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.

The shortest section of the document—covering three pages in Khmer—dealt with “culture, literacy, art, technology, science, mass education, and propaganda and information.” The low priorities given to culture, literacy, and art reflected the rejection of traditional culture by the former schoolteachers who wrote the plan as well as their slavish imitation of Chinese models. Turning their backs on “2,000 years of history” also meant turning their backs on the many-faceted Cambodian culture that had developed over these millennia for the pleasure (Communists would say the “mystification”) of privileged and ordinary people alike. High culture that was accessible to peasants included complex dances, instrumental and vocal music, highly developed decorative skills (evident in woven textiles, bronze work, wood carving, and Buddhist temple paintings), and a long tradition of oral and written poetry—to say nothing of the “feudal” grandeur of Angkor. It also included sophisticated works of Buddhist teaching and exegesis and a wide-ranging collection of ethically oriented poems, known as chbab.

The leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, bewitched by the defeat of the Americans and by slogans like “Three tons per hectare” may have thought there would be little time and energy to devote to these peripheral aspects of existence until the problems of the economy had been solved. This is a generous reading. More likely, they were contemptuous or fearful of the private pleasures that culture, in a wide sense, had always offered to ordinary Khmer.