The Genesis of Red Brotherhood at War

Kelvin Rowley1

Abstract

The paper traces Grant Evans’ intellectual development from university times to his early
academic writings presented as a pre-history of the book Red Brotherhood at War (1984).
It situates this development in the historical circumstances of Australia between 1968
and the early 1980s, which were dominated by the Vietnam War and struggles between
various leftist factions. The core of the argument concerns Grant Evans’ reflexive attitude
to dominant intellectual trends and his early critical attitude towards the totalitarian
tendencies in countries that called themselves socialist at the time.

Introduction

I first met Grant Evans in 1969. We both came from farming backgrounds, came
to Melbourne to attend university, lived in the student quarter near Melbourne
University, and moved in the same social circles. We soon became good friends.
Over the f 2ollowing years, we engaged in constant discussion. There’s a lot that
could be said about Grant’s personal qualities – his generosity, good humor and other
qualities. I will not go into that here. Our discussions ranged freely over a myriad of
topics, from pop music to astronomy. Most of these issues I will ignore.
What I will do here is to recall how our views on issues relevant to the writing of
Red Brotherhood at War evolved. This is a retrospective summing up which brings
coherence to discussions that were actually rambling and often confused. It ignores the
diversions and sidetracks we explored from time to time, and does not attempt to give a
full picture of the range of Grant’s interests. This article simply tries to draw together the
threads of what Grant and I discussed which led to Red Brotherhood at War.
I had begun a science degree at Melbourne University in 1966, but soon became
more interested in politics and history. In 1969, I was doing night school to qualify for
entry into an Arts course. Grant was majoring in English literature at La Trobe University,
and completed that course. However, he became increasingly unhappy with discussions
of Leavisite literary criticism.
This was a time of political and cultural ferment. The conservative hegemony in
Australian politics forged by Robert Menzies in the early 1950s was unraveling. Social
and sexual taboos were being swept away with the rise of the “counter-culture” of sex,
drugs and rock’n’roll. A New Left emerged in the US, stressing empowerment of the
powerless, human rights, and participatory democracy. The War in Vietnam provoked
widespread protests and criticism of US foreign policy. China was swept up in Mao’s
Cultural Revolution. In 1968, the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia to put an end to
the “Prague Spring.”

1
Formerly senior lecturer, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia;
[email protected].

The Journal of Lao Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1, pps 12-23. ISSN : 2159-2152.
Published by the Center for Lao Studies at www.laostudies.org
 Rowley 13

Grant and I were both heavily involved in the student politics of the time,
particularly organizing against the Vietnam War. We found ourselves arguing not only
against defenders of the war, but against others in the anti-war movement. Many Labor
Party supporters were lukewarm in their opposition to the war. On the other hand, the
Maoists, who were numerous at La Trobe University, were sectarian and disruptive.
One of Grant’s Maoist opponents in those days was Ian Macdonald, who later became a
Labor politician in NSW. In the last year of his life, Grant followed with keen interest the
NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption’s investigation into Macdonald’s
activities as Minister for Mining. These led to ICAC recommending Macdonald be
prosecuted for corruptly issuing lucrative mining licenses to his mates (Shanahan 2013).

Marxist beginnings

Grant and I got much of our intellectual stimulus not from formal classroom
discussion, but from debates with fellow students. Marxism was part of the zeitgeist, and
we embraced it. But Marxism came in many different shapes and forms, from
mathematical economics to cultural criticism. There was a lot of interest in philosophers,
especially the “Western Marxists” who tried to create an alternative to Stalinism by
developing a humanist version of Marxism. Grant and I diligently read Marcuse and
wrestled with Hegel’s ideas.
We were initially more attracted to Louis Althusser’s criticism of the Western
Marxist tradition, and to his defense of Marxism as a science. This lasted until he tried to
explain what he meant by science. Then, at least as we saw it, he fell into incoherence and
obscurantism. Neither of us paid much attention as the successors to Western Marxism
and Althusser developed into post-modernism.
Both Grant and I read widely on current events. We were also both keen readers
of the British journal New Left Review and the American Monthly Review. We both also
read widely and eclectically, on mainstream social science. My main focus was more on
economics and Grant’s on sociology. We lapped up the works of C. Wright Mills and Ralph
Miliband, and followed the British Marxist historians, especially Eric Hobsbawm. We
were deeply influenced by Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy (1966; cf. Moore 1965a, b). 3
At La Trobe, Grant worked on the student newspaper. In the early 1970s, with a
group of friends we established a small-circulation magazine, Intervention, with the hope
of stimulating a wider discussion of Marxist analysis of Australian economy, society and
culture. Some of our friends joined the trade union movement, where they tried to apply
ideas of participatory democracy and worker’s control – as a rule, not welcomed by union
oligarchs.
Grant and I also joined the Communist Party of Australia. The CPA had broken
with the Soviet Union over the “Prague Spring” in 1968, and we supported its efforts to
chart an independent course for itself and for Australia. Grant went to Sydney and
worked on the CPA paper Tribune for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I did my Arts degree,
majoring in history and economic history.

3
Barrington Moore, Jr, worked for the OSS (precursor of the CIA) in World War II, then at Harvard University.
14 The Genesis of Red Brotherhood at War

We both left the CPA in the mid-1970s, having concluded that the efforts to reform
the party were not enough to win it a wider base of support. Grant took a position
teaching Sociology at La Trobe University and I took one teaching Politics at Swinburne
Institute of Technology (later Swinburne University of Technology).

Actually existing socialism

This experience helped considerably to sharpen our thinking about “actually-

existing socialism.” Initially, we were heavily influenced by the writings of Isaac
Deutscher. He was sharply critical of Stalin’s dictatorship, but optimistic about the
prospects for reform on the post-Stalin period.
I had read the classic literature of Cold War totalitarian theory before I met Grant.
I thought Friedrich and Brzezinski offered a list of descriptors that did not capture the
dynamics of the regimes to which it applied. They equated communist and fascist
regimes, although their origins, ambitions and consequences were quite different. During
the Cold War, the advocates of totalitarian theory tended to see all communist leaders as
“new Hitlers” and any negotiations with them as “a new Munich.” This was, I thought,
very dangerous.
I do not know if Grant read the classic literature on totalitarianism, but was
certainly familiar with the general concept. We both found Isaac Deutscher’s arguments
on the Stalin and post-Stalin Soviet system more persuasive. 4
However, by 1969 we were beginning to think about the limitation to Deutscher’s
interpretation. His views fitted well with the Khrushchev years, but after Leonid
Brezhnev took over in 1964, democratization halted and even went into reverse, while
the economy slid into stagnation. The suppression of the “Prague Spring” was not only a
violation of Czechoslovakian national sovereignty; it was emblematic of all that was going
wrong with the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era.
Deutscher, we realized, was good on analyzing high politics but weak on
economics. To understand the economics of the Soviet system, we looked to the writings
of Paul Baran, one of the Monthly Review writers, and Maurice Dobb, the leading British
Communist economist, who was a specialist on the Soviet economic system. They set out
the best arguments we could find for the superiority of central planning over the market
in achieving high rates of growth. 5
Both clearly under-estimated the damage done by Stalin’s forced collectivization
and purges. However, by 1969, it was clear that the problems went deeper than that. I
had come across estimates for factor-productivity for the economies of Soviet-bloc
countries,
The figures for the productivity of the capital stock in the USSR were not only
lower than in the west (we knew that the Soviet economy lagged behind the west, so that

4
For the classical theory of totalitarianism, see Carl J. Friedrich and Zbignieew K. Brzezinski (1956). Isaac
Deutscher (1907-67) was expelled from the Polish Communist Party in the early 1930s and moved to Britain
shortly before World War II, where he worked as a journalist (cf. Deutscher 1966 a, b; 1970).
5
Paul A. Baran (1909-1964) was born in Russia, but lived mainly in Germany and France and migrated to the
USA shortly before World War II. He also worked for the OSS during World War II. After the war he taught
economics at Stanford University (cf. Baran/Sweezy 1966). For the career of Maurice Dobb (1900-76) see
Timothy Shenk (2013).
 Rowley 15

was no shock) but it was actually declining. Far from overtaking the west, as Khrushchev
had boasted, by the late 1960s the Soviets were falling further behind.
These figures indicated that the heart of the matter was the efficiency of
investment, i.e., the system of central planning which Baran and Dobb had so praised.
Furthermore, the problem was not unique to the USSR, but could be seen in more
developed countries of the Soviet bloc.
At first, we looked to Ernest Mandel, the Belgian Marxist writer – like Deutscher,
a follower of Trotsky – for a solution. He explained that the planning system in the USSR
was warped by “bureaucratic distortions” which were defended by authoritarian
controls. This could be fixed by democratization, the injection of “worker’s control” into
enterprises and greater freedom into public life - without weakening the overall
mechanism of central planning or the “leading role” of a Leninist party. 6
The old communist Dobb did not accept this. In the 1960s, he took up the case for
reform, for decentralization, as well as democratization. Dobb argued that a highly
centralized system of resource allocation could work reasonably well in a poor country
in the initial stages of economic development. But as development proceeds, the economy
becomes more complex and such a system becomes increasingly dysfunctional. Reform
becomes a necessity.
In 1971, I discovered Alec Nove’s textbook on the Soviet economy, which set out
the problems in detail, and with great clarity. In 1972, his Economic History of the USSR
reinforced the message. The centralized, top-down system of planning was itself the
problem, reinforced by and reinforcing, the one-party system of rule.
The solution inevitably involved an expansion of the role of market mechanisms at the
expense of central planning. This did not lead Grant and me to embrace the neo-liberal
idea of the necessity of privatization. Elsewhere, Nove wrote extensively about how
public enterprises could be run efficiently and accountably by salaried managers. This
could be achieved without subordinating public purpose to generating and maximizing a
private profit income stream. 7
Grant and I agreed that the solution to the problems of Soviet-type economies was
a transition to some form of “market socialism.” Public accountability meant making the
“leading role” of the party contestable. This might lead to a western-style multi-party
system, based on electoral competition between working-class and middle-class parties.
However, this could not be taken for granted. Dominant-party systems, such as had
emerged in Japan and Singapore, were al another possibility.
Accepting this, the question then became, where a Soviet-type system was
entrenched, what pressures would be necessary to force change, and what would be the
outcome? It was clear that in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, economic stagnation
was providing the pressure. The ruling elite was resisting this, but Grant and I thought
that eventually it would have little choice but to embark on the sort of reforms Alexander

6
Ernest Mandel (1923-95) fought in the Belgian resistance during World War II and became a leading official of
the Fourth International after the war (cf. Mandel 1968).
7
Alec Nove served as a soldier in World War II, worked as a public servant in post-war Britain, then became
Professor of Economics at Glasgow University. See Brown/Cairncross (1997). Crucial in shaping our views were
Nove (1961, 1972, 1973, 1983).
16 The Genesis of Red Brotherhood at War

Dubcek had promoted during the short-lived “Prague Spring.” The alternative, we
thought, was not stasis, but regression to something like Rumania or Albania.
We did not think Mao’s China offered a credible alternative. It was still in the
earliest stage of economic development, Even then, under Mao’s utopian impulsiveness
China had not managed to operate central planning effectively. Yet from the early 1960s,
Monthly Review writers, including Baran, had become increasingly enthusiastic about
China (cf. the debate Sweezy/Bettleheim 1972). Baran died in 1965, so we will never
know what he would have made of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. However, other Monthly
Review contributors endorsed it with enthusiasm. However, Deutscher had realized that
Mao was launching a devastating purge of the ruling party, reducing his country to chaos
in the process. Grant and I were convinced that Deutscher’s analysis was right.

A realist approach to international politics

Marxism offered no coherent theory of international politics. Lenin’s theory of

imperialism was essentially an explanation of the behavior of capitalist states before
World War I. It did not purport to explain the international relations of communist states.
They supposedly operated according to quite different principles from the international
relations of capitalist states. The Soviet leaders claimed that their foreign policy followed
the principles of socialist internationalism.
Grant and I thought that socialist internationalism had not survived the First
World War. The realist framework developed by E.H. Carr in his study of interwar
diplomacy The Twenty Years’ Crisis was a much more convincing explanation of Soviet
foreign policy. Carr saw states as pursuing power politics in an insecure, unequal and
competitive state-system. Carr rejected the view that foreign policy was driven primarily
by moral principles or ideology, as idealists insisted. It was driven primarily by practical
concerns and raison d’état. 8
Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s had been one of the case studies on
which Carr based his argument. Then the USSR was the weakest and most vulnerable
state in the European system. It played the other major powers of the day, Nazi Germany,
Great Britain and France off against each other – successfully enough until 1941, when
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The dramatic policy flips involved were
incomprehensible to idealists, but easily explained by realists.
After World War II, to a realist the Soviet Union was an emergent great power. It
had a hard-won sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, which it was determined to
protect at any cost. In this context, we saw Soviet internationalism as essentially a
rhetorical cloak for great-power domination. The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968
was a case in point.
In this respect, we agreed with the Chinese criticism of Soviet “hegemonism.”
However, in our view, the revolutionary zeal of Mao’s China was the bluster of an isolated
and vulnerable country. Once China broke out of that isolation with the opening of
relations with the US in 1972, it began to play the great-power game itself. China’s

8
The British diplomat, journalist and historian E.H. Carr (1892-1982) is best known for his multi-volume history
of Soviet Russia. But in this context, his key work is Carr (1964). For analyses of Carr’s evolving ideas, see
Halsham (1999) and Cox (2004).
 Rowley 17

maneuverings between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1970s were basically similar
those of Stalin in the 1930s.
The US had also emerged from World War II as a great power. The theory of
imperialism had greater relevance here, as the US developed truly global commercial and
financial interests. Even so, the realist approach addressed issues this theory overlooked.
The war in Vietnam was always more about the “credibility” of US power than about
American commercial interests in Southeast Asia.

Peasants and nationalism

Once Cold War blocs stabilized in Europe, Soviet Union and the USA fought out
their Cold War competition in the emerging nations resulting from the collapse of the
colonial empires. There was much discussion of the role of the “Third World” of the newly
independent countries, poor and predominantly rural, as a counter-balance to the two
Cold War blocs.
In 1974, the Portuguese were giving up their colony of East Timor. Grant visited
the country, and wrote about it extensively (Evans 1975). He supported Timorese
independence, but was one of the first to warn of the danger of an Indonesian invasion.
This experience stimulated his interest in the sociology and economics of peasant
agriculture.
There was a lot written at that time about the role of peasants in revolution. Much
of this was fuelled not only by a romanticized view of Mao’s China, but also by the back-
to-nature sentiments popular in the “counter culture” of the time. It was espoused, Grant
and I thought, by people who had never had shit on their shoes. No doubt, our upbringing
in Australian farming communities made us skeptical.
Our interest in peasant studies had begun with Barrington Moore. Before 1974,
both of us had dabbled in anthropology. While studying Asian history, I had discovered
Hsiao Tong Fei’s Peasant Life in China in the Melbourne University library. 9 After East
Timor, Grant began reading in this field much more systematically. I followed along in his
wake. We were particularly impressed by writers such as Marvin Harris, Elman Service
and Eric Wolf. 10 On peasant agriculture in Southeast Asia, Grant introduced me to the
works of James Scott (1976), Samuel Popkin (1979) and Charles Keyes (1977). He also
investigated the Russian populist writer on peasant household economy, Alexander
Chayanov. 11
We continued to oppose the Vietnam War. We saw it as primarily a war of peasant
nationalism against foreign invasion. Vietnam was unusual in that such a war was led by

9
Xiaotong Fei (1910-2005) was a pioneer of anthropology and sociology in China. He was honoured in the early
years of the PRC, purged in the “anti-Rightist” campaign of 1958, and rehabilitated after Mao’s death. When he
died, Xiaotong Fei was Professor of Sociology at Beijing University. Cruciai in shaping our views were Xiaotong
Fei (1945, 1947).
10
Marvin Harris’ magnum opus was The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968).
Elman R. Service wrote Primitive Social Organisation: An Evolutionary Perspective (1963) and Eric R Wolf
wrote Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1971).
11
Alexander Chayanov (18888-1939) was a Russian agrarian specialist prominent in the 1920s, purged in 1930
for “defending the kulaks” in the face of Stalin’s collectivization, and executed in 1939. Grant had a copy of his
Theory of Peasant Economy (1966).
18 The Genesis of Red Brotherhood at War

communists. We found Chalmers Johnson’s Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power

(1962), analyzing the Chinese and Yugoslav experience during World War II, helpful here.
This raised the issue of the relationship between communism and nationalism. In our
view, this depended on circumstance. It was very different in Eastern Europe and Asia
after World War II – in one case, the dominating power was the Soviet Union, in the other
it was the US.
The nature of nationalism was a vexing issue. We were particularly influenced by
the debate between Tom Nairn and Eric Hobsbawm in the pages of New Left Review. This
was part of an extended debate between those who believed nations were communities
of great antiquity, and those such as Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner, who argued that
nationalism was a product of modern history. We were persuaded by the modernists. 12
The idea of national self-determination only became an organizing principle of
international politics with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and Eastern Europe in the
interwar years provided a laboratory demonstration of how difficult it could be to apply
it in practice.

The end of the Vietnam War

We were not surprised by the way the Vietnam War ended. Essentially, in its
attempt to defeat what it misinterpreted as Soviet expansion the US had taken over the
French effort to maintain foreign domination in Vietnam. Escalation turned a guerilla war
into a war of attrition which took a huge toll of human life. The Americans were unwilling
to bear the cost this imposed on them. When they withdrew, the Saigon regime they had
propped up collapsed in two years. This left the Vietnamese communists finally in full
control, but of a devastated country heavily dependent on Soviet and Chinese aid.
Nor were we surprised by the outcome in Laos. When the Americans left Vietnam,
their allies in Laos began seeking an accommodation with their Vietnamese-backed
opponents. The upshot was a more-or-less peaceful transition to communist rule. In both
countries, post war reconstruction commenced under authoritarian one-party rule. This
followed roughly the Soviet model, and we expected that it would work reasonably well
for a few years before the familiar problems would begin to accumulate.
We were surprised – and shocked – by what happened in Cambodia. We had
expected something similar to events in Laos; I had expected the political centre would
hold out better under Prince Sihanouk, moderating the new regime. This was way off the
mark.
Instead, the victorious Khmer Rouge expelled all foreigners, renounced all outside
assistance, and evacuated the entire urban population to the countryside. Then they
closed Cambodia off from the outside world. Sihanouk disappeared from sight. At first,
the only source of information was official propaganda, which was upbeat. But within a
couple of years a trickle of refugees had crossed into Thailand with terrible tales to tell.

12
This debate was kicked off by Tom Nairn, ‘The Modern Janus’ (1975). Ernest Gellner first presented his ideas
in Thought and Change (1964) and reformulated them most forcefully in Nations and Nationalism (1983). Eric
Hobsbawn developed his ideas in his multivolume history of the 19th century, and summed up in Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990).
 Rowley 19

In the absence of hard information, debates about Cambodia generated much more heat
than light. Noam Chomsky emerged as a leading critic of the “western propaganda
machine” over Indochina and Cambodia in particular. He condemned journalists for
reporting speculation in the absence of facts. When Francois Ponchaud published
Cambodia Year Zero, an account of life under the Khmer Rouge based on his own
experience (he was one of the westerners expelled by the new regime), refugee accounts,
and close scrutiny of official propaganda, Chomsky published a critique which was
scathing in tone and nit-picking in substance. 13
Grant and I found ourselves among the pessimists. Vast areas of farmland had
been abandoned due to fighting and bombing. The only possible outcome of repudiating
foreign food assistance under these circumstances was widespread starvation.
We began following developments in all three countries as closely as we could,
scouring newspapers for reports, gathering academic articles and whatever we could
find by way of official documents. We soon became aware of the extent to which
developments in the Indochinese countries were being shaped by the politics of the great
powers.
The US was temporarily out of the game, but bitter about what it saw as its
humiliation at the hands of the Vietnamese. Triumphant but desperately impoverished,
Hanoi was demanding reparations from the US. Its chances of getting this were zero.
The Vietnamese were especially keen to get American reparations, because their
patrons in the communist world had fallen out with each other. Throughout the war,
Hanoi and managed a careful balancing act between China and the Soviet Union. Now
that the war was over, China demanded that Hanoi break its ties with the Soviet Union.
Heavily dependent on economic assistance from the Soviet Union, Hanoi refused to do so.
China stepped up the pressure. When the Khmer Rouge regime made its border dispute
with Vietnam public and denounced the Vietnamese as aggressors, China immediately
threw its full weight behind them.
Mao’s death in 1976 and the ascension to power of Deng Xiaoping bought about
dramatic changes in Chinese domestic policy. Especially in agriculture, the country began
making some the changes Grant and I had been discussing. However, there had not been
the slightest change to China’s relations with Vietnam and Cambodia.
Clearly, this was not a matter of Maoist ideology. The crucial fact for Beijing was
that Vietnam was in China’s backyard. In our view, this confirmed the realist view that
Chinese foreign policy was the raison d’etat of an emerging great power. Embedded in an
unequal triangular relationship with the US and the USSR, it was trying to assert its
position as a regional power over communist Indochina.
Meanwhile, developments inside Cambodia remained shrouded in mystery. In
1978, a handful of sympathetic outsiders were allowed in, to write glowing accounts of
the new regime. These included Ted Hill, leader of the Communist Party of Australia

13
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, ‘Distortions at Fourth Hand,’ Nation, June 6, 1977, concentrated on
cataloguing errors in press coverage, which the authors treated as “propaganda” to whitewash America’s role in
Indochina. They commented on the French version of Ponchaud’s book, which was published in English as
Cambodia Year Zero (1978). Chomsky and Herman elaborated their approach in several works, culminating in
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).
20 The Genesis of Red Brotherhood at War

(Marxist-Leninist). Grant and I agreed that if he thought things were good, they must be
very bad indeed.
There were violent clashes on the Thai-Cambodian border, as well as the
Vietnamese border. Rumors of high-level purges abounded. Only a couple of Khmer
Rouge leaders appeared in public, and they blandly assured their listeners that all was
well.
With the Soviet purges of the 1930s in mind, I remarked to Grant at this point,
“Watch the General-Secretary!” This would be the person who ruled the Party. This
would mean he would also run the regime, and in particular its secret police –
presumably, the instrument of any purge. In 1978, the only thing I knew about this man
in Cambodia was his nom de guerre, Pol Pot.

Deciding to write Red Brotherhood

In late 1978, we heard that an acquaintance of mine, Malcolm Caldwell, was going
to visit Cambodia. Malcolm had even asked to meet Pol Pot himself. He was Southeast
Asian specialist from Scotland who I had met a couple of years previously when he had
visited Australia. I had found him very enjoyable company. He was highly intelligent, well
informed, eloquent - and deeply deluded.
Malcolm was a romantic. He was opposed to industrialization, and believed that
Mao’s aim was to create a rural utopia in China. Easy Rider meets Chairman Mao, I thought
to myself. He rejected my view that the Khmer Rouge had imposed a new catastrophe on
Cambodia, claiming they were leading Cambodia where Mao had pointed, to an agrarian
socialism.
Caldwell went to Cambodia in December 1978 in the company of two American
journalists, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman. They did an extensive but carefully
arranged tour of the countryside. When they returned to the ghost-city of Phnom Penh,
they were given an audience with Pol Pot. He delivered a tirade against the Vietnamese,
who he accused of plotting with the KGB and the CIA against the Cambodian revolution.
Then Becker and Dudman were returned to their hotel, while Caldwell got a private tete-
a-tete with Pol Pot.
What Malcolm made of all this we will never know. Shortly after he returned to
the hotel, gunmen broke into his room and shot him dead. Becker and Dudman were
flown out ASAP, and a week later the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia. 14
Not long before Malcolm’s murder, Grant and I found ourselves in argument with
our friend Gavan McCormack. Gavan had written a lengthy article expounding the
Chomsky view of postwar Indochina (McCormack 1979). Thing were better than western
propaganda had made out. The disputes between the Cambodian and Vietnamese had
been blown out of proportion. They had fought as comrades-in-arms against US
imperialism and were not about to go to war against each other.

14
The circumstances of Malcolm Caldwell’s murder are described in Elizabeth Becker, When the War was Over:
Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (1986). Caldwell (born 1931) was a researcher in the School of
Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and a founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary
Asia. His rural romanticism is evident in his last book, The Wealth of Some Nations: Introduction to the Study of
Political Economy (1977). His previous work, Cambodia in the South East Asian War (1973), was more narrowly-
focused, conventional, and much better.
 Rowley 21

In fact, we argued, things were much worse than that. Comrades were murdering
comrades. The Vietnamese would invade Cambodia as soon as the ground was hard
enough to carry tanks. The whole region would then explode into war once again. The
Soviet Union, China and the US would support opposing sides. We had no idea how it
would end, but we knew a lot more people would die before we found out.
Grant and I found ourselves in such complete agreement on this assessment that
we decided to write an article together about it. Then we decided to visit the region to
see for ourselves what we had been talking about. We could afford to do this, because by
then both of has positions as lecturers – regular, reasonable incomes at last. Then, of
course, the planned article turned into a book. The result, a few years later, was Red
Brotherhood at War (1984).
We conceived that book as an immediate response to events in Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos. A basic motive for writing it was our disagreement with many of the
arguments that were circulating at the time, both those of anti-communist Cold warriors
on the right and of utopians on the Left. However we sought to base our refutations on
factual evidence, rather than our own subjective preferences.
To gather that evidence, Grant and I both visited the region at every opportunity
over the next few years, visiting as many of the places we wrote about as we could, and
talking to people involved, at every level. Spent a lot of time with journalists covering
events as they happened. We also learned an enormous amount from academic
specialists on the region, too. But we were ourselves neither journalists nor regional
specialists.
Commentators on the book acknowledged that we had gathered an impressive
range of empirical material even when they disagreed with our perspective. The
underlying theoretical scaffolding was not so widely recognized. We made few references
to general political theories, but we bought the theoretical perspectives we had
developed over the previous decade to the book.
The general methodology of the book was historical and comparative. We tried to
explain different outcomes by looking at similarities and differences in historical
background, social structure and political institutions. This approach owed much to
Barrington Moore, and Marxism generally. It was also shaped by what we read on peasant
societies and nationalist movements generally.
Our approach to the workings of the communist states of Indochina owed much
to analysts of Soviet-bloc politics and economics, particularly Isaac Deutscher and Alec
Nove. Our approach to the foreign policies of these states was based squarely on the
realist tradition in international relations.
We organized the empirical material we gathered by conceiving our subject
matter as existing on three distinct but interacting levels. There was, first, the internal
politics of the individual nation-states, and the jockeying of individuals within them.
There was the level of regional politics, with Thailand and the ASEAN states vigorously
opposed Vietnam’s role in Indochina after the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. Finally,
there was the level of the great powers, China, the US and USSR, whose rivalry shaped
events in the region so decisively. This made a complex story manageable without over-
simplifying it.
Grant would go on to a distinguished career in Asian studies, based on solid work
he did after his collaboration with me on Red Brotherhood at War. But I think important
22 The Genesis of Red Brotherhood at War

foundations of that career lay in the debates about politics and social theory Grant had
with me and other friends in the decade before the two of us decided to join forces to
write that book.

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