Sorry, but that Pol Pot defense falls flat. Wishing one can do stuff is not materialist. It is at best idealist. Pol Pot didn’t take material considerations in account. Especially at the market situations at that point agricultural exports for cash crops would not have enabled enough money income to “speedrun industrialization”. However as you correctly write rice was the major thing was focused on, which is not a cash crop. This means that the surplus generated per person would be low compared to alternative settings. So even going from that starting point it isn’t “a plan”, but a wish. Wishing to double four times the production of one crop within four years is absurd, especially when you are talking about labour intense crops (which rice is). The geography of Kamodia is also not well suited for large scale cash crop production (in the 1970s).
Pol Pot was inspired in part in some degrowth theories and satirical understanding of dependency theory, which states that peripheral countries are actively “underdeveloped” by the imperial core. That was one of the big reasons for trying to go as self-sufficient as some Red Khmer plans tried to be.
Kambodia, a US ally, was also getting support from China at some point in time. Mainly cause China wanted to prevent a Soviet-Vietnamese encircling of their border and used the Vietnamese-Kambodian conflict to get more independence from the Soviet political sphere. China’s (more correct the ZK of the CPC) aim with that was not only slightly more independence, but also better relations to the US and UK, which means capital import, technology import and knowledge import in addition to a few other bilateral contracts (i.e. military support which only ended after Tian’anmen in 1989, when the public opinion in the West turned on China and it became a realistically opponent compared to the Soviet Union which shortly after was broken up).
Pol Pot was not communist, he wasn’t even left communist (looking at his practice, the structure of decision making and the plans within the country). While plenty of things including anarchism, communalism (Bookchin/Öcalan) are compatible with communism idealism an non materialism is not.
Sorry, but that Pol Pot defense falls flat. Wishing one can do stuff is not materialist. It is at best idealist. Pol Pot didn’t take material considerations in account. Especially at the market situations at that point agricultural exports for cash crops would not have enabled enough money income to “speedrun industrialization”. However as you correctly write rice was the major thing was focused on, which is not a cash crop. This means that the surplus generated per person would be low compared to alternative settings. So even going from that starting point it isn’t “a plan”, but a wish. Wishing to double four times the production of one crop within four years is absurd, especially when you are talking about labour intense crops (which rice is). The geography of Kamodia is also not well suited for large scale cash crop production (in the 1970s).
Pol Pot was inspired in part in some degrowth theories and satirical understanding of dependency theory, which states that peripheral countries are actively “underdeveloped” by the imperial core. That was one of the big reasons for trying to go as self-sufficient as some Red Khmer plans tried to be.
Kambodia, a US ally, was also getting support from China at some point in time. Mainly cause China wanted to prevent a Soviet-Vietnamese encircling of their border and used the Vietnamese-Kambodian conflict to get more independence from the Soviet political sphere. China’s (more correct the ZK of the CPC) aim with that was not only slightly more independence, but also better relations to the US and UK, which means capital import, technology import and knowledge import in addition to a few other bilateral contracts (i.e. military support which only ended after Tian’anmen in 1989, when the public opinion in the West turned on China and it became a realistically opponent compared to the Soviet Union which shortly after was broken up).
Pol Pot was not communist, he wasn’t even left communist (looking at his practice, the structure of decision making and the plans within the country). While plenty of things including anarchism, communalism (Bookchin/Öcalan) are compatible with communism idealism an non materialism is not.