timdrake

Over a week later and you're still talking like this. Please attain proper consciousness soon.

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.