In his view, the abolition of capitalist production relations is only the first stage of the worldwide proletarian revolution.
Marx anticipated that there would be a radical redistribution of wealth and a withering of the global socialist state (the “crude” stage of communism) followed by a fundamental transformation of human nature as all individual culture, personality, and economic uniqueness disappeared (the “higher” stage of communism). Marx looked forward to a time when individuals would be freed from an alleged alienation from their own humanity supposedly caused by the division of labor and money-based economic transactions. Individuality would be replaced by a new generic “species-being” [Marx’s term] personality, a personality that would specialize in nothing and be an expert at everything.
It is now a fact fairly well-known, even among socialists, that economic calculation under pure socialism is an impossibility. And yet compared with the idea that any country or economy could survive, let alone prosper, after government abolishes the division of labor — simultaneously crushing all individuality in the process — the calculation problem (as it’s known) seems downright minor, even though it is not minor at all: yet it seems so simply because this latter idea is sheer madness.
“Most Communist movements, faced with the utter infeasibility of industrial production under socialist central planning (let alone an abolition of the division of labor), chose to reconcile themselves with capitalism in various ways and to defer the Marxist ideal of higher Communism to a remote future that would conveniently never come. Some Communists, notably the Soviets and especially the Yugoslavs, practically admitted that the species-being ideal would never be realized and were willing to settle for varying degrees of centralized socialistic control mixed with elements of capitalism” (ibid).
Maoists, however, remained pure — at least for a time.
Thus the “Cultural Revolution” of China which vainly tried to transform human nature itself — individuals do not exist, these Maoists also preached — that is, until its stupendous failure forced even the most radical of Maoists to step back and reevaluate. This failure-followed-by-reevaluation changed Maoism across Asia and the world — with one appalling exception: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot understood that industrialization and the cities which emerge through the division of labor would have to be eliminated if the Khmer Rouge were to come anywhere close to an egalitarian society. This is why almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power (in April of 1975), the regime began evacuating Phnom Penh. They were, in a very real and literal sense, merely acting with the courage of their Communist convictions.
“The worst that can be said of Pol Pot was that he was sincere,” Vincent Cook also wrote, correctly, and continued:
“The Cambodian people were in fact freed of the ‘alienation’ of a division of labor and individual personality, and were reduced to a perfectly uniform egalitarian existence on the collective farms. If the cruel reality of the Khmer Rouge slave state didn’t quite come up to the extravagant eschatological expectations of Marxist true believers, the fault lies exclusively with those who think of the Marxist pattern of historical development and its egalitarian outcome as a desirable state of affairs. It is not enough to say of Pol Pot, as Prince Sihanouk did: ‘Let him be dead. Now our nation will be very peaceful.’ We must also acknowledge that a Pol Pot-type passion for equality remains as a threat to the peace and well-being of every nation even if the former dictator himself is dead.”
There should be no forgetting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge — no matter how much time has past or will pass — no whitewashing them, no cultural amnesia concerning them, nor any diminishment whatsoever nor rationalization of their utter evil, especially not by academic elites, like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and Anita Dunn (first Barack Obama’s council and now Joe Biden’s) and all 