on whose "solidarity and friendship" Kaysone says the Party had "always placed a high value." Even the theoretical vocabulary is imported: the "three revolutions" that Part Three makes the centrepiece of the transition — "revolution in the sphere of production relations... science and technology... ideology and culture" — is the Vietnamese Communist Party's formula, canonised at its congress of December 1976 and here taken over entire. The Lao–Vietnamese Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation of July 1977, which formalised the garrisoning of Vietnamese troops in Laos, is not named in these pages; but the alignment it sealed saturates them.
To Kaysone's credit, the book does not simply efface the tension. Alongside the language of fraternal fusion runs an insistent theme of "self-reliance," "the principle of independence," the conviction "that the revolution in Laos is a task for the people of Laos to be achieved under the leadership of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party." He is aware, in other words, that a nation whose army was trained by another's, whose party descends from another's, and whose foreign policy tracks another's must assert its sovereignty all the more loudly. The assertion is sincere and the dependence is real, and the book contains both without resolving them — which is itself the most honest thing in it.
A revolutionary leader's account of his own war will suppress what does not serve; the test is whether the suppression concerns something the author plainly knew and had reason to name. Four things meet that test here.
The first is the scale of the American air war. Kaysone denounces the bombing at length and in the right words, and once — exactly once — he gestures at its magnitude: "The millions of tons of metal rained upon it by the enemy the army countered with hatred, courage, resourcefulness." But the phrase is deployed to honour the endurance of his soldiers, not to reckon with what the bombing did to the land and people he now governs. Nowhere does the book state what had by 1979 become widely documented: that Laos was, per head of population, the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare; that the Plain of Jars — which appears in these pages only as a military prize "liberated" on 1 January 1961 — was depopulated and cratered into a moonscape; that the unexploded ordnance would kill Lao farmers for generations after the last plane left. A leader has reasons to dwell on such a catalogue, since it indicts his enemy absolutely. That Kaysone does not may be the tell of a different anxiety: to enumerate the devastation is to describe the ruined country his new state actually had to govern, and the book's forward-looking optimism cannot afford the inventory.
The second silence is the enemy Kaysone will not name. Throughout, the adversary is "the American imperialists," "the puppet army," "Thai mercenaries," "special-purpose crack troops... under their direct command." The word "Meo" occurs once, and it refers to an anti-French uprising of 1918–1922. Nowhere does the book acknowledge the CIA's "secret army" — the tens of thousands of Hmong recruited, armed and paid by American intelligence to fight the Pathet Lao, the largest covert paramilitary operation of the era. The omission is not innocent: the Hmong were a Lao people, the war among them was in part a civil war, and their post-1975 flight would become the country's gravest humanitarian wound. To name the secret army is to concede that the enemy included Lao citizens, and that the new state inherited their enmity.
Which is the third silence: the refugees. By the time Part Three was written, something on the order of a tenth of the population had fled the country, the Hmong most of all, into camps across the Thai border. The book records only the enemy's flight — American personnel and "reactionary leaders" who "pack their bags in haste and leave the country" — never the exodus of ordinary Lao. And the fourth is the fate of those who did not flee. The book's own euphemism is present and revealing. Enemy soldiers, Kaysone writes, were ordered to "participate collectively in seminars"; the previous ruling circles are those "who have consented to re-education in order to become fully-fledged working members of society." The Lao word was samana, "seminar," and behind it lay the re-education camps in which many thousands were held for years without trial — among them the deposed King, Savang Vatthana, whom the book mentions only as an abstraction, the monarch whose "abdication" the Congress "accepted" before abolishing "the anachronistic monarchical regime." The King is never named. That he had been removed to a camp in the northeast, where he and the royal family would die, is nowhere in a book that presents his departure as a voluntary constitutional act.
On all four points the Fourth International's press, following Indochina week by week, said what Kaysone would not — and said it, crucially, while giving the Lao revolution its due. In March 1979, in the same weeks Kaysone was completing his third report, Intercontinental Press carried a long article, "Imperialism's 'Opium War' Against Laotian Revolution," that named the whole apparatus the book omits: that "the stiffest resistance to the regime is being waged in northwestern Laos, where members of the Meo nationality were organized into a mercenary army by the CIA in the 1960s," that Hmong refugees in Thai camps were being recruited for cross-border raids, that the American who had helped "organize the U.S. 'secret war' against the Pathet Lao" was still at work. The point is not that the Trotskyist press was hostile to the revolution — it was not. The resolution "New Advances in the Indochinese Revolution," adopted by the 1979 World Congress of the Fourth International, held that "the greatest advances in the intervening years outside Vietnam have been in Laos," and credited the government of "Premier Kaysone Phomvihane" with a course that, "vacillating but increasingly anticapitalist," had disbanded the royal army, abolished the monarchy, expropriated the big landlords and foreign firms and distributed land to the peasants. The difference is that the same resolution called the leadership "Stalinist" and named the refugees, the CIA army, and the bureaucratic character of the new states — the things a partisan of the revolution can say and its General Secretary cannot.
The deepest question to put to a Marxist-Leninist text is not how often it invokes the enemy but whether its own weapons can ever be aimed at itself. Kaysone's apparatus is complete and orthodox. The dictatorship of the proletariat is "the key aspect, the fundamental characteristic of any proletarian revolution," and its purpose is stated with precision: "the working class must immediately establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as its chief weapon in crushing any opposition from the exploiting classes that have just been overthrown, and in defeating any attempt to restore the previous system." The aim of the socialist revolution is "to suppress any opposition or attempts to revive the remnants of the reactionary forces." The final and longest section demands that "the Party be the true directing force in the system of dictatorship of the proletariat." Opportunism, in the one place it is defined, marks "the fundamental difference between the consistently revolutionary ideology of the proletariat and the reformist ideology of opportunists of every kind" — an essence attached to no act and refutable by no evidence, the standard construction this series meets across the whole Progress corpus.
The point is what all of this is aimed at, and it is aimed, without exception, outward: at the exploiting classes, the remnants of reaction, the opportunists, the imperialists and their agents. There is a single passage of self-criticism, and it proves the rule. In the last section Kaysone acknowledges "many flaws and defects" in the Party — but every one is managerial. Theoretical work is "still inadequate"; ideological work "has not yet been radically restructured"; "many primary Party organisations are still weak"; Party workers "are often unable to cope." Not once does the critique reach the category itself — the possibility that a one-party dictatorship exercised in the name of an almost non-existent proletariat, in a country with no institutions of workers' democracy, might be not an instrument of the working class but a stratum ruling over it. The book can promise "genuine personal freedom" in the same breath as it announces the suppression of all opposition, and register no contradiction. This is the concrete meaning of the abstraction with which the theoretical section opened. The permanent revolution's insistence that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" without proletarian democracy becomes the rule of a bureaucracy over the workers is not a debating point about 1905; it is the exact description of the state whose foundations this book celebrates, offered thirty years earlier and refused in advance. The reflexive test — can the accusation ever be turned on the accuser's own side — comes back, as it does throughout this series, a flat no. That is the finding, and it is not about a word.
Read as history, Revolution in Laos is a genuine, if self-serving, record of a small nation's long fight for its independence, and the fight deserves the honour Kaysone pays it. Read as theory, it is a clear and unusually candid statement of the doctrine of stages in its Soviet colonial form — candid because, unlike the institute monographs, it is written by the man carrying the doctrine out, who will tell you that in the struggle "we did not emphasise the leading role of the Party, did not talk about socialism," who will name the Vietnamese volunteers and the "special relationship," who will call the camps "seminars" to your face. Its value to a critical reader lies exactly there: it lets you watch the theory this series was founded to contest being applied, in real time, to a real country, by its own author — and then, in the decade that followed, it lets you watch that theory's central promise fail, the announced leap to socialism ending in the New Economic Mechanism and the return of the market, exactly as the tradition of permanent revolution had warned it must. The Fourth International's answer was on the presses in the same year, and it was not the imperialist's answer. It credited the land reform and the expropriations, defended Laos against Washington and Bangkok, and still insisted that a revolution led by a Stalinist party in perfect step with Hanoi and Moscow, garrisoned by foreign troops, silent about its own refugees and its own camps, was a deformed thing that the working people of Laos had yet to make their own. Between that judgment and this book's, the reader now has both texts, and can decide.