82
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Awoo@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm just saying that it's hard to say they're rejecting what Marx has taught if they are depicting him as a foundational cornerstone of their ideology. In doing so, reading and understanding Marx is a part of cadre education. No matter what happens if people are reading Marx then they are being influenced by Marxism.

The extent of that I can't really explain without getting a look at the inner workings of the facility and the contents it teaches. But putting his statue there as the very first foundational piece of what they believe means that they absolutely are still being influenced by him, the entire cadre reading him makes seeing it as "rejection" impossible to me.

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

Thank you for citing more substantial evidence. I still disagree, but it requires somewhat more explanation:

My opinion of the DPRK is obviously much more positive than my opinion of America, but just to use some examples from American education due to my own familiarity: A huge proportion, probably the majority of students in America read at least something from MLK Jr., listen to a speech or two, etc. Almost everyone reads Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Does that mean we are given a full idea of what they thought or even an adequate one? Absolutely not. Do we have any idea of how their stances developed later in their lives? No. And obviously they aren't the only people held up as overt national heroes whose opinions get represented only partially or directly distorted. Incidentally, in addition to personal experience with all of those, in college I took multiple classes where Marx was a major element and in those classes, though we did certainly read Marx, the understandings of our instructors was fundamentally inadequate and readily led us astray at the first opportunity (e.g. one could not give even the most basic account of how LTV relates to market prices, and these are people with PhDs I'm talking about). And this is excluding what chud teachers and professors told me about all of these subjects. The opening paragraph of State and Rev has remarkable salience to much more than just Marx's co-opting at that time and place.

But even beyond that, if I was making a course aimed at teaching about Marxism in a robust manner, I would probably assign some writing from utopian socialists, not because I remotely endorsed their theories but because it is helpful for seeing the historical context of Marxism, and of course they will be criticized thoroughly later on. My understanding is that Juche education teaches about a history of socialism that goes at least back to the utopian socialism of particular relevance to Marxism (mainly Fourier, Saint-Simone, and Robert Owen), but based on writings that I've seen from the DPRK -- and one doesn't need to do something analogous to debating the meaning of Xi's two teacups, you can start by just checking what they actually say -- they seem to take a very similar approach in terms of explaining Marxist positions and then casting them as outmoded or something along those lines, depending on which position it is. Here's an essay from a Hoxha-phile (something I don't condone) that I think is a helpful compilation of some of the statements published by 1995 on this point, along with the bit about striking mentions of Marxism from the constitution following the fall of the Soviet Union, which is just a cartoonish behavior.

And it needs to be stressed that Kim Jong-Il led the charge to classify "the Juche idea" as a "new and original philosophical idea," which has inherited the mission of Marxism [as, let me add, it could be fairly said Marxism inherited from the utopians] but is not Marxism-Leninism and has done away with outmoded ideas like dialectical materialism (see the essay). I've been having trouble getting onto .kp websites lately, but if you have better luck they have lots of short essays published that it would be good to look at for reference, some of which are very disappointing. Obviously, I am not of the opinion that we should treat the existing ML corpus like a religious dogma, but the arguments they offer overwhelmingly just don't make sense (with the exception of buying out the bourgeoisie which, honestly, I guess is fair enough depending on if you mean getting them to sell their class position vs just bribing them into cooperation), whether because the argument in question is fanciful or blatantly reactionary.

But again, I need to stress that I'm not interested in trying to argue that they aren't socialist, you can come to your own conclusion on that based on what you define socialism as.

this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
82 points (100.0% liked)

Chapotraphouse

14228 readers
821 users here now

Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.

No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer

Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS