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August 2 2007
MIM received a document on the ideology of northern Korea's government.
Crucially, the letter agrees with MIM that capitalism came back to the Soviet Union after Stalin and in China after Mao in 1976. At the same time, our letter-writer upholds northern Korea as socialist, the only socialist country in fact. MIM believes northern Korea to be state-capitalist. Against MIM, the letter-writer holds that northern Korea managed the transition from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il, unlike China and Albania, where the writer agrees with MIM that the revolution went down to defeat after one leader.
Against us, the letter-writer also says we placed too much emphasis on northern Korean capitulation to imperialism and the persynality cult. We have it from the PCP (comrades in Peru) that the Jucheists helped the united $tates with counter-insurgency in Peru. Others say the northern Koreans are supporting the Ethiopians with weapons sales, despite Ethiopia's not having a good record of what it does with such weapons--including slaughter of Maoists. Nonetheless, let us concede that the scale of capitulation does not approach that of the southern Korean lackeys of U.$. imperialism, who send troops to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us also concede that the persynality cult is a secondary issue, as is the fact that the son followed the father as leader of northern Korea.
What really eats MIM is the straddling of Mao and Deng by Kim Il Sung on economic questions. Even more important is the lack of polemic against international revisionism. We repeat that there was no benefit to Korea from the Soviet bloc's return to capitalism. For a leader of a socialist country to polemicize against it was not just a duty to his or her own country's people, but to the people of the whole world. Otherwise there is no point in cross-national communication. Either there is a universal cause of communism or there is not.
Juche and the struggle against flunkeyism can be taken too far and become subjectivism, individualism and bourgeois anarchism. Somehow the writer agreed with MIM about China and the Soviet Union today, but that agreement seems not to stem from any universal idea. That is why there was a lack of polemic by Koreans against Brezhnevism or even Gorbachevism as a party-guiding idea for instance.
If we think of China as a traditional "Great Power," are Vietnam and Korea then correct to resist Marxism-Leninism-Maoism? The northern Korea comrades would say "yes, oppose flunkeyism." However, are they really saying that Songun is a universal ideology for the Third World or not?
"Juche states that the person of each country is the master of their own revolution. Kim did not lecture China on the path to socialism, and as I mentioned before, he resented those in the GPCR [Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution--ed.] who sought to criticize the DPRK from outside of a DPRK-context."
Actually, our letter-writer hit the nail on the head. MIM would say Kim should have lectured China on the path to socialism, and more importantly, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. The transition from Kim to Kim without a struggle against the hidden bourgeoisie is at best like a transition from Brezhnev to Andropov, just to leave aside the most blatantly revisionist Khruschev and Gorbachev. MIM prefers to think of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as patriots struggling in the new democratic stage. They were reticent about certain anti-revisionist struggles, because they needed nationalism as their first priority in the new democratic stage. Their own subjective explanations of what they were doing did not match up with their objective political requirements in the new democratic stage.
The Juche position has the same kernel of subjectivism as pseudo- feminism that originated in the 1960s imperialist West. Here it is not so much that the subjectivist disagrees with what someone else is saying, but resents the up-close so-called power of the speaker. So Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh resented Mao's potential power in their own countries. Likewise, pseudo-feminist wimmin resented the power of their boyfriends in their persynal lives. Perhaps a majority of pseudo-feminists have gone so far as to say that consistent theory is unnecessary. Critically for pseudo-feminism, boyfriends are wrong not because of what they say, but because of who they are. If there are any men in the proletariat or oppressed nations, then this sort of pseudo-feminism will undermine those struggles.
In Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao continued to use the term "Marxism-Leninism." Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung could have argued with Mao with reference to a common underlying "Marxism- Leninism." Instead, they resented Maoism, and did not polemicize against Brezhnevism, a pernicious international influence that dominated even inside the u.$. communist movement. What the Juche-supporters did was really polemicize against all "-isms," because the Juche supporters could always say that Brezhnevism was wrong simply because it was a foreign doctrine for most of the world's communist parties that upheld it.
It is simply wrong to think that other countries' experience with socialism will not affect the proletariat in one's own country. Even if it is possible or desirable to keep one's own proletariat in the dark, it will not always be true globally. So for a minor geopolitical conflict between Korea and China, the rest of the world is to be deprived of a polemic against Brezhnevism by Korea. Such is not in accord with the interests of the international proletariat.
MIM itself has developed a MIM Thought against considerable local and international resistance. We did not let ourselves become simple toadies of whoever came along first. For that matter, there are parties and individuals who kow-tow to the first leaders who bring salary money for activist work. However, if someone is correct, there is nothing wrong with being a toady and following the correct line. MIM found J. Sakai's work on the Amerikan class structure. We did not reject it because the author's name might be Japanese, nor even because it is an anarchist work. We have to teach people to recognize when the universal truth may even be hidden by such signs. It is not only the bourgeoisie that hides in revisionism. The proletariat also operates under cover. There is much more truth in Sakai's work than in the other works calling themselves supporters of "Marxism-Leninism." So MIM does not shirk its duties regarding concrete analysis of its own conditions. Our polemic against Juche-supporters does not go that far.
It is also possible to argue about origins in the other direction. There are those southern Koreans who will say Mao stole his philosophy from Koreans. For that matter, Koreans played a crucial role in the early stages of the Chinese Revolution. For MIM, the question of "who" origins is secondary. Somehow we must teach people how to identify correct thinking.
In fact, we can see with MIM Thought the same problems that Kim and Mao faced. Once there is a MIM Thought that started distribution inside U.$. borders, we find that many of the same questions come up in Kanada, England etc. The key question of labor appropriation is in fact identical for a group of imperialist countries. Now these other countries' comrades can all be resentful that MIM did systematic work on these questions before they did or they can realize that life is uneven.
Vietnam is so similar to China in its conditions, we cannot be surprised when questions of rural policy and economics find their phrasing in Mao's revolution first--and whether it did or not is a secondary question. We might even dare say that the logic of Juche would be that because Mao was a closer threat to Vietnam that is the reason Brezhnevism took over there.
Our writer seems to imply that holding state power without an obvious Amerikan flag in hand is tantamount to socialism. Northern Korea managed to have transition from Kim Il Sung to his son, and thus continue power-holding. MIM would say in contrast that state- capitalism held power in the Soviet Union a long time. It has to do with understanding economics. When we see no polemics against Soviet state-capitalist economics, we induce that the hidden bourgeoisie has taken over in northern Korea. Why would the proletariat in power seek to hide the flaws of Brezhnev and Gorbachev economics? Why would the proletarian scientists not want to learn negative lessons? The way revisionism works, it is no problem to mimic Maoism in considerable regard as long as the class struggle at home fails to gather any concrete lessons.
It is difficult reading, but we must know the labor theory of value and the operation of the law of value to understand Marxist economics under socialism. When we do this, we will understand that Kim Il Sung in his writings was straddling Mao and Deng. The Cultural Revolution was not just a dream. It had its basis in an economic theory. To argue against MIM that we have not had 50 years of Brezhnev-Andropov-Deng style revisionism in northern Korea, we would need concrete economic facts, the sort of which are not present in the letter and generally do not enter writings of Hoxha or Kim that we have seen. Against us, the Jucheists would say that Kim Jong Il never decimated Stalin the way Khruschev did. Kim Jong Il was no Alia in Albania. However, MIM would point out that Hoxha was much more active in blasting international revisionism.
One could wrongly psychologize the difference between Hoxha and Kim pretty easily. Hoxha's narrow geopolitical interests required keeping Yugoslavia including Serbia at bay. So Hoxha was predisposed against Russian revisionism for narrow nationalist reasons. In contrast, Kim was taking Soviet aid. Hoxha ended up no good, his explanations for why he changed line on Mao after Mao died unconvincing. In Kim Jong Il's case, he has lived long enough to be able to see who was really right in country after country and we need to give the world a theory for that. Kim is left saying that all these other countries were run by Liberals and he has no bourgeoisie in his party that arises on a continuous basis. So what the Jucheists try to sell us is that we can say there is an equality among those who uphold Stalin, and then Kim looks the best among those who uphold Stalin, because Kim was the first to be able to pass leadership from one upholder of Stalin to the next. On this basis we can dispense with Cuba, which never upheld Stalin. Vietnam and China are Dengists. Then that leaves Mao and Mao's Cultural Revolution must have been ultra-left as posited in Kim Il Sung's discussion of the law of value. MIM does not buy this position because northern Korea continued to refer to the Soviet Union under Brezhnev as "socialist," so Kim's defense of Stalin in public was lacking. Had Kim Il Sung attacked revisionism as much as Hoxha, Kim Jong Il would have been in good position to claim the mantle of Stalin, if we go strictly politically and with no knowledge of northern Korea's internal economic situation. Instead we will find if we really do the research that pro-Kim parties such as Belgium's PTB even bought Gorbachev for a while.
All of this is to leave aside that not all questions can be solved at an ideological level without recourse to understanding the mode of production. The Korean position leaves us in doubt on economic details. The leaders of the Cultural Revolution lecturing Korea on revisionism did much more work on the economic questions underlying the restoration of capitalism. Being pro-Stalin in one's heart is not enough.
In some countries there is a realistic prospect of shutting out international influences among the people. To take Central America for example, we start to see how Juche cannot work. In these places there is simply too much concrete knowledge of the united $tates for there to be a "blank slate" approach to the people. In fact, a vanguard leader must have something to say about the united $tates for these peoples, and it cannot just be that Amerikans need to be self-reliant. An idea about the origins of Amerikan wealth needs to be pretty clear. Yet here we bump up against why Juche is no good. If we listen to countless parties, the Amerikans are hard-working and exploited. To say it will not matter to Central Americans which perspective is adopted on this question, the MIM position or the exploiter position, is wrong. It will matter. The exploiter position leads quickly to an integrationist struggle providing shock troops for globalization. We say even in land-locked Nepal, outside imperialist lifestyle influences will have to be contended with.
There is also the question that even if one can shut out foreign influences in a country there is a question of how desirable it is. Mao tried to have his party lead his people on how they should interact with the outside world. Kim Jong Il opposed the "corrupt nature of capitalist society and harboring illusions about it," in "Abuses of Socialism Are Intolerable." So then there is the question of what societies the illusions are about. In many countries, the people will have illusions about the united $tates. If the only illusion is that the united $tates is richer than other countries, then that by itself needs to be dealt with actively and not allowed to fester.
On a last point of theory, our critic says that MIM adopts a Hoxhaite pose toward Kim on the question of unity in Korea. There seems to be a crucial muddle here, because Mao's theory of "new democracy," referred to a stage of the struggle, not socialism. To take Mao's theory of "new democracy" and use that as a basis of unity for socialism would be revisionism. New democracy as a stage includes the role of the patriotic bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat or socialism has no such role. The new democratic stage is only necessary to complete tasks of capitalism. We would like to see Kim Jong Il say that Korea has not completed the new democratic stage and we would also like to see him lecture other countries on revisionism, not so much for the benefit of those countries, but the international proletariat. Even if we have no great Chinese bastion anymore, still having a northern Korea battling revisionism would be something real. Instead what we have is a northern Korea that claims to be constructing socialism on the basis of a class unity hiding the bourgeoisie in the party, when obviously what we really need internationally is an explanation for the collapse of so many socialist countries. Class unity hiding the bourgeoisie in the party is OK for the new democratic stage and definitely not useful in establishing new communist organizations on an anti-revisionist basis. If there are capitalist tasks to complete, then the party leading can be communist, but we should not say we are building socialism.
In southern Korea today, we have no remaining feudalism. For this the communists of the Korean War deserve the credit in implementing land reform. If anything, southern Korea is now nearly imperialist itself and would be if not for major doubts about foreign ownership of Korean banks and corporations. According to Stalin, the national question is especially important because of the content of the agrarian question. Today the agrarian question in Korea that Stalin was concerned about expresses itself only as an historical residual--the division of North and South. The actual original economic content of the agrarian question is gone, so there is only the political remainder. Against MIM, there would be those who say that northern Korea should just go on to build socialism, because the political remainder is not significant enough to build a theory around. In contrast, MIM would say Juche arose instead of Maoist internationalism because of the political remainder of the agrarian question. Korean communist theory seems more insecure and nationalist than Mao's, because Mao was in fact more geopolitically secure. We often hear the same thing in handling First Nations nationalism in the united $tates. There comes a point where geopolitical insecurity is so great that it affects our method behind our theorizing and we end up paving the way for post- modernism. In today's world, it would be a sad irony if Juche ended up mainly as a precursor to post-modernism, but that is how times change. It would be better if Kim would say we are finishing up a problem here in Korea, but Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is for other questions in the world.
MIM would say this to the Vietnamese, Koreans and to a lesser extent the Filipinos: ultimately the international proletariat is confident, secure and globe-conquering. Likewise, without confidence in the oppressed nations, all our strategic thinking will be wrong and capitulationist. That is why Marx said that the scientific communists disdain to conceal their views. Politically, in concrete terms today, who can say that u.$. imperialism will fall because of Juche in one country? Of course not, Nazi Germany did not fall that way. How can we defeat U.$. imperialism if we retain a reticence about questions outside our borders? Who is really benefitting from such reticence?
There are particular problems for small oppressed nations to take up a universal ideology. It is wrong to psychologize and say, "it was easy for Mao to take up a universal ideology, because China was sometimes a Great Power anyway." We have to get past that level of thinking and decide whether it is true or not that a universal ideology is good for oppressed nations. We should decide for ourselves without psychologizing how others arrived at their answers. Was Lenin right that imperialism was principally responsible for the problems of oppressed nations or should the oppressed nations play themselves off against other oppressed nations sometimes. Does Marxism-Leninism- Maoism benefit only larger nations or is it not in fact the small nations, the oppressed nations that benefit most from the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations over imperialism?
MIM has called on Kim to acknowledge that Korea is in the new democratic stage and take up Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Songun would be justified along these lines as well. The northern Koreans seem to be saying they went along to build socialism without their southern brethren, but what is all this Songun and building nuclear weapons for except for the liberation of their southern brethren from the clutches of u.$. imperialism? If the U.$. imperialists had never come and never occupied the South, can we say that everything afterwards would have been the same? We are sure the Jucheists agree that the concrete conditions on this mattered, even much moreso than U.$. designs on Taiwan mattered to China.
Practically-speaking we have already derided Limonov on Iraq. We do not want Syria to shut itself off to Iraq, and we do not mind lecturing on that point. The insurgents fighting U.$. troops need freedom of operation. So the "national Bolsheviks," "Jucheists" and NaCAzis with that position are just wrong. There are many situations where a universal component to knowledge is absolutely critical--and thus proletarian internationalism is critical. When the KCNA criticizes U.$. imperialism for the slaughter of the indigenous people, is this not also internationalism? Our Jucheist writer agreed with us somehow on China, the Soviet Union, Albania and Yugoslavia. To do that there must be some way to explain to people how to achieve that result. We call it Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Juche is a progressive doctrine for the Third World, because the nationalism of the oppressed is applied internationalism as Mao said. In addition, Kim has also correctly targeted some past revisionisms.
MIM is not composed of China-chauvinists. In the Cultural Revolution it was Mao aggressively polemicizing against the capitalist road internationally. Today, there is more inspiration from the Korean struggle than the Chinese one. The world's largest economies all agreed to trade with the southern Koreans and prop up their economy and nonetheless, a considerable portion of Koreans fights for the end of the u.$. occupation.