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.

From the first two sentences it’s clear you didn’t read what I said, where I explicitly mentioned state control. For the third, it’s clear you’re not willing to let go of your arbitrarily chosen formal definition (which sits among several others) as the one and only, presupposing it prior to reality and therefore making discourse impossible.

For arbitration clauses, how do you think corporations are able to do this? Because of contract law devised/clarified and enforced by government courts; arbitration clauses require contract law sitting above private actors.

You can’t “incorporate” with capitalism “elements” that are necessarily immanent to it, that constitute an aspect of what capitalism is. State regulation, ownership is not some other to capitalism. Capitalism cannot be what it is without these elements (ex. capitalism requires contract law and the protection of private property rights, which requires a state, state-operated courts and police forces, whose existence cannot be subject to market forces as with private companies). This is not capitalism taking elements from socialism.

The dictionary can be wrong about what a concept is (see: God). Regardless of any formal definition (and there isn’t just one formal definition of socialism), capitalism (capital-ism) requires state ownership and market administration to some degree in order to be what it is.

Because this isn’t what socialism is. State ownership/price regulation by itself isn’t necessarily socialist or capitalist. It can be used to expand/reinforce market freedom or to undermine it.

No, it isn’t.

New questions for you to answer: https://archive.org/details/19thcenturyphil

Socialism is not when the state owns or regulates some things. There is nothing inherently socialist about public healthcare or firefighters.

Nowhere within Capital does Marx actually say proletarian uprising is inevitable; he arguably alludes to this in the Afterword to the Second German Ed. but it’s actually a difficult question whether proletarian revolution is inevitable in Marxism in the first place.

It was obviously known in Marx’s time that people don’t always act rationally or optimally. This isn’t the basis for Marx’s theory.

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.

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§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.

I can’t believe a living person with the powers of introspection could have written something like this.

Pol Pot admitted to not being a communist.

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 did not admit to not being a communist, this is just a lie.

• The CPK had an agrarian focus because the reality was that US bombing had destroyed much of the country’s agricultural capacity and there was a threat of mass starvation (and a need of a massive amt of agricultural labor to prevent this); as mentioned, the CPK had (in 1976) laid out a four-year plan which included the development of (light and) heavy industry (which was actually partially carried out with the restoration and expansion of factories) with the goal of building a fully self-sufficient national economy. After the evacuation of the cities, they were repaired and the process began of repopulating them. The assumption that anything was motivated by some ideological reverence for agrarianism is a very clear instance of “historical idealism.”

• Pol Pot never ordered the targeting of Vietnamese people for their nationality. There is the problematic characterization of border disputes as outbursts of nationalistic hatred (supported by complete acceptance of the Vietnamese narrative of DK as the sole aggressor) and of all actions of cadres as necessarily being ordered/allowed by central leadership. Not even in the ~mainstream is there a broad consensus that Cambodia committed a genocide against ethnic/national minorities. To add, “pro-Vietnamese Cambodians” wouldn’t even be a protected group against which genocide could be committed. There’s another side to this because the KR never got close to the amt of Cambodians killed by Vietnam in its invasion.

• Deng and Mao were both “pro-US” (in opposition to the Soviet Union), to the point of supporting the expansion of US power on the international stage and the formation of united Western bloc, and in the case of Deng, coordinating with the US in support of the Afghan resistance forces against the USSR; I’m sure you would call this a mistake, but the recognition of Mao and Deng as communists and mostly positive remains. If you can point me to support of the US by Pol Pot that goes above and beyond this, then fine, but being pro-US in any regard is clearly not a dealbreaker; Pol Pot (/the CPK) was supported by the US against Vietnam (and Soviet influence in general) as the US had devoted significant support to the USSR (/Stalin) against Germany. And there are contradictions in both of these in terms of the leadup to this; the notion that being supported by the US against another group = ideological betrayal is just “historical idealism” again. I’m not saying you have to support Pol Pot, but it is inconsistent with your stated principles to accept narratives about Pol Pot without any investigation.

There is no strict definition of a “socialist state.” DK was led by a communist party which set out concrete plans for developing a self-sufficient “socialist economy” and a “socialist culture” and was able to follow through on some of those in its short time. There is nothing that makes it “non-socialist” in comparison to other projects.

I presume, didn’t actually commit a genocide

You can presume that based on the fact that the allegation of genocide clearly violates the meaning of the word.

How about the Vietnamese-backed state of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea? Was it Socialist?

I don’t see why not.

He says this twice in TonF.

In neither of these quotes does he say this. I can’t even imagine how you got this from what you quoted. And if he did, all the worse for it, because this does not hold up at all.

You can nit pick this semantically or whatever, but semantics aren’t Marxist.

I don’t care if semantics are or aren’t “Marxist”; you need to get into semantics if you want to analyze the meaning of a sentence. There’s no nit pick, Marx isn’t saying anything close to this.

but, because the working class is the vast, vast majority, we create a more just and democratic society

You can’t just smuggle in the concept of justice. Wrt democracy, Engels said that the communist aim of overcoming the state also implies the overcoming of democracy. Wrt Marxism, democracy is not some virtue to be maximized nor does communism have anything to do with the concept of justice.

But you are going to have to provide something more substantive on your theory of individuals as pseudo-subjects. […] I think you’re being overly mechanical, and dismissing my point without evidence. It seems like you’re just chucking subjectivity out the window, and giving into determinism. There is a deterministic element to Marxism, the world dictates the limits and possibilities, but people change it. I really don’t buy what your selling here, and you’re not supporting your argument, on this very load-bearing point.

Oy vey. How could you misread my words so completely?

I’m not getting rid of goals. To me the goal is to determine what is happening here and now, and make predictions and plans based in concretion.

Here is where semantics would come in handy.

But I don’t see how something in the far flung future defines us, and you aren’t convincing me.

It’s just been established that you didn’t actually read what I said with any attention so this isn’t a very big issue for me.

Anyways, this is Marxism 101. This grand calculus is what justifies everything (you see this in the draft ch.6 of Capital quote). Without this view, what justifies the call for global proletarian revolt? Within Marxism there is no universal (real) justice or morality, so it cannot derive legitimacy from this; it can’t be immediate self-interest, because Marx wasn’t a proletarian (why not side with the bourgeoisie?). Who’s to say this world we know nothing about will be “better”? Who’s to say the global terror won’t backfire tremendously and lead to a world far worse than the one against which people revolted? Capitalism contains contradictions? Why don’t we work to alleviate them as much as possible? If you think about this for two seconds you realize there is no other option than that Marxism relies on the image of the future communist society/the historical necessity it traces from capitalism to it for the legitimacy of communism as a movement. If that’s idealist, then Marxism is idealist. This is the backbone of the movement, this is what defines it.

Marx’s theories about “communist society” are concrete enough to believe

I don’t think so. You didn’t seem to either: “The ‘comprehension’ of ‘communist society’ does not even reach the level of contemplating single individuals! Only an abstract civil society. So it does not even reach the level of bourgeois materialism, it’s not scientific, its pre-modern conception.”

“Since we can’t possibly imagine what those experiences will be in ‘communist society’ we can’t imagine a communist individual existing in that society.”

“while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (The German Ideology).

However CotGP is not a description of communism, but a criticism of Lassalle.

It’s a criticism of Lassalle that also contains a description of communism. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Since we can’t possibly imagine what those experiences will be in “communist society” we can’t imagine a communist individual existing in that society.

Marx violates this in TGI.

The issue you seem to be having throughout everything is the comprehension of revolutionary subjects as unconscious pseudo-subjects, where revolution comes about as a mechanical inevitability springing from capitalism, and ““communist society”” (unpredictably) from this (“communist society will be brought about”), hence the ability to preserve the movement towards communist society via ~“revolutionary praxis” but do away with this as the ultimate goal.

So communism isn’t actually defined by a future condition but by a present condition that will continually develop into the central characteristic of individuals in communist society.

For Marx, communism is defined by a present condition (“the premises now in existence” ~ TGI) which carries the possibility for the creation of a communist society (“Looked at historically this inversion appears as the point of entry necessary in order to enforce, at the expense of the majority, the creation of wealth as such, i.e. the ruthless productive powers of social labour, which alone can form the material basis for a free human society.” – Draft Ch. 6 of Capital). This possibility is immanent to these conditions and therefore Marx and Engels can sketch certain features of this possible society through studying present society and its historical premises, which is the actual basis for their call for the proletariat to become organized and unite.

I don’t care if you disagree with Marx but that is what you’re doing.

Ideas only exist in practice.

This isn’t what Marx is saying, nor is it true.

This is a total dismissal of the definition of communism as some future idyllic society. Right here at the beginning of part two of the manifesto.

I already addressed a very similar passage from TGI.

If imagining a better world is the impetus for actually engaging in the here and now, then that’s a subjective factor that is part of the process.

No, it’s absolutely not just motivation. Communist society being a real possibility/historical necessity (in what is effectively though not explicitly a moral “should”), is what Marxism rests on–this is where “historical materialism” is supposed to transcend the “social materialism” of classical political economy. You can’t justify the call for global proletarian revolution without this. If it turns out that Marx doesn’t manage to prove this, that it can’t be proven because of when the owl of Minerva spreads its wings, then the only thing to do is to drop Marxism.

Knows nothing about Democratic Kampuchea award

The only way I can imagine you don’t defend Pol Pot, as a communist, in any regard is if you don’t actually hold to the notion of taking back communist history from “bourgeois historiography”™ and not automatically accepting prepared narratives. “Historical idealism” in the sense Losurdo talks about in “Hegel, Marx, and the Ontology of Social Being.”

Because they don’t support Pol Pot.

You’re clearly alluding to the words in The German Ideology about communism being the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. And yet in the same work, and in several others, Marx and Engels also do talk about “communist society” and give some rough descriptions of how it would operate. The notion that communism is pure negativity and that it “goes away when capitalism goes away” (or that “the idea of socialism as the achievement of minimum demands, that leads to communism as the realization of maximum demands, is not a Marxist communist theory of change, it is a social democratic one”) is something you would have to take up with a lot of works, again, but this is most clearly put down in Critique of the Gotha Programme.

And I don’t think Marx would go so far as to say “communism exists now within the working class,” because there is no world-historic struggle by the collective proletariat to <upheave> the present state of things; struggle on the individual level is not communism, as is also made clear in TGI, nor would communism exist within the working class semantically regardless, as it is the <real movement> [which seizes upon the immanent negativity in capitalism and reorganizes production, thereby upheaving capitalist relations of production], it is not some rebellious spirit people come to possess.