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.
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.
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.
Pol Pot was used as a tool to extend imperialist interests in the region
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.
It’s dishonest to double down twice on something that isn’t true, the second time sourcing an article you didn’t properly read (best case), and then not admit you were wrong after I read the article and explained this to you.
–
§1: The CPK’s “erasing of the past” was cultural/ideological, it had nothing to do with “agrarian communalism”; and the CPK didn’t only plan on industrializing. Whether this was a mistake or their approach was wrong is something you can actually make an argument for, but instead you refuse to let go of this provably false idea that the CPK ever put forward “a dogmatic, reactionary form of agrarian communalism.”
§2: I didn’t quote the CPK to show they believed they were justified, that would obviously be useless. I’d reiterate my argument but you can just scroll up.
§3: I used a tilde before imperialism to show that I understand it’s not what you mean by imperialism, but Lenin does not have a monopoly on the term. And I wasn’t referring just to “influence,” but, and I don’t mean this as an insult, I shouldn’t have expected you to read the article I linked. “Sid[ing] with the US Empire” is in fact the only course because it is the only possibility to avoid external domination; that the CPK should have forfeited the self-determination of Cambodia because otherwise they’re helping the US in the short term is not a fair demand.
§3: You’re just wrong about what the CPK believed and what they practiced. The bottom line is that Pol Pot was a communist, is slandered with claims that are easily proven false with a little investigation (you brought up some of these), and yet, unlike with Mao or Stalin, nearly all communists (you included) go along with this because they “don’t actually hold to the notion of taking back communist history from ‘bourgeois historiography’™ and not automatically accepting prepared narratives” (from prev. comment) like they claim to.
No, comrade, you’re dogmatically upholding someone with deeply incorrect views on what communism means in practice, from a scientific socialist perspective, purely because they claimed and believed themselves to be communists. There’s good reason Pol Pot and the CPK are denounced by Marxists everywhere, it’s because even if we take them most charitably, they were disastrously wrong at best, and actively rejected scientific socialism at worst. They were ultimately a reactionary force.
You know that you were the one who made a point of beliefs, to which my clarification of beliefs was a response, and that you then strawmanned me as relying on the fact that “CPK believed themselves to be justified.” You know that you were the one who twice claimed “Pol Pot admitted to not being a communist” and emphasized this as an important point, and that I only addressed whether Pol Pot/the CPK “claimed and believed themselves to be communists” in response to this (where you still haven’t admitted you’re wrong).
I am not dogmatically upholding Pol Pot/the CPK because they believed themselves to be communist; I am not dogmatically upholding Pol Pot/the CPK at all (“Whether this was a mistake or their approach was wrong is something you can actually make an argument for, but instead you refuse to let go of this provably false idea that the CPK ever put forward ‘a dogmatic, reactionary form of agrarian communalism’”). You have to know this.
Wrt the appeal that “the CPK are denounced by Marxists everywhere,” this is “‘historical idealism’ in the sense Losurdo talks about in ‘Hegel, Marx, and the Ontology of Social Being,’” as well as not even being true.
even if we take them most charitably, they were disastrously wrong at best, and actively rejected scientific socialism at worst
You have to prove this. You’ve failed to do so. What is the risk of admitting you didn’t know as much as you thought you did about this? If you did, you wouldn’t have to resort to this.
Pol Pot did explicitly mention that alignment with the communists was a matter of practicality in allies. It was a result of this opportunism that they then shifted to the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, a more overtly nationalist party formation, with the conflict with Vietnam. It’s crystal clear that Pol Pot was not ideologically attached to communism. In his 1997 interview, he stated the following:
When I joined the Communist Party of Cambodia, I did not know what communism was… We helped the Vietnamese, who were communist. But now the communists are fighting us. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way.
This is a complete admission to being, at best, opportunistic and willing to pick whatever outside ideology gathered the best allies. This is why they pivoted to western support, this was not a betrayal of their “communist values,” but a logical extension of their already present opportunism. You can point to Pol Pot not saying literally the words “I am not a communist,” and I’ll concede that he did not sat those words. However, I stand firm in my opinion that Pol Pot was at best opportunistic and did not have an actual understanding of scientific socialism.
As for my claims of the CPK fronting a dogmatic, reactionary form of agrarian socialism, I stand by this. Having a vague plan for industrialization does not justify the assault on the urban proletariat, nor does it justify the focus on agrarian communalism. It was not the proletariat that was in power, it was arguably the peasantry’s intelligentsia. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it does partially explain why they had such a disastrous idea of how to progress. You insist that I haven’t proven how they’ve taken this stance, yet I have consistently shown how they tried to skip to classless society directly, and industrialize afterwards, which is horrendously wrong from a Marxist perspective.
As for the CPK being denounced by Marxists everywhere, it’s both true and not historical idealism. It would perhaps be idealism if this was the only point I made, but it wasn’t, it’s supporting evidence. Consensus among the trained and educated on a topic is a helpful indicator for understanding what is probably true. It isn’t the reason for something being true, but it’s helpful for learning. From Hoxha to Deng Xiaoping to Vietnam to the Soviets, Pol Pot was regularly denounced by all major sides once it became evident that the CPK was not actually following any coherent communist plan but instead were violently reactionary.
Overall, I can admit to Pol Pot not literally saying “I am not a communist,” that was a more clear claim than simply saying that Pol Pot was opportunistic, had a horrible understanding of Marxism, and was perfectly willing to abandon pretenses of communism in favor of gaining a western ally. What I wonder is why you seem so intent on defending Pol Pot and the CPK.
Contemporary analysis aligns with what I’ve been saying, that their agrarian focus and destruction of productive forces in favor of a communalist society was at best incorrect and reactionary, and the fact that they were responsible for 2 million deaths, a quarter of the Cambodian population at the time, employing brutal methods of execution like smashing heads. This is from a Vietnamese source, not a western source, so at most you could say that it’s the opinion of Vietnamese communists, not western anti-communists.
Comrade, I really think it’s best to call it a done conversation. I can own up to communication failures on my part, as well as to the mistaken claim that Pol Pot outright admitted to not being a communist. However, I stand firmly behind my analysis of the CPK and Pol Pot, and nothing you’ve presented has given me any reason to reconsider. I don’t think others are viewing this conversation either, so I don’t think this is productive anymore. We can agree to disagree here, as we’ve done before.
I’m content to let the conversation go, but to address just one thing:
Pol Pot did explicitly mention that alignment with the communists was a matter of practicality in allies. It was a result of this opportunism that they then shifted to the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, a more overtly nationalist party formation, with the conflict with Vietnam. It’s crystal clear that Pol Pot was not ideologically attached to communism. In his 1997 interview, he stated the following:
When I joined the Communist Party of Cambodia, I did not know what communism was… We helped the Vietnamese, who were communist. But now the communists are fighting us. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way.
The first sentence (“When I joined the Communist Party of Cambodia, I did not know what communism was…”) is not a quote from Pol Pot, but Ta Mok (see p. 12). This is stitched to the beginning of the following sentences, which are attributed to Pol Pot in Anatomy of a Nightmare, and yet Short cites “Kan, interview.”, which does not match anything in the list of full source citations.
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.
It’s dishonest to double down twice on something that isn’t true, the second time sourcing an article you didn’t properly read (best case), and then not admit you were wrong after I read the article and explained this to you.
–
§1: The CPK’s “erasing of the past” was cultural/ideological, it had nothing to do with “agrarian communalism”; and the CPK didn’t only plan on industrializing. Whether this was a mistake or their approach was wrong is something you can actually make an argument for, but instead you refuse to let go of this provably false idea that the CPK ever put forward “a dogmatic, reactionary form of agrarian communalism.”
§2: I didn’t quote the CPK to show they believed they were justified, that would obviously be useless. I’d reiterate my argument but you can just scroll up.
§3: I used a tilde before imperialism to show that I understand it’s not what you mean by imperialism, but Lenin does not have a monopoly on the term. And I wasn’t referring just to “influence,” but, and I don’t mean this as an insult, I shouldn’t have expected you to read the article I linked. “Sid[ing] with the US Empire” is in fact the only course because it is the only possibility to avoid external domination; that the CPK should have forfeited the self-determination of Cambodia because otherwise they’re helping the US in the short term is not a fair demand.
§3: You’re just wrong about what the CPK believed and what they practiced. The bottom line is that Pol Pot was a communist, is slandered with claims that are easily proven false with a little investigation (you brought up some of these), and yet, unlike with Mao or Stalin, nearly all communists (you included) go along with this because they “don’t actually hold to the notion of taking back communist history from ‘bourgeois historiography’™ and not automatically accepting prepared narratives” (from prev. comment) like they claim to.
No, comrade, you’re dogmatically upholding someone with deeply incorrect views on what communism means in practice, from a scientific socialist perspective, purely because they claimed and believed themselves to be communists. There’s good reason Pol Pot and the CPK are denounced by Marxists everywhere, it’s because even if we take them most charitably, they were disastrously wrong at best, and actively rejected scientific socialism at worst. They were ultimately a reactionary force.
You know that you were the one who made a point of beliefs, to which my clarification of beliefs was a response, and that you then strawmanned me as relying on the fact that “CPK believed themselves to be justified.” You know that you were the one who twice claimed “Pol Pot admitted to not being a communist” and emphasized this as an important point, and that I only addressed whether Pol Pot/the CPK “claimed and believed themselves to be communists” in response to this (where you still haven’t admitted you’re wrong).
I am not dogmatically upholding Pol Pot/the CPK because they believed themselves to be communist; I am not dogmatically upholding Pol Pot/the CPK at all (“Whether this was a mistake or their approach was wrong is something you can actually make an argument for, but instead you refuse to let go of this provably false idea that the CPK ever put forward ‘a dogmatic, reactionary form of agrarian communalism’”). You have to know this.
Wrt the appeal that “the CPK are denounced by Marxists everywhere,” this is “‘historical idealism’ in the sense Losurdo talks about in ‘Hegel, Marx, and the Ontology of Social Being,’” as well as not even being true.
You have to prove this. You’ve failed to do so. What is the risk of admitting you didn’t know as much as you thought you did about this? If you did, you wouldn’t have to resort to this.
Pol Pot did explicitly mention that alignment with the communists was a matter of practicality in allies. It was a result of this opportunism that they then shifted to the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, a more overtly nationalist party formation, with the conflict with Vietnam. It’s crystal clear that Pol Pot was not ideologically attached to communism. In his 1997 interview, he stated the following:
This is a complete admission to being, at best, opportunistic and willing to pick whatever outside ideology gathered the best allies. This is why they pivoted to western support, this was not a betrayal of their “communist values,” but a logical extension of their already present opportunism. You can point to Pol Pot not saying literally the words “I am not a communist,” and I’ll concede that he did not sat those words. However, I stand firm in my opinion that Pol Pot was at best opportunistic and did not have an actual understanding of scientific socialism.
As for my claims of the CPK fronting a dogmatic, reactionary form of agrarian socialism, I stand by this. Having a vague plan for industrialization does not justify the assault on the urban proletariat, nor does it justify the focus on agrarian communalism. It was not the proletariat that was in power, it was arguably the peasantry’s intelligentsia. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it does partially explain why they had such a disastrous idea of how to progress. You insist that I haven’t proven how they’ve taken this stance, yet I have consistently shown how they tried to skip to classless society directly, and industrialize afterwards, which is horrendously wrong from a Marxist perspective.
As for the CPK being denounced by Marxists everywhere, it’s both true and not historical idealism. It would perhaps be idealism if this was the only point I made, but it wasn’t, it’s supporting evidence. Consensus among the trained and educated on a topic is a helpful indicator for understanding what is probably true. It isn’t the reason for something being true, but it’s helpful for learning. From Hoxha to Deng Xiaoping to Vietnam to the Soviets, Pol Pot was regularly denounced by all major sides once it became evident that the CPK was not actually following any coherent communist plan but instead were violently reactionary.
Overall, I can admit to Pol Pot not literally saying “I am not a communist,” that was a more clear claim than simply saying that Pol Pot was opportunistic, had a horrible understanding of Marxism, and was perfectly willing to abandon pretenses of communism in favor of gaining a western ally. What I wonder is why you seem so intent on defending Pol Pot and the CPK.
Contemporary analysis aligns with what I’ve been saying, that their agrarian focus and destruction of productive forces in favor of a communalist society was at best incorrect and reactionary, and the fact that they were responsible for 2 million deaths, a quarter of the Cambodian population at the time, employing brutal methods of execution like smashing heads. This is from a Vietnamese source, not a western source, so at most you could say that it’s the opinion of Vietnamese communists, not western anti-communists.
Comrade, I really think it’s best to call it a done conversation. I can own up to communication failures on my part, as well as to the mistaken claim that Pol Pot outright admitted to not being a communist. However, I stand firmly behind my analysis of the CPK and Pol Pot, and nothing you’ve presented has given me any reason to reconsider. I don’t think others are viewing this conversation either, so I don’t think this is productive anymore. We can agree to disagree here, as we’ve done before.
I’m content to let the conversation go, but to address just one thing:
The first sentence (“When I joined the Communist Party of Cambodia, I did not know what communism was…”) is not a quote from Pol Pot, but Ta Mok (see p. 12). This is stitched to the beginning of the following sentences, which are attributed to Pol Pot in Anatomy of a Nightmare, and yet Short cites “Kan, interview.”, which does not match anything in the list of full source citations.