Red Harvests: Agrarian Capitalism and Genocide in Democratic Kampuchea

Between 1975 and 1979 the infamous Red Khmers ruled over Cambodia, causing the death of about a quarter of the country's population either through executions or through famines and exhaustion. This genocide goes beyond comprehension. Genocide studies, the academic field that studies the causes and context of such horrific chapters of human history, will probably have decades of work ahead.James Tyner tries to understand the broader context of this genocide in terms of what exactly the Khmer Rouge aimed to destroy and for what purpose. The apparent answer is the destruction of cities, of everything intellectual, religious, and creative, to instill a complete obedience to the central leadership of the Khmer Rouge. Pervasive also was the collectivization of agriculture and the abolition of currency as part of a policy to eradicate traditional rural life, with its family farms, and turn the countryside into one big work camp. But why, and what did this have to do with the professed communist ideology of the Khmer Rouge?Tyner addresses these questions by writing "a political economy of the Cambodian genocide" (114). He applies the conceptual lens of state capitalism, which means the state, ruled by a single party, controls the country's entire economy to generate surplus value. The state takes over the role of capitalist enterprise in order to generate revenue, usually to be reinvested in industrialization. This happened despite the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and contradicts how scholars have described the democratic Kampuchea as "pure communism" or "agrarian socialism." Tyner argues therefore that we need to study the rural transformation of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge from the perspective of the history of capitalism and its many different manifestations. In this case, the CPK leadership aimed for independence from outside investments through massive exploitation of the countryside to generate the economic surplus needed for industrial investments.The draconian policies of the Khmer Rouge originated in the civil war between 1970 and 1975. The US bombardments helped to generate support for the Khmer Rouge, legitimize its policy of depopulating towns and villages under their control, and reorganize the countryside. Not surprisingly, the CPK rapidly lost popular support, setting in motion a vicious cycle of oppression, distrust, and large-scale executions. The only way out for leaders of the Khmer Rouge was to set Cambodia on a trajectory in which "the meaning of socialism changed from self-emancipation of the working class to national economic development" (33). The example of the Soviet Union and the emphasis of the Non-Aligned Movement on self-reliance provided the ideological and historical legitimation for an autarkic course. Whereas in classical Marxism the emancipation of the working class was only conceivable at a world scale, since the rise of the Soviet Union it had been believed that a socialist utopia could be achieved within national boundaries. The only route toward such a paradise, however, was by squeezing all surplus capital from the countryside and investing it in sectors that would generate the economic growth necessary to catch on with the wealthier countries in the world.The Khmer Rouge set the economic goals of technical advance of agriculture and import substitution. Official contacts of the CPK leadership with a number of Non-Aligned countries may have helped to achieve such a modernization, as did Tanzania at that time, for example. But Khmer Rouge leaders failed to obtain the necessary development aid to modernize the agricultural sector. Instead, Tyner argues, the Khmer Rouge engineered a project of original accumulation, turning the country into one big commodity frontier. This policy failed too.Tyner does not directly address the question why the agricultural exports obtained at such a high price did not lead to investments that generated higher agricultural productivity and more agricultural surplus. The answer is more or less hidden in the book: it was the betrayal of the country by the big powers that facilitated the paranoid and totally incompetent leadership of the Khmer Rouge coming to power. Moreover, after years of extreme violence the country was deeply traumatized. Marx and Engels would never have agreed with a violent imposition of a communist regime, and they would have been even more appalled by the idea that such a transformation would be orchestrated by guerrilla bands. While it is clear that what the Khmer Rouge did had nothing to do with the emancipation of the working class, I am not sure whether this was the result of fundamental contradictions in Marxist-Leninist ideology that produced the oxymoron of state capitalism, as Tyner suggests. What I read in his book is that in a country ravaged by war, internationally isolated, and taken over by guerrillas there was no basis for whatever government to start a healing process without structural outside help.