Reading notes - Pol Pot regime: Was it a workers state?

Pol Pot regime: Was it a workers state?

....The Khmer Rouge leaders saw the exploited and oppressed of the cities not as a potential popular base for a new revolutionary regime, but as irreconcilable class enemies. Proclaiming the need to crush "enemy agents," the regime actually crushed the Kampuchean working class and its urban allies.

....the fundamental economic strategy of the Kampuchean regime under Pol Pot. The new regime aimed to maximize exploitation of labor and minimize consumption, so as to become self-sufficient in food and accumulate an agricultural surplus that could be sold on the world market. Through these exports, it would finance industrialization.

....The extreme, and seemingly bizarre, aspects of the Kampuchean regime were not the product of any special irrationality of the Pol Pot regime. They were part and parcel of the profound irrationality and inhumanity that marks the world capitalist system in its advanced decay.

....The class character of the Pol Pot government compelled it in its death agony to look toward every counterrevolutionary force that ever infested Kampuchea. This petty-bourgeois, Stalinist-led gang had nothing to do with Kampuchean sovereignty or independence from imperialism. It was a deadly enemy of the working class and socialism.

From:
Pol Pot regime: Was it a workers state?
By Fred Feldman and Steve Clark

THE MILITANT/FEBRUARY 23, 1979
http://themilitant.com/1979/4307/MIL4307.pdf

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