Four hundred thousand garment and shoe workers in Cambodia organized a strike on December 24 for a wage increase. The strike was led by a coalition of unions. It began with 200 workers who protested in front of government offices where union leaders and government representatives discussed the price of the work to which the workers will continue to be subjected.
In Cambodia seven hundred thousand workers, 90% of them women, labor for western brands like GAP, Adidas, Nike, and Puma. They also produce for big stores like Kmart and Target, among others.
The minimum wage in Cambodia is $80 a month. The workers are asking for an increase to $160 per month. The government has only proposed an increase to $100.
Garment manufacturing represented a profit of $5.1 billion for the companies in the first 11 months of 2013, according to the Cambodian Minister of Commerce, 22% more than in 2012.
For the current government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, the union of the garment workers in struggle and the national Party of Rescue of Cambodia (electoral opposition party) are a challenge, but for the workers they are a trap. And now, as the legacy of the socialist movements, the union organizations lead us to the slaughter and propose to the workers that an increase in the minimum wage is the only solution to their situation of poverty and wage slavery.
Last year, Cambodian garment workers carried out 131 labor reform strikes. This is also not the solution. We know that with a wage increase comes an increase in the price of everything we consume, reversing the wage increase, creating a capitalist vicious cycle in which we workers always lose. Our goal must be the destruction of capitalism once and for all.
The workers in Cambodia have been among the most militant fighters in Asia. After World War II, millions of them confronted their exploitative government and the profits of the French imperialist bosses and then the US bosses during the Vietnam War.
From 1965 to 1973, the US imperialists dropped 1.9 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, which was supporting the Vietnamese nationalists in their struggle against the US. Today, in this epoch of sharp inter-imperialist struggle, the Cambodian capitalists are fighting like caged dogs to determine who can exploit the workers more and get more profits for their imperialist cronies.

Workers Everywhere Have Same Enemy, Same Fight
The conditions in the sweatshops in El Salvador, in Bangladesh and in Los Angeles are the same as in Cambodia. We have a common enemy, capitalism, which exploits us and keeps us enslaved to a machine and a wage so that the owners of these machines enrich themselves and live off our work.
A garment worker in Los Angeles commented:
"A few weeks ago we did not have work; we worked two days a week and had to look for work in another factory. Once some 10,000 pieces came from the company Lucky but there wasn't anybody to do the work. We garment workers are important, but the bosses treat us like garbage and throw us away when they don't need us anymore."
In Los Angeles, thousands of workers do not receive the minimum wage of $8 an hour, since they are paid by the piece. This seems to workers in other places to be a lot of money, but the reality is that to survive and pay monthly rent of $1,000 or more, several families have to live together.
We workers do not have to follow the bosses' game and their unions tied to economic reforms. We do not accept the electoral parties in Cambodia, or the fmln in El Salvador or Lopez Obrador in Mexico, or Obama in the US. We workers need to build our own International Communist Workers' Party, ICWP.
We propose that workers worldwide join the Party to be able to organize millions to take power and to build a communist society, where there will no longer exist bosses or money or exploitation.

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (KR) brutally ruled Cambodia from 1975-79. Since then, Pol Pot has been a poster child for anti-communism. But Pol Pot was no communist.
Saloth Sar (later Pol Pot) came from a landowning family closely tied to the King. As a student in Paris after WWII he joined the French Communist Party, an electoral, trade-unionist party that supported nationalists in former French colonies like Cambodia.
Sar returned to Cambodia in 1953, seeking alliances among southeast Asian nationalist movements. In 1963, he became the leader of a tiny party which rejected Marxism, declaring peasants (not workers and soldiers) the key revolutionary force.
In 1968, Sar took the very anti-communist step of isolating himself in a private compound with personal guards, setting himself above his comrades. A 1970 US-backed coup installed Lon Nol as Cambodia's military dictator and supported him with an invasion of 20,000 US and south Vietnamese troops. Soon, two million people (out of seven million) were homeless, and rice production dropped by over 80%.
The Khmer Rouge started growing rapidly. Its leaders limited new membership to poor peasants, although they themselves were mostly from student or middle-peasant backgrounds. Real communists welcome the masses into the Party. We struggle to build communist working-class understanding, developing all members into leaders.
The 1972 KR Land Reform policy aimed to create equally–sized private plots. Their 1973 policy turned peasant villages into cooperatives that owned property jointly. Both policies were essentially small-capitalist.
Neither top-down reorganization mobilized rural workers for communism. Further, a ban on individual possessions (not just the means of production) ridiculously caricatured communism, considering the precious few items that most people owned.
At the same time, the KR exposed its antiworking class character by attacking cultural minorities like the Chams, attacks which soon extended to all Cambodians. Such racism is a hallmark of capitalism's "divide and rule" strategy. Meanwhile, the KR supplemented its aid from China with profits extracted from forced labor on rubber plantations.
In mid-1973, the KR controlled two-thirds of Cambodia and half its population. It besieged the capital, Phnom Penh.
When the Chams rebelled, the KR responded like true capitalists by crushing the uprising and building more jails in which rebels were tortured. When the KR took power in 1975, it evacuated all urban workers to the countryside and forced them into slave labor in the "killing fields." Its policy was to "eliminate money," but it had foreign trade, calculated state expenditures in US$, and bought food in Thailand for its cadre with $100 bills.
US imperialists collaborated with their new Chinese allies in backing Sar, now calling himself Pol Pot. Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski explained: "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot... Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could."
US, European, and Chinese imperialists continued to "recognize" the Khmer Rouge throughout the 1980s, long after it lost real power.
Pol Pot a communist? No way!