Dear Leader gone

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What would China have been able to do about it? KJI kept the DPRK alive even when the USSR collapsed around it

No, China kept DPRK alive by providing it with 90% of its energy and and almost half of its food, and the three Chinese armies in the Shenyang military region is the main deterrent against ROK and US aggression in face of ever widening technological and training gap between the KPA and the ROK and US militaries.

Many Stalinists here would do well to read some Sam Marcy and the Global Class War.

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Say what you will about Kim Jong-il, but the very fact that Korea wasn't flattened by Imperialists or that North Korea's biggest exports aren't sex slaves, drugs, and human organs shows how much he did for Korea.

I dunno about human organs, but I've heard that lots of North Korean women end up as prostitutes after leaving the country (what a stupid decision, then!). Doesn't that count as "exporting sex slaves"?

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The so-called "Marxists" here have decided to piss on his grave as though he was Boris Yeltsin. Even Gaddafi and Saddam got more respect than this.

I completely agree that this is a disgusting attitude to have.

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Marxism is objective science and proper class analyses,it's not about paying respects to hereditary "great leaders" who explicitely renounced Marxism and who pursued anti-Marxist and anti-socialist policies.

Such as?

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Fact is,KJI and Juche is no factor in the international worker's movement,it's a moribund,decaying,degenerate revisionist and nationalist "system" surving mostly thanks to the ruling Militarist opressor-junta there.

oh god.

1. There is no international workers' movement that isn't reformist/social democratic.
2. Juche is not decaying or degenerate.
3. It is also not a system, but an idea. btw, Marxism isn't a system either, but a critique of capitalism based on diamat. If you'd read any of Kim Jong Il's works, you'd know that he was extremely good at this critique, and therefore a highly competent Marxist.
4. What makes the WPK more oppressive than the CPSU? I really want to know.

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Cults of personality are deeply flawed and antithetical to Marxist thought. The melding of the cult with the Oriental tradition of ancestor worship is incredibly problematic.

That's nothing to blame on Kim Jong Il. He was born into this system. Even if he does realize how faulty it is (and I don't know if one can reasonably expect him to) - there has never been an opportunity during his lifetime to change anything about this. Imperialist pressure and famines tend to change a stateman's priorities.

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There is zero relation between Juche and communism. Juche is simply a religion with cult like characteristics.

This is an abjectly moronic statement.

The Juche idea is nonsensical without communism. In fact, you have to be a capable Marxist in order to even grasp Juche. That's like saying there is zero relation between geometry and calculus.

Juche is not a religion. Juche is not focused on metaphysical entities but on human praxis. Juche cannot by its very nature be religious because it presupposes materialist dialectics.

Juche does not have cult like characteristics. It's true that Juche places extreme emphasis on the leader, but that doesn't make it a cult. In fact, it pretty much subordinates the leader to the masses of the people, who are "the masters of everything". This latter claim is highly emancipatory, truly revolutionary, extremely progressive and certainly not anti-Marxist, religious or otherwise reactionary.

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I dunno about human organs, but I've heard that lots of North Korean women end up as prostitutes after leaving the country (what a stupid decision, then!). Doesn't that count as "exporting sex slaves"?

What I meant was women being forced into prostitution by organised crime, like what happens in places like Kosovo and Russia.

Oh, that. Ew.

Well, I wasn't entirely serious anyway, my intention was to show how much nicer life in the DPRK is compared to the PRC.

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Such as?

The Kim family.I already posted some of their own relevant writings in that other thread.

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There is no international workers' movement that isn't reformist/social democratic.

Sure there is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio ... truggle%29

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2. Juche is not decaying or degenerate.

Right,and we're now seeing the third(!) dynastic succession,with someone without any credentials or credit becoming the official leader of the country and the "KWP".

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If you'd read any of Kim Jong Il's works, you'd know that he was extremely good at this critique, and therefore a highly competent Marxist.

KIS,IIRC,also said that Juche is exclusive to Korea,therefore we also have to take into consideration the conditions in the DPRK and the developments that took place there (since 1994)...

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4. What makes the WPK more oppressive than the CPSU? I really want to know.

The fact that,for start,"leaders" of the Soviet Party were elected(unlike Kim III) and there was no dynastic succession.

Loz wrote:

Sure there is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio ... truggle%29

I would understand your laughter perfectly if it weren't coming from someone who is a MTWist/LLCOist himself.

touché

Oh shit. I made a really stupid error yesterday:

I wrote:

how much nicer life in the DPRK is compared to the PRC.

I meant: nicer than life in Kosovo, of course. Sorry. Somehow I can't edit this. :/

Anyway:

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The Kim family.I already posted some of their own relevant writings in that other thread.

FACEPALM. I meant, what anti-Marxist and anti-socialist policies has the Kim family pursued?

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Sure there is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio ... truggle%29

1. I doubt that any of these parties can be considered a worker's party.
2. Even if you regard them as workers' parties, they are still not relevant in any way. I don't think it's a valid criticism of the DPRK to blame them for not being involved with this. I certainly wouldn't want to be involved with the KPD (Roter Morgen)

...wait, your argument is that they aren't doing anything for international socialism because they're not in an irrelevant, sectarian conference of irrelevant, sectarian parties? That is the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard.

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Right,and we're now seeing the third(!) dynastic succession,with someone without any credentials or credit becoming the official leader of the country and the "KWP".

And why does that mean that Juche is "decaying" or "degenerate"?

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KIS,IIRC,also said that Juche is exclusive to Korea,therefore we also have to take into consideration the conditions in the DPRK and the developments that took place there (since 1994)...

...and if we do that, what changes about what I said?

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The fact that,for start,"leaders" of the Soviet Party were elected(unlike Kim III) and there was no dynastic succession.

The internal power relations of a party are irrelevant to the question whether they oppress their population or not.

So, again: What makes the WPK more oppressive than the CPSU, from the point of view of a common citizen? The common Soviet citizen had no more influence on Stalin's rise to power than the common Korean citizen had on Kim's.

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I meant: nicer than life in Kosovo, of course.

I don't know...
Kosovo's nominal GDP per capita is twice the North Korean one.Kosovo's 2010 Human Development Index is 0,7 while DPRK stood at 7,6 in 1998 (i assume it hasn't risen much.Of course there's the issue of food which Kosovars have and North Koreans have been short of for 20 years now.
There's a high number of Mercedes cars in both countries though.

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I meant, what anti-Marxist and anti-socialist policies has the Kim family pursued?

I'd like to point out to this (quite lengthy,but the most important parts are clearly marked) article (and the other one one i posted before):
http://ml-review.ca/aml/China/KoreaNS.htm

Kimilsungism,for example,if my sources are to be trusted,negates and ignores the class struggle in socialism,materialist-dialectic conception of history,proletarian internationalism and so on...

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...wait, your argument is that they aren't doing anything for international socialism because they're not in an irrelevant, sectarian conference of irrelevant, sectarian parties? That is the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard.

No,i just pointed out to you that there actually exists an antirevisionist international movement,that's all.
Point is that North Korea stresses out the exclusiveness of Juche,which is a solely (North) Korean ideology.

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And why does that mean that Juche is "decaying" or "degenerate"?

Because the masses have no say in this,for start.
Also:
We call loyalty to the leader the highest expression of communist morality.
Kim Jong Il, "On Establishing the Juche Outlook on the Revolution: Talk to the Senior Officials of the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea, 10-10-1987

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The internal power relations of a party are irrelevant to the question whether they oppress their population or not.

Which proves us that WPK is not a vanguard party of the working class.

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So, again: What makes the WPK more oppressive than the CPSU, from the point of view of a common citizen? The common Soviet citizen had no more influence on Stalin's rise to power than the common Korean citizen had on Kim's.

In my opinion we have to look at how Stalin and now Kim the 3rd came to power.The last of Kims was assigned a chair without any,even fake elections!
The party had no say in this.

Loz wrote:

I don't know...
Kosovo's nominal GDP per capita is twice the North Korean one.

GDP of socialist countries (or, to avoid confusion, countries with a planned economy/fixed exchange rate) is irrelevant; I even remember explaining that to you in a private message.

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Kosovo's 2010 Human Development Index is 0,7 while DPRK stood at 7,6 in 1998 (i assume it hasn't risen much.

LOL? in 1998 the DPRK was still recovering from the Arduous March and was completely unable to feed itself. The people had literally NOTHING.

Today they have cell phones, laptops, burgers and pizza. The situation today is ten times better than it was in 1998. I'm actually kind of weirded out by the fact that you don't know this. Isn't it a bit premature to wholeheartedly condemn the DPRK if you just ignore the last 14 years?

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I'd like to point out to this (quite lengthy,but the most important parts are clearly marked) article (and the other one one i posted before):
http://ml-review.ca/aml/China/KoreaNS.htm

No, I'm not reading this. You will have to defend your point by yourself. Just saying "read this" is incredibly poor debate practice. If somebody asked you why capitalism sucks, would you just hand them a copy of Capital and walk away? It's you who thinks that the Kim family has pursued anti-Marxist policies. Surely you can tell me yourself why you think that?

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Kimilsungism,for example,if my sources are to be trusted,negates and ignores the class struggle in socialism

No. "Enemy of the people" is a well-known concept in Juche. Also it's ridiculous to schematically hold on to the dogma that there is class struggle in socialism.

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materialist-dialectic conception of history

Most definitely not. Kim Jong Il praises the materialist conception of history all the time.

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proletarian internationalism

...and that's why the DPRK hosted the 1989 Festival of Youth and Students?

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No,i just pointed out to you that there actually exists an antirevisionist international movement,that's all.

More than one. But you said workers' movement, that's another matter. A conference of Marxist-Leninist parties is

a) not a movement
b) not composed of workers, but of "professional revolutionaries" - that is, if they're true to ML dogma. But most of them probably aren't - they're not strong enough to actually pay their leaders enough to free them from the necessity of wage labor.

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Point is that North Korea stresses out the exclusiveness of Juche,which is a solely (North) Korean ideology.

That's like saying that Marxism is an exclusively German/British theory.

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Because the masses have no say in this,for start.

Masses -> Party/Military -> Acceptance of Kim Jong Un. It's not like North Korea's soldiers and party members appear out of thin air, you know. If the masses had a problem with Kim Jong Un, party members and soldiers would, too. And in that case, he would hardly be able to consolidate his power base.

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Also:
We call loyalty to the leader the highest expression of communist morality.
Kim Jong Il, "On Establishing the Juche Outlook on the Revolution: Talk to the Senior Officials of the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea, 10-10-1987

Yeah, that's retarded. To speak of "communist morality" is rather disgusting. Oh well, nobody's perfect.

That doesn't mean that Juche is degenerated though. Ever heard of democratic centralism? Yeah right, that "shut up and do what the top tells you" way of organizing society that Lenin came up. I hate that. Does that mean I'm going to go around and tell everybody how Marxism-Leninism is "decaying" or "degenerate"? No, because I have studied ML thoroughly and know that there are very many, very intelligent and useful things in it. Now, I haven't studied Juche quite as thoroughly, but what I've read sounds pretty nice so far. And it still does, even though that one quote sucks. Yeah, it's not perfect, but I never thought it was.

Don't be so binary.

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(The fact that the internal power relations of a party are irrelevant to the question whether they oppress their population or not,) proves us that WPK is not a vanguard party of the working class.

LOLWUT. This is like the definition of non sequitur; I seriously don't get what you're saying there.

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In my opinion we have to look at how Stalin and now Kim the 3rd came to power.The last of Kims was assigned a chair without any,even fake elections!
The party had no say in this.

That is no answer to the question whether the WPK is more oppressive than the CPSU. A party can do incredibly evil things to its people even though its leaders are elected, and vice versa.

Juche is a joke. There is no need to intellectually dissect it. One only needs to observe the situation in North Korea. Many of the problems such as poor allocation of resources, cult like figures, and terrible living conditions can't all be blamed on the West. Juche is a failed ideology that clearly benefits the ruling family. Did you see the fake crying in the streets organized by the State? It was scary because even if it wasn't staged by the State it demonstrates how psychologically dependent these North Koreans are on their figure head.

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GDP of socialist countries (or, to avoid confusion, countries with a planned economy/fixed exchange rate) is irrelevant; I even remember explaining that to you in a private message.

You're right indeed,point taken.

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LOL? in 1998 the DPRK was still recovering from the Arduous March and was completely unable to feed itself. The people had literally NOTHING.

Point taken again,however the data published in '98 is actually from '95 (even though these too weren't very good times for the DPRK).
Although with NK still being in a situation of chronic food shortage i'd guess that their HDI hasn't risen much.Concrete and updated data is,to my knowledge, unavailable though.

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Today they have cell phones, laptops, burgers and pizza. The situation today is ten times better than it was in 1998. I'm actually kind of weirded out by the fact that you don't know this. Isn't it a bit premature to wholeheartedly condemn the DPRK if you just ignore the last 14 years?

Zaruka noted that average people can barely afford food at "free kiosks".I doubt that anyone but the wealthiest NKoreans can eat pizzas or buy cellphones.The situation today is of course better,maybe significantly better,although fact is that the country still hasn't solved the basic questions of food,fuel and electricity...so that makes me doubt that any huge increases of living standards may have happened.

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No, I'm not reading this. You will have to defend your point by yourself.

You're right,that wasn't very smart from me,i'll try to address things point by point by using appropriate quotes from the article.

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No. "Enemy of the people" is a well-known concept in Juche. Also it's ridiculous to schematically hold on to the dogma that there is class struggle in socialism.

Sure,they took that well-known phrase,however the question is what exactly does it mean in the North Korean context.The WPK may speak of "the people" without even recognizing the class struggles among that "people".I don't find it hard to imagine that a North Korean Marxist could be shot as an enemy of the people for criticizing,for example,the SEZs built in the country.
Kim Jong Il says:

"In the socialist revolution, it (the WPK) did not eliminate rich peasants and capitalist businessmen and entrepreneurs; it admitted them into the cooperative economy on the principle of voluntary participation and led them to be transformed into socialist working people. Our Party has been leading all these transformed people to socialism and communism by trusting them as its lasting companions, rather than as temporary fellow travellers, no matter which class or stratum they came from."

And Stalin wrote:

There have been no cases in history where dying classes have voluntarily departed from the scene. There have been no cases in history where the dying bourgeoisie has not exerted all its remaining strength to preserve its existence.

KIS also said:
"Under the people's democratic system in our country, the individual entrepreneurs, traders and those in other social sections participate in government together with the workers and peasants, and form a component part of the unified front. The entrepreneurs and traders in our country are fellow-travelers of all the working people, including the working class, not only when carrying out the democratic revolution but also the socialist construction in the northern half. The people's government supports the legitimate business activities of entrepreneurs and traders . . . it opens the way to a new life for them by gradually turning them into socialist working people through voluntary membership in various cooperatives and by other methods."

To quote the article:

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On the basis of the above official sources of the 1957-58 period, therefore, ample evidence can prove that "socialism" had been achieved in North Korea without the socialist revolution (i.e., without expropriating and overthrowing the national capitalist class), without the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat (thus rejecting the Marxist-Leninist concept that the dictatorship of the working class is essential to construct and maintain socialism once the exploiting classes have been overthrown) and by peacefully and "voluntarily" absorbing the national capitalist class into the state, either through direct participation in government or through cooperatives. There is no doubt that this capitalist class was numerically small and that its power had been considerably reduced by the democratic reforms implemented in the country after 1945. Nonetheless, this capitalist class did exist and did actively participate in establishing Korean-style socialism. The issue of the proletarian dictatorship was therefore simplistically solved, during the late fifties, by equating the new democratic system of various classes exercising state power in North Korea with the dictatorship of the proletariat itself.

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Kim Jong Il praises the materialist conception of history all the time.

And yet he writes:
"The major limitation of the materialistic conception of history is that it failed to correctly expound the peculiar law of the social movement and explained the principles of the social movement mainly on the basis of the common character of the motion of nature and the social movement in that both of them are the motion of material."

"The theory of socialism in the preceding age . . . did not regard the social and historical movement as a movement of the motive force, as a movement which begins and develops on the initiative and through the role of the popular masses, its motive force, but as a natural historical process which changes and develops due to material and economic factors. . . .
In socialist society, the transformation of man, his ideological remoulding, becomes a more important and primary task than that of creating the material and economic conditions of socialism. . . .
In the past, the founders of Marxism evolved socialist theory by putting the main stress on material and economic conditions. . . .
Marxism defined man's essential quality as the ensemble of social relations. . . . the definition of man's essential quality as the sum total of social relations does not provide a comprehensive elucidation of man's own essential qualities. . . . The history of social development is, in the long run, the history of the development of man's independence, creativity and consciousness."

I mean,dunno,maybe this makes perfect sense,maybe it's just that i simply don't understand his point and his critique here...
How do you understand these thoughts?

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...and that's why the DPRK hosted the 1989 Festival of Youth and Students?

And South Africa hosted the latest one...
In my opinion the North Korean official stance on race (viewtopic.php?f=131&t=50462)
or KIS's "rewriting" of Marx's "The workers don't have a homeland" are more relevant to us.

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That's like saying that Marxism is an exclusively German/British theory.

I think that KIM himself said that,however i can't find the exact quote right now.Maybe i was wrong about it so ignore the whole remark.

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Masses -> Party/Military -> Acceptance of Kim Jong Un. It's not like North Korea's soldiers and party members appear out of thin air, you know. If the masses had a problem with Kim Jong Un, party members and soldiers would, too. And in that case, he would hardly be able to consolidate his power base.

Ordinary soldiers clearly don't have much to say about anything,it's the high generals and others (probably the most privileged strata in the DPRK) that matter and have influence.

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LOLWUT. This is like the definition of non sequitur; I seriously don't get what you're saying there.

Sorry,i was thinking along the lines of "if the people have no influence over the "internal power relations of the party",that is, if that party isn't a vanguard of the working class,we can,i guess,say that this party must oppress the working class,since every state is of course a tool of class oppression.
I don't see how a party that the working class doesn't have a say in can not be oppressive towards the working masses.
BTW i kinda feel that this argument of mine doesn't really feel right or make perfect sense,so i'd be grateful for criticism.