"Currency is a Most Poisonous Tool": State Capitalism, Nonmarket Socialism, and the Elimination of Money during the Cambodian Genocide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea sought to establish a non-monetary and non-market economy. In the process, however, upwards of 1.7 million men, women, and children perished. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the CPK’s decision to eliminate money in its attempt to transform Cambodia’s pre-revolutionary economy into a communist mode of production. First, I provide some general remarks on Marx, money, and markets; the purpose here is to establish a common foundation for readers, in order to properly assess Khmer Rouge monetary policies with those of orthodox reading of Marxism. Second, I position CPK macro-economic policies within the context of the Non-Aligned Movement and revolutionary socialism, as these movements greatly informed economic policies in Democratic Kampuchea. Third, I comment upon the decision of senior CPK personnel on the elimination of money. Lastly, I evaluate the contradictions of CPK macro-economic policies, specifically, the suspension of money and markets domestically but the need to participate in the global economy in order to accumulate rapidly much needed capital for investment purposes. These contradictions, I conclude, established the structural context of the subsequent Cambodian genocide and the resulting famine that resulted in a massive loss of life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".