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.

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.

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.

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.

I shouldn’t have to explain that repeating what you already said won’t somehow make it count as a justification.

I shouldn’t have to explain that telling you to read a specific book is not the same thing as saying “read theory” (nor is it a thought-terminating cliche, as just saying “read theory” could be); I shouldn’t have to explain why books aren’t five bullet points long in the first place or why “If their arguments are too complicated to present in a Lemmy post, they’re too complicated to be bothered with.” isn’t something anyone should unironically say.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that reading (thought-terminating cliche) about any nation will show you that the way you think things are presented (“It pretends that you only relate to people of your own ‘nation’, and that nobody in your nation relates to anybody outside of it. It’s drawing hard lines on a spectrum and trying to define portions of that spectrum as homogeneous groups, entirely distinct and different from others just on the other side of that line.”) isn’t actually how they’re presented. If only anyone had realized that ~the delineations between nations aren’t really so rigid and people of different nationalities have things in common and interact with each other! I shouldn’t have to explain that people of different regions have different cultures/languages, that the concept of nations is not a completely ideological invention and that conflicts between nations are not just caused by ideology.

I shouldn’t have to explain the difference between being an Aries and being of a particular nationality, how people of particular nationalities relate to each other in an actual way and how nationality can be changed, but that, as long as you stay in the US/retain US nationality you actually do have a stake in their position wrt other nations, whether you like it or not.

I shouldn’t have to explain to you how it’s arguing in bad faith to write out a condescending spiel about how you “understand” that I psychologically need the concept of nations to make sense of the world and that’s why I made fun of your “alternative.”

I have very little patience for bad faith arguments

Don’t laugh don’t laugh

It is still bad, and it is still wrong.

You have to actually justify the things you say. Anarchism is truly even worse than communisation theory.

Every state is its own little empire, enforcing its will against the individuals within it just as more powerful states try to impose their will on other states (and their own people).

Read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or any Winfield and you’ll immediately realize how philosophically incoherent your position is.

You don’t need national identity. You don’t need national cultural history. You can have individual identity and individual cultural history. These can be defined by yourself and the others you relate to.

Others you relate to! I wonder if this somehow inevitably transforms into national identity!