ABSTRACT
Saloth Sar and his colleagues deliberately set Cambodia on a revolutionary path toward-in their minds-a Communist utopia. As David Chandler explains, they explicitly sought to refashion, or remake, Cambodia. However, unlike Marx’s scientific reasoning, the Khmer Communist’s decision to “wage revolution everywhere in Cambodia did not spring from a study of Cambodian social conditions or from consultation with others, but from a conviction on the part of the CPK’s [Communist Party of Kampuchea] leaders that a recognizably communist revolution needed to be waged. If the right preconditions did not exist, that problem could be overcome by revolutionary fervor.”3 Saloth Sar, however, had apparently not learned a key insight offered by Marx, namely that Marx “knew he could not impose his own will on the course of history.” Rather, Marx “condemned conspiratorial revolutionaries who wished to capture power and introduce socialism before the economic base of society had developed to the point at which the working class as a whole is ready to participate in the revolution.”4
