The death of Marxist scholar-activist Malcolm Caldwell on December 23, 1978 in Cambodia (Kampuchea) is a shocking event, not only because he was deliberately murdered as the best-known friend of the Cambodian revolution, but also because it occurred in the context of a war between the two countries of Indochina, which had triumphed over the most vicious attacks of American imperialism. Caldwell is the author of several books, including "Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War" and, most recently, "The Wealth of Some Nations" on Third World underdevelopment.  He edited "Ten Years of Military Terror in Indonesia" at the request of the Indonesian Communist Party and was editor of the Journal of Contemporary Asia, which publishes articles and documents from liberation movements in Asia. He was not just a writer, but gave generously of his time and energy in speaking engagements and other fundraising tours to fight imperialism in Asia and the growing racist and fascist movements in Britain itself. Before his death, Malcolm had written a series of articles, no doubt in preparation for a book, on Kampuchea since liberation. He believed that the Kampuchean Revolution was "the most maligned revolution in the world. He argued that because the country had been kept so backward by the processes of colonialism, so "isolated" from any benefits of modernization, so idealized by Westerners as a kind of untouched land of Buddhist tranquility and the fairyland of Angkor Wat, the very speed and thoroughness and overwhelming popular support of the revolution, when it came, was a worse shock than even the defeat in Vietnam.
 

Imperialism and the Shaping of the Kampuchean Revolution

Perhaps, then, a truly fitting tribute to Malcolm Caldwell would be a close look at the evolution of the Kampuchean revolution and the forces that shaped it. While the imperialist-originated narrative of the revolution as the most barbaric, extreme and despotic regime in history has no basis in fact, it is important to understand why such stories could be spread and believed. French imperialism raped and exploited the Indochinese countryside, turning countries like Vietnam and Cambodia into exporters of rice and corn to Europe while their peasants starved (two million Vietnamese peasants died of famine during World War II) and while cities like Saigon and Phnom Penh flourished as centers of parasitic bureaucrats and merchants who lived in their luxurious villas to the end. The Cambodian peasants called Phnom Penh "the great prostitute of the Mekong" where the situation was even more extreme than in Vietnam because the country was kept under "indirect rule" (by puppet princes) and no industry of any kind had developed. American imperialism deliberately intensified the parasitic and cancerous growth of the cities. The Americans had recognized early the truth of the proverb: "The guerrilla lives among the people as a fish lives in water.  The "solution," of course, is to drain the water, and this - i.e., the removal of the people from their land - is what counterrevolutionary warfare has been about from the beginning. The most "normal" form, of course, is the familiar "relocated" or "protected" village, where people are taken from their homes and put behind barbed wire in a new environment where the guerrillas cannot reach them; whether it is Kenya and the "Mau Mau" or Malaysia or Algeria, the story is much the same. In Indochina, however, the American government took a further step: a deliberate attempt to bomb the people out of the countryside and into the cities. A total of seven million tons of U.S. and allied air munitions were used in Indochina, compared to a total of two million tons used during the entire Second World War; an additional seven million tons of ground munitions were also used.
 

The Impact of War and the Reshaping of Kampuchean Society

An estimated 26 million craters were created by the bombing, and 20 percent of Indochina's land surface is said to have been contaminated by missile fragments. In Cambodia itself, between March and August 1973, 50 percent more American bombs were dropped than on Japan during World War II, even though Japan is twice the size of Cambodia. The effect was to swell already overgrown cities, and by the end of the war South Vietnam's urban population had grown to 40 percent of the total, while in Cambodia the single city of Phnom Penh grew from 700,000 to three million. People in the cities generally could not find productive work, but lived instead in service and parasitic occupations (including prostitution, which was said to have employed 400,000 women in Saigon by the end of the war, equivalent to the city's prewar population) financed by American lollars. And they were fed not by their own agriculture, devastated by imperialism and war, but by imports of American rice under the ironically named PL-480 "Food for Peace" program. The entire social structure of these countries was thus distorted, and the withdrawal of American money and rice necessarily meant a serious, if temporary, crisis -- resulting in some decline in living standards and the need for some rural resettlement.  In Vietnam, which had some industrial base and infrastructure and a socialist economy in the north, the process could be gradual. Even so, thousands of frustrated city dwellers - who had had no experience of rural life for 15 years and were unwilling to try, and who had been given the mirage of America as a land of unlimited wealth - fled in confusion from the new hardships of socialism, becoming the so-called "boat people". The situation in Cambodia was worse. Phnom Penh, with three million of the country's seven million people, had, according to U.S. AID officials, only a six-day supply of rice at the time of liberation and U.S. departure. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Kampuchean communists chose to evacuate the parasitic city, the "great whore," and bring its population to the food rather than the other way around, and, more importantly, to give them the only productive work available in the current state of the country, that of food production. The evacuation of Phnom Penh and the establishment of agricultural communes whose exchange was based on a barter system (there was little indigenous banking infrastructure), led to accusations of "massacres," purges, forced labor, and a general portrayal of the regime as some kind of incredibly primitive combination of Asian despotism and Orwell's totalitarian nightmare.  Such an image has almost no basis in reality. The massacre stories were concocted: the last journalists and priests to leave the country reported that they "witnessed no atrocities. There were unverified Thai pictures of armed soldiers guarding peasants (Thailand was the most anti-Communist country in the region at the time), which were used to prove "atrocities".
 

Revolutionary Strategy and the Pursuit of Self-Reliance

A Vietnamese refugee who crossed the country for three months in 1976, speaking the language and working for food in various villages, heard no stories of atrocities until he reached Thailand.  It is somewhat tedious to continue to refute unsubstantiated evidence, especially when such stories are themselves published in widely circulated dailies after they have been refuted. The main point is that while there was undoubtedly some "force" used in the evacuation of Phnom Penh, this consisted mainly of telling the population that the alternative was to starve in an empty city. Perhaps the greatest "atrocity" of the Kampuchean revolution was that the middle and upper-middle classes of the big city were forced to live and work like the peasants of their own countryside. But the evacuation of Phnom Penh was not just an ad hoc response to an objective necessity. It was also a revolutionary strategy. As Malcolm Caldwell argued, "The leaders of the Cambodian revolution had developed both short-term tactics and a long-term socio-economic strategy based on a sound analysis of the realities of the country's society and economy in the years leading up to liberation. ... and the course chosen is a sound one, whether one judges it in terms of its domestic appropriateness or in terms of its reading of the future of the international economy. This means that there was a deliberate rejection of an alternative strategy, which might have been to stay in Phnom Penh, accept the massive imports of food aid from Russia or China that this would have necessitated, maintain a commercial economy, and maintain their country's ties to the international market. Instead, Kampuchea's leaders opted for peasant-based self-reliance, an "autarkic" development strategy that involved a temporary but complete from the rest of the world. There is more to say about this. market, an intensive effort to build up, as far as I know, Malcolm had agriculture in coordination with the industries that served it, and only after its base was well established to slowly expand its attempts to industrialize and rebuild its world trade links.6 "Our goal is to turn our country into a modern agricultural and industrial nation," said Deputy Prime Minister Leng Sary in a 1975 UN speech.
 

Peasant-Scholar Leadership and the Vision for Self-Sufficiency

Like everyone else-but Kampuchea's revolutionary leaders were convinced that this meant relying on and rebuilding the country's devastated agriculture rather than relying on faster, more glamorous aid and "development" projects. This leadership was an odd combination of peasant and scholar (there was almost no real working class in the country). Many, most of them of peasant background themselves - had degrees from Paris, like the current president, Khieu Samphan, who had a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the Sorbonne and worked with other Marxist scholars there at the time, like Samir Amin. The conclusion of their youthful Marxist scholarship was that premature integration into an international economy would only perpetuate the mechanisms of underdevelopment: a theoretical expression of the raw experience of the Cambodian peasant who saw his rice and labor drain from the countryside to the city and from Asia to Europe. Beginning in 1971, the Khmer Rouge began organizing peasants in liberated areas to build intensive irrigation systems that eventually doubled their output. At the time of his death, Sihanouk had little to say publicly about the growing conflict between Kampuchea and Vietnam.  
 

Malcolm Caldwell’s Silence and the Uncertain Future of Indochinese Revolutions

Like most Western anti-imperialists, he was incredibly pained by developments in Indochina and felt that public condemnation of any country was out of place. Indeed, his mood was to focus more on developments in Britain: the growing anti-racist struggle and his favorite cause, Scottish nationalism.  But it is hard to see how he could have avoided saying something about the role of Vietnam: a popular and ultimately rational revolutionary regime does not crumble in the face of mass insurrection, even if it is driven back into the jungle by superior firepower. In the end, Malcolm went to Southeast Asia and his voice was silenced.  And more than ever, huge question marks hang over the future of the revolutions not only in Kampuchea, but also in Vietnam and Laos.