Interview with a member of the CPT central committee
Question. What is the importance of the documents of the IVth Congress of the CPT, both for the organisation and for the Thai revolutionary movement?
Answer. These documents express the conclusions reached by our conprogressive line. Above all what we want in making them known is to submit them to discussion and to the test of experience. We are publishing them so that people can study the conclusions we have arrived at and judge for themselves about the evolution of our party.
For example, we hope that everyone - whether Thai or not - will be able to discuss them in the light of their own experience and in a way that will shed some light on the correctness or the errors of the documents. It is possible that a reading of the documents will lead to miscomprehensions or disagreements, which will then spark off a discussion.
these documents, not published officially in English until now?
After the 1982 congress, we immediately study. They were sent to party cadres and distributed in the jungle camps explained and to educate the weren't able to prepare a good English translation.
have been difficult period. We lost a lot of our abroad who could help us
More generally, with the leaving of too many activists and the arrests, our work has been disorganised. We have had big financial problems. A number of our members have had to deal with urgent tasks first of all: finding work in the towns and adapting to changes the situation in the countryside, where the army has been particularly active militarily as well as politically with the amnesty programme democratic promises.
At that time many activists were opposed to keeping too many forces in the jungle camps. They therefore decided to leave the jungle and return 16 to the towns, or sometimes to their
But the social implantation of our members was too weak, and this made it very difficult for these militants who were returning to legal existence. In a hurry to find work or to restart their studies that were interrupted after the coup d'etat assailed by multiple practical difficulties, many members CPT. They left with the idea that they would contact the party again problems of social and reintegration the period following the IVth Congress, we therefore had a thousand problems to resolve, such as the weakorganization, organizing our apparatus, on. There was quite a lot of confusion and a number of militants were paralyzed, incapable of
Having pinned great hopes on the Ith Congress, able to see the results coming, many o sympathisers were discouraged.
However, two or three years after the congress, the positive results are being seen. A substantial recovery is apparent. It is very important. You could say, taking account of the crisis we have been through, that the conclusions of the IVth Congress have been put to their first practical test during some very difficult years. It has been a positive test. In fact, I think that if these conclusions had been wrong, we would not have been
Can you be more precise about the progress registered during this time?
Three years after the Congress, we reorganized the basis of our urban and rural work. Organizations that had become useless were dissolved. New ones, better adapted to the situation, were developed. In general, you could say that the engine has begun to function again after having been seized up. A number of left the party have contacted us again.
Concerning publications, we now have a monthly review, Thong Tai
THAI
Gult of Thailand
("The Flag of Liberty"), aimed at everyone. It is printed centrally, with a print run of at least 500 copies, with more reproduced by local groups. About every two months we publish Pragai Fai ("The Spark"). Lastly, we have begun to publish the bulletin Thai Democratic Solidarity, in English, so as to ensure a regular flow of and to help with solidarity. We reckon on publishing Thai Democratic Solidarity three or four times a year. The first issue appeared at the beginning of this and the second will be out What is the present situation of the mass movement? has to be emphasized that the experi-
After the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973, there was a proliferation of free newspapers. The elections themselves, whether local or national, became occasions for educating the people. Election times became times for mass educa-
Similarly, the experience of the struggle that followed the bloody coup d'etat in 1976 has not disappeared. The people's general level consciousness is clearly much higher than was the case ten years
This level of popular consciousness can rise progressively, day after day. It is up to us to show we are capable of responding to the needs of the situa tion. New possibilities for action exist. But we face an important problem in that the mass movement remains fragmented. It is divided around multiple specific objectives. In the
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Andaman Ser
absence of big central objectives, there is no spontaneous dynamic of unification of the mass movement, of unity in action. We hope that the day will soon come when there will be a new possibility to launch such a unitary dynamic around common objectives of struggle.
Q. What are your international politics now? And what do you expect from international solidarity and from the contact you can establish with other movements?
A. On our international politics, I would refer you to the relevant points of our political resolution from the IVth Congress. Concerning international solidarity, we are now opening our party to an exchange of views with others. We hope to be able to develop relations of mutual solidarity. We want to have exchanges of opinion and, I stress, of experiences. Every party, every progressive group and every mass movement has its own experience. They deserve to be studied. We must study the lessons of history.
Internationalism is inscribed in the statutes of our party. We have fundamentally internationalist politics towards other communist parties and other Marxist and Leninist movements. And we also want to make close links with all the solidarity groups. •
DOCUMENT overall growth of capitalism. At the same time feudalism still persists. II. Basic contradictions, the stages and patterns of the revolution, the targets, forces, duties and path of the revolution. A. Basic contradictions:
1. The contradiction between imperialism and the Thai nation.
2. The contradiction between the comprador bureaucrat capitalism and feudalism on the one hand, and the Thai people on the other. B. Stages and patterns of the revolution:
The present stage of the revolution is a national democratic revolution. The pattern of the revolution