I have a minority position but like talking about this subject:
The DPRK is plainly anti-Marxist by their own account, though we can learn a lot about centralized production (something important to Marxism) from their experiences.
They are also plainly not very democratic in that the Supreme People’s Assembly, their closest analogue to Congress (though it is worth noting that their government structure is different from the traditional western one), has never in its history reported a split vote or even a strongly contested vote that I’ve been able to find, meaning it’s a rubber stamp machine. I think their elections outside of the SPA (which are trivialize by the above) are much more genuinely democratic though, and the government has consistently been making reforms in the direction of diffusing authority, in addition to recently making positive reforms to their election procedure.
The DPRK is a historically progressive force, meaning that its influence on the world overall pushes the world in a positive direction, so it’s successes that are in line with that propensity or that can be a platform for that propensity (like here) are to be celebrated. It is not at all how I think a government should be operated, but I still think it’s better than the US colony to its south and I hope it succeeds in its reunification efforts (which Kim has gone kind of sour on, but he is actually not supported in this by much of the rest of the government!)
Edit: oh yeah, and it’s worth noting that most of the stories we receive about the DPRK from the capitalist press that aren’t the sort of thing the dprk also reports are plainly lies. Like, whether it’s the stuff about unicorns and the Kim’s not pooping or about them wrongfully imprisoning Americans or Laura Ling or whoever (they were arresting criminals and generally let them go on a reasonably short timescale)
Your evidence of their “rubber stamp” system could also be evidence of a system which is more efficiently oriented where proposals only come to that level once they are already so well thought out and we’ll worked out that disagreement isn’t necessary. Or that the disagreement first is worked out at other democratic levels before the rubber stamps just check it for validity/achievability. It’s exactly what I would expect to happen as communism shifts away from elected assemblies as we know them to something more of a “check that it integrates well with the rest of the laws” towards the nebulous “statelessness”.
I don’t think DPRK is completely there, but rubber stamping usually also has some reason for existing, and your assumption that it’s a negative thing is just that: an assumption
This is just making rationalizations. Is it possible that there is some justification? Sure, but you would need to actually do something to substantiate that rather than just say that an explanation could exist somewhere deeper inside of the DPRK bureaucracy.
Obviously I am not saying that there needs to be constant disagreement, that shouldn’t be a question, but if you can point me to even one single contested vote in its decades of history, that would be new to me, and given any frame of reference I have (and I’m not an expert but I’ve repeatedly looked), the simplest explanation is that it’s anti-democratic. Feel free to introduce a new frame of reference.
The DPRK, besides repudiating Marxist principles, does not have statelessness on the table. There cannot be a one-nation stateless society unless perhaps it exists in genuinely complete isolation rather than the present incomplete strangulation. Speculating on statelessness when the state is still very present and, from the optimist’s perspective, has even more work to do with the SEZ, doesn’t seem helpful to me.
You are also just rationalizing, that’s what I was responding to. I could’ve shifted to ways that we know their system works that could explain it, but I wanted you to just realize that you were doing it. You are rationalizing with an assumption that I reversed: namely, that constant agreement within a political is a sign of undemocratic principles. I think this is a bad assumption
I’ve found this site a helpful little picture to use in discussions! Site with flow
It seems to me that the democratic process, if done well, can be achieved in steps 1-11, and from there it be a more ceremonial role (which could be abused, I understand). There’s no reason for a logical system to still have disagreements and rejections at stages 12 onwards if the rest is functional and the parties are working together for the betterment. This plus the instant recall mechanism through the 50,000 people represented per representative, seems to me very democratic.
Is this the total reality there? Likely not, there’s always added cultural aspects that shift how something is done and interpreted, and it’s hard to know about the DPRK. But I will always push back when someone fills the gaps with assumptions based on how bourgeois politics wastes all previous steps by still doing bullshit fake politics within the assemblies. Any move away from that is positive
Also, just to have it stated: I am a losurdoist about statelessness. It seems like a major utopian mistake of Marx to really believe this. The state as its current function can be aufgehoben through new functions, but it has more functions than just class struggle for the ruling class that won’t go away. Defense of the revolution might never end, though it will change in form to something much less violent and negative. So I don’t think the DPRK is anti-marxist but it also is not attempting to throw away the state. I was just speaking in hypotheticals that most leftists understand to explain the rationalization you made and how it could be otherwise.
I think in the Marxist account the state is whatever is functionally the mediator of class struggle and it’s not like there would no longer be a government in Marxist communism (something that some anarchists express disdain for), it’s just that the character of a government that is no longer the mediator of class antagonisms is very different. Marx also never suggested that history would end, though he clearly implied it would reach a stage where it proceeds on very different terms. He would probably agree that the revolution would need to be defended forever because you can’t just not have politics (even if a lot of the mainstream functions of the government, the “administration of things” becomes sort of depoliticized), but as you say it would require very little violence.
But I wasn’t calling the DPRK anti-Marxist because it opposes being dissolved into an international body (though afaik it does and therefore it is), I was talking about them railing against basically every conceivable aspect of historical materialism.
As Losurdo puts it, Marx sometimes didn’t imply an end to the state saying “the falling away of the state AS SUCH” and other times clearly implied it would go away entirely saying “the falling away of the state” and then discussing the ways that no state power would be needed. It seems Marx just slipped sometimes into that line of thought, but I don’t judge the main body of his work for that slip (the historical materialism and analysis of capitalism)
But what do you consider ways that the DPRK rails against historical materialism? I’ve never heard this claim, genuinely!
I sympathize with this, though I have a ‘philosphy of science’ critique of these sorts of critiques–the forest missed for the trees sort of thing. Holistically considering quotes and portions of huge things as evidence of something while actions and a holistic look may still show its opposite. That is all to say, this doesn’t convince me, but I get that it can be convincing.
I didn’t read this all–I won’t lie by saying I did. But I took an example:
"The main factor in this change is alleged to be the fact that it is now not objective conditions, but man that plays the decisive role in history:
“It is not objective conditions but man that plays the decisive role in the development of history”. (Kim Song Il: ‘On Some Problems of Education in the Juche Idea’, in: ‘On Carrying Forward the Juche Idea’; Pyongyang; 1995: p. 144). "
This seems very easy to me to clarify as the combination of the idea that objective conditions are also created by humans, or at least the most dominating ones. It is just highlighting the opposite in a dialectic which Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were needing to push the other pole of in their times. When Kim Song Il was writing, it was much more important for the movement to recognize the human aspect.
It reminds me of what I read recently (will have to look it up) where Ho Chi Minh talked about Lenin ‘bending the stick’ the other way by saying a more extreme argument to bring the opinions towards a better understanding of the dialectical motion
which Kim has gone kind of sour on, but he is actually not supported in this by much of the rest of the government!
Can you cite where you learned about this? I’d assume the destruction of the reunification monuments and the responses that the DPRK recently made towards the US drills and the refusal to meet with ROK diplomats would mean that the anti-reunification position is the central position.
I checked and have struggled to find it. I might have been remembering cases that turned out to be institutional inertia, since this change has happened over the course of a few years.
I would be happy to try to explain the rest of it in a more comprehensible manner. Can you tell me what you did understand or if there was any easily-identifiable point of confusion?
No problem. I got a lot of replies yesterday and it was a bit too much. From your comment and what others have said, North Korea went through a very intense bombing by the US, and so its leaders fear that they will be attacked again. So they have taken an over-centralized, ‘military first’ approach. This is also why they have nuclear weapons. For North Korea to focus on its people’s well-being, the US etc. have to first stop threatening them. Is this broadly correct?
That’s more what other people were talking about, but yeah, I’d say that’s broadly correct.
The one correction that I would make is that the DPRK is already quite concerned with its people’s well-being, and makes an effort to make sure they have food, housing, healthcare, employment, etc. that already exceeds what most countries do relative their resources, including sacrificing a great deal of their hypothetical economic productivity to make sure that they produce enough food (and other basic needs, but especially food) such that being completely cut off from the world (a reasonable fear imo given their history) would not result in a severe famine. That’s why so much of their economy is agriculture, something western sources don’t deny but rarely mention.
The DPRK does still have a malnutrition problem, not famine but still malnutrition, but I don’t think it’s from government neglect just like I don’t think its widespread poverty is a matter of government neglect. The government and country are poor and the Kims aren’t sitting on a magic wand to make it go away (though you could argue China and Russia had been sitting on one because of the veto power they didn’t use when the DPRK was sanctioned). If the DPRK wasn’t sanctioned, even if the military threats remained just the same, you would see a massive transformation.
But I agree certainly that if they were less threatened, they could spend more resources on other things and that would generally be to the benefit of their population, and I would also say that you would be much more likely to see more rapid social political reforms if they were less threatened by external forces.
![[CW: Transphobia] Congrats to North Korea for winning the U-17 Woman's World Cup!](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/e0f95f39-e410-42a1-8130-454ce954a438.png){kind=link}
I have a minority position but like talking about this subject:
The DPRK is plainly anti-Marxist by their own account, though we can learn a lot about centralized production (something important to Marxism) from their experiences.
They are also plainly not very democratic in that the Supreme People’s Assembly, their closest analogue to Congress (though it is worth noting that their government structure is different from the traditional western one), has never in its history reported a split vote or even a strongly contested vote that I’ve been able to find, meaning it’s a rubber stamp machine. I think their elections outside of the SPA (which are trivialize by the above) are much more genuinely democratic though, and the government has consistently been making reforms in the direction of diffusing authority, in addition to recently making positive reforms to their election procedure.
The DPRK is a historically progressive force, meaning that its influence on the world overall pushes the world in a positive direction, so it’s successes that are in line with that propensity or that can be a platform for that propensity (like here) are to be celebrated. It is not at all how I think a government should be operated, but I still think it’s better than the US colony to its south and I hope it succeeds in its reunification efforts (which Kim has gone kind of sour on,
but he is actually not supported in this by much of the rest of the government!)Edit: oh yeah, and it’s worth noting that most of the stories we receive about the DPRK from the capitalist press that aren’t the sort of thing the dprk also reports are plainly lies. Like, whether it’s the stuff about unicorns and the Kim’s not pooping or about them wrongfully imprisoning Americans or Laura Ling or whoever (they were arresting criminals and generally let them go on a reasonably short timescale)
Your evidence of their “rubber stamp” system could also be evidence of a system which is more efficiently oriented where proposals only come to that level once they are already so well thought out and we’ll worked out that disagreement isn’t necessary. Or that the disagreement first is worked out at other democratic levels before the rubber stamps just check it for validity/achievability. It’s exactly what I would expect to happen as communism shifts away from elected assemblies as we know them to something more of a “check that it integrates well with the rest of the laws” towards the nebulous “statelessness”.
I don’t think DPRK is completely there, but rubber stamping usually also has some reason for existing, and your assumption that it’s a negative thing is just that: an assumption
This is just making rationalizations. Is it possible that there is some justification? Sure, but you would need to actually do something to substantiate that rather than just say that an explanation could exist somewhere deeper inside of the DPRK bureaucracy.
Obviously I am not saying that there needs to be constant disagreement, that shouldn’t be a question, but if you can point me to even one single contested vote in its decades of history, that would be new to me, and given any frame of reference I have (and I’m not an expert but I’ve repeatedly looked), the simplest explanation is that it’s anti-democratic. Feel free to introduce a new frame of reference.
The DPRK, besides repudiating Marxist principles, does not have statelessness on the table. There cannot be a one-nation stateless society unless perhaps it exists in genuinely complete isolation rather than the present incomplete strangulation. Speculating on statelessness when the state is still very present and, from the optimist’s perspective, has even more work to do with the SEZ, doesn’t seem helpful to me.
You are also just rationalizing, that’s what I was responding to. I could’ve shifted to ways that we know their system works that could explain it, but I wanted you to just realize that you were doing it. You are rationalizing with an assumption that I reversed: namely, that constant agreement within a political is a sign of undemocratic principles. I think this is a bad assumption
Frequent agreement is fine, but uniform agreement across decades is not the same thing.
Why would it be if all disagreement is worked out before this vote ever takes place? Then it’s just like signing an already hashed out contract.
Tell me about the decision-making.
I’ve found this site a helpful little picture to use in discussions! Site with flow
It seems to me that the democratic process, if done well, can be achieved in steps 1-11, and from there it be a more ceremonial role (which could be abused, I understand). There’s no reason for a logical system to still have disagreements and rejections at stages 12 onwards if the rest is functional and the parties are working together for the betterment. This plus the instant recall mechanism through the 50,000 people represented per representative, seems to me very democratic.
Is this the total reality there? Likely not, there’s always added cultural aspects that shift how something is done and interpreted, and it’s hard to know about the DPRK. But I will always push back when someone fills the gaps with assumptions based on how bourgeois politics wastes all previous steps by still doing bullshit fake politics within the assemblies. Any move away from that is positive
Also, just to have it stated: I am a losurdoist about statelessness. It seems like a major utopian mistake of Marx to really believe this. The state as its current function can be aufgehoben through new functions, but it has more functions than just class struggle for the ruling class that won’t go away. Defense of the revolution might never end, though it will change in form to something much less violent and negative. So I don’t think the DPRK is anti-marxist but it also is not attempting to throw away the state. I was just speaking in hypotheticals that most leftists understand to explain the rationalization you made and how it could be otherwise.
I think in the Marxist account the state is whatever is functionally the mediator of class struggle and it’s not like there would no longer be a government in Marxist communism (something that some anarchists express disdain for), it’s just that the character of a government that is no longer the mediator of class antagonisms is very different. Marx also never suggested that history would end, though he clearly implied it would reach a stage where it proceeds on very different terms. He would probably agree that the revolution would need to be defended forever because you can’t just not have politics (even if a lot of the mainstream functions of the government, the “administration of things” becomes sort of depoliticized), but as you say it would require very little violence.
But I wasn’t calling the DPRK anti-Marxist because it opposes being dissolved into an international body (though afaik it does and therefore it is), I was talking about them railing against basically every conceivable aspect of historical materialism.
As Losurdo puts it, Marx sometimes didn’t imply an end to the state saying “the falling away of the state AS SUCH” and other times clearly implied it would go away entirely saying “the falling away of the state” and then discussing the ways that no state power would be needed. It seems Marx just slipped sometimes into that line of thought, but I don’t judge the main body of his work for that slip (the historical materialism and analysis of capitalism)
But what do you consider ways that the DPRK rails against historical materialism? I’ve never heard this claim, genuinely!
https://espressostalinist.com/2011/11/01/bill-bland-the-workers-party-of-korea-and-revisionism/
Bland was wrong on plenty of things and I’m not endorsing his Hoxhaphilia, but I like this as a collection of quotes.
I sympathize with this, though I have a ‘philosphy of science’ critique of these sorts of critiques–the forest missed for the trees sort of thing. Holistically considering quotes and portions of huge things as evidence of something while actions and a holistic look may still show its opposite. That is all to say, this doesn’t convince me, but I get that it can be convincing.
I didn’t read this all–I won’t lie by saying I did. But I took an example:
"The main factor in this change is alleged to be the fact that it is now not objective conditions, but man that plays the decisive role in history:
“It is not objective conditions but man that plays the decisive role in the development of history”. (Kim Song Il: ‘On Some Problems of Education in the Juche Idea’, in: ‘On Carrying Forward the Juche Idea’; Pyongyang; 1995: p. 144). "
This seems very easy to me to clarify as the combination of the idea that objective conditions are also created by humans, or at least the most dominating ones. It is just highlighting the opposite in a dialectic which Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were needing to push the other pole of in their times. When Kim Song Il was writing, it was much more important for the movement to recognize the human aspect.
It reminds me of what I read recently (will have to look it up) where Ho Chi Minh talked about Lenin ‘bending the stick’ the other way by saying a more extreme argument to bring the opinions towards a better understanding of the dialectical motion
Can you cite where you learned about this? I’d assume the destruction of the reunification monuments and the responses that the DPRK recently made towards the US drills and the refusal to meet with ROK diplomats would mean that the anti-reunification position is the central position.
I checked and have struggled to find it. I might have been remembering cases that turned out to be institutional inertia, since this change has happened over the course of a few years.
I understood about 20% of that, but thank you.
I would be happy to try to explain the rest of it in a more comprehensible manner. Can you tell me what you did understand or if there was any easily-identifiable point of confusion?
No problem. I got a lot of replies yesterday and it was a bit too much. From your comment and what others have said, North Korea went through a very intense bombing by the US, and so its leaders fear that they will be attacked again. So they have taken an over-centralized, ‘military first’ approach. This is also why they have nuclear weapons. For North Korea to focus on its people’s well-being, the US etc. have to first stop threatening them. Is this broadly correct?
That’s more what other people were talking about, but yeah, I’d say that’s broadly correct.
The one correction that I would make is that the DPRK is already quite concerned with its people’s well-being, and makes an effort to make sure they have food, housing, healthcare, employment, etc. that already exceeds what most countries do relative their resources, including sacrificing a great deal of their hypothetical economic productivity to make sure that they produce enough food (and other basic needs, but especially food) such that being completely cut off from the world (a reasonable fear imo given their history) would not result in a severe famine. That’s why so much of their economy is agriculture, something western sources don’t deny but rarely mention.
The DPRK does still have a malnutrition problem, not famine but still malnutrition, but I don’t think it’s from government neglect just like I don’t think its widespread poverty is a matter of government neglect. The government and country are poor and the Kims aren’t sitting on a magic wand to make it go away (though you could argue China and Russia had been sitting on one because of the veto power they didn’t use when the DPRK was sanctioned). If the DPRK wasn’t sanctioned, even if the military threats remained just the same, you would see a massive transformation.
But I agree certainly that if they were less threatened, they could spend more resources on other things and that would generally be to the benefit of their population, and I would also say that you would be much more likely to see more rapid social political reforms if they were less threatened by external forces.
Got it, thanks!