The remainder of the plan seems hastily flung together. Under “Trade,” for instance, “imports” consist of “screws and nuts, spare parts, agricultural and industrial machinery, necessary goods for the livelihood of the people, and goods for national defense.” Under “Tourism” came the laconic note: “Must organize: hotels, water, electricity, ... places to relax.” The section on health and welfare stressed the importance of traditional healers (kruu khmer) working with local medical remedies. This preference reflected the triumphalism of the regime, echoed the policies of “barefoot doctors” in China and was seen as a way of saving money. The results of the poorly conceived medical program were disastrous. Survivors’ memories teem with grisly accounts of arrogant, untrained medical practitioners in the countryside—many under fifteen years old—and of the regime’s insistence on prerevolutionary (indeed, precolonial) cures, without emphasizing hygiene or heeding diagnoses. In many areas, people who were ill received fewer rations than those who were able to work. Once again, achieving public health was conceived in terms of storming attacks. Under “General Hygiene,” for example, the plan proposed to “instigate a mass movement for general hygiene in every field” but provided no details.

The plan underscored the importance of accelerating collectivization, a program that was seen as synonymous with society’s well-being. Collectivization, it was thought, would raise the people’s living standards: “In 1977 there are to be two desserts per week. In 1978 there will be one dessert every two days. Then in 1979, one dessert every day, and so on.” This macabre pledge is the only material incentive mentioned in the plan.

One aspect of collectivization not mentioned in the plan was the policy of forcing people to eat together in large dining halls rather than as families. This policy, which went into effect in 1977 and was arguably the most unpopular one in Democratic Kampuchea, deprived families of food and opportunities for cooking and casual conversation. According to a spokesman, “the capitalist framework”—which included relatives eating together—still existed in China and North Korea and had postponed revolutionary success in those otherwise admirable countries. “So long as the capitalist system exists,” he said, “it will ... become an obstacle to the socialist revolution.”

The connection between families, private property, and counterrevolutionary ideas was made in the nineteenth century by Marx’s colleague Friedrich Engels. Twentieth-century Khmer, however, never understood how families eating together endangered progress or how people with access to less than $100 per year in prerevolutionary times were “capitalist” or “bourgeois.” It is generous to assume that communal eating, as a policy, was intended to benefit ordinary Khmer. It seems more likely, however, that it was intended as a means of strengthening the organization’s surveillance and control over the people.