Against the current: the need for mobilisation and expansion

SRP MP Mu Sochua, a tireless activist and campaigner for her party and the cause she believes in. She appears to combine all her worldly strengths with her readiness to reach out to and engage the common man and woman aided by that rarest of gift: common touch - School of Vice [Photo: Philip Skoczkowski]

Reference: SRP Youth making a Difference in Local Government

by School of Vice

Opposition parties will need more young recruits and activists like Ms Sin Rozeth who will help the party to reach out to the towns and villages across the country. The more recruits it can attract the better if only to compensate the party's current lack of mass media coverage. But, it is vital that every recruit is thoroughly screened and their activities meticulously monitored to guard against lapses in discipline or infiltration and sabotage effort aimed at weakening the party's movement in every respect.

The party should be 'fun' and relevant to join, but should be rewarding in terms of personal development or growth as well. Exceptional talents should be welcomed; someone who will be morally upright and steadfast, and if needs be training and further guidance should be extended to them so that the leadership can entrust them with specific responsibilities vis a vis the population as well as carrying out their role as commanding officers in relations to the rest of activists acting as the party's foot-soldiers.

The party must clearly spell out its core principles first and foremost to its own rank and file members and be prepared to take ‘ruthless measures’ or subject them to stern internal disciplinary codes if and when any of them violates or breaches such codes. If the guilty member shows clear manifest desire to reform him/herself and the misdeed committed not serious enough to warrant expulsion then the party should also show reciprocal desire to persevere with such individuals. Sometimes a reformed offender can turn out to be the party's more loyal member.

The party's leadership itself needs to compose of varied individuals and talents: it needs to be able to relate to specific situation or phenomenon unencumbered by its own dogma and theoretical refinements. Every arising phenomenon, every social calamity and crisis presents possibilities and opportunities for the party to pitch down its tent and make its political presence felt. Activists must be encouraged and trained to grasp social geography and terrain with all their apparent and less obvious features clearly laid out and sussed in their minds even before arriving at the scene. Ordinary people may lack the gift of vision or ability to see things beyond their immediate want and preoccupations, but they know what really matters for them and their families; it is this certainty that the prospective activist must address, work around on or add something to, and more. It is no use decrying their perceived mental ‘insularity’ as an example of backwardness or "ignorance". The mindset of a peasant or an urban worker can be just as opaque and cunning as that of a scholar; and in fact, generally they are more so as can be demonstrated by the longevity of the country's incumbent rulers who had been extracted from the stock of the peasantry, and since they had once shared and lived the life of the peasant and drank from the same well, they perhaps know instinctively how best to exploit the peasants' fears or to appease the latter’s aspirations to their own political advantage.

The ideal party activist will have something material and pertinent to offer every potential recruit encountered, be it a remote hill-tribesman, a slum-dweller, a garment worker, a state employee, a rice farmer, a high school student or a university undergraduate, and even members of opposing parties provided the said activist is in sound intellectual command of each and every such prospective subject individual's overall, specific situation. However, if you don't know any of these things try Plato's tentative method and ask him relevant questions likely to yield the answers you seek!

"Pragmatism" is often mistaken or exploited for all kind of motives - we should not seek to "change things for the better" and yet end up reproducing the precise same things in new clever guises. There must be an undoubted political will to overhaul the overall political culture, and reinstitute a healthy one in replacement on a sound, steady footing. Sihanouk had his chance to do this during his reign, but hadn't bothered to do so. The present leaders . . . well, they are a nightmare really since they are nothing more and nothing less than causal embodiments and outcomes of that former monarch's crucial political failings for whatever reason, including the one just mentioned.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of organisational cohesion and mobilisation. Cambodia is being confronted with ‘threats’ on two main fronts even if both can be described as intertwined in relations to one another i.e. external and internal threats. It is up to opposition party strategists to devise appropriate means by which to counter or neutralise these threats. For now, however, it must expand and consolidate its influence and presence through mobilisation and activism. It is of secondary importance that a party's leader is in exile, but he or she must ensure that his/ her moral and strategic guidance and spiritual presence is felt by all the party's affiliates and followers at every level; that every party worker must be promoted and demoted on merit and not through personal favour and connection. Above all, there shall be one unified life force coursing through the veins of the party and into the channels of every commune and every district, and every principality, and every factory and every place of work and every place of leisure enriching the impoverished with practical support and insights and converting the affluent with ideas and unquestioned patriotism.  Go forth and multiply!