Do you consider Pol Pot / The Khmer Rouge communists or did they misunderstand everything, deviate too much? Is there anything to learn from them?
I've a hard time deciding on this. Their ideas seem so fucking off the wall that I'm going to go for no, for both questions. At the same time, I absolutely want to avoid the cheap "lmao the 20th century failures weren't even real socialism" defence: but maybe at the Rouge, we can draw a line.
I never use cheap arguments of the "it's not REAL socialism" sort, but I absolutely refuse to acknowledge Pol Pot's regime and North Korea as anything even resembling socialism.
Pol Pot was nothing short of a lunatic, dreaming of bringing the country back to its past Khmer Empire glory by having everyone be a farmer, because hey if it worked 1000 years ago it should work now, right? The simple fact that he dreamt of returning to a "glorious national past" is clue enough that he had nothing good in mind, as any far leftist will advocate a complete break with the past.
Oh, there were all those murders too.
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They were literally useful idiots for Western powers trying to contain and weaken Vietnam, whom eventually invaded their violence orgy of a state and took over, which massively increased the quality of life; in other words, even other communists hated them, which is why they were so convenient.
If you think killing people that wear glasses is Marxist, you are beyond retarded.
The Khmer Rouge was a fucking cult and Pol Pot and his ilk were nothing more than a proxy force for the other imperial powers with no ideology beyond Cambodian nationalism. When China backed them they called themselves socialist. When America started backing them they called themselves liberals.
Democratic Kampuchea had Maoist peasant agrarian cooperatives
wow, just, wow
Hold on user, I need my glasses to read that!
ok
Isn't it ironic? A glasses-wearing, foreign-educated, alienated intellectual going on a rampage against his own kind.
It reminds me of how Hitler himself had Jewish and African DNA
This is purely second-hand information so take it with a lot of salt. Apparently there's a case to be made that the Khmer Rouge was such an unorganized mob that Pol Pot wasn't even aware of the trainwreck taking place, as various upper cadres became practically warlords and fed him false information.
"Please understand, with my high level of work, I only made decisions concerning the very important people. I didn't supervise the lower ranks."-Pol Pot
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This is, of course, part of the explanation in all these "2much violence" cases.
There was overblown violence and stupid shit in Mao's China: but its not like a single man or core of a party actually could control a huge amount of people like that. It would even be impossible to fully keep up with that is going on. Especially since it wasn't an industrialized, advanced society, etc, and the information could always be unreliable. Even Stalin, who had better possibilities for control, more like unleashed the violence, rather than using it in a fully controlled manner.
This surely applies for the Khmer case as well.
But still, their ideas were retarded nationalism, return to the past shit and so on. And widespread, ridiculously justified violence must've been accepted by the leaders nonetheless. I can't see any way to redeem them.
they were esoteric depopulationists commissioned by crypto fascists in the CIA to make a large blood offering to jungle gods for good opium harvest :/
If this is all it takes to define socialism, then everyone is already free to practice socialism under any capitalist system that allows cooperatively-owned businesses.
IE all of them.
And defining the cause of communism or socialism like that is retarded.
If there is a serious attempt to build communism/socialism, surely we can talk about it being communist/socialist policy, or if these policies are enacted in a state, we can call it a communist/socialist state.
The name doesn't only mean the state of society, but also the cause itself. The "lel not real socialism" cop-out is avoidance of self-critique, if not simply wordplay.
They were insane cultists
Not sure it HAS to come about via a specific means to be valid.
Certainly think that if nobody's able to suggest at least ONE viable way by which it would possibly come about, then there's no surprise it's 'never been tried'. Cause if there's no feasible path to it, it's jut utopian nonsense that's of little use other than a thought experiment.
But there seem to be folks here sincerely proposing it. Eh then maybe I'm forgetting where I am.
They weren't though. That's a convenient means by which you justify not taking the time to understand what went wrong and why.
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PLEASE provide evidence, I've been trying to prove this forever
In 1981, the Khmer Rouge went as far as to officially renounce Communism[72] and somewhat moved their ideological emphasis to nationalism and anti-Vietnamese rhetoric instead. However, some analysts argue that this change meant little in practice, because, as historian Kelvin Rowley puts it: "CPK propaganda had always relied on nationalist rather than revolutionary appeals."[76]
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i laughed but considering this is the cia.. it supprise me if they where that cracked but i'd beleave it
Holocaust was also real, Holla Forumslacks, its not atrocity propaganda, you know that, right?.
Remember the 6 gorlillion who did nothing wrong, poor souls killed by nazi farts
This depends on if you take Pol Pot's word for it. He says this in his final interview:
youtube.com
There's also the problem that a lot of his recruits were incredibly young, with the majority of the Khmer ground forces being between 14 and 20 when everything started getting really out of hand.
Bumping this. I understand that nominally communist regimes do not equal communism, obviously, but this leads me to understand that communism requires such an insane amount of violence to be implemented that it's actually not worthwhile. The 20th century was an absolute bloodbath, dozens of attempts were made to implement social control of the means of production, yet we still live in a world where private ownership exists confidently.
People can keep attempting to build communism, but what if it's literally impossible? There are dozens of cases of "not real socialism", yes, but what if this is because socialism simply cannot be translated into the real world? I understand that you guys see eternal capitalism as the worst possible outcome, but isn't eternal revolution arguably worse? What if people keep revolting, the 20th century over and over, and we never see communism simply because it can't exist?
Once the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Lon Nol regime in 1975, they did not replace the government, it's bureaucracy or institutions with anything that resembled a modern state. Due to the massive attacks against urban areas perpetrated by the U.S after the detainment of U.S warship 'Mayaguez' by Khmer Rouge forces, the ongoing tensions against the Vietnamese and Soviets and the mass famine resulting from the U.S bombings of Cambodian agricultural land causing a subsequent influx of refugees to urban areas reliant on U.S and Thai food aid distributed by the former Lon Nol regime, the Khmer Rouge made the active decision to continue control of Kampuchea as a secretive guerrilla movement and not a state apparatus. This resulted in poor lines of communication between the central command and embeded guerrilla forces tasked with the policy of 'de-population' (mass exodus from urban areas into the countryside) and the establishment and covert administration of agricultural collectives not to mention a total lack of oversight.
The western support for the Khmer Rouge only came after they siezed power and it was due to the tensions with Vietnam and it's Soviet allies (not to mention the historical tensions predating the colonization of Indochina). I find it massively ironic that many of the left wing critics of the Khmer Rouge raise this point but don't seem to have an issue with U.S and Israeli support for Rojava.
Drug laws are a spook :^)
No, this was never an official policy however due to the forced exodus from the urban area to the countryside by unsupervised angry peasants and armed 13 year olds many cosmopolitans died.
No, the vast majority of deaths in Democratic Kampuchea was due to the massive famine engineered by the U.S and it's allies. The Khmer Rouge's policy of forcing people to work in collective farms was a direct response to this and ultimately saved countless lives and prevented the famine from worsening.
I mean to be fair, year zero
The quick argument (to be made because I'm just hovering around for more cool Khmer Rouge stories. These guys fucking fascinate me. They destroyed everything resembling modern society, that's fucking cool. It's awful, but in the world of "There is no alternative" to our specific variant of neoliberal, globalizing capitalism, that's music to the ears just to know that sure - you can be absolutely insane.) would be to point out how many people die because we don't have communism implemented. Starvation under Mao is the problem of communism, but in India under Britain? Ireland? At best Imperialism gets the blame, even though it's just an adjunct to capitalism.
I mean there are large groupings that don't even think you need a violent revolution or that we'll transition away from capitalism slowly (probably along some kind of decentralizing model, think uber minus central corporate control and profit extraction.) but now i'm getting bored because, as said, i just want more pol pot stories.
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I can understand the view that communist ideas - or any radical break-offs with capitalism, there's no need to restrict ourselves to a single theory - may seem utopian. I'm also not one who advocates for the old school 1900s model and if radical leftists do again assume power, the chief goal should be avoiding the atrocities of the 20th century.
My response would be this one: the true utopia is the idea that we can continue with capitalism, with small social democrat changes here and there, without almost literally destroying everything, without our situation getting gradually worse. Our means of living, etc. I'm not advocating some form of socialism because of deep, theoretical reasons or because I love revolutions, but because I frankly can't see anybody but the left save humanity. Capitalism won't end on its own, but capitalism might end us all.
Even many "reasonable leftists" actually desire a really radical change - think Piketty's idea of a global power that can impose huge taxes on capital. It may alone seem a relatively modest idea, but in reality, realising it basically means that "we" (the radical left) must've already won. It can't be done as a single, isolated, small change.
But the implementation of social ownership has caused more deaths than the implementation of private ownership - in proportion. Regardless of whether the end goal of social ownership would be better for human life, how can communists continue to support revolution in light of the 20th century and the clear failure of communism as a practice? Aren't there better ways to solve property, poverty, class etc? I see the "decentralizing model" as a clearly superior option because if social ownership is actually better than private ownership then it will eventually surpass the capitalist mode of production and nobody has to suffer from the violent nature of revolution.
"Social ownership" in the sense that existed in the USSR certainly did kill a lot of people during its formative stages but the death toll dropped right back once the initial stages past. However, the consequences of private property continue to kill vast number of people every year worldwide with no sign of stopping. In fact the proportion of people living in absolute poverty is in fact increasing at a global level, meaning a corresponding rise in the number of premature deaths as a result of malnutrition and lack of adequate medical care (not to mention the constant imperialist wars).
Just research what "primitive accumulation" is and what it entails fam, private ownership was stablished through colonialism, racism and genocide.
In fact, let me just upload book related.
The implementation of private ownership involved the mass removal of peasants from their traditional communal lands, forcing millions off of land they'd used for centuries so that it could be enclosed and farmed at a profit with cash crops. Automation eventually drive many millions more off their ancestral lands as the agricultural jobs that sustained them suddenly disappeared. That's to say nothing of the millions of annual deaths caused by the privatization of services or resources, or the environmental destruction, or the strife it causes as national bourgeoisie vie for control over valuable resources.
Well since we're apparently talking about magical fantasies maybe we can find a genie to just grant us Socialism while we're at it
You know when you factor in all the US backed coups, deaths from arbitrary sanctions, etc, that's probably very dubious.
The only exception is perhaps China famine deaths, and that nation buggers everything with her huge population. (I mean, nearly the entire reduction in global poverty has been China too.)
There's also the fact that yes, socialist industrialisation was always a bloody mess. It did work and it did raise everyone's quality of life. It did that quickly.
The industrialisation of capitalist societies was slower, kind of less bloody, but still, really fucking awful. Awful working conditions for decades, child workers, etc. It wasn't beautiful, stuff just happened sooner and slower while socialists forced it all to go quickly.
And to continue a lil bit:
Now that many of our societies are already industrialised, it is very likely that socialism in those countries wouldn't require as much blood as it did in the 20th century.
honestly, some of what pol pot seemed fascist in the year zero stuff and rebuilding society from scratch. I still dig it, the zeal at which they were willing to restructure society, even if they went cray cray (also, the whole problems of people saying vietnamese were worse than khmer rouge and alternate sources on how much died from that.)
given how much acid CIA agents took it wouldnt surprise me if they were srs about that.
Shit happens, also people want to believe in a better world by returning to a mythologized past and then rebuilding a new future. Apparently Khmer Rouge was planningon reindustrializing eventually, it wasnt a forever thing.
please. the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars resulted in the deaths of large portions of the European population, but people didnt' go "lol democracy aint cut for it back to monarchist reaction"
I really do love you, Holla Forums.
So you're saying that there was a spike in deaths when social ownership was implemented and then deaths went back to normal? The fact that social ownership was later abolished proves that this should never have taken place. All that happened was death, with no benefit. Because what I'm asking is how you can justify violent revolution in light of the fact that it demonstrably fails. I have no reason to believe that communism can be achieved, so I have to assume that revolution will continue forever without success. The 20th century indicates that this is true. How can you support violent means to an impossible end? That's just never-ending violence.
And those are all violent forms of private ownership. In fact, it's a contradictory form of private ownership in which self-ownership is unrecognised. Unless you want to agree that all "communist" regimes are completely valid examples of social ownership, then you can't say that colonialism and genocide are valid examples of private ownership. Also, even if your claim that private ownership was implemented violently is true, it doesn't matter, because social ownership has proven to be just as violent - even though its implementation has failed almost everywhere in the world. That's my point - how can you continue to advocate for the implementation of social ownership when it not only causes deaths and violations of human rights, but also does not succeed? It's been 100 years since 1917 and communism is still a theory that only exists in the mind. How could I rationally support that when there are other solutions to property that don't require violence?
If social ownership is superior to private ownership then it can be implemented voluntarily and prove itself to be better. It will outcompete capitalism and workers will prefer it.
That's exactly what Proudhon (first self-described anarchist, coined the word "capitalism" and defined himself as against it) advocated for, in fact - create cooperatives until they supersede corporations.
As Marx would show, however, that's not enough to achieve social ownership, for capital has a mind of its own. What do I mean by that? Well, let's take a basketball making factory. It relies on a machine to cut and stamp the rubber, workers to stitch and inflate it, and it's owned by a single capitalist proprietor. Due to competition with other firms, the capitalist must always reinvest in improving the machine. To make these improvements worth anything, however, the workers must work harder. Even the capitalist doesn't get a straight-up benefit - he is ultimately living by capital's whim, his profits managed by the faceless, decentralized, permeating need to reinvest for more profit, more capital accumulation, more, more, more. The worker's just incredibly poorly off and can only see the capitalist making his life harder. If the worker just removed the boss and made it into a cooperative, though, he would still have to obey this logic of capital. Most can't. Thus, it all goes back to the way it was before, because self-managed or not, capital-ism is an impersonal force bearing down upon the human character with the never-ending cry of "More!".
The only solution is to abolish production for exchange and institute production for use. There are various ways to achieve this beyond state ownership - if I didn't think so, I would not be an anarchist! I personally prefer worker-owned firms confederating into syndicates to plan the economy by collective bargaining with the help of cybernetic planning applications (see our "Soviet Cybernetics" thread in the catalog).
