-Pro-Vietnamese KR faction takes power in 1975 instead of Pol Pot's faction; Thailand ends up falling to revolution by the very end of the 1970s
-Sukarno defeats Suharto's coup; eventually propels the PKI into power by the late 1960s in a twisted sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for the Suhartists
I know nothing about Thailand's party, but I doubt it had the…horrific self-discipline of the Vietnamese party. I assume, therefore, that Thailand's party will be ideosyncratically expressive like the KR were. In part the hyperrationality of the VWP is related to it being essentially a liberal bourgeois dictatorial party. In part it is due to the success of French colonisation producing a workers movement that has a labourist streak—imagine the VWP as a revolutionary labourism which is nationalist. Lang labour writ large. I assume, therefore, that the VWP and Kampuchean People's Party intervenes into Thailand to "sort their shit out for them." between going to war with China and purging the southern Petits-bourgeois economy.
Now if that isn't a set up for all the ways Indonesian Communism can go wrong I don't know what is. But the better question is: how can Indonesian Communism go right.
I've always thought that the Soviets missed a golden opportunity in accepting, embracing, and co-opting western counter-culture movements, specifically: electronic house and techno-rave music and hip-hop; and to lesser extants: punk, metal, grunge, rap, counter-cultural hippy rock/ folk rock, alternative/ indie rock, and even ironically reggae to some degree. It seems to me that each of these genre "scenes" had the potential to be turned into soft power daggers that the Soviets could twist and manipulate against the cultural stability of the West. Each one of them could've been used to subtly spread class concioussness and provoke popular resentment and antagonism against the ruling class.
1979. The Soviet Union decides to sponsor the Rajneeshee movement's MDMA supply network. Despite this being seen as a hobby horse by the party, like the RAF or other "games," it turns out the Rajneeshees are really fucking good at dealing low priced MDMA supplied in bulk from Soviet pharmacy. While the Miners Strike fails as historical, London's freeways are utterly disrupted.
BUT THE CONSEQUENCES WERE HORRIFIC. With MDMA flooding the international dance scene BPM stayed under 140, breakbeats died in mainstream dance culture, and only in horrible backwaters of industrial death did people up the BPM to attempt to make up for the lack of drugs. The Rotterdam Sound is known as major chords around 130 BPM.
My first thought about things like this is always: How? Like is this even feasible? Spending state funds to send Soviet agents into the United States not to collect valuable information from intelligence informants but rather to spend time hanging out at dive bars and acid parties passing Foreign Languages Publishing books into the hands of underground artists?
Team A: We push Euphorics cheaply throughout a culture that has massive economic decline. LA may have been flooded with guns by […] but it was flooded with eccy by the Soviet Union. Gang culture…changed…that night.
A Soviet Union supporting team A strategies would view the international revolution as a proletarian one, where the Soviet Union itself was a necessarily ossified defensive position trying to restart a war of manoeuvre to relieve the siege…
Team B: ICE. LOTS OF ICE. MORE ICE THAN CRACK.
en.m.wikipedia.org
In 1980 a polish military mutiny occurs capturing a couple of cities.
How will soviets respond ? let the polish communists handle it on its own ? Or a 1968 style WP invasion?
1968 was an attack on a fraternal party that had deviated. A mass mutiny by multiple divisions would be against the party. As such the Polish Government would *invite* soviet assistance in.
* * *
ObWI: Imre Nagy gets balls. Instead of fleeing to the Yugoslav Embassy he flees to Cspel. Despite dying of a self-inflicted pistol shot early, his body is photographed with rifle injuries and armed with a submachine gun. Historiography of '56 focuses far more on workers movements than Nagy's government as a result.
(Some left Hungarian communists died in action. They tended to be the ones most supportive of the workplace councils.)
yours,
Sam R.