Matthew Galway - Experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia

Brantly Womack

The basic revolutionary question What is to be done? excites an intellectual dialectic of virtually infinite dimensions. Most immediately, there is the tension between the desired revolutionary directionwhat should be doneand the circumstances of the moment: what can be done. Each of these poles is a nest of further contradictions. What should be done is a commitment to transformation, sometimes at mortal risk to oneself, and usually shaping the activists future. Ones conviction of both the necessity of transformation and its possibility must be absolute. The critique of the present is founded on the absolute and universal validity of ideology. But an ideology is not a simple moment of enlightenment. There are various texts, various teachers and various revolutionary experiences elsewhere. What to believe absolutely? Whose teaching or example should be followed? But these questions do not address the current practical problem the activist faces of what can be done now. Do we wait for the proper moment? Do we join with other critics even though their ideas are different? Do we compromise with incumbent forces? How should we organise? To some extent the theories, teachers and examples suggest answers, but they are often conflicting, and never dealing with this place, this point in time. Compared with Mao Zedong or H Ch Minh, Hamlet had it easy.

Trying to understand the thinking and actions of revolutionaries is important because they stand at the forward edge of what was imagined to be possible in their societies in their times. Regardless of whether they succeeded, they marked a limit of imagined possibilities. As the editors point out in the Introduction, at the time most of the close interest of outsiders (other than fellow revolutionaries) was in defending the existing orderto know their enemy to defeat it. But from a greater historical distance it is important to get inside the minds and organisations of the revolutionaries to grasp a vital part of the vivid present of their societies. How urgent did its problems seem? Which thinkers were attractive, and why? How did they view their interactions with other groups, and with international revolutionaries? In what respects were they original in their adaptations of general theories? Could they make the claim Mao made, that their thoughts were the creative application of Marxism-Leninism to the circumstances of their societies? Did they make that claim?