Khmer Rouge adopts Primitive communism
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Assuming the Scholz's Star aliens started picking up Soviet "Woodpecker" radar signals from 1980s and sent RKVs to deal with the annoyance ... impactors should arrive sometime in 2030s.
As somebody else mentioned, "primitive communism" is not a political program. It's a term used to describe premodern economies. If you're looking for a political ideology which seeks to replicate primitive communism today, "anarcho-primitivism" is the term you want.
To answer OP's question, no, the Khmer Rouge would never adopt an anarcho-primitivist platform. IOTL, an agrarian focus on the part of the Khmer Rouge fit with the contemporary and historical economy of the region. Cambodia had experienced very little in the way of industrialization and had been the site of intensive agriculture for several thousand years. The country had millions of peasants engaged in agriculture whose families had been engaged in agriculture for millennia. This provides a large base of people receptive to the idea that this new industry stuff is less important than agriculture.
Hunting and gathering, on the other hand, had been absent as a primary form of subsistence in Cambodia for thousands of years. Even the "hill tribes" were agriculturalists. You're asking every single person in the country to change their way of life to a much more dramatic degree than with agricultural collectivization. Practically nobody in Cambodia had any experience with subsistence foraging.
And statelessness? Let alone whether the Khmer Rouge would want to give up their power like that, how do you enforce such an all-encompassing change to how literally everyone survives without a state? As soon as you say you're no longer in charge, most people are gonna go "Okay, fuck you then" and go back to farming like they were before.
To answer OP's question, no, the Khmer Rouge would never adopt an anarcho-primitivist platform. IOTL, an agrarian focus on the part of the Khmer Rouge fit with the contemporary and historical economy of the region. Cambodia had experienced very little in the way of industrialization and had been the site of intensive agriculture for several thousand years. The country had millions of peasants engaged in agriculture whose families had been engaged in agriculture for millennia. This provides a large base of people receptive to the idea that this new industry stuff is less important than agriculture.
Hunting and gathering, on the other hand, had been absent as a primary form of subsistence in Cambodia for thousands of years. Even the "hill tribes" were agriculturalists. You're asking every single person in the country to change their way of life to a much more dramatic degree than with agricultural collectivization. Practically nobody in Cambodia had any experience with subsistence foraging.
And statelessness? Let alone whether the Khmer Rouge would want to give up their power like that, how do you enforce such an all-encompassing change to how literally everyone survives without a state? As soon as you say you're no longer in charge, most people are gonna go "Okay, fuck you then" and go back to farming like they were before.
This. You can’t “adopt” a political programme of ‘primitive communism’ as if it’s some sort of ideology or political idea, it’s a descriptor for hunter gatherer societies. An Anarcho-Primitivist Khmer Rouge makes zero sense in context of the region, and had a whopping 0.000% of even being dreamed up by the leadership, let alone actually attempting to implement it. Even among the standing committee of the CPK Party Center, the highest decision makers for the CPK, there isn’t really any reason why they’d attempt it. There was, in fact, an internal logic and philosophy that guided the actions of the Khmer Rouge in depopulating the cities (as @NorCalifornio pointed out, a strong tradition of agriculture as the primary market in Cambodia, the idea to attempt a classless society rooted in agrarian life, American bombings making city administration difficult, and CPK support being derived from the peasantry overwhelmingly). They had reasons for the ultimate butchery carried out, believe it or not, and there’s literally no incentive for them to one day wake up and say “Hey... let’s screw the whole ‘organized peasant vanguard on its way to organizing a socialist economy based on agricultural industries under the guidance of the CPK’ thing and just... live in the woods and wear loincloths and eat berries and shit...”
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Scroll down a bit for a mildly NSFW cartoon from the 2000s(I think), portraying an anarcho-primitivist uprsing.
I believe this one did, in fact, claim inspiration from Fight Club, though that movie's weirdo gender antagonism is mostly absent. And while it's pivotal to the ideology-based storyline that the rebels are office workers, the fact that none of them seem to be members of a pre-existing hunter-gatherer class possibly drives home what other posters have said about the dismal prospects for such a revolution to take place in Cambodia.
I believe this one did, in fact, claim inspiration from Fight Club, though that movie's weirdo gender antagonism is mostly absent. And while it's pivotal to the ideology-based storyline that the rebels are office workers, the fact that none of them seem to be members of a pre-existing hunter-gatherer class possibly drives home what other posters have said about the dismal prospects for such a revolution to take place in Cambodia.
marathag
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The Khmer Rouge believed that they had to force material conditions of history to match the achievements of Mao. They had an industrialized urban core and a service sector, but the peasantry were not adequate agents of revolutionary sentiment, so they had to make that happen via the back to land campaign
It was a Marxian understanding of capital H History, with Leninist tactics, but Maoist principles
So I don't think this is as far fetched as some may
No, it is far fetched. As you said yourself, the core supporting group of the Khmer Rouge was the peasantry. The peasantry would not give up their farms and the (even when it's pretty low) standard of living to become hunters and gatherers, a way of live extinct on earth for thousands of years.
Also AFAIK the Khmer Rouge thought that by forcing everyone on farming, they could export their goods to acquire machines for a later industrialization. Needless to say this didn't work.
OTL Khmer Rouge is far fetched.
I mean we are talking about the guys who get the idea that people with glasses should be killed, based on the notion of "communism failed other places because of the resistance of the intellectuals, so we should kill the intellectuals. Who are the intellectuals? Well, apparently they read a lot, so probably it must be people with glasses" or had conversations like "Boss, our reeducation camps are using too many bullets? Sure, we can use to pickaxes instead".
Over 4 years, they managed to kill a quarter of the population, which by communist genocide standards is the all time high.
All you really need is for Pol Pot to become impressed by a tribe which has a strong reverence on hunting while he is fighting in northeast prior to his victory and/or pick up some French philosopher building on Rosseau to argue for a hunter-gather society, and down the rabbit hole we go.
But as ridiculous and horrible as those things were, there was an internal logic to them, rooted in their agrarian vision of Kampuchean society.
As a comparison, if I proposed an ATL Hitler who tried to exterminate Calvinists, and someone replied that that's pretty far-fetched, I don't think I could just rejoinder that with "Well, Nazism itself is pretty far-fetched, look at the holocaust". Because a maniac raised in anti-semitic Europe in the era of Social Darwinism could plausibly come up with an ideology combining those ideas in a genocidal fashion. Not so much C20 anti-Calvinism, even if that had historically been a thing in Catholic circles.
As for any tribal/Rousseuian inspiration, the Khmer Rouge didn't just borrow their ideology from a few nomads and a couple of books by some misguided French philosopher. They emerged from a society that was already heavily agrarian to begin with, and they just sorta made that into a state cult.
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By the way, if you do a google on "Underdevelopment In Cambodia by Khieu Samphan", you can find the Ph.D thesis that basically served as the Mein Kampf of the Khmer Rouge. It's displayed in a direct reproduction of the journal in which it was originally published.
Of course Pol Pot can choose whatever ideology he wants, but that doesn't mean that the Khmer Rouge will select him as leader nevertheless (and that the Khmer Rouge would win the civil war in such a scenario).
You see, "successful" ideologies have to have a basis in the socioeconomic system of the country. That's why Communism/Socialism/Social Democracy gained traction in industrialized countries - it was rooted in the working class, the emerging class of the 19th century. Anarchoprimitivism on the other hand doesn't have a basis in society: There are next to no people who still are hunters & gatherers.
Cambodia at the time was a majority farmer-society. And anti-urban sentiment (very often associated with anti-intellectualist thought) is often pretty widespread in the countryside as can seen by many rural movements against the "urban cosmopolites". The Khmer Rouge at the end didn't do much but clothed that anti-urban resentment into pseudo-marxist words.
The Kalahari "Bushmen", North American indigenous peoples, and various Amazon tribespeople might be examples of groups with current or at least relatively recent(though no living memories in the case of North America) experience with hunter-gatherer societies. A somewhat plausible ATL might be for one of them to adopt some militantly anti-agriculultural or anti-industrial ideology, possibly formulated by cultural expatriates who moved into academia(like Pol Pol or Khieu Samphan), and directed against state assimilation efforts.
Though such a belief system would likely be entirely reactive, with little possibility for forming a state of its own.
What tribe in the northeast? They're all rice farmers, the nearest hunter-gatherers live in the interior of the Malay Peninsula.
As for the French philosopher angle, that's certainly something Pol Pot could do. People like that exist, but they hang out in anarchist bookstores or live off the grid someplace. Unusually motivated ones might organize something like MOVE. They don't end up becoming the head of state of a country populated primarily by peasants.
As @HelloThere, @overoceans, and others have been saying, there's an internal logic to even the most ridiculous and horrible successful political movements. Cambodia had a built-in constituency for a movement that lionized an agrarian way of life. On the other hand, they had zero hunter-gatherers
Good analogy. I think this site would write off ATL anti-Calvinist Hitler, for the reasons you point out. But even that is nowhere near as wild as Khmer Rouge-enforced hunting and gathering. Just look at the repercussions for people. The Calvinists are screwed, obviously. Everybody else has to deal with the Calvinists all being gone. Aside from those admittedly terrible things though, life is pretty much the same. Removing Calvinists from the equation is not some all-encompassing change to German life.
Removing agriculture is another thing entirely. Every single person in Cambodia is seeing their way of life change down to the most basic level. OTL you had urbanites accustomed to buying rice being forced to harvest it along with the millions of Cambodians who were already doing that. In the proposed ATL, rice is now forbidden. All the staple foods are off-limits, as are the materials people make their clothes out of. Fish are still fine, but aside from that basically nobody knows what to eat, and there are no preexisting foragers in the region for guidance.
Industrialization? Deindustrialization? Collectivization? Transitioning between feudalism, capitalism, and/or communism? All practically minor tweaks compared with a switch to subsistence foraging in a region that's had intensive agriculture for millennia. Alt-Pol Pot would be removed from office before he had a chance to figure out how to implement such a drastic change.