Abolishing Illiteracy and Upgrading Culture: Adult Education and Revolutionary Hegemony in Socialist Laos

ABSTRACT

This article examines the monopolisation of political space by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, before and after 1975. Together with coercive measures, the Marxist-Leninist regime consolidated rule by establishing and disseminating new concepts of state power, social responsibility and socialist subjectivity, which formed the basis of a radical form of revolutionary hegemony. The Party propagated a new rhetoric of rule through mandated activities including village meetings, co-operatives and a much expanded but poor-quality mass education system. This article examines the system of adult education, where the Party sought to eradicate illiteracy and “upgrade culture” among economically productive 15 to 45-year-olds. Motivated by both politics and pedagogy, the Party imported this system from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the 1960s before institutionalising it after 1975. The resulting organisational structure fanned the rhetoric of rule across the national territory in an extensive manner that reached the illiterate “masses” in large numbers. Even where the programme encountered material shortages and apathy, mandated participation in adult education propagated the vocabulary and grammatical structure of socialist Laos, providing a codebook for how to participate in socialist society.

KEY WORDS:

• Laos
• Lao People’s Revolutionary Party
• adult education
• state rule
• socialist rhetoric

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the workshop “Authoritarian State, Weak State, Environmental State? Contradictions of Power and Authority in Laos,” which I co-convened with Keith Barney at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, on January 18–19, 2013. I express my sincere thanks to CSEAS for generously funding and supporting the workshop, to Keith Barney for his collegiality in bringing the workshop to fruition, and to the other participants and two anonymous referees for critical comments and suggestions on this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Self-regulation pervades the traditional media in Laos and this has generally been true of the internet too (Mayes 2009). A notable forum for debate are a few websites run by the non-governmental organization Coalition for Lao Information, Communication and Knowledge (CLICK http://clicklaos.org/), which aims to uphold Article 44 of the constitution providing for free speech, but the two main sites, LaoLink (in Lao) and LaoFAB (English), are carefully moderated to avoid critical discussion of politics. Social media offers wider avenues for critical discussion, as suggested by the arrest of three people in 2016 for criticising the Party on Facebook (see Baird 2018). On the other hand, the government's public and hard-line response, duly shared across social media, was no doubt calculated to reinforce self-regulation among social media users.

2. Lao was introduced as the medium of instruction from around 1970 in the RLG’s USAID-funded Fa Ngum comprehensive schools, but not across the entire education system (Chamberlain and Evans 2010, 89).

3. The third revolution is usually translated as the “revolution in ideology and culture,” but the Lao term neo khit, literally “way of thinking,” is more accurately rendered as “thought.” Ideology is usually translated as latthi.

4. For the use of hero narratives in Laos, more generally, also see Pholsena (2006). For a more thorough treatment of these themes in Vietnam, see Tréglodé (2012).