By Jay Sophalkalyan
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
When the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989 and the Soviet
Union dissolved two years later, a great many in the West declared the long
struggle settled. The free market had prevailed, liberal democracy stood
unchallenged, and the century-long duel between Marx’s prophecy and humanity’s
stubborn pluralism seemed finally resolved.
Yet, China’s extraordinary rise
in the 21st century revived a
confidence many assumed had died with the USSR. The Marxist system—a model
of society so discredited that only museum shelves and the occasional graduate
seminar would remember it—seemed to wear the face of a global power again, and
the world slipped back into a bipolar posture. But the front lines of this new
cold war run not just between nations, but through the interior of Western
societies themselves. Cultural rifts at home now refract foreign policy abroad,
turning geopolitics into another theater of the culture wars.
How else to understand the spectacle of MAGA firebrand Tucker Carlson, who
recently commended Nicolás Maduro—a socialist strongman who presides over
economic ruin and state repression—solely because he banned pornography,
abortion, gay marriage, and gender transitions? In Carlson’s framing, Venezuela
became “one
of the most conservative countries in North or South or Central America,”
and the U.S.-aligned opposition was cast as “pretty eager to get gay marriage”
into Caracas, as though the crisis of Venezuelan democracy were simply another
skirmish in America’s own cultural trench warfare.
The pattern repeats on the other pole of the ideological
spectrum. Progressive commentator Hasan
Piker toured China and lauded
the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party while gliding past the
imprisonment of dissidents, the suffocation of civil society, and the machinery
of surveillance that touches every corner of Chinese life.
For the right, economic repression becomes tolerable so
long as a foreign regime strikes the proper blows against any marker of modern
liberalism they despise. For those on the left, they can wave away social
coercion because they admire the scale of the welfare state or the mirage of
“efficient” central planning. Each camp selects the pieces that flatter its
priors and discards the rest. What emerges is not analysis but
projection—foreign governments turned into cardboard stand-ins for domestic
grievances, avatars drafted into America’s never-ending feud with itself.
Growing up where communist rule wasn’t an intellectual
exercise but a scar still raw in national memory, I learned early that the
ideology so many Westerners romanticize bears no resemblance to the clean
abstractions they parse in classrooms or on Twitter threads. Communism is not
socially conservative in the way American traditionalists imagine, nor is it
economically liberatory in the way Western progressives sometimes pretend.
Those who invoke it as a convenient prop in America’s culture wars reveal, most
of all, the distance between their rhetoric and the realities they presume to
interpret.
Consider a recent example. On the Triggernometry podcast,
Piker remarked, “While I don't call myself a communist, I don't have an issue
with the end goal of communism. … I just think that it's probably not likely to
happen. A stateless, moneyless, borderless society … I think that communism
would be most likely an international thing. It'd be like the Star Trek universe.
And it feels especially at this point far too utopian to achieve.”
To him, the problem with communism isn’t its premises but
its feasibility, because it imagines a postscarcity federation of enlightened
citizens—a vision so frictionless it belongs more to science fiction than to
political reality.
When host Konstantin Kisin noted he had been born in the
USSR and did not share that optimism about communism, Piker replied that the
Soviet Union had merely attempted communism without achieving the genuine
article: “They never actually were able to successfully implement communism. It
wasn't a borderless, moneyless, classless society.”
The trouble with this formulation is that it treats the
gap between theory and practice as a bureaucratic inconvenience rather than the
central tragedy of the ideology itself. If perfection is always just out of
reach, then every failure can be excused, every cruelty reframed as an
unfortunate detour on the road to the earthly paradise.
But there is a place in recent history that came closer
to fulfilling the ideological parameters Piker outlined than the USSR ever
did—my birthplace, Cambodia. Or rather, Democratic Kampuchea, the regime that
ruled from 1975 to 1979 under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
If one seeks a society with no money, no private
property, no markets, no borders as an expressive category, and no class
distinctions beyond the party’s revolutionary vanguard, Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge is the bleak prototype. Khieu
Samphan, who served as head of state of Democratic Kampuchea, once
summarized the ideology:
The moment you
allow private property, one person will have a little more, another a little
less, and then they are no longer equal. But if you have nothing—zero for him
and zero for you—that is true equality.
While the second article of the
Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea used more moderate language—“property
for everyday use remains in private hands”—the Khmer Rouge took the elimination
of private ownership to its logical extreme, forcing citizens to surrender
everything but a few personal scraps. The real governing ethos appeared not in
the constitutional text but in the slogans that
had already circulated through the “liberated zones” of the countryside in the
years before 1975. As provincial towns fell and cooperative life was imposed, a
new orthodoxy took hold: “All that every Cambodian has the right to own is a
small bundle he can carry on his back,” and the even more chilling dictum,
“Absolutely everything belongs to the Angkar [the secretive ruling body of the
Khmer Rouge].”
On April 17, 1975—the day Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer
Rouge—this philosophy was enforced on the last major urban population,
extending a project that had until then remained regional to the entire
country. Within hours, the capital was emptied, its inhabitants forced into the
countryside at gunpoint. Urban life, in the party’s cosmology, was a bourgeois
infection, a softening agent that threatened the revolutionary core. To cleanse
it, the Khmer Rouge did not merely reorganize society; they uprooted it. Hospitals,
schools, and monasteries were evacuated on the spot. Newborns were carried into
the heat, the wounded wheeled away on hospital beds, the elderly compelled to
march until they collapsed. A nation was made nomadic overnight.
Currency vanished next. With a single decree, every
banknote—from the riel to the emergency coupons circulating in the capital—was
declared void. Families who had spent years saving for medicine, education, or
simple security found their wealth reduced to colored paper. Exchanges of any
kind were forbidden; markets were stamped out; even bartering became suspect. A
society built on rice harvests, trade routes, and regional commerce was
overnight driven into subsistence units under absolute state authority.
The idea behind this abolition was neither accidental nor
uniquely Cambodian. It drew on a purist reading of Marxist theory, one that
sought to bypass the capitalist stage altogether and leap directly into a
classless agrarian millennium. Where others hesitated,
Pol Pot and his circle pressed forward. The Bolsheviks tried, briefly and
unsuccessfully, to build
a nonmonetary economy. China’s radical wing voiced similar ambitions during
the Great Leap Forward, and Cuba toyed with the idea before retreating to more
conventional socialist management. But only in Cambodia did a ruling party
attempt to erase money itself.
Andrew
C. Mertha, a leading scholar of Chinese and Cambodian politics, called this
a “literalist interpretation of communism,” and the description is apt. The
leadership of the Khmer Rouge did not see Marx as a springboard but as a
blueprint. If Marx wrote of a society without currency, then the revolution
must sweep away currency. If Marx imagined a world without class distinctions,
then class must be extinguished through forced reeducation, surveillance, and,
when necessary, liquidation. If Marx spoke of internationalism, then borders
themselves had to become secondary to the ideological orthodoxy of the
revolution.
In a
speech titled “Long Live the 17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of
Kampuchea,” delivered on September 29, 1977, Pol Pot celebrated the abolition
of currency as proof of ideological triumph:
We continue to
operate without the use of money, with no daily salary. Our entire people, our
Revolutionary Army, all our cadres and all our fighters live in a collective
system through a communal support system, which is being improved with every
passing day. This is a successful step toward the solution of the
contradictions between the cities and the countryside, between the workers and
the peasants, between manual workers and intellectuals, between the cadres and
the masses, between the economic infrastructure and the superstructure.
Here was communism articulated not as a distant
aspiration but as a lived reality, proclaimed by its architects at the height
of their power. The regime’s leaders believed, sincerely and disastrously, that
they had done what others could not: eradicated class contradiction by
extirpating the social categories that produced them. In their doctrine, the
absence of money was not an administrative detail—it was the revolutionary
solvent through which all lingering inequalities would dissipate.
Pol Pot described the communal system as if the nation
had seamlessly ascended into a harmonious equality. But beneath that triumphal
rhetoric lay a more brutal truth: Those “contradictions” were resolved not
through consensus or abundance but through forced labor, mass displacement, and
the grinding deprivation of a people denied every economic mechanism that
sustains life.
What came out of that experiment was not human
flourishing, but the annihilation of every fragile, humane instinct that keeps
a society recognizable to itself. To speak of communism as a noble destination
sabotaged by flawed travelers is to ignore this, because the Marxist
ideal—whether labeled socialism or communism—hinges on redistribution. And
redistribution, however elegantly phrased in theory, always demands a steward,
an allocator. It calls forth a managerial class even in a system that vows to
extinguish class itself.
Once a society pulls economic power away from its
citizens and concentrates it in the hands of those stewards, the result follows
a grim pattern. Power corrupts; the authority to distribute life’s necessities
corrupts even faster. Absolute control over redistribution becomes its own
ideology, one that tolerates no rivals and requires ever-tighter enforcement to
sustain itself. Good intentions cannot restrain such a system. Individual
virtue cannot redeem it. A society should never have to gamble on the hope that
the people at the top will resist the temptations that come with unbounded
discretion.
That is the core flaw embedded in the dream Piker
describes—a stateless, postscarcity brotherhood where human nature has been
perfected into something predictable and benign. Year Zero Cambodia revealed
the opposite truth. When the Khmer Rouge abolished money, markets, borders, and
private property, they did not eliminate the struggle for advantage; they
consolidated it. The Angkar became the fountainhead of all permissions. Food,
medicine, movement, marriage, labor—every decision was routed through the revolutionary
center. And when one group holds exclusive dominion over the distribution of
survival itself, the word “equality” becomes a rhetorical ornament.
The tragedy is that this dynamic is not unique to
Cambodia. Variations of it recur wherever redistribution becomes the organizing
principle of a society. A system that imagines itself morally immaculate tends
to rationalize the harshest measures in the name of maintaining that immaculate
state. And the further it drifts from lived reality, the more ruthlessly it
must discipline its citizens to preserve the illusion.
Some Western commentators approach these ideologies as
though they are blank canvases waiting for the right visionary to complete
them. They imagine that with better leadership, more humane incentives, or a
purer interpretation of Marx, the next attempt might redeem the project. But
the Khmer Rouge were not incompetent amateurs bungling a utopian script. They
pursued the script with greater fidelity than any regime before them. Their
failure was instructive. They exposed the hazard of letting a theory that romanticizes
total equality become a guide for governing real human beings with real needs,
fears, imperfections, and loyalties.
But the Khmer Rouge’s experiment wasn’t confined to the
economic realm. The same ideology that sought to erase markets also attempted
to purify the human spirit, and in doing so constructed one of the most
aggressively puritanical social orders of the modern era. In much Western
popular commentary, communism
is treated as socially
emancipatory—a kind of collectivist progressivism
scaled up to the level of the state. But for all their Marxist rhetoric, the
revolutionaries who claimed to be building a classless tomorrow for Cambodia
governed their subjects with the moral rigidity of an ancient priesthood.
Consider how the Khmer Rouge treated marriage and family
formation. If the family existed to serve the revolution, then the revolution
was entitled to define what a family was. Marriage ceased to be a covenant
between households; it became a cog in the machinery of national purification.
As the party’s youth magazine Revolutionary Youth put it,
Therefore, in
order that our families may know true happiness, peace, and prosperity, our
entire nation and people must first be liberated and freed from every type of
exploitation by the reactionary imperialists-feudalists-capitalists. So,
building our revolutionary families is not just for our personal interests or
happiness, or to have children and grandchildren to continue the family line.
Importantly, it is so that the revolution may achieve its highest mission, to
liberate the nation, the people, and the poor class and then advance toward
socialism and communism.
Traditionally, Khmer society entrusted marriages to
elders. Mothers, aunts, and village matrons negotiated unions. An achar—a
Buddhist priest—would be consulted to judge compatibility and choose an
auspicious date. These were not merely transactions but fusions of kinship
networks, ritual, and the tacit wisdom of people who understood village life
down to its emotional grain. The Khmer Rouge looked at these customs and saw
only corruption. If elders guided matches, class interest guided elders. And if
love was involved at all, it was suspect—an indulgence that might distract from
the revolution’s higher purpose. The solution was the same one applied to every
other facet of life under Democratic Kampuchea: replace the organic with the
engineered.
Thus, the party assumed the role traditionally held by
families, monks, and matchmakers. “When marrying,” Revolutionary Youth instructed,
“it is imperative to honestly make proposals to the Angkar, to the collective,
to have them help sort things out.” In theory, young men and women could choose
their partners. In practice, no union existed until it had been sanctified
through bureaucratic approval.
What followed was a system in which couples were
paired in mass ceremonies, matched not for compatibility but for political
reliability. Husbands and wives learned each other’s names on their wedding
day. They stood before officials, not elders. They pledged themselves to the
revolution first, each other second, if at all. Many were coerced into consummating
marriages they never chose—acts carried out under duress and stripped of
agency. Gay men and lesbian women were not spared in these rituals. The Angkar
made no allowance for orientation; it did not even acknowledge that such a
category existed. Those whom their villages quietly understood to prefer the
same sex were compelled into heterosexual unions with strangers, and refusal
was treated as sabotage.
In the sprawling imagination of the Khmer Rouge, cities
themselves were sites of moral decay—places where softness, individuality, and
cosmopolitan habits had infected the national spirit. Phnom Penh was a moral
failing. By emptying it, the regime believed it was returning a corrupted
people to a purer origin, a rural Eden that had supposedly existed before
markets, music, literature, and the clutter of human difference. Their utopia
was not futuristic at all. It was a reactionary dream of enforced simplicity—a
society stripped to pre-modern austerity, policed by revolutionary monks.
In recalling the seizure of Phnom Penh, Pol Pot stated:
The brother and
sister combatants of the revolutionary army … sons and daughters of our workers
and peasants … were taken aback by the overwhelming, unspeakable sight of
long-haired men and youngsters wearing bizarre clothing making themselves
indistinguishable from the fair sex. … Our traditional mentality, mores,
traditions and literature and arts, and culture and tradition were totally
destroyed by U.S. imperialism and its stooges. … Our people’s traditionally
clean, sound characteristics and essence were completely absent and abandoned,
replaced by imperialistic, pornographic, shameless, perverted, and fanatic
traits.
One need not stretch far to recognize the danger in the
way some Western voices look at foreign authoritarianism through a keyhole,
focusing only on the parts that flatter their resentments at home. When Tucker
Carlson applauds Nicolás Maduro for banning pornography, abortion, and same-sex
marriage, he reveals a temptation older than the Cold War: the wish to
outsource one’s moral agenda to any strongman who promises to deliver it. The
fact that Maduro presides over shortages, corruption, and repression becomes
irrelevant so long as he wages the right kind of kulturkampf.
If such observers were to evaluate the Khmer Rouge
through the same narrow lens, what would they see? A regime that outlawed
divorce, enforced sexual chastity, punished extramarital relationships with
execution, segregated men and women into rigid labor divisions, and imagined
itself as the guardian of an embattled national virtue. A movement that
distrusted art, discouraged pleasure, and treated individuality as a subversive
impulse. A government that replaced the family with the state and demanded obedience
not only of behavior but of thought.
Would some of today’s culture warriors mistake that
severity for strength? Would they praise the discipline while overlooking the
cruelty, just as their counterparts on the left admire social equality while
averting their gaze from the camps? It is not a hypothetical meant to draw glib
equivalence. It is a reminder that authoritarianism often wears the costume of
moral clarity. And when people become so consumed by their domestic feuds that
they begin to valorize foreign tyrannies for banning the sins they dislike,
they reveal something troubling about their own political appetite.
The tragedy of Cambodia is that its revolution fused the
worst impulses of both ideological poles: the economic absolutism of the
radical left with the moral absolutism of the radical right. It built a world
with no money and no markets, but also no music, no private affection, no
family autonomy, and no room for the ungoverned rhythms of human life. It was
the nightmare that emerges when purity—of class or of culture—is pursued with
equal fanaticism.
And if the West persists in grafting its fantasies onto
distant regimes, mistaking repression for order or coercion for virtue, it
risks learning the lesson only after stepping too close to the edge: that
utopias, whether painted red or draped in traditionalist rhetoric, demand the
same sacrifice at the altar of perfection—the human being, made small enough to
govern.
