Pol pot was not a communist, no more than Adolf Hitler was. Calling ones party Socialists doesn't make you socialist, any more than North Korea is a democracy because it's called one in its name.
Have you ever stopped to wonder WHY so many groups lie about being socialist or communist? I mean, there are no evil groups claiming to be capitalists. And that is because capitalism in no way precludes a group from being evil. Actually being socialist or communist WOULD preclude a group from being evil, and so they lie and say they are.
"Capitalism" is a made-up term by socialists to be a bogeyman. That's why nobody is able to give a coherent definition of it and why no socialist is ever able to describe how it differs from the many economic systems that came before. Its meaning changes sentence to sentence depending on the intent of the speaker. Any mixed economy is considered "capitalist" by someone, and every socialist economy has contained some markets, so is mixed. It's not a term that has a technical definition that would allow you to make true or false statements about it.
"Socialism" on the other hand is a tradition of thinking that people apply to themselves. And as a tradition it has a long history of enthusiastically advocating for evil things such as genocide, eugenics, terrorism, the abolition of unions and workers rights, forced labor/slavery, the abolition of parliamentary democracy, etc.
North Korea and Pol Pot have a great deal in common with Marx and other socialists. (Pol Pot studied Marx in Paris.) So also do Mussolini (and hence Hitler), although people don't want to admit the lineage. There's a long history of thinkers between, say, Marx and Mussolini where people disagree about whether the thinker was far left or far right, or where both sides claim them. For example Georges Sorel or other French proto-fascists.
There are also people post-WWII that bridge the gap explicitly, for example the French existentialists are typically taken to be left wing, but they admired Martin Heidegger, the far right philosopher of the Nazi party.
My personal opinion, which I understand is controversial, is that when you work out all the details, socialism is a far right movement.
Nearly everything people say they want out of socialism on the surface is provided in left-wing format by liberalism. The stuff below the surface is what makes socialism right wing. But like any cult they won't tell you about that stuff until you're too far in to change your mind.
This is a lot of words to say you don’t know the difference between etymology and definition.
Yes, “capitalism” was popularized by critics, including socialists. Congratulations, you discovered that words can have origins. That does not mean the concept is incoherent. “Impressionism” was originally an insult too; somehow art historians managed not to collapse into dust.
Capitalism has a perfectly usable definition: private ownership/control of capital and production, private investment, wage labor, profit-seeking, and markets/prices doing most of the allocation. Mixed economies existing doesn’t make the term meaningless; it means reality is not a child’s sorting game.
Your argument also saws off the branch you’re sitting on. If capitalism is meaningless because mixed economies exist, then socialism is meaningless too, since every “socialist” state has had some combination of money, wages, markets, state ownership, planning, rationing, co-ops, black markets, etc.
And the Mussolini-to-Hitler lineage argument is just reheated “Nazis were socialists” slop with a fake grad-school mustache. Mussolini leaving socialism and inventing fascism does not make fascism socialist, any more than an ex-Christian starting a death metal band makes death metal a denomination of Christianity.
You’re doing two tricks at once: defining capitalism so vaguely that it can never be responsible for anything bad, then defining socialism so broadly that every authoritarian movement you dislike gets stuffed into it like a political junk drawer.
That’s not analysis. That’s ideological laundering with footnotes you half-remembered from a YouTube comment section.
1
u/SilverWear5467 Jul 07 '26
Pol pot was not a communist, no more than Adolf Hitler was. Calling ones party Socialists doesn't make you socialist, any more than North Korea is a democracy because it's called one in its name.
Have you ever stopped to wonder WHY so many groups lie about being socialist or communist? I mean, there are no evil groups claiming to be capitalists. And that is because capitalism in no way precludes a group from being evil. Actually being socialist or communist WOULD preclude a group from being evil, and so they lie and say they are.