"Kampuchea: The Revolution Rescued" (1986 book, PDF)

[Ismail]

https://archive.org/details/KampucheaTheRevolutionRescued

The author (Irwin Silber) condemns Pol Pot's regime, points out the anti-Marxist views of the Khmer Rouge, and discusses/defends the Vietnamese intervention and the People's Republic of Kampuchea.

There's very little online about Cambodia in the 1980s, so yeah. Credit goes to another person for sending it to me so I could scan it.

[Teacher]

I have a couple of books by this guy. One of them is a really anti-communist book written shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Haven't gotten around to reading any of them yet.

[Ismail]

I have a couple of books by this guy. One of them is a really anti-communist book written shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Haven't gotten around to reading any of them yet.I think he was similar to Albert Szymanski, Harry Haywood and a bunch of others who looked to China until Mao's "Three Worlds Theory" ushered in a period of collaboration between US imperialism and Chinese social-imperialism against the USSR. They reacted by declaring that China and Albania were "wrong" to characterize the USSR as state-capitalist and social-imperialist* and instead began to defend the USSR.

Many of these pro-Soviet ex-Maoists looked pretty silly in the late 80s defending Gorbachev and his ostensible program to "revitalize and democratize socialism." When the USSR collapsed Silber and Co. reacted to the "crisis of communism" by becoming social-democrats. That being said I still think this is a generally good book, even if in defending Vietnam and Cambodia against Pol Pot and China he puts this in a wider context of the "necessity" of defending Soviet revisionist "socialism" and its aggressive ("internationalist") policies abroad in Afghanistan, etc.

* The fact that Dengist China actually abandoned these analyses of the USSR from circa 1982 onwards and began a partial reconciliation with the Soviet revisionists was overlooked.

[Stephen]

Marxist academic Margaret Slocomb wrote a Gramscian study of the PRK about eleven or twelve years ago called The People's Republic of Kampuchea, 1979-1989: The Revolution after Pol Pot.

There is also Michael Vickery's Kampuchea, Politics, Economics and Society, written in 1986. It's available to read online at his own site (I can't post links at present). I'm sure at least some of you will be aware of Marxist Vickery's study of Democratic Kampuchea and its aftermath, Cambodia, 1975-82, with its interesting but untenable 'peasant revolution' position.