/marx/ - Marxism

This is a surprisingly excellent article on Pol Pot. Does a great job of dismantling liberal chauvinist slander against his acheivements (though it comes from a first worldist source).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/18/pol-pot-revisited/

>>1765

Typical Hoxhaite revisionist slandering genuine socialist revolutionaries. Comrade Pol Pot led his nation's proletariat closer towards communism in 4 years than Hoxha did in 40.

>>2485

Under Hoxha the output of Albanian industry grew significantly in just five years, let alone twenty or thirty.

Under Pol Pot Cambodian industry was pretty much abandoned en masse based on his anti-Marxist idea of "restarting" society and upholding the peasantry as the leading force rather than the "corrupted" proletariat.

Also Pol Pot's forces in the 1980s were supported by the West, by the anti-communist military in Thailand, and by Dengist China while the Khmer Rouge literally said that the task of constructing socialism would be delayed for thousands of years as part of allying with these reactionary forces.

>>2485

>The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. He was brought up in royal palace circles; his aunt was a concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but instead of making money and a career, he returned home, and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot, a monkish man of simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to village tradition, and from there, to build a new country from scratch.

>mfw reading that delusional nonsense

>>2489

>The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant

Idi Amin has more popularity in Uganda than Pol Pot does in Cambodia. Pretty much every single Cambodian who was alive in 1979 viewed the Vietnamese as liberators. Out of all the "communist" leaders, Pol Pot is the only one anyone can be united in opposing.

>>2506

>Pretty much every single Cambodian who was alive in 1979 viewed the Vietnamese as liberators.

This is laughable propaganda. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was not a "liberation". It was a blatant expression of Soviet-backed social imperialism and Vietnamese national chauvinism. Funny to see supposed "anti-revisionists" cheering on the Khrushchevite satellite of Vietnam for sabotaging an independant stronghold of actual socialism.

An excellent source for reading on the topic:

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/cs-k-8.pdf

>>2510

It's not "propaganda," any academic work on the subject, and plenty of on-the-ground interviews at the time, confirms that the Vietnamese were viewed as having prevented even more Cambodians from being killed.

Pol Pot's "government in exile" continued being recognized in the UN throughout the 80s by the connivance of the American, British and Chinese imperialists, who in supporting Pol Pot were supporting someone who, as I said, claimed socialism would not come to Cambodia for thousands of years. The Khmer Rouge also became close with Thailand's military junta and began to involve itself in various business ventures in smuggling, logging, etc.

Vietnam's friendly relations with the Soviet revisionists endangered the cause of socialism in that country, and the Albanians noted as such. But this does not change the fact that Vietnam reacted to Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnamese territory, which were part of a wider campaign to promote the destruction of the Vietnamese as a nation. Pol Pot outright declared them a "reactionary race" at one point.

As Hoxha noted: "When the first conflicts broke out on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, the view of socialist Albania was, and the world is witness to this, that disagreements between the two neighbour countries should be resolved through talks and without the interference of the Chinese or Soviet social-imperialists. But this was not done. On the contrary, the Pol Pot group, incited by Beijing, brought out in Pnom Pen daily communiques in which they announced that thousands of Vietnamese were being killed by its army on Vietnamese territory."

I fail to see how a group that promotes genocide, adopts a caricature of socialism, allies with imperialism and praises the rise of Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping in China can be considered as having built "an independant stronghold of actual socialism."

>>2511

>I fail to see how a group that promotes genocide, adopts a caricature of socialism, allies with imperialism and praises the rise of Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping in China can be considered as having built "an independant stronghold of actual socialism."

What about Soviet Union allying with Third Reich to buttfuck Poland and share Eastern Europe amongst themselves?

Or relations between Leninist Russia and Fascist Italy which were as friendly as between Stalinists and Hitlerites?

Would you accuse Lenin or Stalin of revisionism or pragmatism?

>>2519

Well to begin with Stalin didn't praise Hitler as a great Marxist, nor did Lenin praise Mussolini. Pol Pot meanwhile praised the likes of Hua and Deng, praised Tito, Ceaușescu, Kim Il Sung and other dubious "Marxists."

Second, the USSR never allied with Nazi Germany. Throughout the 1930s the USSR sought to contain Nazi expansionism by was rebuked not only by the British and French, but also by the Baltic states and Poland which sought alliances with the Nazis against the USSR (with the Polish regime in particular hoping in any future war to "reclaim" the Ukraine for itself.)

When the Nazis invaded Poland its government collapsed. The Soviets moved in to secure those areas which the Polish regime had annexed in 1920, areas which were not ethnically Polish but Ukrainian and Byelorussian and which faced all kinds of discrimination on the part of the fascist-inspired Polish regime.

As for relations between the USSR and Italy, why focus on just that country? Lenin sought good financial relations with every capitalist state, as did Stalin, so long as such relations were mutually beneficial to both sides and strengthened Soviet industry. It had no ulterior motives, nor is it objectionable unless you believe that the USSR "in principle" shouldn't trade with capitalist states (and fascism is a variant of capitalism) because that's icky or something.

Pol Pot meanwhile was actually allied to the imperialists, who financed his armies inside Cambodia, while he himself literally became bourgeois by branching out the Khmer Rouge into smuggling, timber, and other industries either in the areas of Cambodia under their control or in Thailand.

>>2519

Lenin under Lenin was not Leninist, it was Bolshevik. Leninism both as an ideological apparatus and social phenomena was a result of both the power struggle within the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin each faction tendency positing themselves as the true successor to the mighty Lenin and as the theoretical rallying cry of leftist anti-imperialist national-liberation movements primarily in East Asia backed by the Soviet Union, respectively. As Stalin says, reiterating Lenin of course, in The Foundations of Leninism, if not for the rise of moribund capitalism in the age of imperialism and Red October giving rallying cry to oppressed people's around the world, there would have been no Leninism.

Also, pragmatism (as in practical activity, not the school of philosophy) defined in the sense of 'doing things that make practical sense' is by no means incompatible with the Marxism. The problem that lies whithin the the commonplace pragmatism is that most so-called national pragmatists are chauvinists that serve the state or the 'people'. In truth, the state is but the representation of the hegemony of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. As for the people, the people are not hegemonic; within the whole of people there are contradictions of interests between differing social groups. Many antagonisms are intrinsic to the very nature of the social relations that define each social group. If Marxists are to be pragmatic, it should be for the practical application for the social interests of the group we claim to represent, the proletariat and the working classes rather than vague notions of 'the whole of the people'.

Though, as communists, we are opposed to the interests of Capital being that the interests of Capital (and those that are in control of it, the capitalists) is diametrically opposed to the social interests of wage-labour (the proletariat), they are both two sides of the same relation. There can be no class of wage-labourers without capital. The Civil War was utterly devastating. The proletariat as a class within Russia was already a minority of the population before the revolution, after the Civil War, the proletariat were almost completely destroyed! Socialism as a social system does not only presuppose collectivized property, it presupposes the existence of heavy industry. It was a necessary concession of the Soviet government to allow foreign capital to enter into Russia because both the Russian economy and the proletariat was in shambles.

Also, I don't think the Bolsheviks ever traded, under Lenin, to Mussolini.

I think what really makes Pol Pot look good by comparison is what came before and after him.

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/26/cambodia

https://www.globalwitness.org:443/documents/13455/country_for_sale_low_res_english.pdf