Late Stage Capitalism
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
RULES:
1 Understand the left starts at anti-capitalism.
2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
5 No bigotry, no racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any type of prejudice.
6 Be civil in comments and no accusations of being a bot, 'paid by Putin,' Tankie, etc. This includes instance shaming.
Introduction to Socialism (external links)
Marxism-Leninism Study Guide: Basic Course
Marxism-Leninism Study Guide: Advanced Course
view the rest of the comments
Pol Pot admitted to not being a communist. He attacked the urban proletariat and proletarian intellectuals, and the communists that fled Cambodia for North Vietnam left Cambodia largely with nationalists. This nationalism took on a highly reactionary character when targeting communists and Vietnamese, which led to war with Vietnam.
Pol Pot's agrarian focus wasn't just due to being underdeveloped, as were China's and Vietnam's economies, but also due to a severe distrust of the proletariat. Pol Pot essentially made a dictatorship of the reactionary peasantry against the proletariat, and against socialism.
Further, I find your comment about Deng and Mao with the US to be misplaced. Deng and Mao made mistakes in allying with the US. Pol Pot's mistakes far exceeded their mistakes. The fact that someone makes a mistake is not inherently an entire judgement of them, but when understood in the context of their entire character and actions it becomes clear that Pol Pot was used as a tool to extend imperialist interests in the region.
It's not idealist to note the class nature of what happened under Pol Pot.
Pol Pot is quoted exactly zero times in this article. To address the Ieng Sary quote, which is probably what you mean to refer to, Furr alleges that “the Pol Pot group [...] sometimes described themselves as communists [...] in an attempt to get help from China,” yet doesn’t consider that Sary might have done the inverse to gain the support of ASEAN (to whom he told the quote, referring to the same page from Vickery). This is something Castro famously did to try and get the support of the US.
Prev. addressed the main example of the CPK’s “attack on the urban proletariat”; and otherwise the “attack” on the old ~intellectuals and on a certain section of the “urban proletariat” has nothing to do with a disdain for the proletariat in general but with the overall goal of ~erasing the past and constructing a new “revolutionary culture,” which does not exclude factory work (the GPCR had the same targets and many others and yet was also motivated by a genuine belief in communism).
I’ve already explained how the CPK objectively didn’t fetishize agrarianism, which rules out the possibility that they fetishized agrarianism “due to a severe distrust of the proletariat”. You can further look at confidential CPK documents, including the four-year plan I mentioned previously, where for instance it’s resolved to “continue to strengthen and expand the building of revolutionary culture, literature and art of the worker-peasant class in accordance with the Party's proletarian standpoint” (p. 113). And in doc. 6, Pol Pot reports that “We have nourished political consciousness, proletarian patriotism and proletarian internationalism” and that “proletarian patriotic consciousness and proletarian internationalism can transform people's nature into something new. As for the problem of nurturing a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, we should allow this to seep in according to our chosen methods” (p. 202). Clearly the “Party Center” believed that they were representing(/serving the interests of) the proletariat, and that this was the basis of their legitimacy.
That may be so but I'm only saying that in terms of support for the US, Pol Pot is not unique and actually happens to be perhaps less effectively pro-US than Mao and Deng.
Definitely true, and yet he was also a genuine communist. And don’t forget that he also opposed Vietnamese ~imperialism. So the choices are to become a Vietnamese satellite or to attempt to assert national independence and in so doing support the US’s goal of containing Vietnam (and the USSR) (although if successful DK would become its own problem), and the result is that the second option ends up at the first. “The Pol Pot group” (Furr) really had no choice.
Pol Pot and the CPK trying to "erase the past" is exactly an example of attacking the foundations of scientific socialism. It's a dogmatic, reactionary form of agrarian communalism, not communism. I know they planned on industrializing, their approach itself was wrong and horribly misguided at best.
My issue is not whether or not the CPK believed themselves to be justified, my issue is that they were horribly wrong and acted in a reactionary manner.
As for "opposing Vietnamese imperialism," this is largely nonsense. Even if we assumed Vietnam was imperialist, the correct course would not have been to side with the US Empire, which far eclipsed any Vietnamese influence. Further, influence is not imperialism, anyone speaking of Vietnamese "imperialism" without an imperialist stage in capitalist development is making a mockery of Lenin.
The CPK was wrong. My point was never that they were evil by intention or anything, such an argument isn't Marxist. Pol Pot is wrong for similar but not the same reasons as Gonzalo, both are examples of people believing themselves to be in the right, while being entirely wrong.