Communist Party of Thailand seemed to be in a position for the first time in its history to seriously undertake a struggle for power.
But, subsequently, the CPT and all the progressive forces in the country have gone into a crisis, which has been growing more acute year by year and more and more difficult to overcome.
This crisis was fostered by the turnabout in the regional situation that occurred in 1978-79, when the tensions between the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Chinese regimes worsened to the point of leading to open military conflicts.
But, more fundamentally, it reflects the impasse which the policy followed by the CPT leadership led the Thai revolutionary forces.
Paul PETITJEAN
When the fall of the military dictatorship opened up a period of semi-democracy in 1973, the Communist Party of
Thailand was still in a very marginal position in the country. But it was the only force able to make rapid gains from the explosion of mass struggles that followed the student and popular uprising in Bang-
The other progressive formations were too weak, too new or too disorganized to offer a significant alternative to the CPT.
When a new dictatorship was installed in
1976, following a bloody coup d'etat, the CPT was the only party that had redoubts in the countryside and guerrilla forces that could offer a basis for organizing armed resistance.
It was at that time that the CPT really consolidated itself as the backbone of a dynamic revolutionary left.
students, peasants and although in smaller flocked to the CPT's base in the jungle.
In 1977, the Coordinating Committee of Patriotic and Democratic Forces was
This reflected the adherence to the armed struggle of trade-union, student and peasant leaders, well-known inorganizations such as the Socialist Party of Thailand.
guerrilla forces
According to the governfigures, they soldiers (perhaps
14,000). According to the CPT's figures they numbered 20,000.
However, during the next four years, the CPT was undermined by violent disa veritable draining away of its membership. It lost the bulk of its major guerrilla bases, including a
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
In particular, this upsurge number of those that had already been established before 1973.
The Coordinating Committee faded out of existence, and the main leaders who had adhered to the armed struggle in 1975-76 either returned to Bangkok or left the country. and see Dorell and Chai-anan,
Thailand, Roots of Conflict, Spokeslanae. Editions Karthala, Paris, 1983. This book has L'Enjeu thailandais by Sylvia and Jean Cattori,
The CPT leadership succeeded in winning the new generations of activists. But it then proved unable to resolve the difficulties that inevitably accompanied the eruption of the Sino-Indochinese conflicts or those created by the rapid evolution of the situation in Thailand itself. To the contrary, the party leadership demonstrated a fatal dependence on Peking, political ossification and apparatus
The consequences of this failure on the part of the CPT have been grave. The mass movement has been disorganized and often disarmed. In turn, this has had its adverse effects on the social struggles. A generation of activists remains disoriented, and, to a large extent, demobilized.
The political initiative has fallen back into the hands of the royal family, the army and the big bourgeois parties. progressive forces have been paralyzed, since no revolutionary formation today is able to offer a concrete alternative to the CPT, which itself is divided, greatly weakened and on the defensive. (2)
It is still difficult to retrace the history of the CPT. But it is possible to identify a certain number of major problems that make it possible to get a better idea of the nature of the crisis the CPT has been going through and the reasons for its present setback. These problems remain central to the attempts at reorientation underway in the Thai left. (3)
Since the beginning of the 1960s, when the pro-Maoist faction gained the majority in the CPT leadership, the party's strategy has been based on a slow buildup of military forces, spreading from the periphery of the country (generally mountainous areas not served by roads) toward more populated areas and the cen-
This strategic conception is expres sed in the following key formula:
see "L'evolution des partis communistes thai et philippins," Paul Petitjean, Inprecor (French edition) No 84, September 11, 1980; and No 85, September 25, 1980. Since that time, the CPT crisis has grown considerably worse. All the figures who remained witi the CPT whose names were cited in these articles, such as Seksan Prasertkul and Thirayuth Boonimie, have now broken with it. An abundant documentation of the evolution of the Thai left up to the eve of the Fourth Congress of the CPT can be found in the Bulletin thai d'information, c/o Thibeaut, 9 rue du Dauphine, 93600 Aulnay-sous-Bois, France. 3. One of the main problems had to do with the regional context, the CPT's policy toward the Sino-Indochinese conflict, and the nature of its ties to Peking. This important question cannot be dealt with here. In this regard, see the two articles previously cited published in Inprecor in September 1980.
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THAILAND
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See also "After the October Days: Ambiguous Situation," Inprecor (English edi- tion), March 13, 1975, "Growing Class Polari- No 38, November 20, 1975. "Thailand's Military Coup: anol November 25, On the beginnings of the crisis of the Thai
jungle leads the villages, the countryside encircles the cities."
was formally founded in 1942 (the first communist organizations date back to the 1930s but they were destroyed by the repression). During the resistance to the Japanese occupation, the pariy gained a certain military experience, especially in the southern part of the country.
several years during the second world war, the CPT tried to pursue a course of political mass action, mainly in the urban centers. The hardening up of a dictatorial military regime at the end of the 1950s convinced a number of activists of the need to retreat into forest areas far from the centers, where the surveillance of the state apparatus was and to build up a basis there for this reorganization of the CPT was not accomplished without difficulty and internal conflicts. guerrilla nuclei did not go into action before 1965, when they came under the pressure of government forces that had had the time to prepare to deal with them.
From 1965 to 1973, the guerrilla struggle of the People's Liberation Army of Thailand (PLAT) showed a slow but steady growth in the northeast and north, along the Cambodian, Laotian and, later, Burmese borders and in the south. the Muslim far south, various groups of the Communist Party of Malaysia established bases on the Thai side of the fron-
Before 1973, thus, the development of the PCT was slow, even though it got major aid from outside the country. The Thai regime was not in an open crisis, since the US was unsparing in its aid. And no other party was doing better than the CPT, far from it. The orientation adopted by the party leadership, therefore, could seem all the more correct when in 1973, although it was in fact almost unknown, this leadership enjoyed considerable prestige and moral authority in the eyes of the young generations of activists. Very few of these young people had any previous political education and very few made any critical assessment of the CPT's "maoism." The missed opportunities of the urban upsurge
The Communist Party's audience and openings expanded abruptly with the fall of the military dictatorship in 1973 and the increasing economic and democratic struggles. But it was then that the limitations of the CPT's organization and orientation were revealed.
The CPT's traditional apparatus had given priority to military activity. But from 1973 to 1976, the stage was dominated by big social and political mass mobilizations. While this was happening, the party was besieging remote country areas and neglecting Bangkok, the capital.
But it was in Bangkok that the October 1973 insurrection toppled the dictatorship. It was in Bangkok that the 22 movement of university and high-school students was centered. It was in Bangkok and its suburbs that the backbone of the trade-union movement was being built up. It was to Bangkok that peasant delegations were coming from all over the country to demand application and extension of the agrarian reform laws.
It was also in the capital that the success of the October 1976 coup was decided and where, since then, a number of political battles have been waged that have dominated the political life of the country as a whole.
The reason that the central apparatus of the CPT was ready to neglect Bangkok during these crucial years was because it based its strategy exclusively on a steady buildup of its military forces, while it rejected urban guerrilla actions. Obviously, the party had networks operating in the capital. But the focus of their orientation was elsewhere. They worked to support the guerrillas, facilitate national contacts and assure the circulation of in-
In 1973, there was no longer a political leadership for the capital itself (sup posedly for security reasons). more, it did not have the status of an autonomous region in the CPT. network that the party had in Bangkok was directly linked to the national leadership, or to a rural guerrilla zone, whose leadership had authority over the activists working in the capital.
Nonetheless, CPT members were active in many struggles in Bangkok as well as in the provinces. Some networks took it on themselves to intervene more systematically in the mass movements. But it was impossible to mobilize all urban members to assure the success of a campaign or an initiative. Cambodian refugees in Thailand (DR)
The national leadership remained largely ignorant of the real situation in the capital, since it was not on the spot. As a national organization, the CPT remained generally out of the picture, unable to propose concrete orientations for struggle and work, while the regime was regaining the initiative and the young generations were facing more and more complex and difficult tests.
"Where's the party?" the student and union movement cadres often asked anxiously in 1974-75. The inflexibility of the jungle apparatus
The October 1976 coup put an end to the semi-democratic period and temporarily opened up the way for an extremely repressive regime. For the CPT leadership this was, in a way, a "return to normality," as it had predicted would happen. The stress put in the preceding years on maintaining and consolidating the guerrilla zones now seemed fully justified.
Activists and sympathizers abandoned the "white areas" (that is, those controlled militarily by the government) to seek refuge with the CPT, to avenge the hundreds of students massacred at the time of the coup d'etat and all the peasants and trade unionists who had been struck
Nonetheless, the CPT's rural and militarist orientation had disastrous results. The royal family, the army and the far-right groups were able to maneuver more freely to prepare the way for the coup d'etat, setting up more and more provocations and traps. Lacking a national political leadership, the movement that arose in 1973 could not avoid divisions and costly errors.
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
activity may make it possible for the practice was conclusive. But it did not
The movement was unable to hold the political initiative. Likewise, it was unable to systematically build up ahead of time the basis for maintaining networks of activists in the "white" urban and rural zones that could provide an underground support structure for the mass movement
When the exodus to the guerrilla zones took place, too few activists and cadres were willing or able to stay in the urban areas to assure the continuity of political work. The mass movement, in particular the unions, is still suffering from the effects of this exodus.
Finally, the CPT's traditional apparatus remained untouched by the extraordinary experience of the social struggles in the period 1973-1976. But it was on the basis of this experience that the new generations of activists joined the People's Army and the party. It was on the basis of this experience, moreover, necessary strategic reorientations could
There could not in fact be any simple "back to business as usual," that is, continuing the party's previous orientations. The period 1973-1976 was not a mere "interlude" between two military dicta-
The upsurge of mass mobilizations for economic and democratic demands marked the country's entry into a new historical stage, the era of modern
The whole society was
In order to adjust to these changes, the Communist Party had itself to modify its line, its internal functioning, its outlook and its bases of support. It could only do this by going through the experience and analyzing it. The mass influx into the party of new generations of activists coming precisely out of this new reality offered the CPT a unique opportunity to do this. But the party's central apparatus seems never to have been willing or able to understand even that the problem existed.
which become the CPT's organizational and political center of gravity.
The fact that the bulk of members of the party and the People's Army lived in jungle encampments was a physical reality that reflected a lot more in this case than a certain political orientation. It represented a distinct form of insertion into the traditional society, a very special form of struggle. It was also a physical reality that shaped a mode of functioning and a political rigidity that it was very difficult to break out of.
"The jungle leads the villages" was an orientation that was in fact followed in practice and for a period enabled the guerrilla struggle to grow. In the mid1970s, the CPT and the PLAT already had several thousand members and mass support in the northeast and in the south (in the north, they were allied with the highland tribes).
But the CPT and the PLAT assumed the role much more of a people's protection force than of a revolutionary one. They generally intervened to protect the village or the tribe against an external enemy (the government army, a corrupt functionary, gang leaders, "protection" racketeers and pirates in the Gulf of Thailand area, and to provide services not offered by the central state (medical service or education for tribal children who were sent to schools in China). But they intervened only very rarely to change the social relations themselves. Revolutionists entrapped in local framework
In providing armed protection, the CPT attacked particularly grave aspects of oppression, and it is symptomatic that the Communist Party scored its main successes in areas where the state had alienated the population (the tribes; the Thai-Lao of the disinherited northeast; the south, which was relatively prosperous but subjected to harsh arbitrary rule by the central administration). It did not achieve such gains in the areas where the market economy was producing the most advanced social transformations the central plain and especially the provinces surrounding Bangkok).
This context points up the extraordinary poverty of the CPT's agrarian program, which reflected no analysis of the varied structures of Thai rural society and gave no detailed list of demands. The testimony of activists The testimony of activists from various guerrilla zones coincides on the fact that in most cases the CPT and the PLAT gained a mass base not through economic struggles but by supporting the villagers against external threats (attempts to make the population move to make way for dams, attempts to evict people occupying government forests, extortion by some "godfather," exactions by the army).
It is obviously normal for a revolutionary organization to provide such protection when it can. However, in the absence of any other form of intervention on the national scale, while such guerrilla zones to make slow headway in the regions where conditions are favorable, it cannot give impetus to social and political struggles throughout the country.
The CPT owed its local or regional successes to its ability to fit itself into the traditional mechanisms of Thai society. This included flight into the jungle as a means of resisting the central government and winning gratitude by offering protection or other services (such as medical aid) that could induce a village to support the guerrillas by giving them food or information or by sending youths to their jungle camps.
However, this form of action proved particularly inadequate when social struggles developed on the national level. In 1974-1975, the peasantry in the north around such questions as the price of rice.
Mass organizations formed, such as the Thailand Peasants Federation (students in the city of Chiang Mai and CPT members helped build this organization). Struggles were organized to force the adoption and implementation of laws. Contacts developed between the student movement, peasants associations and trade unions. In the wake of October 1973, a democratic education program was pursued.
What was needed to respond to all these crucial developments was a national program built around demands, a concrete perspective for ex-
The CPT, the party tation. the jungle camps. young party activists, with the benefit of the experience that had been accumulated in 1974-75, decided to establish themselves right in the villages rather than in the jungle. The test in
23
induce the party apparatus to change its and the Red Khmer, Vientiane and Hanoi abruptly drove the CPT out of its sanc- as well.
general orientation.
It seems that in some cases local or regional leaderships organized mass intervention with greater flexibility, notably in the Phuphan region in North Isan, the northeastern region where the ThaiLao live. But, overall, the CPT remained a jungle party.
More disastrous than the CPT's underestimation of the importance of work in the cities was the effect of its traditional method of building its base in the periphery of modern Thailand. Given the rigidity of the party leadership, this mode of functioning kept the CPT from developing consistent mass work in either the "pink" (militarily disputed) areas or the "white" areas.
If this underlying problem only came
First of all, the Coordinating Committee of Patriotic and Democratic Forces lost all its substance. It had never given rise to real united-front structures. Most of its members were gathered in a camp in Laos tightly controlled by the CPT, isolated from the movement and from the struggles.
After the CPT's break with Vientiane, some members of the Coordinating Committee remained in Laos, others went to Kunming in China and some returned to Thailand.
But, in any case, the CPT never accorded any real political role to the parties and personalities in the Committee. The setting up of this body did not go
Today a lot of former cadres are leaving
In the wake of the Fourth Congress, the CPT's structures in several regions in fact collapsed. This congress, which was held in 1982 in the form of three more or less simultaneous regional assemblies linked by morse code messages to
Kunming, offered the last chance for stemming the crisis. Opposing regional blocs confronted each other, and the theses of the "reform" currents won out by a narrow margin.
Struggle to reorient the party
The "reformers" proposed an orientation giving a greater importance to intervention in the cities and to political work. They advocated a "mass line,"
calling for a more independent internato the fore recently, that is because before 1973 the CPT operated only in peripheral regions, even though some of these areas, such as the northeast and to do. south, were rather densely populated. Moreover, for various historical reasons (4), the Kingdom of Thailand had not yet been shaken by a general political and social crisis.
Oppression and exploitation obviously existed, and even poverty. But the crisis in social relations in agriculture began to manifest itself only belatedly. The emergence of a nationwide interaction of urban and rural struggles was also a late development. This lag has now been overcome, and that is why the years 1973-1976 represent such an important turning point in the history of the country and of the revolutionary movement.
The CPT had to transform itself in order to be able to meet the needs of the new period. But the influence of Peking on the one hand (5) and the party's structure on the other made such a transfomation particularly difficult.
The CPT's crisis started to become evident in 1979, when it lost the bases that it had set up in Laos. In reprisal for the party's aligning itself de facto with Peking
CHINA CHIENGMA 24 any further than a propaganda operation. It remained a head without a body, and the nonparty members had no real work
As its members resigned one after the other, the Coordinating Committee
On top of the difficulties the CPT had in intervening in the cities and in doing mass work, it faced problems in its international alignments and in its practice of the united-front policy. There was, moreover, a problem of internal democracy. The CPT never managed to organize a significant discussion on a national or interregional level.
For a long time, the central leadership was content to repeat nostrums about students who could not bear the burdens of guerrilla life and to strike a strong, silent pose in the face of more and more pressing questions raised by rank-and-file activists and intermediate-level cadres.
Isolated in the jungle camps, most of the former students were unable either to start up a real discussion or even to develop roots of their own. They left in greater and greater numbers, along with peasants and workers. The great majority of those who joined the CPT in 19751976 have now gone their own way.
tional policy. The fact that the reformers' views got a formal majority shows that opening up a democratic discussion in time and holding a representative congress could have limited the effects of the crisis and led to major reorientations.
However, the documents presented to the congress have never been published, and the dominant faction has maintained its control of the central apparatus. Badly prepared, bureaucratically manipulated, aborted, the Fourth Congress opened up a new phase in the party's crisis. After being shoved to the sidelines in the leadership, the great majority of the reformers (notably in North Isan) have broken with the CPT.
Moreover, the Thai regime has been actively playing on the CPT's internal contradictions, offering an amnesty to party members while keeping "returnees from the jungle" under surveillance.
The government army has been able to take bases that had long remained impregnable, and the PuAl is holding up the best today in the southern part of the country. In the cities, the army factions are taking advantage of the paralysis of the left forces to penetrate deeper into the unions.
It will take a considerable time for the Thai left to recover from the crisis of the CPT. In the absence of a solid mass base in the cities, activists "returned from the jungle" have had to concentrate on surviving and finding work. The demoralization will not be easy to overcome either. But while the mass movement remains disoriented, its back has not been broken. It will not be long before the movement revives and offers revolutionary forces a new opportunity to build a base. 4. Among these factors, the following should be noted: the fact that the country was never a direct colony and that the authority of the royal family has never been broken; the fact that for a long time the proletariat was made up of Chinese immigrant workers cut off from the peasantry; the fact that up to the end of the 1960s, virgin lands were still available, which offered the peasants an escape from intoler able conditions; the fact that Western capital did not penetrate into agriculture until late and the development big landholding (with the exception of the royal family) remained limited.
Peking did not want a stronger revolutionary struggle in Thailand.
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984