/lit/ - Literature

I watched a documentary this morning on Pol Pot and what struck me were the similarities between his thought and praxis and Bakuin(ism) (I acknowledge that a lot of contemporary anarchism owes more to council-communism and syndicalism than it does to Bakuin) in that the whole way that the core of the "organization" remained secret goes almost completely hand in hand with Bakuin's stuff about "Invisible dictatorship", and also would seem to flow out of what he wrote in "catechism of a revolutionist". Then there is seeing the peasants and the lumpens as more "pure" revolutionary material because of their being more "natural" than urban workers. Then there is the cultural nihilism and wanting to sweep everything away that belongs to the past culture as opposed to integrate from it what is truly human. This of course was also the strategy of Blanqui, who hated the working class and believed socialism could only be implemented by a secret intellectual elite via a coup.

I also saw a lot of parallels between Brother Number One and Nestor Makhno for very much the same reason. Like Makhnovtchina the Khmer Rouge wasn't really a "state" in a traditional sense. Makhno also organized the peasants (not the industrial proletariat) into a revolt that was very free-form, decentralized, and not tied down to a single set of moral principles, much like the Angkor. Makhnovtchina also resulted in mass clusterfuck.

So in conclusion it seems to me that rather than an example of the "failure" of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the Khmer Rouge should be used as an example of the failures of anarchism, blanquism and ultra-leftism.