North Korea shuts down universities for 10 months

[Le Libérer]

I almost posted this in Learning with the question, "How can North Korea identify as a Communist state when they are sending students back into the peasantry?." Anyway....

Source (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/8602525/North-Korea-shuts-down-universities-for-10-months.html)


Pyongyang has told the North Korean people that the nation will have achieved its aim of becoming "a great, prosperous and powerful nation" in 2012, which marks the 100th anniversary of the founder of the reclusive state, Kim Il-sung.
In addition, Kim Jong-il will turn 70 in February and the "Dear Leader" hopes to be able to transfer his power and an economically stronger nation to his son and heir-apparent, Kim Jong-Un.
Reports in South Korea indicated that the government in Pyongyang on Monday ordered all universities to cancel classes until April of next year. The only exemptions are for students who will be graduating in the next few months and foreign students.
The reports suggested that the students will be put to work on construction projects in major cities while there are also indications that repair work may be needed in agricultural regions that were affected by a major typhoon recently.
Analysts in Japan claim there may be other reasons behind the decision to disperse the students across the country.
Thoughts?

[scarletghoul]

I don't see a problem with having people take time out from academic study to do practical work in constructing the country, especially considering the state North Korea is in right now. Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution. It may be a bit bothersome for the students but in the long term it will be make them more proletarian and develop the country. Maybe 10 months is too long, but the principle is not a bad one.

[RedBaltico]

Well apparently the intelligence is not in demand anymore, well the economy of North Korea is poor and so I goes they have too much well educated university students for which they can't find any use. For that I would advise them to use a style of Cuba, where they educate more doctors they need so they ''export'' them to work abroad in different countries of the world. So being isolated from the entire world will bring several problems.

[agnixie]

It would imply there is anything communistic at all to Juche, an ideology based on militarism, racism and nationalism...

[Lenina Rosenweg]

I don't see a problem with having people take time out from academic study to do practical work in constructing the country, especially considering the state North Korea is in right now. Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution. It may be a bit bothersome for the students but in the long term it will be make them more proletarian and develop the country. Maybe 10 months is too long, but the principle is not a bad one.

I take this to mean you are taking time out from your studies to do farm labor in the North Country? Will you be working on an organic farm somewhere? What is your specialty?

[Kléber]

Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution.
The CPC sent students to the countryside at the end of the Cultural Revolution to stop them from organizing and protesting while the army restored order. Political unrest may be why the North Korean bureaucracy is doing the same.

[Triple A]

And they continue to support it.
Juche calls itself communist thereofre lets support it, if someone called himself vegetarian and eat meat would he be vegetarian?

[t.shonku]

I don't see a problem with having people take time out from academic study to do practical work in constructing the country, especially considering the state North Korea is in right now. Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution. It may be a bit bothersome for the students but in the long term it will be make them more proletarian and develop the country. Maybe 10 months is too long, but the principle is not a bad one.


Very well said !

Actually working while studying is cool, it develops your mindset and makes you more practical oriented rather than a pen-pusher, not only that doing this also brings the students closer to working class, I think it’s good, I myself during my 2nd year Engineering in University used to work for a TV repair shop for 6 to 7 months or so , this actually made me practical oriented and helped my Engineering carrier later in my life. I also had worked as a book shop sales boy during my school years, my father hated me for all this he used to say that I was making a fool of myself.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Why can't the country's bloated armed forces contribute to this process, instead of relying on students? By all standards, the DPRK economy is hardly doing well, it would be better to utilize soldiers who offer nothing productive than students who are trying to study skills that are actually economically and socially useful.

[Q]

Moving students away from their studies to "rebuild the country" seems nonsensical and utterly contraproductive. If emergency rebuilding needs to take place, isn't the (hugely oversized) army much better equiped for the task?

Kléber's post makes much more sense to me, but it is pretty hard to confirm given the nature of the North-Korean regime towards the rest of the world.

[El Oso Rojo]

Why can't the country's bloated armed forces contribute to this process, instead of relying on students? By all standards, the DPRK economy is hardly doing well, it would be better to utilize soldiers who offer nothing productive than students who are trying to study skills that are actually economically and socially useful.

How do you know, that the soldiers don't study or busy with important stuff?

[Q]

How do you know, that the soldiers don't study or busy with important stuff?

Military engineering corpses, aided by other parts of the army, are very often utilised in many countries facing disasters. It is pretty much their one useful task they could have.

[JoeySteel]

Why can't the country's bloated armed forces contribute to this process, instead of relying on students? By all standards, the DPRK economy is hardly doing well, it would be better to utilize soldiers who offer nothing productive than students who are trying to study skills that are actually economically and socially useful.

It's pretty well known that one of the PLA's major duties in Korea is construction and soldiers work on all the major construction projects, as far as I know.

[El Oso Rojo]

It would imply there is anything communistic at all to Juche, an ideology based on militarism, racism and nationalism...

Have you even read Juche lit? Basically, I do not see nothing wrong with it. I agree to one of the point that sung made, we should focus on building revolution in own country, instead of being constantly focus on others. It does not mean, not study them, but focus on change in your nation instead.

[danyboy27]

I don't see a problem with having people take time out from academic study to do practical work in constructing the country, especially considering the state North Korea is in right now. Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution. It may be a bit bothersome for the students but in the long term it will be make them more proletarian and develop the country. Maybe 10 months is too long, but the principle is not a bad one.

Except in that case its not really a choice, is it?
If a governement decide to shut down a school for x month and send folks doing manual labor, its hardly considered a choice, its an obligation.

I remember the good old day when tankies used to have a coherent way to defend such actions using utilitarian arguments like: ''Well there is an emergency, its necessary for those folks to stop whatever they do and start farming the land and build factories''

The whole world is wrestling with economics problems and everyone have their own kind of ''stimulus package''.

the U.S got QE1, QE2, europe got their bailout and austerity measures, and north korea send studients plowing the fields.

if the pile of bodybags is not too high, and north korea succed by increasing its national production, we could i guess call it a win for the korean state.

[t.shonku]

Moving students away from their studies to "rebuild the country" seems nonsensical and utterly contraproductive.



10months study break won't make some one dull as butter knife !

I know people who dropped out for a year or two and yet managed to graduate

As long as the University is helpful in readmission process it OK

[RED DAVE]

I don't see a problem with having people take time out from academic study to do practical work in constructing the country, especially considering the state North Korea is in right now. Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution. It may be a bit bothersome for the students but in the long term it will be make them more proletarian and develop the country. Maybe 10 months is too long, but the principle is not a bad one.Typical apologetics for failed state capitalism. You guys slay me.

Let's see: Did the students choose to quit school, or did the government of the alleged workers state order the schools to close?

RED DAVE

[Q]

10months study break won't make some one dull as butter knife !

I know people who dropped out for a year or two and yet managed to graduate

As long as the University is helpful in readmission process it OK

You're comparing apples and oranges I'm afraid. Individual dropouts are one thing, holding the entire education system is something completely different. The first has a (near) zero impact on society, the latter however surely has social ripple effects for some time to come.

[Kamos]

I don't see a problem with having people take time out from academic study to do practical work in constructing the country, especially considering the state North Korea is in right now. Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution. It may be a bit bothersome for the students but in the long term it will be make them more proletarian and develop the country. Maybe 10 months is too long, but the principle is not a bad one.

So putting a random generation of students into labor camps for a year is not a bad principle? And you call yourself a revolutionary?

[danyboy27]

Let's see: Did the students choose to quit school, or did the government of the alleged workers state order the schools to close?

RED DAVE
free will and all that shit.

In theory, those studients are free to refuse what the governement ask them to do, just like i am completely free to punch a cop in the face.

[danyboy27]

10months study break won't make some one dull as butter knife !

I know people who dropped out for a year or two and yet managed to graduate

As long as the University is helpful in readmission process it OK

Due to sanctions against north korea, the avearge north korean, even the one who are highly educated is lacking mineral and vitamin in their diet.

if you take a bunch of studients who are badly fed to do extensive manual labor, you will get a lot of people who will get sick and a good number of them could die in the process.

that how a great deal of jewish died during ww2, lack of healthy alimentation combined with a lot of manual labor.

[Per Levy]

that sounds to me that the students will be used as cheap labour to help out, why the military cant do that is beyond me but since the military in north korea is the "real revolutionary class" they probally cant be botherd with peseantry labour.

[Kenco Smooth]

Arguments that this will make them more 'proley' are baffling. Firstly because social identity and ideology are firmly built in right from the moment of birth. A year in the country won't do anything to seriously change that. Secondly because the idea that a 'socialist' government forcing university students into manual labour for a year seems like a pretty good way to alienate these students from socialism.

[Le Libérer]

The CPC sent students to the countryside at the end of the Cultural Revolution to stop them from organizing and protesting while the army restored order. Political unrest may be why the North Korean bureaucracy is doing the same.

This. It could be the economic crunches the world is feeling now. It could also be turmoil from the students. My guess is is the latter.

[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

Very well said !

Actually working while studying is cool, it develops your mindset and makes you more practical oriented rather than a pen-pusher, not only that doing this also brings the students closer to working class, I think it’s good, I myself during my 2nd year Engineering in University used to work for a TV repair shop for 6 to 7 months or so , this actually made me practical oriented and helped my Engineering carrier later in my life. I also had worked as a book shop sales boy during my school years, my father hated me for all this he used to say that I was making a fool of myself.

So working while studying is so utterly cool that the goverment should mandate every single person does it? Really cool there.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Very well said !

Actually working while studying is cool, it develops your mindset and makes you more practical oriented rather than a pen-pusher, not only that doing this also brings the students closer to working class, I think it’s good, I myself during my 2nd year Engineering in University used to work for a TV repair shop for 6 to 7 months or so , this actually made me practical oriented and helped my Engineering carrier later in my life. I also had worked as a book shop sales boy during my school years, my father hated me for all this he used to say that I was making a fool of myself.

And did you do this off your own back, or did your government shut your university down and force you into the countryside?:rolleyes:

[W1N5T0N]

Imagine your principal coming into lecture one morning and saying:

"Hey everybody! Dear Leader has invited all of us happy, free academics, to voluntarily come and work in a collective farm just on the outskirts! Now, if you have any questions left, these gentlemen here will happily answer all your questions after class..."

[Revy]

I almost posted this in Learning with the question, "How can North Korea identify as a Communist state when they are sending students back into the peasantry?." Anyway....

Source (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/8602525/North-Korea-shuts-down-universities-for-10-months.html)


Thoughts?

We are definitely nearing the rebellion that will topple Kim Jong-il, and it doesn't seem like he's doing anything to appease the population, he's actually pissing them off more in the attempt to silence them. But there's nothing he will be able to do when the working class explodes and surprises both him and the world with such sudden fury. And I'm sure some here will call it a "counter-revolution" when it's just the inevitable overthrow of a state capitalist dictatorship, like we've seen many times before. North Korea is best comparable to Romania under Ceausescu and I believe Kim Jong-il will suffer the same fate.

[Dogs On Acid]

free will and all that shit.

In theory, those studients are free to refuse what the governement ask them to do, just like i am completely free to punch a cop in the face.

Are you Socialist? Serious question.

Anyway forcing people to work won't create a very productive labour force. Students will be thinking "fuck this". It might even be counter-productive.

NK is going to collapse sooner or later.

[manic expression]

The Soviet Union used to mandate that students help at retirement homes and lead recycling campaigns...very different scenario on a different scale but same principle IMO. In all honesty, I don't think any of us know what the military's role in agriculture is, and while I think soldiers helping out would be a good idea I don't see how it automatically makes this a bad one.

Also, I'm quite suspicious on the "shutting down ALL universities" part. It's coming from the South Korean media, so hyperbole is definitely within the realm of possibility.

But hey, it took just over one page for someone to compare it to the Holocaust, so at least we're keeping it in perspective. :rolleyes:

[Impulse97]

Have you even read Juche lit? Basically, I do not see nothing wrong with it. I agree to one of the point that sung made, we should focus on building revolution in own country, instead of being constantly focus on others. It does not mean, not study them, but focus on change in your nation instead.

This statement, should have gotten you restricted. Juche is the reason NK is in the shitter. It has no basis in Marxism whatsoever.


free will and all that shit.

In theory, those studients are free to refuse what the governement ask them to do, just like i am completely free to punch a cop in the face.

Yea, but the US isn't quite so overt in it's repression. Sure, a student in NK could defy the government, but there's a damn good chance their going to get a 7.62 to the back of the head before the sun sets.

[danyboy27]

The Soviet Union used to mandate that students help at retirement homes and lead recycling campaigns...very different scenario on a different scale but same principle IMO. In all honesty, I don't think any of us know what the military's role in agriculture is, and while I think soldiers helping out would be a good idea I don't see how it automatically makes this a bad one.
. :rolleyes:
But then again, the soviet union was able to feed their people with food of greater quality and the U.S.S.R was a fully industrialised nation using machines to make this job more bearable. North korea is crippled by sanctions getting oil



But hey, it took just over one page for someone to compare it to the Holocaust, so at least we're keeping it in perspective. :rolleyes:
if you speak about my exemple, i didnt wanted to compare what north korea does to the holocaust, just to give a known exemple of what happen when intellectuals have to plough the field without the necessary food supply and without the necessary mechanical supply.

[danyboy27]

are you socialist? Serious question.

Anyway forcing people to work won't create a very productive labour force. Students will be thinking "fuck this". It might even be counter-productive.

Nk is going to collapse sooner or later.

s.a.r.c.a.s.m.

[Dogs On Acid]

s.a.r.c.a.s.m.

Sorry 'bout that comrade.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Military engineering corpses, aided by other parts of the army, are very often utilised in many countries facing disasters. It is pretty much their one useful task they could have.

FYI, Stalin had such engineering corps organized under the NKVD and MVD, not the armed forces. ;)

People have speculated in recent years that the NK regime is in fact a military dictatorship, characterized by the power of the Central Military Commission relative to the Politburo and the five-man Politburo Presidium.

[danyboy27]

that sounds to me that the students will be used as cheap labour to help out, why the military cant do that is beyond me but since the military in north korea is the "real revolutionary class" they probally cant be botherd with peseantry labour.

For the same reason the My governement dont want the cops to participate in community projects, that would break the class system in place, and therfore be dangerous for the system.

[caramelpence]

Whilst it's intuitively desirable for students to remain in close contact with working people rather than looking on themselves as a superior body of intellectuals, I would ask the following: given the aim of reforming students' thinking, is this likely to be achieved through forcing students to enter into manual labour for an extended period of time? I would argue that benefits from the viewpoint of political consciousness are likely to come about only if manual labour is voluntarily entered into by the students themselves with an understanding of why it is useful and why they are doing it, whereas, if students are forced into this kind of thing, the effect is likely to be the same as students being forced to do physical education at school, for example - they will not get anything out of the activity, and will instead be bored, apathetic, and resentful. At least, that's the way I felt as a student when I was forced to do things that could have been beneficial, had I chosen to do them of my own accord.

It's worth pointing out, also, that, based on my understanding of how higher education and military service work in North Korea, students in universities have already gone through an extended period of military service - so what this policy is doing is taking people who are already older than university students in other countries, due to having to complete military service before they enter the higher education system, and delaying the completion of their higher education by imposing a further obligation, which is not even being staggered across the student population. Given the absurdity and inefficiency of the policy from that point of view, it might well be possible that this policy was not introduced as a response to social or political unrest, much less as a thought-out response to ideological weaknesses, and that it instead reflects the general incoherence and instability of policy-making in an authoritarian state, the same being true of other erratic and bizarre policy initiatives in North Korea.

[scarletghoul]

Why can't the country's bloated armed forces contribute to this process, instead of relying on students? By all standards, the DPRK economy is hardly doing well, it would be better to utilize soldiers who offer nothing productive than students who are trying to study skills that are actually economically and socially useful.
What makes you think the army are not helping out ?? I'd be very surprised if that was the case


I take this to mean you are taking time out from your studies to do farm labor in the North Country? Will you be working on an organic farm somewhere? What is your specialty?
I haven't been able to get into university so not sure what im gonna be doing now. I don't live in the "North Country" btw lol

Due to sanctions against north korea, the avearge north korean, even the one who are highly educated is lacking mineral and vitamin in their diet.

if you take a bunch of studients who are badly fed to do extensive manual labor, you will get a lot of people who will get sick and a good number of them could die in the process.

that how a great deal of jewish died during ww2, lack of healthy alimentation combined with a lot of manual labor.
Are you uhh suggesting that no one in North Korea should do any work because they are lacking in vitamins ? ...I think I have found a flaw in your economic plan...


social identity and ideology are firmly built in right from the moment of birth.
lol what. unless youre making a lacanian point about the subject already having a designated place in the symbolic order before it comes into existence, then you are profoundly mistaken. how could a baby have an ideology when its just popped out of the vagina ??

[scarletghoul]

omg thats so mean those fuckers how dare they bla bla bla
You know, I can imagine what would happen if the universities had stayed open and there was no drive to build up the economy and North Korea went back into severe poverty.. people on revleft would be saying "this is ridiculous, the kim dynasty is fostering a new generation of pampered intellectuals while the workers starve!!"

(though as has been said we dont have the full details and the source it south korean so who knows if all the universities are actually closing)

[Sun at Eight]

Whilst it's intuitively desirable for students to remain in close contact with working people rather than looking on themselves as a superior body of intellectuals, I would ask the following: given the aim of reforming students' thinking, is this likely to be achieved through forcing students to enter into manual labour for an extended period of time? I would argue that benefits from the viewpoint of political consciousness are likely to come about only if manual labour is voluntarily entered into by the students themselves with an understanding of why it is useful and why they are doing it, whereas, if students are forced into this kind of thing, the effect is likely to be the same as students being forced to do physical education at school, for example - they will not get anything out of the activity, and will instead be bored, apathetic, and resentful. At least, that's the way I felt as a student when I was forced to do things that could have been beneficial, had I chosen to do them of my own accord.

I think this has a lot of truth to it, but then we have to look into the whole issue of compulsory education, which could be seen as having similar problems of "[being] beneficial, had [the student] chosen to to do them of [their] own accord". In the context of compulsory education, I would like to see manual labour as part of the curriculum and, indeed, wider respect shown to the full spectrum of human labour and creativity. Integration is key here.

On this specific North Korean case, while I was surprised at the immediate disdain for the very concept of students doing compulsory manual labour, I doubt its goals are more than breaking up student unrest or some desperate straits/immediate goal in which massive amounts of people are cheaper than machines. EDIT: Along of course with the question of whether this is actually happening.

[Dogs On Acid]

Firstly because social identity and ideology are firmly built in right from the moment of birth.

:lol:

There should be a facepalm smiley on RevLeft, I could really use one right now.

[Homo Songun]

if you take a bunch of studients who are badly fed to do extensive manual labor, you will get a lot of people who will get sick and a good number of them could die in the process.

that how a great deal of jewish died during ww2, lack of healthy alimentation combined with a lot of manual labor. Wow, Godwin's law in effect by the second page. Well done.

Anyways, it seems like the antagonism to this news report, if true, falls into two camps:

1) People who oppose this as a matter of principle. This says more about the class outlook of the posters in question than anything else really, and as such is not very novel nor is it interesting. As Mao said, "In the final analysis, the dividing line between revolutionary intellectuals and non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary intellectuals is whether or not they are willing to integrate themselves with the workers and peasants and actually do so." Nuff said.

2) People who are opposed on the grounds of supposed coercion. To this I would inquire, what class society does not have coercion of young people in some degree? Setting aside the blatant example of mandatory military service in many countries around the world, do you have free reign over your studies in school or college? Aren't there certain hours or semesters of particular subject matter that must be undertaken as a matter of course? Have you ever stopped to consider why it is that subject x or y but not z? Because x and y are valued higher than z, where x is something like mathematics and z is say, tiddlywinks. And why is x's valuation greater than z? Invariably its because x prepares for a "career", which is short-hand for something along the lines of, "satisfactory integration in the society at large in which you currently find yourself". The question is then, what kind of society do you find yourself in? How do you think that has affected the curricula? [Bonus points: compare and contrast your sophomore year in high school with your grandmother's.]

Please note, before anyone starts in about the mad "state capitalist" dictator Kim Jong-il, the truth value of nothing I've written is predicated on DPRK actually BEING a workers state. So save your breath in that regard.

[danyboy27]

Are you uhh suggesting that no one in North Korea should do any work because they are lacking in vitamins ? ...I think I have found a flaw in your economic plan...

The north korean life expectency is decreasing over the year. Lack of food combined with extensive manual labor does that.

Its worst with the studients tho, they are not necessarly used to do manual labor and their bodies are still developping.

For an adult used to work hard, lack of vitamins and mineral mean a shorten life expectency, for a teen or someone who isnt used to manual labor it could mean death.

[caramelpence]

People who are opposed on the grounds of supposed coercion. To this I would inquire, what class society does not have coercion of young people in some degree?

All this amounts to saying is that class societies embody the institutionalized and continuous use of coercion, and that North Korea is a class society in that respect. I think another point that is relevant here but which has not yet been raised is why such a measure would even be necessary. The fact that the state in North Korea has found it necessary to haul university students out to the fields suggests that there are serious shortages of labour power and that there are inadequate technological inputs (like farm machinery) that could be used as substitutes for human labour - and what that suggests from a more general perspective is that as long as human beings find themselves in a situation of intense scarcity where a highly developed productive apparatus is not available, it will not be possible for large numbers of people to spend the main part of their time engaging in activities that are genuinely fulfilling and creative (for example, study, which has historically been seen as a core component of human flourishing by philosophers other than Marx, Aristotle being the most obvious example) because a large body of labour time is required for the production of basic subsistence, and even that may be precarious. This is a key point that Marx was fully aware of, and he expressed it by arguing that human flourishing only really begins outside of the "realm of necessity", that is, the time that human beings spend producing their subsistence, and that, even whilst communism would also involve this realm and the labour it embodies being made more fulfilling, it is ultimately only through the shortening of the working day, through the application of technology, that the "true realm of freedom" can be given full scope. In other words, I think the fact that measures of this kind (like the similar policy that was enacted in China during the Cultural Revolution) have so often received support amongst leftists speaks more to an intuitive and romantic identification with manual labour (and rejection of intellectual activity) than to a sound understanding of Marx's vision of communist society, in that, for Marx, a communist society is one in which degrading manual labour has been radically limited (if not totally eliminated) through the application of technology, in such a way that individuals can, if they so choose, spend all of their time studying and doing other things that some leftists would reject as "bourgeois" and "decadent".

In sum, I'm hesitant to accept that the glorification of manual labour has anything in common with Marxism, because it conflicts with Marx's own expectation that manual labour would be overcome through the liberating power of technology.

[Sun at Eight]

I think this gets more to the problem of self-proclaimed socialist revolutions in extremely poor countries ("The century of the unexpected" as the Big Flame pamphlet called it). I think the support for this comes from both necessity in those cases and as a sort of attack against the division of labour (especially intellectual-physical) that Marx's "hunt in the morning" passage speaks about. Compulsion obviously comes with all its problems, especially the compulsion that is probably going on here. EDIT: And that's why I wrote about integration, not just closing everything down.

[Homo Songun]

All this amounts to saying is that class societies embody the institutionalized and continuous use of coercion, and that North Korea is a class society in that respect. I think another point that is relevant here but which has not yet been raised is why such a measure would even be necessary. The fact that the state in North Korea has found it necessary to haul university students out to the fields suggests that there are serious shortages of labour power and that there are inadequate technological inputs (like farm machinery) that could be used as substitutes for human labour - and what that suggests from a more general perspective is that as long as human beings find themselves in a situation of intense scarcity where a highly developed productive apparatus is not available, it will not be possible for large numbers of people to spend the main part of their time engaging in activities that are genuinely fulfilling and creative (for example, study, which has historically been seen as a core component of human flourishing by philosophers other than Marx, Aristotle being the most obvious example) because a large body of labour time is required for the production of basic subsistence, and even that may be precarious. This is a key point that Marx was fully aware of, and he expressed it by arguing that human flourishing only really begins outside of the "realm of necessity", that is, the time that human beings spend producing their subsistence, and that, even whilst communism would also involve this realm and the labour it embodies being made more fulfilling, it is ultimately only through the shortening of the working day, through the application of technology, that the "true realm of freedom" can be given full scope. In other words, I think the fact that measures of this kind (like the similar policy that was enacted in China during the Cultural Revolution) have so often received support amongst leftists speaks more to an intuitive and romantic identification with manual labour (and rejection of intellectual activity) than to a sound understanding of Marx's vision of communist society, in that, for Marx, a communist society is one in which degrading manual labour has been radically limited (if not totally eliminated) through the application of technology, in such a way that individuals can, if they so choose, spend all of their time studying and doing other things that some leftists would reject as "bourgeois" and "decadent".

In sum, I'm hesitant to accept that the glorification of manual labour has anything in common with Marxism, because it conflicts with Marx's own expectation that manual labour would be overcome through the liberating power of technology.
Wow, sad.

[Hiero]

The question is why do we trust the media? The daily telegraph is a conservative paper, wikipedia sources that 64% will vote for the conservative party. I am not runing the whole 'this is a capitalist lie', but I am amazed at how confused people have become at being able to determine the image from the real.

To make it clear this is a media article, it's sources are from South Korea who have heard things surrounding this "back to the countryside" style policy. It is not a direct reflection of what is happening in North Korea, that means there is room for error, mistake, lies and speculation. Many people on this site honestly think they are wonderfull critical and independent thinking leftist, well it only takes one article from a conersative UK tabliod to knock over that illusion.

The article appears to have some knowledge of a "back to the countryside" style campaign. It gives vague reasoning for this, around the possibility of student protests, which is not in verified.

We do not know the excact reason why they are shutting university, how many universities they are shutting down and if they are shutting univeristies down at all. But if they were for a period of time, while it would cause lost time in intellectual labour, for a small and poverty stricken country the labour would be made usefull. It is not ideal to force classes to close, again we don't know if they have, the ideal procedure would be to set up volounteer programs.

I think alot of people have a mystical idea of what socialism really is, and part of building socialism is a collective effort, that means sacrificing some of your time to help in other areas and industries of the country. Alot of people talk on this site about collectivity and communalism, but the idea that they would have 10 months of their study cut short to aid other areas of the country absolutely disgusts them, and that is disgusting in itself. That is what that whole "from each according to their need, each according to their ability" and "for the people" is all about, it is about using your ability to better the living standards of thoose around. I am not sure if that is what the DPRK are doing, but in a socialist country, and especially a poor third world socialist country that is trying to achieve the means to create a egalitarian society, from time to time it would become neccassary to ask for students to drop studies for a period and engage in labour to build that infrastructure. If people are unwilling to do that, that the idea of socialism is flawed and the capitalist are truely correct about human nature and the greed factor. And if you are against the idea of having to sacrifce some of your time to help build infrastructure than your not going to like socialism and you can probably get a better deal in a capitalist society.



In sum, I'm hesitant to accept that the glorification of manual labour has anything in common with Marxism, because it conflicts with Marx's own expectation that manual labour would be overcome through the liberating power of technology.

And we get there by building that technology, and someone has to do that and that should be a share responsibility in a socialist society. Or it is just technocracy, were we maintain the divisions of labour. That would make it impossible to actually achieve communism if that society did not attempt to break divisions of labour.

[caramelpence]

That is what that whole "from each according to their need, each according to their ability" and "for the people" is all about, it is about using your ability to better the living standards of thoose around. I am not sure if that is what the DPRK are doing, but in a socialist country, and especially a poor third world socialist country that is trying to achieve the means to create a egalitarian society, from time to time it would become neccassary to ask for students to drop studies for a period and engage in labour to build that infrastructure. If people are unwilling to do that, that the idea of socialism is flawed and the capitalist are truely correct about human nature and the greed factor.

I think there are several distinct issues being pushed together here. I personally find it problematic to accept any rigid division between socialism and communism as distinct historical stages - at the same time, however, I also recognize that the process of building a radically different society is a protracted process that is likely to start in one country or a small number of countries rather than beginning around the world simultaneously, and that in those conditions, and especially if the process begins in a relatively underdeveloped country, there will still be scarcity, such that it won't initially be possible to have the unfettered development of each and every individual in the way that Marx expected. In those conditions, we can probably both accept that there will have to be a sharing of onerous tasks like manual labour, and that it would be wrong for one part of society to be able to enjoy the good life (regardless of whether that involves studying or some other set of activities) on a full-time basis whilst another part of society devotes most of its time to the production of subsistence. That being said, and putting aside my views on the continued existence of commodity production and alienated labour in North Korea, what I find is that you and others who come from the Maoist tradition in particular do not view the sharing of manual labour as a temporary necessity that is only required until such a point where scarcity has been abolished - which is a view I would probably be able to identify with. Instead, you elevate manual labour to the level of an aesthetic ideal, and equate socialism with a total rejection of the self and individual development. This is most evident in the Maoist idiom of "the people".

This is what I find problematic. A communist society should definitely be about community but this is not because individuals would or should be compelled to sacrifice themselves for some abstract societal interest - rather, it is because community life is requisite for the development of the individual and their ability to enjoy a life of human flourishing, and it is precisely this prospect of flourishing (with its manifold components, some of which will surely be specific to given individuals) being universalized that, for me at least, constitutes the appeal of communism. In that sense, I don't see communism through the prism of selflessness, I see it as the society that creates the conditions for individual development, and it therefore has considerable appeal from the standpoint of self-interest.


And we get there by building that technology, and someone has to do that and that should be a share responsibility in a socialist society. Or it is just technocracy, were we maintain the divisions of labour. That would make it impossible to actually achieve communism if that society did not attempt to break divisions of labour.

The requisite technological basis for communism already exists, on an international level, and that is the basis for world revolution being both possible and necessary. If you genuinely believe that the productive forces can be advanced to the level required for communism within a single country and over time, then does that mean that socialism (or the initial phase of communist society, during which you see the productive forces being developed) does not have any material preconditions to begin with, in that all that needs to happen is for socialism to be created, and then for the productive forces to be advanced over time? Would it be feasible, in your view, for the working class (which you presumably believe can be represented by a party like the CPC that has no entrenched links with the class itself, as a social actor) to take power in any society, in a pre-capitalist society even, and for socialism to develop and eventually turn into communism so long as the right ideas and ideological leadership are present? Moreover, do you straightforwardly think that, in conditions of scarcity, it is possible to maintain socialism at the same time as developing the productive forces, despite the spontaneous tendencies towards capitalism that scarcity would necessarily produce, not to mention the implications of being in a world-system comprised of capitalist states?

[Geiseric]

Wow this is rediculous, sending students, the people who will one day lead the country, who use all of their time studying and working, in order to do a job THAT CAN'T BE DONE BY MOST PEOPLE (because of factors where they can't go to college or have to go right into the workforce), back to the countryside for even more labor, while the laborers in the countryside are already starving due to the famine and the allocation of resources towards the military, for manual labor for about a year, a year that can be used to finish their education or start their college education. This is the worst idea i've ever heard for stimulating an economy. If anything this is the time they need to be in school the most, use the worlds 4th largest army for this shit. If a college student can do it i'm sure a regular soldier can do it as well. Anybody saying that they need to be ''integrated into the proletariat'' needs to re-examine their literal translation.

[Homo Songun]

Wow this is rediculous, sending students, the people who will one day lead the country, who use all of their time studying and working, in order to do a job THAT CAN'T BE DONE BY MOST PEOPLE (because of factors where they can't go to college or have to go right into the workforce), back to the countryside for even more labor, while the laborers in the countryside are already starving due to the famine and the allocation of resources towards the military, for manual labor for about a year, a year that can be used to finish their education or start their college education. This is the worst idea i've ever heard for stimulating an economy. If anything this is the time they need to be in school the most, use the worlds 4th largest army for this shit. If a college student can do it i'm sure a regular soldier can do it as well. Anybody saying that they need to be ''integrated into the proletariat'' needs to re-examine their literal translation.

Imagine! Getting dirt under their fingernails.. the horror! Someone obviously didn't get the memo that "shit" is for "regular" people, not "the people who will one day lead the country", like you and I!

[Decommissioner]

Wow, sad.

I don't understand, his basic statement was marx argued for a society where man would flourish beyond the realm of necessity, where man would not be encumbered day in and day out by labor (and when one does labor, it would not be in oppressive conditions). Do you not agree with this?

From reading marx myself, thats what I gathered. The working class is tied to labor, not free to embrace study and other things like travel, that allow a person to flourish once their needs of food, shelter, entertainment and free time are met. I don't see what is so disagreeable with that, by getting rid of class we get rid of surplus labor for profit and the reserve army of unemployed, which means more time to do things we actually want to do. I do not see anything sad about that.

[Sir Comradical]

Typical apologetics for failed state capitalism. You guys slay me.

Let's see: Did the students choose to quit school, or did the government of the alleged workers state order the schools to close?

RED DAVE

Would you be able to explain to us why the DPRK's economy is faltering without falling back on the usual ''it's not true socialism, it's state capitalism'' formula? While I have no illusions about the DPRK and accept that it is indeed an autocratic state, why are they having the problems they're having? What are the objective economic conditions they're facing? These are important questions. After all, they're not sending students into the workforce purely because they're evil totalitarians, they're doing this out of some failure in their own system.

[Geiseric]

Imagine! Getting dirt under their fingernails.. the horror! Someone obviously didn't get the memo that "shit" is for "regular" people, not "the people who will one day lead the country", like you and I! So i presume you'd like to take a vacation from schooling, which you worked years to earn, in order to work on a 3rd world farm, which conditions are little above slave labor, while there's somebody who isn't involved in higher education, sitting around at an army encampment that's never going to be used since south korea will never invade. God, It amazes me how lacking in common sense stalinists are sometimes. This isn't a temporary trip for manual labor experiance, it's forced relocation FOR A YEAR, into an environment you're hardly used to, physically and mentally, and which most people as well will never be used to.

[Homo Songun]

OP's article employs the weaselly formulation: "Analysts in Japan claim there may be other reasons behind the decision to disperse the students across the country", but how do we know that this is not an ideological decision? During the Cultural Revolution, students were sent to the country side, but there was no lack of peasants in China at the time!

[Homo Songun]

So i presume you'd like to take a vacation from schooling, which you worked years to earn, in order to work on a 3rd world farm, which conditions are little above slave labor, while there's somebody who isn't involved in higher education, sitting around at an army encampment that's never going to be used since south korea will never invade. God, It amazes me how lacking in common sense stalinists are sometimes. This isn't a temporary trip for manual labor experiance, it's forced relocation FOR A YEAR, into an environment you're hardly used to, physically and mentally, and which most people as well will never be used to.

Its like you walked out of the pages of a psychology textbook.

[Geiseric]

That phase of the cultural revolution, I would presume, is one of the reasons why the working class hated the Beuracracy, at this point North Korea needs to develop. For this they need people with technical know how to fill in gaps that people without college education can't fill, like jobs in engineering, architecture, sciences, computers etc. to be fused into the workforce. This move comes at the worst possible time, U.S.'s economy will collapse, thus China's will collapse, thus NK will collapse, doing something like this doesn't build self sufficiency, it's idiocy. To Sir Comradical, im guessing their main economic flaw is their huge army that they use all their recourses to maintain.

[W1N5T0N]

and North Korea went back into severe poverty

as far as I can tell, they ARE suffering extreme poverty and famine right now...

[Sir Comradical]

That phase of the cultural revolution, I would presume, is one of the reasons why the working class hated the Beuracracy, at this point North Korea needs to develop. For this they need people with technical know how to fill in gaps that people without college education can't fill, like jobs in engineering, architecture, sciences, computers etc. to be fused into the workforce. This move comes at the worst possible time, U.S.'s economy will collapse, thus China's will collapse, thus NK will collapse, doing something like this doesn't build self sufficiency, it's idiocy. To Sir Comradical, im guessing their main economic flaw is their huge army that they use all their recourses to maintain.

Considering what happened to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, wouldn't you say their military policy is purely rational and understandable?

[Bandito]

I never defended present North Korea, but this matter could be harshly misinterpreted.

For example, in former Yugoslavia, labor work program for middle and high school kids called Youth labor action was a perfectly normal thing. They traveled across the country on state expense, helped build some important structures, such are major highways and never had a problem with it. Everyone back in the day saw that as nothing but a chance to have some fun with your friends while on a road trip, have some beer and fool around with other boys or girls. Labor was never a problem. They weren't forced to participate, actually everybody was really looking forward to that time of year.

And, yeah, hard labor is nothing to be ashamed of.

[Kenco Smooth]

lol what. unless youre making a lacanian point about the subject already having a designated place in the symbolic order before it comes into existence, then you are profoundly mistaken. how could a baby have an ideology when its just popped out of the vagina ??


:lol:

There should be a facepalm smiley on RevLeft, I could really use one right now.

Very bad wording on my part there. Point being from the moment of birth ideology and cultural affinity begin to be built into an individual and because of this the idea that we could wipe away any undesirable behaviour with a spell of enforced labour is simply ridiculous. A year of manual labour will no more turn an ivory tower aiming academic hopeful into a socialist than a year in Africa will turn those who take gap years from developed countries on to left politics.

[Blackscare]

Very well said !

Actually working while studying is cool, it develops your mindset and makes you more practical oriented rather than a pen-pusher, not only that doing this also brings the students closer to working class, I think it’s good, I myself during my 2nd year Engineering in University used to work for a TV repair shop for 6 to 7 months or so , this actually made me practical oriented and helped my Engineering carrier later in my life. I also had worked as a book shop sales boy during my school years, my father hated me for all this he used to say that I was making a fool of myself.



I have to say, this sounds a lot like "slumming" to me (for those who've not heard of this, it's when rich kids go to poor areas to get a "rush" or whatever and feel like badasses). Lots of students, including myself through the period of time I could afford to go to college, have to work through school. And you know what? It's not a fucking "experience" like watching pandas in their native habitat or something. The very fact that you word it like this means that your perspective is so alien to the working class it's mind-boggling. It's not something that you do to become more "proletarian", it's something you do because if you don't you can't pay your rent or your car insurance, or gas for your car, or classes to drive your car to. It's that simple. The fact that you tried some "prole" work out before finishing your degree and getting a well-payed job is really just... fucking infuriatingly condescending.

The part that I bolded also bothers the shit out of me, your father was angry because you were working, which means that you were well off enough not to work, and you want us all to admire you for having the dedication to do something totally unnecessary for "6 or 7 months", probably really part time, so you'd have drinking money with your friends and pat yourself on the back.



As a proletarian, and one time (maybe future, if I can) student, fuck you. Nobody should have to work through college. By that I mean, actual real-life no bullshit I've barely slept in three fucking days because I can't miss school and I just worked two double shifts work. That shit fucks with your head and prevents you from getting the most of your education. Maybe if you come from a country where only the elite go to university (and you, at least, definitely don't come off as anyone who really knows a thing about average-low income proletarian life, you sound like a spoiled self-indulgent brat), the idea of everyone being sent out to do hard labor, disrupting their studies, sounds cool or adventurous or something, but in my country people from all strata of society have to go to college just to have a decent shot these days. They aren't privileged, they know what work means, and they sure as hell don't want to go out on field trips to fucking coal mines so that the privileged students who never had to work can "learn something" from it.


God the whole attitude just sickens me. You're sound so damn proud of yourself, it's fucking sick. For that vast majority of people working in school isn't a matter of picking up some extra pocket money, you have no idea what it's like. To be fair, in a relative sense, I have no idea. I worked to rent a house, pay my bills and my gas, and pay for classes, which was hard enough, let me tell you. But I know several women right now who are doing all that and raising a child, working at dennies at night or something, trying to become nurses (pretty common one because the cost/time in school trade off isn't as bad as other options) or whatever. When do you think they even get to sleep, let alone see their kids?


How about this? No one should have to work during school. Especially under some absurd order from a bizarre authoritarian state (which, as others pointed out, I think is almost certainly doing this to prevent students from causing unrest about the conditions of their countryman/woman that you seem to think they need to go to labor camps to understand or empathize with!) Let people focus on their studies.



I know I'm repeating myself, but holy shit man. Holy shit. Only someone who never had to deal with paycheck to paycheck bullshit would ever say that working in school is "pretty cool". It's only "pretty cool" if you don't have to do it.

[Kiev Communard]

I never defended present North Korea, but this matter could be harshly misinterpreted.

For example, in former Yugoslavia, labor work program for middle and high school kids called Youth labor action was a perfectly normal thing. They traveled across the country on state expense, helped build some important structures, such are major highways and never had a problem with it. Everyone back in the day saw that as nothing but a chance to have some fun with your friends while on a road trip, have some beer and fool around with other boys or girls. Labor was never a problem. They weren't forced to participate, actually everybody was really looking forward to that time of year.

And, yeah, hard labor is nothing to be ashamed of.

The system of students' labour programme in the USSR was rather controversial, because it involved, for instance, sending faculty students to kolkhoz fields to help with the harvest, and it was generally viewed as an expression of the USSR's failure to conduct agricultural production without additional workforce. Therefore the key thing there is whether North Korean agriculture is in even more complicated situation and whether the students will be treated merely as common labourers (as it was in the USSR) or in the same way as urban intellectuals were treated during the Cultural Revolution in China. In any case, the people who defend the labour corvée (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvée) system practiced in the former USSR and modern North Korea as a hallmark of "socialism" are rather confused, in my opinion.

[W1N5T0N]

Seeing as students only hang out on computers and leftist forums these days, some hard labor could be quite useful...;)

[danyboy27]

I never defended present North Korea, but this matter could be harshly misinterpreted.

For example, in former Yugoslavia, labor work program for middle and high school kids called Youth labor action was a perfectly normal thing. They traveled across the country on state expense, helped build some important structures, such are major highways and never had a problem with it. Everyone back in the day saw that as nothing but a chance to have some fun with your friends while on a road trip, have some beer and fool around with other boys or girls. Labor was never a problem. They weren't forced to participate, actually everybody was really looking forward to that time of year.

And, yeah, hard labor is nothing to be ashamed of.

indeed it isnt something should be ashamed of.

All i am saying is that, if those folks arnt properly fed or overworked, it could be hasardous for their health.

and with all those sanctions i dont see how the north korean governement could properly feed them.

[Geiseric]

Considering what happened to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, wouldn't you say their military policy is purely rational and understandable?

Well the only real threat they face of from invasion is from South Korea, who doesn't really even need to invade the north since they recieve everything they need from the U.S.

I believe they need a large army to suppress their civilian population and fight against a possible rebellion, which is the same reason I believe China needs a large army, not saying I support it, just that's the logical reason behind it. What does North Korea have that's more valuable than those middle eastern and north african countries, (which as we all know are rich in Oil)? Afghanistan is huge on other natural recources as well, such as Cobalt and Boxxite. North Korea, to my knowlege, isn't very valuable to invade.

[Hiero]

I think there are several distinct issues being pushed together here. I personally find it problematic to accept any rigid division between socialism and communism as distinct historical stages - at the same time, however, I also recognize that the process of building a radically different society is a protracted process that is likely to start in one country or a small number of countries rather than beginning around the world simultaneously, and that in those conditions, and especially if the process begins in a relatively underdeveloped country, there will still be scarcity, such that it won't initially be possible to have the unfettered development of each and every individual in the way that Marx expected. In those conditions, we can probably both accept that there will have to be a sharing of onerous tasks like manual labour, and that it would be wrong for one part of society to be able to enjoy the good life (regardless of whether that involves studying or some other set of activities) on a full-time basis whilst another part of society devotes most of its time to the production of subsistence. That being said, and putting aside my views on the continued existence of commodity production and alienated labour in North Korea, what I find is that you and others who come from the Maoist tradition in particular do not view the sharing of manual labour as a temporary necessity that is only required until such a point where scarcity has been abolished - which is a view I would probably be able to identify with. Instead, you elevate manual labour to the level of an aesthetic ideal, and equate socialism with a total rejection of the self and individual development. This is most evident in the Maoist idiom of "the people".

Before I state this really where we need to start pulling out the relevant material for and adequate and in depth discussion, I don’t have the time for this due to my own studies however please excuse any mistakes but if anyone wants to quote the relevant material that would be encouraged. Also a lot of these questions are big questions which I won’t have the answers for. I will ask for our posts to be moved into another thread.
First, I am not a strict Maoist. It is hard to say that since I have a picture of Mao as avatar. Mao is interesting and offers a lot for understanding conflict, Mao began to clarify how complex conflict really is when there is multiple levels and intensities of those levels. However I am becoming more influenced by Bourdieu these days, and that adds more complexities to how people react to conflict.
Anyway, I see what you are saying about Maoist tradition elevating manual labour to a life changing experience. Also true as someone mentioned they probably sent a lot of students to the countryside for political reasons, so the PLA could clean up after the Cultural Revolution without them as a nuisance. Two things, I don’t personally elevate manual labour to that aesthetic level. Secondly, I believe there is a different concept of “self” and “individual” amongst different societies/cultures/groups of people and this has been a big debate amongst social science. We can’t underestimate that at the creation of Maoism as an political ideology that the Chinese had a different understanding to our concept of self and individual. In the West we have a firm root in enlightenment ideas about self and then more recently the neo-liberal idea of self. Which is running quite consistently throughout this discussion “you can’t make me work! I have rights”, which is about choice and freedom of choice in a neo-liberal context which delineates the individual from society. I believe in the creation of socialism that self has to be critiqued and there has to be some solution. Maybe not to the point of total rejection of the self and individual development, maybe Che’s concept of self in Socialism and Man in Cuba may be a good starting point (which would include an evaluation of the practice of socialism Cuba). I think there is in some part a negation of one version of self during socialism and that is part of the contradiction when moving to a socialist economy, that it requires new forms of self. But we have to be careful that we do not use the neo-liberal construction of self as a base mark, which some people are doing in this discussion.

This is what I find problematic. A communist society should definitely be about community but this is not because individuals would or should be compelled to sacrifice themselves for some abstract societal interest - rather, it is because community life is requisite for the development of the individual and their ability to enjoy a life of human flourishing, and it is precisely this prospect of flourishing (with its manifold components, some of which will surely be specific to given individuals) being universalized that, for me at least, constitutes the appeal of communism. In that sense, I don't see communism through the prism of selflessness, I see it as the society that creates the conditions for individual development, and it therefore has considerable appeal from the standpoint of self-interest.
I guess this comes down to the concept again of individual and self. I am coming from a non-humanist perspective and your coming from a humanist perspective. I think the point I would make here is to not make the societal interest abstract, but real. You stating that motivation should be turned inwards, that one acts in the community for individual development when I say one acts in the community for the community for real social gains and interest. I believe revolution transforms humans, and that our nature is transformed as well. Individual development and the conditions for development is improved in conjunction with the revolution.


The requisite technological basis for communism already exists, on an international level, and that is the basis for world revolution being both possible and necessary. If you genuinely believe that the productive forces can be advanced to the level required for communism within a single country and over time, then does that mean that socialism (or the initial phase of communist society, during which you see the productive forces being developed) does not have any material preconditions to begin with, in that all that needs to happen is for socialism to be created, and then for the productive forces to be advanced over time? Would it be feasible, in your view, for the working class (which you presumably believe can be represented by a party like the CPC that has no entrenched links with the class itself, as a social actor) to take power in any society, in a pre-capitalist society even, and for socialism to develop and eventually turn into communism so long as the right ideas and ideological leadership are present? Moreover, do you straightforwardly think that, in conditions of scarcity, it is possible to maintain socialism at the same time as developing the productive forces, despite the spontaneous tendencies towards capitalism that scarcity would necessarily produce, not to mention the implications of being in a world-system comprised of capitalist states?
I think the requisite technological basis for revolution does exist, but the multiplicity of contradictions that exist make revolution possibility complex and world revolution impossible, Hence where Mao and even Althusser’s dialectics play an important influence in understanding these complexities. I guess your second question is where Maoist politics come involved. I don’t believe that “the productive forces can be advanced to the level required for communism within a single country and over time”. To the point of communism I believe this has to be a world process.
The questions you are ask are difficult to answer, and I guess your second question is where Maoist politics come involved. Where there is a tiny working class, they can form some dictatorship to create socialism with the productive forces that allow it in the country. I am not strict on the role of a party like the CPC, if anything I am not a strict Maoist. The institution for political domination can vary. I mean this goes back to the complexities of contradictions that I mentioned, I guess that the nature of conflict that if you build some form of socialism while developing the productive forces you are going to have the tendency for spontaneous capitalism. Which I guess is the requisite for cultural-revolution, to maintain socialist production and a continued nationalisation of the developing productive forces as they pop up. A more liquid form of socialism would be required then. Rather than a Stalinist “we have socialism” it would be a more fluid “we have conflict, lets appropriate the economy to build socialism” which is a style of Maoism maybe even Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution, minus the emphasis on world revolution.
You really caught me out with these questions, as I am answering them I am trying to rectify the inherent problems in Marxism when it is applied to the practical world. Especially in countries that have structural problems and the class conflict is not clearing lineated

[Hiero]

How about this? No one should have to work during school. Especially under some absurd order from a bizarre authoritarian state (which, as others pointed out, I think is almost certainly doing this to prevent students from causing unrest about the conditions of their countryman/woman that you seem to think they need to go to labor camps to understand or empathize with!) Let people focus on their studies.

I agree and disagree with your points.

Firstly no one should have to do any work that impedes on their education. In most capitalist societies except for some of the Scandinavian countries, alot of students have to work. I am one of thoose students, I work aorund 20-30 hours a week to maintian myself.

In a socialist society, education should be free and students should be maintained. If that same society provides free education and living necessities then there is nothing wrong with that society asking students to participate in needed labour. In poor third world countries that may be a necessity.

So there are two different things you are talking about. First is being forced to work due to economic conditions while studying, which impedes on your study. That does suck.

The other is in a socialist society, where you take time away from study, not doing it at the same time as study. This is different to the first. I am not sure what they are doing in the DPRK, as I mentioned earlier this is a media report from a right wing tabliod. They probably don't know. But from the media article, they are suspending studies, not forcing people to study while working.

[Tim Finnegan]

Well the only real threat they face of from invasion is from South Korea, who doesn't really even need to invade the north since they recieve everything they need from the U.S.
More to the point, they'd have almost nothing to gain from the North beyond the burden of finding that half their country was, all of a sudden, an underdeveloped backwater with a shattered economy and populated largely by impoverished and malnourished peasants. It would be like the UK waking up one morning to find that somebody had wedged Zimbabwe into the Irish Sea with a note saying "your problem".

[manic expression]

More to the point, they'd have almost nothing to gain from the North beyond the burden of finding that half their country was, all of a sudden, an underdeveloped backwater with a shattered economy and populated largely by impoverished and malnourished peasants. It would be like the UK waking up one morning to find that somebody had wedged Zimbabwe into the Irish Sea with a note saying "your problem".
Can't really make that comparison. Korea is one nation and has been so throughout history. Anyway, an imperialist occupation of the DPRK would inevitably include extremely low-wage labor for capitalists backed up by brute force. Korean capitalists would be able to move their operations to the occupied north, exploit the living hell out of the workers there to the point of slavery and then turn around and tell workers in the south that they have to accept wage cuts and higher hours, lest they price themselves out of the market. Then, the RoK could cut down on its military spending (aka capitalists would tax themselves less)...and within a few years one of their imperialist leaders could fly to Oslo to get his Peace Prize.

PS most citizens of the DPRK aren't peasants...city denizens make up the majority IIRC.

[LegendZ]

Considering what happened to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, wouldn't you say their military policy is purely rational and understandable?No. For one there are no Islamic extremists in the DPRK. I doubt there are many Muslims at all. Second what would they gain from attacking the DPRK? With their forces scattered throughout Africa and the Middle-East it would be illogical. I've heard this excuse many times from leftists. But but but the US and South Korea are ready to invade at any moment. If they wanted to have invaded the DPRK they would have done it by now. They wouldn't try to invade them when their military is occupied in the largest quagmire in it's history.


Can't really make that comparison. Korea is one nation and has been so throughout history. Anyway, an imperialist occupation of the DPRK would inevitably include extremely low-wage labor for capitalists backed up by brute force. Korean capitalists would be able to move their operations to the occupied north, exploit the living hell out of the workers there to the point of slavery and then turn around and tell workers in the south that they have to accept wage cuts and higher hours, lest they price themselves out of the market. Then, the RoK could cut down on its military spending (aka capitalists would tax themselves less)...and within a few years one of their imperialist leaders could fly to Oslo to get his Peace Prize.

PS most citizens of the DPRK aren't peasants...city denizens make up the majority IIRC.With the exception to the rest of that post. That doesn't sound much different from it's current situation.

Now I'm not sure if you know but S. Korea is a fairly high tech place. Why would they want to spend money to move their complex industry up north with a relatively inexperienced workforce vs having their industry already set in place with an experienced workforce with years of making those products. One would assume that N. Koreans are used to more agricultural work while S. Koreans are used to more high tech industry's.

[manic expression]

No. For one there are no Islamic extremists in the DPRK. I doubt there are many Muslims at all. Second what would they gain from attacking the DPRK? With their forces scattered throughout Africa and the Middle-East it would be illogical. I've heard this excuse many times from leftists. But but but the US and South Korea are ready to invade at any moment. If they wanted to have invaded the DPRK they would have done it by now. They wouldn't try to invade them when their military is occupied in the largest quagmire in it's history.
There aren't too many Muslims (left alone Islamic extremists) in Honduras...that didn't stop imperialism from imposing its will upon the workers of that country.


With the exception to the rest of that post. That doesn't sound much different from it's current situation.
Yes, a murderous war against the people of the DPRK, followed by a murderous occupation wouldn't be any different. :rolleyes:


Now I'm not sure if you know but S. Korea is a fairly high tech place. Why would they want to spend money to move their complex industry up north with a relatively inexperienced workforce vs having their industry already set in place with an experienced workforce with years of making those products. One would assume that N. Koreans are used to more agricultural work while S. Koreans are used to more high tech industry's.
Because capitalists like to expand their operations. A bit of investment would give them access to an enslaved workforce (which is experienced with industry) and push down wages in the south. It's not like Korean capitalists are incapable of the task, especially with the US behind them.

And you should really read my post next time. Most DPRK citizens aren't peasants, most of them (to the tune of 60%) live in cities, so they're not "used to more agricultural work". Why do people keep repeating this fallacy that a vast majority of the DPRK is made up of peasants? It must be because some want to belittle and patronize the people of the DPRK, and thanks to imperialist propaganda, they think they can get away with it. Sad.

[KC]

Manic keeps saying that "capitalists" would exploit them. What he doesn't go into is how imperial expansionism works and the relationship between the state and capital of the imperialist nation. If he did so he would realize that the state usually picks up the bill, while the national capital moves in to exploit the circumstances. What has been asked of him, and what he refuses to respond to, instead going back to vague Marxian sloganeering, is how South Korean capital would benefit from taking over the North to such an extent as to convince the state to pick up the tab.

I think China or Russia would have more of a desire, economically speaking, to acquire the territory. After all, both of these countries are already exploiting the Northern workers and they have the budget to do so.

Culturally speaking it's a much more complex story, obviously.

[LegendZ]

There aren't too many Muslims (left alone Islamic extremists) in Honduras...that didn't stop imperialism from imposing its will upon the workers of that country. How long ago was that? I thought we were talking about why the US wouldn't invade the DPRK now? The US is fighting a war on terror against Islamic extremists. What would invading the DPRK do to further their goal of killing as many terrorists as possible? Now, back then their fight was against the USSR. Do you really expect for them to let another ML country set up in it's backyard?



Yes, a murderous war against the people of the DPRK, followed by a murderous occupation wouldn't be any different. :rolleyes:So you mean to say that they don't already work for low wages with fear of being sent to a work camp? Well that's news to me.:rolleyes:



Because capitalists like to expand their operations. A bit of investment would give them access to an enslaved workforce (which is experienced with industry) and push down wages in the south. It's not like Korean capitalists are incapable of the task, especially with the US behind them.Of course I would expect them to open industry in the North. Not taking advantage of a new labor pool would be stupid. Although I would assume most North Koreans would immediately go down South looking for work instead of waiting for people to just open shop which would probably take months. Especially when after the war they'd probably have to rebuild their homes and businesses.


And you should really read my post next time. Most DPRK citizens aren't peasants, most of them (to the tune of 60%) live in cities, so they're not "used to more agricultural work". Why do people keep repeating this fallacy that a vast majority of the DPRK is made up of peasants? It must be because some want to belittle and patronize the people of the DPRK, and thanks to imperialist propaganda, they think they can get away with it. Sad.Well compared to ROK with agriculture making up an amazing 3% of it's GDP. I'd say more DPRK workers are used to agriculture work.

[manic expression]

Manic keeps saying that "capitalists" would exploit them. What he doesn't go into is how imperial expansionism works and the relationship between the state and capital of the imperialist nation. If he did so he would realize that the state usually picks up the bill, while the national capital moves in to exploit the circumstances. What has been asked of him, and what he refuses to respond to, instead going back to vague Marxian sloganeering, is how South Korean capital would benefit from taking over the North to such an extent as to convince the state to pick up the tab.
The state wouldn't be needed to be convinced of anything. If the RoK and US were to make good on their threats against the DPRK, they would already be picking up the tab and would have continue to do so as part of any military action and resulting occupation. How you missed this, I cannot say.


Culturally speaking it's a much more complex story, obviously.
The real point is that DPRK : RoK is not as England : Zimbabwe.

Even you can agree, I should think.


How long ago was that?
June 2009. You were saying?


So you mean to say that they don't already work for low wages with fear of being sent to a work camp? Well that's news to me.:rolleyes:
That's a funny statement. Workers are forced to work...or else they get sent to camps where they're forced to work. :lol: Anyway, no, the workers of the DPRK are not being forced to work, they are not exploited as owing to the social relations of their socialist country and they have a great deal of benefits from the worker state (healthcare, housing, etc.).


Of course I would expect them to open industry in the North. Not taking advantage of a new labor pool would be stupid. Although I would assume most North Koreans would immediately go down South looking for work instead of waiting for people to just open shop which would probably take months. Especially when after the war they'd probably have to rebuild their homes and businesses.
They wouldn't be able to move under the most likely scenario (military occupation). I couldn't see the imperialists doing anything except keeping the peninsula in two separate zones.


Well compared to ROK with agriculture making up an amazing 3% of it's GDP. I'd say more DPRK workers are used to agriculture work.
It's not an agricultural society. Most of the terrain is mountainous, and only a small percentage of it is truly arable.

[Tim Finnegan]

Can't really make that comparison. Korea is one nation and has been so throughout history.
Firstly, I meant in economic terms, and secondly, anyone claiming to be a Marxist should be aware that the "nation", as we now understand it, is a bourgeois ideological construct dating back no further than the 17th century.


Anyway, an imperialist occupation of the DPRK would inevitably include extremely low-wage labor for capitalists backed up by brute force. Korean capitalists would be able to move their operations to the occupied north, exploit the living hell out of the workers there to the point of slavery and then turn around and tell workers in the south that they have to accept wage cuts and higher hours, lest they price themselves out of the market. Then, the RoK could cut down on its military spending (aka capitalists would tax themselves less)...and within a few years one of their imperialist leaders could fly to Oslo to get his Peace Prize.
Well, as LegendZ has observed, this process is well under away, under the reluctant but increasingly accepting supervision of the Workers' Party, and is only likely to extend. Why bother extending democratic rights, welfare entitlements, and so forth to the country, when you can judge gradually tip the belligerent little Kim dynasty out of the picture and foster the emergence of a full-fledged comprador-state? That's a route to economic hegemony almost as old as what you might call "classic imperialism".

(And, wait, how is it "imperialist" is the the two regions are eternally bound in nationhood? It sounds almost as if your abandoning the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism in exchange for something a tad more objective, there... :rolleyes:)

[qupte]PS most citizens of the DPRK aren't peasants...city denizens make up the majority IIRC.[/QUOTE]
Well, before the DPRK's economy went bottom-up and its unsustainable agricultural system collapsed, sure, but from what I hear there's been a significant amount of migration back to the countryside. Perhaps Western aid has changed that, I don't know; the exact demographics in question aren't particularly important in this instance.

[LegendZ]

June 2009. You were saying?Yes because supporting a military coup ≈ a full scale invasion, possible total war, and a subsequent occupation?



That's a funny statement. Workers are forced to work...or else they get sent to camps where they're forced to work. :lol: Anyway, no, the workers of the DPRK are not being forced to work, they are not exploited as owing to the social relations of their socialist country and they have a great deal of benefits from the worker state (healthcare, housing, etc.).Funny how there are no statistics showing the DPRK's unemployment rate. The only thing I'll agree with is that they aren't being exploited and their benefits.



They wouldn't be able to move under the most likely scenario (military occupation). I couldn't see the imperialists doing anything except keeping the peninsula in two separate zones.I wouldn't see that lasting to long after the conflict.



It's not an agricultural society. Most of the terrain is mountainous, and only a small percentage of it is truly arable.When did I say it was an agricultural society? I said compared to ROK, the DPRK's workers do more agricultural work.

[manic expression]

Firstly, I meant in economic terms, and secondly, anyone claiming to be a Marxist should be aware that the "nation", as we now understand it, is a bourgeois ideological construct dating back no further than the 17th century.
Right, but there is the idea that if you stuck Zimbabwe next to Wales, the cultural shockwaves would be history-changing stuff. Not so much if Korea was united. Also, perhaps we should agree to disagree on the national question, because I hold that the nation, far from being a recent ideological construct, is based firmly in the material study of history...but that's definitely another discussion IMO.


Well, as LegendZ has observed, this process is well under away, under the reluctant but increasingly accepting supervision of the Workers' Party, and is only likely to extend. Why bother extending democratic rights, welfare entitlements, and so forth to the country, when you can judge gradually tip the belligerent little Kim dynasty out of the picture and foster the emergence of a full-fledged comprador-state? That's a route to economic hegemony almost as old as what you might call "classic imperialism".You're conflating the PRC with the US and RoK. There's no economic activity in the DPRK that remotely involves the latter forces, and they're the ones militarily threatening the country. Further, the PRC is working, as you said, under the auspices of the KWP, which means it's not a case of imperialism at all and instead economic cooperation between two worker states. Lastly, a lot of what you're saying is a matter of pure prediction.


(And, wait, how is it "imperialist" is the the two regions are eternally bound in nationhood? It sounds almost as if your abandoning the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism in exchange for something a tad more objective, there... :rolleyes:)Korea is one nation, but as the RoK is essentially a US client, the relationship is very clear. Even if that wasn't the case, we can see that one nation can be split between imperialist and non-imperialist: the DDR and West Germany is one useful example.


Well, before the DPRK's economy went bottom-up and its unsustainable agricultural system collapsed, sure, but from what I hear there's been a significant amount of migration back to the countryside. Perhaps Western aid has changed that, I don't know; the exact demographics in question aren't particularly important in this instance.It wasn't that the agricultural system was unsustainable, it was that the DPRK has almost no ability to be agriculturally self-reliant. It's a mountainous country and sees very little arable land. Anyway, as of 2008, 60% of the population lives within cities, so whatever the effects of this supposed migration, it's still a majority urban country.


Yes because supporting a military coup ≈ a full scale invasion, possible total war, and a subsequent occupation?
You were speaking intent, not method. It's not a matter of Muslim or non-Muslim, it's a matter of economic interest and what the imperialists think is most profitable to them.


Funny how there are no statistics showing the DPRK's unemployment rate. The only thing I'll agree with is that they aren't being exploited and their benefits.OK.


I wouldn't see that lasting to long after the conflict.Perhaps not, but I couldn't see it happening any other way regardless of length.


When did I say it was an agricultural society? I said compared to ROK, the DPRK's workers do more agricultural work.OK sure, I was just trying to say that it's not a huge difference.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Anyway, an imperialist occupation of the DPRK would inevitably include extremely low-wage labor for capitalists backed up by brute force.http://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/2011060800964_0.jpg

New China-DPRK Free Trade Zone in 황금평 (Hwanggumpyong).

And...

"Kaesŏng Industrial Region is a special administrative industrial region of North Korea. It was formed in 2002 from part of Kaesŏng Directly Governed City.... Kaesŏng Industrial Park is being operated in the region, as a collaborative economic development with South Korea.... The industrial park is seen as a way for South Korean companies to employ cheap labour that is educated, skilled and speaks Korean which would make communication considerably easier." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaesong_Industrial_Region

[What was that? ... "You're conflating the PRC with the US and RoK. There's no economic activity in the DPRK that remotely involves the latter forces"?]

And...

"The DPR of Korea (North Korea) will become in the next years the most important hub for trading in North-East Asia.... Lowest labour cost in Asia.... Highly qualified, loyal and motivated personnel. Education, housing and health service is provided free to all citizens. As opposed to other Asian countries, worker's will not abandon their positions for higher salaries once they are trained." - Business in DPRK (http://www.korea-dpr.com/business.htm)(Official Website of DPRK)


Korean capitalists would be able to move their operations to the occupied north, exploit the living hell out of the workers there to the point of slavery "GAESEONG, North Korea — When a South Korean businessman explained to a group of foreign diplomats and journalists visiting his garment factory here last week how he overcame political differences with North Korean workers with the "help of God," his Communist interpreter blushed and declined to translate the comment." - South Korean factories across border keep lines open to North (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/business/worldbusiness/28iht-gaeseong.1.5894946.html) (New York Times)


and then turn around and tell workers in the south that they have to accept wage cuts and higher hours, lest they price themselves out of the market."The Federation of Korean Industries has joined with other capitalist groupings in calling for all workers in south Korea to be made 'non-permanent.' Blaming the workers, who are the biggest victims of the world financial crisis, for its occurrence, the Federation claims 'The current problems originated from the labor market rigidity.'... Some 5.4 million workers in south Korea, representing one-third of the total workforce, are currently 'non-permanent' workers. About half of them earn the minimum wage, which is about $3.20 (US) per hour." - Capitalists in south Korea call for all workers to be made “non-permanent” (http://amte.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/capitalists-in-south-korea-call-for-all-workers-to-be-made-non-permanent/)

[manic expression]

New China-DPRK Free Trade Zone in 황금평 (Hwanggumpyong).
That's a conflation of the PRC and imperialism.


"GAESEONG, North Korea — When a South Korean businessman explained to a group of foreign diplomats and journalists visiting his garment factory here last week how he overcame political differences with North Korean workers with the "help of God," his Communist interpreter blushed and declined to translate the comment." - South Korean factories across border keep lines open to North (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/business/worldbusiness/28iht-gaeseong.1.5894946.html) (New York Times)
Ah, I see. And do these businessmen dictate the economic process they operate under or are they going through avenues opened to them by the KWP? One backwards businessman does not a capitalist country make.

[flobdob]

Alarmism, sweeping statements, absurd logic and a total lack of knowledge of the topic at hand? Uh oh, it must be a revleft thread on the DPRK!

This thread perfectly illustrates the truth behind the slogan "no investigation, no right to speak". Had many of the people participating in the thread investigated the DPRK they would know that the sending of students out of the universities to work had a long pedigree in the education system there. Indeed, the policy of "ideological revolution" in the postwar reconstruction period relied on it. Brun and Hersh describe this:


Students at higher institutions recieve wages, while workers at factory colleges continue to draw salaries from their enterprises. Theory and practice thus imply some form of participation in productive labour. School children under the age of sixteen are not directly involved, but this does not mean that they are not taught to respect work and make themselves useful. Their contribution may include planting flowers on roadsides, growing cucumbers, feeding rabbits, collecting scrap iron and waste, cleaning their classrooms, and doing propaganda work. After the eighth school year, they take part in an annual one-month stint of light productive labor in nearby factories or cooperatives. On the political level this contact familiarizes the pupils with the conditions of the working people. Educationally it provides an additional opportunity for closing the gap between theory and practice. The system of compulsory ten-year education has the further advantage of reducing the contradictions between town and country, as all children everywhere are offered similar educational opportunities.

Indeed, the idea of sending students out into productive labour is far from something thought up by nasty Mr Kim. As manic_expression correctly pointed out, the USSR had a similar practice of trying to integrate students with the working class by encouraging the participation in labour. The GDR did things similar to the DPRK here, as does Cuba. Indeed, it's a crucial strategy for any socialist state on a basic ideological level; it limits the ability for an intellectual strata to emerge which sees work as "below" it. It's quite curious therefore that the people who talk so much about the problems of bureaucracy and elitism in a socialist society are so vehemently attacking the DPRK on this.

As manic_expression has already demonstrated, it also serves a useful tool for the DPRK to push forwards in socialist construction, and rebuild crucial areas of its economy where needed. As the (biased) article says: "The reports suggested that the students will be put to work on construction projects in major cities while there are also indications that repair work may be needed in agricultural regions that were affected by a major typhoon recently.". In the context of the agricultural problems faced by the DPRK, this is not only legitimate but also essential. When people here attack the DPRK for having problems in agriculture, and then attack it for trying to improve this situation, you can do nothing more than despair.

Perhaps it would do some people a service to actually partake in some study, rather than bleating like scared animals whenever they see an article in a bourgeois newspaper...

[Tim Finnegan]

Ah, I see. And do these businessmen dictate the economic process they operate under or are they going through avenues opened to them by the KWP? One backwards businessman does not a capitalist country make.
Do businessmen in the West?

Capitalism is a set of social relations, not a legal structure. Those social relations are evidently present in the DPRK, so to deny that it is capitalist is to reject Marxism in favour of what I can only call "Hayekian socialism".

[manic expression]

Do businessmen in the West?
Of course they do, the capitalist class is what holds power under capitalism, and businessmen are certainly part of that.

[Jose Gracchus]

Of course they do, the capitalist class is what holds power under capitalism, and businessmen are certainly part of that.

But the capitalist class is not reducible down to a collection of individuals with individual relations to wealth and individual motivations. I challenge you to locate this conception of yours (based only on what I can conceive of as moral appeals to businessmen's "greed") in Marx. What is a state enterprise in pre-Thatcher Britain? It operates on profit without a private owner. Is it some socialism sprinkled on top of an imperialist capitalist state?

[Tim Finnegan]

Of course they do, the capitalist class is what holds power under capitalism, and businessmen are certainly part of that.
I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood; I took "the economic process they operate under" to refer to the process of competitive accumulation, which Western capitalists are, in their own way, enslaved to. That they hold political power doesn't change that, it merely alters their approach.
But perhaps you were referring to something else?

And I note your silence in regards to my comments on capitalist social relations.


But the capitalist class is not reducible down to a collection of individuals with individual relations to wealth and individual motivations. I challenge you to locate this conception of yours (based only on what I can conceive of as moral appeals to businessmen's "greed") in Marx. What is a state enterprise in pre-Thatcher Britain? It operates on profit without a private owner. Is it some socialism sprinkled on top of an imperialist capitalist state?
Case in point, the most ferocious episode of class struggle in the post-war era was the 1984-85 Miners' Strike, in which capital was represented by the National Coal Board, a state-owned enterprise. If the relationship between the NCB and the miners did not constitute capitalist social relations, then what was the strike? A mere tiff between workers?

[manic expression]

But the capitalist class is not reducible down to a collection of individuals with individual relations to wealth and individual motivations. I challenge you to locate this conception of yours (based only on what I can conceive of as moral appeals to businessmen's "greed") in Marx. What is a state enterprise in pre-Thatcher Britain? It operates on profit without a private owner. Is it some socialism sprinkled on top of an imperialist capitalist state?
Except that wasn't the question. Do businessmen make up part of the capitalist class or not? This hair-splitting would be interesting if it had anything to do with the issue at hand. As it is, it's just trying to play "GOTCHA!" instead of thinking up a contribution of substance.


I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood; I took "the economic process they operate under" to refer to the process of competitive accumulation, which Western capitalists are, in their own way, enslaved to. That they hold political power doesn't change that, it merely alters their approach.
It changes complexion quite a bit when it's about capitalists being allowed to operate in the DPRK. They have to accept the terms given to them by the worker state, which prohibits the specifics outlined in the next topic:


And I note your silence in regards to my comments on capitalist social relations.
Silence is the appropriate response, for your comments hold no water. Are you telling me that you think the DPRK has capitalist social relations? How does that coexist with the fact that the party in power has nothing to do with owning the means of production, with employing workers in exploitative firms, in owning stocks and bonds? How does that explain the fact that the majority of industry is not in private hands? How does that square with the fact that the DPRK sees a state monopoly on foreign trade?

[KC]

The state wouldn't be needed to be convinced of anything.

So what is the relation of the state to capital? One of complete subordination? If so, to which section of capital? Or is capital one single monolithic entity with one single monolithic interest?

This is one of the greatest problems with classic imperialism theory. Lenin (nor anyone else) never explained the relation between "the division of the world among capitalist associations" and "the division of the world among the great powers". Of course you're going to dismiss this, because you're a dogmatist, but the fact remains that there has been not one single exhaustive analysis of this relationship by anyone.


If the RoK and US were to make good on their threats against the DPRK, they would already be picking up the tab and would have continue to do so as part of any military action and resulting occupation. How you missed this, I cannot say.

Because neither the US nor the RoK are interested in annexing the DPRK because of the disastrous effect it would have on the RoK's economy.

[agnixie]

As manic_expression has already demonstrated, it also serves a useful tool for the DPRK to push forwards in socialist construction

A country that considers the military to be the revolutionary class does not get to call itself socialist. End of.

[Tim Finnegan]

It changes complexion quite a bit when it's about capitalists being allowed to operate in the DPRK. They have to accept the terms given to them by the worker state, which prohibits the specifics outlined in the next topic:


Silence is the appropriate response, for your comments hold no water. Are you telling me that you think the DPRK has capitalist social relations? How does that coexist with the fact that the party in power has nothing to do with owning the means of production, with employing workers in exploitative firms, in owning stocks and bonds? How does that explain the fact that the majority of industry is not in private hands? How does that square with the fact that the DPRK sees a state monopoly on foreign trade?
I'm saying that the hiring of workers by capitalists within the DPRK is an example of capitalist social relations, and the simple presence of a single set of blatantly capitalist social relations in one part of the DPRK negates the possibility of genuine communist social relations existing anywhere in the DPRK. You cannot have communist social relations in one part of town, and capitalist social relations in another.
Whether or not the DPRK allows quite the breadth of private enterprise is neither here nor there, because, yet again, the Marxian, rather than Hayekian conception of capitalism is of a set of generalised social relations, not simply a legal-political framework which favours formally private accumulation. Talk all you like about "majority of industry" and "monopoly on foreign trade", but the very, very best that you can possibly claim of the DPRK is an "advanced Fabianism", if you will, which is no socialism as Marx understood it.

[manic expression]

So what is the relation of the state to capital? One of complete subordination? If so, to which section of capital? Or is capital one single monolithic entity with one single monolithic interest?
The state is the instrument of capital, just as it was before the dawn of imperialism. American capital calculated it to be in its best interests to conquer resources and geopolitical control in Iraq, and so its state did so.


Because neither the US nor the RoK are interested in annexing the DPRK because of the disastrous effect it would have on the RoK's economy.
Yes, we all know you're so sympathetic to poor old imperialism, just trying to defend itself from those mean Koreans. :rolleyes: It's really heartwarming.


A country that considers the military to be the revolutionary class does not get to call itself socialist. End of.
They could call unicorns the revolutionary class and it wouldn't change the material realities of the DPRK. I don't agree with everything the DPRK says, but I still recognize a socialist society when I see one.


I'm saying that the hiring of workers by capitalists within the DPRK is an example of capitalist social relations, and the simple presence of a single set of blatantly capitalist social relations in one part of the DPRK negates the possibility of genuine communist social relations existing anywhere in the DPRK. You cannot have communist social relations in one part of town, and capitalist social relations in another.
Can you have feudal relations and capitalist relations within eyesight of each other? Yes, and this has happened throughout history. Your "one drop theory" is utterly ridiculous besides. But I think it's an academic argument because my position is that by submitting to the KWP and accepting their terms, the South Korean firms are not imposing their social relations upon those they employ in the DPRK.


Whether or not the DPRK allows quite the breadth of private enterprise is neither here nor there, because, yet again, the Marxian, rather than Hayekian conception of capitalism is of a set of generalised social relations, not simply a legal-political framework which favours formally private accumulation. Talk all you like about "majority of industry" and "monopoly on foreign trade", but the very, very best that you can possibly claim of the DPRK is an "advanced Fabianism", if you will, which is no socialism as Marx understood it.
That's simply insane. Did Marx jump up and down about the "advanced Fabianism" of the Paris Commune (which had far more capitalist relations than the DPRK does)? No, he didn't. Stop trying to commandeer a legacy you have no interest in upholding. Further, the legal-political framework is extremely important, because it denies any attempt to create direct capitalist exploitation of the workers. Capitalists might bring in resources and then take some of the proceeds of production, but that's hardly the same as what you're arguing.

[Tim Finnegan]

Can you have feudal relations and capitalist relations within eyesight of each other? Yes, and this has happened throughout history. Your "one drop theory" is utterly ridiculous besides.
That analogy holds no water; feudalism is a non-universalising social formation, and so can permit geographical variation, while capitalism is a universalising one, and so does not. (That's why, among other things, the as-yet non-generalised social relationships witnessed in the mercantile communes can not properly be considered "capitalist"; that's a social formation that only properly emerges when agriculture is rationalised in a capitalistic manner.) Because of this, communism can not exist in a stable fashion alongside capitalism, but only in a temporary, revolutionary situation, in which the workers are actively unmaking capitalism and making communism- something which is rather blatantly absent in North Korea. As the negation of a universalising set of social relations, it too much be universalising; it very much lacks the luxury of sitting on its laurels in some backwater state.


But I think it's an academic argument because my position is that by submitting to the KWP and accepting their terms, the South Korean firms are not imposing their social relations upon those they employ in the DPRK.You're suggesting that there is, in the South Korean-owned factories, no wage system, no exploitation, no division between labour and capital? :confused:


That's simply insane. Did Marx jump up and down about the "advanced Fabianism" of the Paris Commune (which had far more capitalist relations than the DPRK does)? No, he didn't. Stop trying to commandeer a legacy you have no interest in upholding.Marx never claimed that the Commune was representative of communist social relations; in fact, the opposite, he claimed that the commune was the political dictatorship of the working class, which, if allowed to continue, would be obliged to reconcile the contradictions between its political empowerment and its economic dis-empowerment by dissolving capitalist social relations. The Commune, having existed for slightly over two months in a state of near-constant siege, was hardly in a position to advance that program very far.
Below is the only passage of The Civil War in France in which Marx uses the word "communism":

It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!

Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system – and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?Now, if you can infer from that the Marx took the Commune to represent actually represented an established set of communist social relations, then you must be reading something that I am not.

And, for the record, I have little interest in "upholding" "legacies". I'm a communist; we don't got in for that shit.


Further, the legal-political framework is extremely important, because it denies any attempt to create direct capitalist exploitation of the workers. Capitalists might bring in resources and then take some of the proceeds of production, but that's hardly the same as what you're arguing.But profit is by definition the exploited surplus value of labour; to argue the absence of labour would be to argue the absence of profit in the DPRK, which makes the eagerness of the Southern capitalists to establish factories there rather baffling. Since when did the process of competitive accumulation allow for pointless, non-profitable detours?

[Revy]

The DPRK's biggest threat is its own people.

I don't feel that the regime will last that long anymore. It's in its death throes and this is just an example why.

DPRK is a MONARCHY. All of you DPRK apologists tried to deny that, while all of the people in touch with reality were telling you it was a monarchy and that his son would be declared his successor. And then it happened and Kim Jong-un is now the next in line to the throne.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01900/un_1900491c.jpg

No working class person in North Korea decides anything. There is no democracy in North Korea. The "elections" are a complete fraud.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ It is a figurehead monarchy covering up the military dictatorship of the Central Military Commission. It succeeded and then some where Jiang Zemin in the PRC failed just before his retirement.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Yeah, I doubt that the regime will last that long either. Eventually it will just rot away like the other former states that it's commonly mentioned with like Vietnam, where trinkets are sold in the tunnels where former guerillas once roamed, or Cuba, where gringos go to oooh and aaah at one of the last vestiges of old religion socialism. I guess that will probably only happen when the bloated state capitalist zombie called China finally decides that the present government in the DPRK no longer suites it's strategic interests though.

[agnixie]

They could call unicorns the revolutionary class and it wouldn't change the material realities of the DPRK. I don't agree with everything the DPRK says, but I still recognize a socialist society when I see one.


You wouldn't recognize a socialist society if it was collectivizing your country.

[manic expression]

That analogy holds no water; feudalism is a non-universalising social formation, and so can permit geographical variation, while capitalism is a universalising one, and so does not. (That's why, among other things, the as-yet non-generalised social relationships witnessed in the mercantile communes can not properly be considered "capitalist"; that's a social formation that only properly emerges when agriculture is rationalised in a capitalistic manner.) Because of this, communism can not exist in a stable fashion alongside capitalism, but only in a temporary, revolutionary situation, in which the workers are actively unmaking capitalism and making communism- something which is rather blatantly absent in North Korea. As the negation of a universalising set of social relations, it too much be universalising; it very much lacks the luxury of sitting on its laurels in some backwater state.
You are, of course, ignoring the other side of that comparison: that your "universalizing social formation" DID coexist with feudalism at many points in time, and DID exist within societies that were not fully capitalist. This is only to say that your "one drop theory" doesn't work when we look at history.


You're suggesting that there is, in the South Korean-owned factories, no wage system, no exploitation, no division between labour and capital? :confused:
When done through the allotted avenues of the DPRK, then those factors are nullified. There isn't a division of labor and capital in the DPRK because the capitalists neither live there nor control anything there. A wage system does not contradict socialism. Exploitation depends on direct employment of workers by capital...which isn't happening here as far as I can tell.


Marx never claimed that the Commune was representative of communist social relations;
Precisely my point. He supported it, because it was a step forward for the workers, and didn't toss around insults like "advanced Fabianism".


And, for the record, I have little interest in "upholding" "legacies". I'm a communist; we don't got in for that shit.
To be a revolutionary is to uphold the legacies of those who came before us, and those who gave everything for the cause. Nothing else will do.


But profit is by definition the exploited surplus value of labour; to argue the absence of labour would be to argue the absence of profit in the DPRK, which makes the eagerness of the Southern capitalists to establish factories there rather baffling. Since when did the process of competitive accumulation allow for pointless, non-profitable detours?
You need to step back a second. As I said before, are the capitalists in charge of the process from start to finish or are they forced to work with a very non-capitalist entity in the DPRK and KWP in order to open operations there?


You wouldn't recognize a socialist society if it was collectivizing your country.
The DPRK is already collectivized, and yet you don't support it.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Because neither the US nor the RoK are interested in annexing the DPRK because of the disastrous effect it would have on the RoK's economy.

I don't think this is a good argument. Nationalist sentiments are strong and quite favour unification, regardless of economic realities. It never stopped West Germany from swallowing up the DDR, did it?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

This is a typical manic expression post, which I assume is why he's on so many ignore lists.

First of all, the fact that DPRK is advertising itself as a future hub for business, with the lowest wages and most disciplined labor force, and in English, gets no attention.

Neither does the capitalist outpost in (개성) Kaesong.

Then the usual wrangling, worming and subjecting changing we've come to expect:


That's a conflation of the PRC and imperialism.
Ah, I see. And do these businessmen dictate the economic process they operate under or are they going through avenues opened to them by the KWP? One backwards businessman does not a capitalist country make. Of course this is an entirely different argument from the original point which was that "an imperialist occupation of the DPRK would inevitably include extremely low-wage labor for capitalists backed up by brute force." The fact is extremely low-wage labor for capitalists (in China and South Korea, soon to be others) backed up by brute force (the mammoth North Korean state) is already taking place.

PS. Pointing out that the "KWP" [sic... it's 조선로동당 or Workers' Party of Korea (WPK)] dictates (and enforces) the terms at which labor-power the workers in the DPRK is sold on the world market doesn't do much for your case.

[Kotze]

I don't feel that the regime will last that long anymore. It's in its death throesIf they survived the 90s, why shouldn't they continue to exist? I don't see how the situation today is more fucked up.

[manic expression]

This is a typical manic expression post, which I assume is why he's on so many ignore lists.
This is a typical NHIA post, replete with the subtle indication of some sense of superiority and, as always, the insinuation of widespread sympathy even when his line is something no one actually agrees with.


First of all, the fact that DPRK is advertising itself as a future hub for business, with the lowest wages and most disciplined labor force, and in English, gets no attention.
The DPRK cannot survive if it attempts to be completely isolated. It's not ideal but the alternatives would be far worse for the workers. Of course, it's not a complete contradiction of socialism unless you hold that any involvement of capitalist forces in a society renders it completely capitalist. Is that indeed your argument?


Neither does the capitalist outpost in (개성) Kaesong.
I did touch upon that. The thing is we already had a huge thread about those economic zones just a few weeks back, so it's not exactly my first desire to regurgitate everything said there.


Then the usual wrangling, worming and subjecting changing we've come to expect:
Well, since you asked so nicely, let's get down to specifics:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopoly capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

Here is how Lenin defined imperialism. Can we apply any of these to the PRC when we consider its historical development and present situation? The ball's in your court.


Of course this is an entirely different argument from the original point which was that "an imperialist occupation of the DPRK would inevitably include extremely low-wage labor for capitalists backed up by brute force." The fact is extremely low-wage labor for capitalists (in China and South Korea, soon to be others) backed up by brute force (the mammoth North Korean state) is already taking place.
That is all through the avenues allowed to the capitalists by the worker state. Your argument is like saying that since Italian car companies were involved in opening factories in the Soviet Union, the present situation of capitalist Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. is indistinguishable from that in 1975. Obviously this is entirely untrue and predicated on a completely over-simplified understanding of what constitutes capitalism. We're apparently to believe that capitalism means that capitalists have some part in the economy of a society, even if by admission this means that there is no empowered capitalist class in existence in that same society.


PS. Pointing out that the "KWP" [sic... it's 조선로동당 or Workers' Party of Korea (WPL)] dictates (and enforces) the terms at which labor-power the workers in the DPRK is sold on the world market doesn't do much for your case.
Whatever you say. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%E2%80%99_Party_of_Korea) Anyway, the point is that the party doesn't compromise a capitalist class. Its members aren't owning stocks and bonds in any companies, they aren't directly employing workers and they aren't extracting capitalist profit from the economic activities they direct. In fact, what you bring up shows that the DPRK is run almost exclusively through centralized planning, which is the antithesis of capitalist planning and a central pillar of all socialist societies history has seen. It also shows us that the labor power of DPRK workers is not subject firstly to the market as we see across the capitalist world.

[KC]

The state is the instrument of capital, just as it was before the dawn of imperialism. American capital calculated it to be in its best interests to conquer resources and geopolitical control in Iraq, and so its state did so.

I knew you would say something like this, simply based on your politics. So what is "American capital"? Is there one single monolithic "American capital" with one single monolithic interest, or are there various competing sections within "American capital"? If the latter, what does it mean to say that "the state is the instrument of capital"? Which capital, at which time? Further, how is the state "controlled" by capital? How is it decided how to act in the interests of capital? Is the state simply dictated to? Is it completely subordinate to "capital" and, if so, who?

Who is "American capital"? What is the relation between multinational corporations and the "national capital"? In whose "national capital" are they represented? What is the relation between the national capital of one country and that of another? Are they competing? Are they allies? What?

These are just a few of the presumptions you're making when you claim that "the state is the interest of capital". You, like everyone else that unquestioningly accepts classic imperialism theory, fill in these gaps with ideological presumptions.

[manic expression]

I knew you would say something like this, simply based on your politics.
Likewise.


So what is "American capital"?It's a term that can refer to a few things. First, it can refer to the capital (that is the accumulation of money) of the American bourgeoisie. Second, it can refer to the bourgeoisie itself. Third, it can refer to the political interests of that class.


Is there one single monolithic "American capital" with one single monolithic interest, or are there various competing sections within "American capital"? If the latter, what does it mean to say that "the state is the instrument of capital"?That would be the latter. However, the age of imperialism does, owing to the centrality of monopolies, decrease the amount of competition among the capitalist class. That being said, the state becomes the instrument primarily of the strongest faction of the capitalist class, with other sections also represented but with decreasing power. To use the same example, the invasion of Iraq was questioned (and opposed) by some capitalist voices, but these voices were marginalized and basically discarded, owing to the calculation of the bourgeoisie as a whole that invasion was in its best interests.


Which capital, at which time?To say there are various sections of capital is not to say that there are many capitals.


Further, how is the state "controlled" by capital? How is it decided how to act in the interests of capital? Is the state simply dictated to? Is it completely subordinate to "capital" and, if so, who?It's controlled by the capitalist class because each and every politician who rises to any position of authority must not only go through the two major parties (which are essentially owned by the capitalist class), must not only become indebted to the capitalist class through financial backing in order to win elections, but also must show that s/he is willing and able to carry out the will of the capitalist class or be marginalized. In other words, the state is not just controlled by capitalists but filled with the ideologues of capitalism...the political counterparts to Wall Street bankers.

Thus, the state is not dictated to, it is simply the political and martial arm of the bourgeoisie.


Who is "American capital"? What is the relation between multinational corporations and the "national capital"? In whose "national capital" are they represented? What is the relation between the national capital of one country and that of another? Are they competing? Are they allies? What?Already answered it. "National capital" is something you'll need to define yourself if you'd like me to use it. Different imperialist countries can become allies or competitors based on the calculated interests of each imperialist bourgeoisie, which of course depends on their specific situations.


These are just a few of the presumptions you're making when you claim that "the state is the interest of capital". You, like everyone else that unquestioningly accepts classic imperialism theory, fill in these gaps with ideological presumptions.Uh, yeah, sure. For your info, there are easier ways of saying "I don't care for Lenin's contributions to Marxism"...

[Tim Finnegan]

You are, of course, ignoring the other side of that comparison: that your "universalizing social formation" DID coexist with feudalism at many points in time, and DID exist within societies that were not fully capitalist. This is only to say that your "one drop theory" doesn't work when we look at history.
It existed while it was universalising itself; bourgeois accumulation began in the cities, island in a feudal sea, and from there expanded to swallow the whole globe as part of the process of social reconstitution embodied in international proletarian revolution. Communist social relations must, therefore, be similarly universalising, beginning in the secure seats of working class power and spreading outwards across the globe. That can hardly be said of North Korean "socialism", which is not only confined to a single tiny scrap of Asia, but is, evidently, in retreat even there.


When done through the allotted avenues of the DPRK, then those factors are nullified. There isn't a division of labor and capital in the DPRK because the capitalists neither live there nor control anything there. A wage system does not contradict socialism. Exploitation depends on direct employment of workers by capital...which isn't happening here as far as I can tell.So you're claiming that the South Korean firms are not, in fact, investing capital in North Korea, managing North Korean factories, or hiring North Korean workers? That this is all the work of the North Korean state, which is merely working to order for South Korean firms? :confused: Even setting aside the fact that this still implies participation in commodity production and therefore capitalism, I'm forced to ask why, if this is the case, would it require the sort of Special Economic Zones which are being established? Why would the state not simply produce as normal, making use of the external trade monopoly which you claim it possesses?


Precisely my point. He supported it, because it was a step forward for the workers...I believe that Marx based that evaluation on rather more than the presence of red flags, though, which is more or less what you're asking me to accept on behalf of the DPRK.


...and didn't toss around insults like "advanced Fabianism"."Advanced Fabianism" wasn't an insult, it was merely an attempt to describe the situation existing in North Korea through analogy. An insult would be "God-forsaken backwater hellhole run by a manchild fuckhead with delusions of grandeur". Difference, ken? :rolleyes:


To be a revolutionary is to uphold the legacies of those who came before us, and those who gave everything for the cause. Nothing else will do.Marxist revolutionism isn't an ideological tradition, it is the support of the interests of the working class, and of the eventual seizure of political power by the working class. As Marx said, "communism is the real movement that changes the present state of things"; no ancestor-worship in that.

I'm happy to recognise the contributions to the working class cause made by historical figures, as theorists, activists, and organisers, but all this "upholding" and "legacies"? Reminds me of a Catholic upbringing far more than anything that I would consider truly "revolutionary".


You need to step back a second. As I said before, are the capitalists in charge of the process from start to finish or are they forced to work with a very non-capitalist entity in the DPRK and KWP in order to open operations there?What does being "in charge" of it have to do with anything? Most capitalists today take an only minimal interest in their actual operation, devoting their energies instead to shifting capital around in pursuit of profits. The major critique of Bernsteinism given by the revolutionary left, remember, was its deluded notion that the state could pull ownership out from under the bourgeoisie and leave them as mere administrators, while the historical trend was in fact towards the further and further removal of the bourgeoisie from the actual administration of production- an emerging that Marx and Engels noted very well!

And arguing that the social relations in the DPRK are not capitalist because the DPRK is not capitalist is, and I'm honestly surprised that I have to tell you this, circular logic. The objective social relations embodied in any given society dictate whether it is capitalist or communist, not the colour of the ruling party's flag.

[manic expression]

It existed while it was universalising itself; bourgeois accumulation began in the cities, island in a feudal sea, and from there expanded to swallow the whole globe as part of the process of social reconstitution embodied in international proletarian revolution. Communist social relations must, therefore, be similarly universalising, beginning in the secure seats of working class power and spreading outwards across the globe. That can hardly be said of North Korean "socialism", which is not only confined to a single tiny scrap of Asia, but is, evidently, in retreat even there.
How do we square with your assertion that both capitalism and communism are "universalizing"? Both can't be equally universalizing.

Fully communist social relations (not including primitive communism) have never been established, so it's not going to spread if it doesn't exist. Socialist social relations, however, are beset by the attacks of imperialism and must adapt to the local conditions they face. The workers there must hold on to state power against the belligerence of imperialism the best they can until the situation changes. Instead of decrying whatever retreats are made, let's give them our full support and solidarity so they can better struggle along their course.


So you're claiming that the South Korean firms are not, in fact, investing capital in North Korea, managing North Korean factories, or hiring North Korean workers? That this is all the work of the North Korean state, which is merely working to order for South Korean firms? :confused: Even setting aside the fact that this still implies participation in commodity production and therefore capitalism, I'm forced to ask why, if this is the case, would it require the sort of Special Economic Zones which are being established? Why would the state not simply produce as normal, making use of the external trade monopoly which you claim it possesses?
I'm claiming that they're not in control of that very process, they must submit to the DPRK's state monopoly in order to even have the ability to invest. In other words, a worker state and not any capitalist class still reigns supreme in the DPRK, and so capitalist involvement is done without being incorporated into a larger capitalist market there. This isn't the law of the rule of value but outside cooperation in production through the parameters set by the party.


I believe that Marx based that evaluation on rather more than the presence of red flags, though, which is more or less what you're asking me to accept on behalf of the DPRK.
Who in the DPRK owns private property? Who directly employs workers in capitalist operations there? We've seen capitalists involved in production, but not in control of production.


"Advanced Fabianism" wasn't an insult, it was merely an attempt to describe the situation existing in North Korea through analogy. An insult would be "God-forsaken backwater hellhole run by a manchild fuckhead with delusions of grandeur". Difference, ken? :rolleyes:
OK, that's fine. I suppose my main point isn't that it's insulting, but that it's incorrect.


Marxist revolutionism isn't an ideological tradition, it is the support of the interests of the working class, and of the eventual seizure of political power by the working class. As Marx said, "communism is the real movement that changes the present state of things"; no ancestor-worship in that.
Through the years of struggle and sacrifice, it does have a tradition, it has a long and proud history that we need to uphold as we move forward. The songs we sing, the leaders we look to, the writers we read, the symbols we hold most dear to us...that's part of a tradition. What you pointed out were objectives, but we also need to honor the bravery and dedication shown by those who went before us. It's not ancestor-worship, it's taking the torch and carrying it further.

After all, the best that our movement has to offer is not only our pinnacle but that of humanity. To borrow the KKE's phrasing, those who gave everything for the cause of progress vindicate human existence.


What does being "in charge" of it have to do with anything? Most capitalists today take an only minimal interest in their actual operation, devoting their energies instead to shifting capital around in pursuit of profits. The major critique of Bernsteinism given by the revolutionary left, remember, was its deluded notion that the state could pull ownership out from under the bourgeoisie and leave them as mere administrators, while the historical trend was in fact towards the further and further removal of the bourgeoisie from the actual administration of production- an emerging that Marx and Engels noted very well!
If capitalists aren't in charge of the processes that allow them to be part of DPRK production, then how can we say that there is an empowered capitalist class in the country? If the market is not the rule but instead (at best) the rare, limited and marginalized exception, how can we say it's a capitalist society?


And arguing that the social relations in the DPRK are not capitalist because the DPRK is not capitalist is, and I'm honestly surprised that I have to tell you this, circular logic. The objective social relations embodied in any given society dictate whether it is capitalist or communist, not the colour of the ruling party's flag.
The DPRK state isn't capitalist because there aren't any capitalists (materially or ideologically) in the halls of power (thus the capitalist class does not hold state power). That's what I'm referring to. Unless someone shows me that the DPRK leadership owns private property and exploits workers (which can be done in the case of the PRC but not here), then it's reasonable to say that socialism is the foundation and construction of the DPRK.

[internasyonalista]

The DPRK state isn't capitalist because there aren't any capitalists (materially or ideologically) in the halls of power (thus the capitalist class does not hold state power). That's what I'm referring to. Unless someone shows me that the DPRK leadership owns private property and exploits workers (which can be done in the case of the PRC but not here), then it's reasonable to say that socialism is the foundation and construction of the DPRK.

"the transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the work*ers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the na*tional capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head" (Engels, Anti-Duhring)

It does not mean that the disappearance of private property/private capitalists is automatically the disappearance of capitalism. The state itself can become capitalist.

[internasyonalista]

Communism against "state socialism"....

http://en.internationalism.org/ir/078/commy-09

[manic expression]

"the transformation, either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the work*ers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the na*tional capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head" (Engels, Anti-Duhring)

It does not mean that the disappearance of private property/private capitalists is automatically the disappearance of capitalism. The state itself can become capitalist.
Engels was talking about how the capitalist state takes on the nature of capitalist production. If the capitalist state is overthrown and replaced by a state controlled by the working class, however, then all of that kind of goes out the window. To wit, this "national capitalist" feeds on the capitalist relation instead of existing in opposition to it, as the DPRK does. That private property and thus private profit, direct employment of workers and the like are outlawed in law and in practice in the DPRK is all evidence of this.

For contrast, we can look across the 54th Parallel to a functioning capitalist society, which formerly saw the capitalist state bring the capitalist relation to a head in its development. See a difference? Me too.

[Tim Finnegan]

How do we square with your assertion that both capitalism and communism are "universalizing"? Both can't be equally universalizing.
I would've thought that even a Marxist-Leninist was at least very dimly aware of the concept of "class struggle". Was I too optimistic? :rolleyes:


Fully communist social relations (not including primitive communism) have never been established, so it's not going to spread if it doesn't exist. Socialist social relations, however, are beset by the attacks of imperialism and must adapt to the local conditions they face.Could you provide me with a reference to Marx's discussion of "socialist social relations", and the manner in which they differ from communist social relations? I'm aware that Lenin discussed "socialism" as the "lower stage of communism", in which communism (somehow) took on the superficial form of a system of generalised commodity production, but that seems to be a couple of steps removed from what you're suggesting, which strikes me as a far more fundamental revision of the theories of Marx as I understand them; unless, as I said, you can provide me with a validating reference.


The workers there must hold on to state power against the belligerence of imperialism the best they can until the situation changes. Instead of decrying whatever retreats are made, let's give them our full support and solidarity so they can better struggle along their course.
Oh, believe me, the North Korean workers have my full support; would I offer these criticisms of the DPRK if they did not?


I'm claiming that they're not in control of that very process, they must submit to the DPRK's state monopoly in order to even have the ability to invest. In other words, a worker state and not any capitalist class still reigns supreme in the DPRK, and so capitalist involvement is done without being incorporated into a larger capitalist market there. This isn't the law of the rule of value but outside cooperation in production through the parameters set by the party.The nominal character of legal-political structures do not determine the objective social relations which constitute a society. Again, I will ask you, and this time I hope that I will get a straight answer: Do capitalist social relations exist in the South Korean factories, and, if not, then how do the South Korean investors make a profit from those factories?


Who in the DPRK owns private property? Who directly employs workers in capitalist operations there? We've seen capitalists involved in production, but not in control of production.Private property as such is a legal form taken by capital, not capital in its fundamental form, i.e. as a social relationship. That is incredibly basic.


OK, that's fine. I suppose my main point isn't that it's insulting, but that it's incorrect.Is it, though? Your description of the DPRK sounds very much like the society that the Fabians once envisioned; centralised, bureaucratic, state-monopoly, etc. That I consider that to be an unMarxian vision of socialism is, from your perspective, neither here nor there; it's not as if you give a damn what I think.


Through the years of struggle and sacrifice, it does have a tradition, it has a long and proud history that we need to uphold as we move forward. The songs we sing, the leaders we look to, the writers we read, the symbols we hold most dear to us...that's part of a tradition. What you pointed out were objectives, but we also need to honor the bravery and dedication shown by those who went before us. It's not ancestor-worship, it's taking the torch and carrying it further.

After all, the best that our movement has to offer is not only our pinnacle but that of humanity. To borrow the KKE's phrasing, those who gave everything for the cause of progress vindicate human existence. Andthat demands that we "uphold" their "legacy", does it? Sounds a bit "Up the RA" to me, to be honest, but whatever you say...


If capitalists aren't in charge of the processes that allow them to be part of DPRK production, then how can we say that there is an empowered capitalist class in the country? If the market is not the rule but instead (at best) the rare, limited and marginalized exception, how can we say it's a capitalist society?

...

The DPRK state isn't capitalist because there aren't any capitalists (materially or ideologically) in the halls of power (thus the capitalist class does not hold state power). That's what I'm referring to. Unless someone shows me that the DPRK leadership owns private property and exploits workers (which can be done in the case of the PRC but not here), then it's reasonable to say that socialism is the foundation and construction of the DPRK.Again, you're employing thoroughly circular logic. The class character of any given social strata is not determined by their self-declared character, but by their relationship to the means of production. Your logic can not be "the North Korean nomenklatura is X, therefore North Korea is Y", but "North Korea is Y, therefore North Korea nomenklatura is X". The latter is a materialist analysis, but the former, your contrived offering, is mere idealism.

[manic expression]

I would've thought that even a Marxist-Leninist was at least very dimly aware of the concept of "class struggle". Was I too optimistic? :rolleyes:
I didn't see the word "class" in "universalizing force".


Could you provide me with a reference to Marx's discussion of "socialist social relations", and the manner in which they differ from communist social relations? I'm aware that Lenin discussed "socialism" as the "lower stage of communism", in which communism (somehow) took on the superficial form of a system of generalised commodity production, but that seems to be a couple of steps removed from what you're suggesting, which strikes me as a far more fundamental revision of the theories of Marx as I understand them; unless, as I said, you can provide me with a validating reference.
Here. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.)


The nominal character of legal-political structures do not determine the objective social relations which constitute a society. Again, I will ask you, and this time I hope that I will get a straight answer: Do capitalist social relations exist in the South Korean factories, and, if not, then how do the South Korean investors make a profit from those factories?
The legal-political structures are usually a great part of social relations. It would be one thing if the laws of the DPRK meant nothing, but they do mean something, and so we should inform ourselves of them when making an analysis.

We should get more information on those factories. Who pays the wages of the workers? The state or the RoK firms? Who actually owns the factories? Perhaps you think me obtuse, but I'd rather not make an analysis on this instance unless I know for sure that the RoK businessmen are employing workers directly and owning property themselves (IIRC Italian car companies operating in the USSR didn't do either of those things, as an example).


Private property as such is a legal form taken by capital, not capital in its fundamental form, i.e. as a social relationship. That is incredibly basic.
And I don't see anyone who fulfills that social relationship in the DPRK.


Is it, though? Your description of the DPRK sounds very much like the society that the Fabians once envisioned; centralised, bureaucratic, state-monopoly, etc. That I consider that to be an unMarxian vision of socialism is, from your perspective, neither here nor there; it's not as if you give a damn what I think.
The Fabians formulated the idea of the vanguard party before Lenin? And at any rate, centralized, bureaucratic (another way of saying with a state), state-monopoly are adjectives hardly exclusive to the Fabians. Excuse the comparison but it kind of feels like someone saying "well Fabians used red flags and so do you"...lots of socialists have, not just them.


Andthat demands that we "uphold" their "legacy", does it? Sounds a bit "Up the RA" to me, to be honest, but whatever you say...
No idea what "Up the RA" means...but what I'm saying is that when you're indebted to the sacrifices and contributions of those who went before you, you show due respect and carry on their legacy. That goes double when everyone tries to drag you and your ideals and your heroes through the mud. I'm not saying you have to do it, but taking the torch makes our movement stronger and prouder.


Again, you're employing thoroughly circular logic. The class character of any given social strata is not determined by their self-declared character, but by their relationship to the means of production. Your logic can not be "the North Korean nomenklatura is X, therefore North Korea is Y", but "North Korea is Y, therefore North Korea nomenklatura is X". The latter is a materialist analysis, but the former, your contrived offering, is mere idealism.
I'm not pointing to self-declared character but the inherent fact of the state's construction. If bureaucrats can't own factories or employ workers, then we can do nothing but conclude that they can't be bourgeois. That's what I'm trying to point to.

[Tim Finnegan]

I didn't see the word "class" in "universalizing force".
No, but presumably you understand that the ruling class and thus propagating class under capitalism is the bourgeoisie, and the revolutionary class which brings about communism is the proletariat; it does not take a great leap of imagination, from that foundation, to realise that the process of communist universalisation is the process of social revolution.


Here. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.)Well, the link doesn't appear to work, but if I'm correct in guessing from the URL that what you are linking to is the Critique of the Gotha Program, then I'm afraid that I'm going to have to say that this is not a sufficient reference. In the Critique, Marx discusses a form of "low communist" distribution on the basis of contribution, rather than need, but that is not anything approaching the same thing as suggesting an entirely distinct set of social relations. Distribution ; was war-time rationing, for example, non-capitalistic, in that it constituted a departure from the free-market? Are public services such as publicly-funded healthcare outside of capitalism, in that they constitute the provision of a service outside of the market?


The legal-political structures are usually a great part of social relations. It would be one thing if the laws of the DPRK meant nothing, but they do mean something, and so we should inform ourselves of them when making an analysis.They should inform our analysis of any concrete situation, yes, but they cannot take the place of a analysis of the fundamental social relations in any given society. There's a reason that Marx begins Capital with a discussion of commodities, and not of, say, the British liberal parliamentary system, French property law, or the dress code of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Marxism, properly applied, works from fundamental abstractions to concrete realisations of those abstractions, not, as you would seem to have it, the reverse.


We should get more information on those factories. Who pays the wages of the workers? The state or the RoK firms? Who actually owns the factories? Perhaps you think me obtuse, but I'd rather not make an analysis on this instance unless I know for sure that the RoK businessmen are employing workers directly and owning property themselves (IIRC Italian car companies operating in the USSR didn't do either of those things, as an example).Firstly, I'm of the understanding that the entire point of these special administrative areas- either the is that South Korean firms are able to operate within the DPRK as capitalist firms, rather than merely trading with independent North Korean state-owned firms; that could've been done anyway, without the need for special administrative areas, and without the need for South Korean management personnel in the DPRK areas.
Secondly, does not the existence of wage labour in itself indicate capitalist social relations? That the state is the employer is neither here nor there; you'll recall that the British miners' strike of 1984-85 was against the National Coal Board, a state-owned enterprise.
Thirdly, yeah, the Southerners own property, at least in the Kaesong Industrial Region, which contains an industrial park on a fifty-year loan to a committee of South Korean officials, who in turn delegate the development of the plant to Hyundai Asan, a division of the Hyundai Group. [source] (http://web.archive.org/web/20060905224821/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9285506/site/newsweek/from/RL.3/) That's a rather more significant enclave of open capitalism that then Sinuiju Special Administrative Region, which looks to be a little bit stillborn, and not one which I'm sure you can write off as "trade between socialist states", or whatever it is you call this.


And I don't see anyone who fulfills that social relationship in the DPRK.The presence of capitalist social relations indicate the "who", rather than the reverse. If capitalist social relations exist, then whoever plays the capitalist will become apparent; materialism is a tool for analysis social formations, not Where's Waldo.


The Fabians formulated the idea of the vanguard party before Lenin? And at any rate, centralized, bureaucratic (another way of saying with a state), state-monopoly are adjectives hardly exclusive to the Fabians. Excuse the comparison but it kind of feels like someone saying "well Fabians used red flags and so do you"...lots of socialists have, not just them.Again, it was an analogy, not an attempt to locate Juche within the Fabian tradition.


No idea what "Up the RA" means... but what I'm saying is that when you're indebted to the sacrifices and contributions of those who went before you, you show due respect and carry on their legacy. That goes double when everyone tries to drag you and your ideals and your heroes through the mud. I'm not saying you have to do it, but taking the torch makes our movement stronger and prouder.
Is it necessary, though, to carry a doctrinal torch to expressan awareness of and respect for past struggles? That is what you seem to be suggesting.


I'm not pointing to self-declared character but the inherent fact of the state's construction. If bureaucrats can't own factories or employ workers, then we can do nothing but conclude that they can't be bourgeois. That's what I'm trying to point to.Again, legal institution =/= social relationship. Basic, basic stuff, here.

[caramelpence]

think there is in some part a negation of one version of self during socialism and that is part of the contradiction when moving to a socialist economy, that it requires new forms of self

I think this is a totally valid point that we can agree on. It is perhaps useful to make a careful distinction between individuality on the one hand and individualism on the other, and to see the latter as a decisive cultural force under capitalism that involves the erosion of pre-capitalist community networks, leading to the isolation and atomization of the individual, due to them no longer being able to draw identity and support from a broader social context, with the result being that their autonomy as an individual is also eroded. Now that I've thought about these broader issues more thoroughly, I think it's most productive, when considering the nature of self and community in a communist society, to envisage communism being not so much about the individual sacrificing themselves in order to serve the interests of the community as a whole, and more about individuality and community being reconfigured and re-conceptualized in ways that make it possible for them to nourish one another rather than being in conflict with one another. In fact, I think that's an effective way of summarizing Marx's own views on individual and community and it also relates to some of the more progressive trends in the history of liberal thought, such as JS Mill and Tocqueville. In connection with that, and in relation to your point about revolution and socialism transforming human beings, I think it's also correct to argue that defining how society should be organized and how we should think about concepts like self and community needs to be seen as a protracted process that is part of socialism itself, in the sense that these and other questions are not ones that can be decided in advance or ones that can be given a simple answer through a single decision, rather, they need to be examined and continually re-assessed as part of broader processes of socialist reconstruction - and that requires that socialism embody spaces for dissent and disagreement, which gives us reason to critique the historic experience of the party-state and the disciplined cadre party. On this point, I also agree with what you have to say about a fluid understanding of socialism. In general, reading your post, I think we're mostly in agreement.

[manic expression]

No, but presumably you understand that the ruling class and thus propagating class under capitalism is the bourgeoisie, and the revolutionary class which brings about communism is the proletariat; it does not take a great leap of imagination, from that foundation, to realise that the process of communist universalisation is the process of social revolution.
Surely. But you said capitalism was "universalizing" in the context of the DPRK. It seems a contradiction to hold that there are two universalizing forces at work.


Well, the link doesn't appear to work, but if I'm correct in guessing from the URL that what you are linking to is the Critique of the Gotha Program, then I'm afraid that I'm going to have to say that this is not a sufficient reference. In the Critique, Marx discusses a form of "low communist" distribution on the basis of contribution, rather than need, but that is not anything approaching the same thing as suggesting an entirely distinct set of social relations. Distribution ; was war-time rationing, for example, non-capitalistic, in that it constituted a departure from the free-market? Are public services such as publicly-funded healthcare outside of capitalism, in that they constitute the provision of a service outside of the market?
Oops, you're right it doesn't work. But yes, it's the CotGP part one. To be precise about what I was referring to:

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

You were talking about two phases of communism, ie socialism, no? That lines it out pretty well. If you want to talk about the difference between nationalized production in capitalism and state-owned production in socialism, that's another thing with different parts to it. The main difference is the society it exists in, and the purposes of each are accordingly divergent. This is where commodity production and the rule of the law of value come into play.


They should inform our analysis of any concrete situation, yes, but they cannot take the place of a analysis of the fundamental social relations in any given society. There's a reason that Marx begins Capital with a discussion of commodities, and not of, say, the British liberal parliamentary system, French property law, or the dress code of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Marxism, properly applied, works from fundamental abstractions to concrete realisations of those abstractions, not, as you would seem to have it, the reverse.
I'm not writing the counterpart to Capital (I wouldn't be able to, but that's not the point). I'm pointing out that the DPRK is socialist and not capitalist. Looking to what is legal and illegal in the DPRK is an accessible and easy way to do this.


Firstly, I'm of the understanding that the entire point of these special administrative areas- either the is that South Korean firms are able to operate within the DPRK as capitalist firms, rather than merely trading with independent North Korean state-owned firms; that could've been done anyway, without the need for special administrative areas, and without the need for South Korean management personnel in the DPRK areas.
Secondly, does not the existence of wage labour in itself indicate capitalist social relations? That the state is the employer is neither here nor there; you'll recall that the British miners' strike of 1984-85 was against the National Coal Board, a state-owned enterprise.

Thirdly, yeah, the Southerners own property, at least in the Kaesong Industrial Region, which contains an industrial park on a fifty-year loan to a committee of South Korean officials, who in turn delegate the development of the plant to Hyundai Asan, a division of the Hyundai Group. [source] (http://web.archive.org/web/20060905224821/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9285506/site/newsweek/from/RL.3/) That's a rather more significant enclave of open capitalism that then Sinuiju Special Administrative Region, which looks to be a little bit stillborn, and not one which I'm sure you can write off as "trade between socialist states", or whatever it is you call this.
OK. I'm still not clear if the workers there are employed directly by the RoK firms. I'll briefly address both possibilities: If they are, then it may well be a case of a NEP-esque situation, where a worker state is forced to permit capitalist production in order to compensate for complete isolation and lack of resources. Still, it does beg the question of how it would all fit into a market if the market is basically cordoned off in one area. Workers aren't forced, as they are in capitalism, to work for one capitalist boss or the other. This, really, can't be called capitalism in any meaningful sense. If the workers aren't so employed, then perhaps it is a matter of the DPRK cooperating with capitalist firms in the same way the USSR did at times...keeping control of the societal relations as between workers and their own worker state and not workers and a capitalist boss.

Wages are not the same as wage labor. Wage labor presupposes generalized commodity production as the cell of society.


The presence of capitalist social relations indicate the "who", rather than the reverse. If capitalist social relations exist, then whoever plays the capitalist will become apparent; materialism is a tool for analysis social formations, not Where's Waldo.
What I'm trying to argue is that not only is there a dead-end when it comes to capitalist social relations (because it's simply incompatible with the system there), but that the "who" is nowhere to be found. They go hand-in-hand, as you're saying.


Is it necessary, though, to carry a doctrinal torch to expressan awareness of and respect for past struggles? That is what you seem to be suggesting.
Not necessary but definitely desirable. What kind of movement would we be if we didn't have the courage to laud and honor the accomplishments of our most distinguished comrades? We'd be aimless at the very least, not to mention lacking in pride and perspective.


Again, legal institution =/= social relationship. Basic, basic stuff, here.
Legal institutions arise from social relationships. We can therefore use them as indicators of what sort of society we're confronted with.

[Tim Finnegan]

Surely. But you said capitalism was "universalizing" in the context of the DPRK. It seems a contradiction to hold that there are two universalizing forces at work.
Of course it's a contradiction: the contradiction of capital and labour, which leads to the dissolution of capitalist relations and the establishment of communist social relations. What is revolution, after all, but the heightening of the internal contradictions of capitalism to the point at which capitalism is undone?


Oops, you're right it doesn't work. But yes, it's the CotGP part one. To be precise about what I was referring to:

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

You were talking about two phases of communism, ie socialism, no? That lines it out pretty well. If you want to talk about the difference between nationalized production in capitalism and state-owned production in socialism, that's another thing with different parts to it. The main difference is the society it exists in, and the purposes of each are accordingly divergent. This is where commodity production and the rule of the law of value come into play.Marx discusses "phases", but at no point does he suggest the existence of distinct social formations. In both cases, production is for use, it is merely applied differently, in that the products of production are distributed in a different manner. Again, does state-mandated rationing constitute a distinct social formation from capitalism, simply because it involves the distribution of goods along non-market lines?


I'm not writing the counterpart to Capital (I wouldn't be able to, but that's not the point). I'm pointing out that the DPRK is socialist and not capitalist. Looking to what is legal and illegal in the DPRK is an accessible and easy way to do this.No, it isn't: it's an idealist and therefore fundamentally unMarxian way of doing that. Marx very clearly goes through a process of analysis which begins with the abstract and from there moves onto the concrete, something which you completely abandon in favour of swooning over red flags and partial state monopolies.


OK. I'm still not clear if the workers there are employed directly by the RoK firms. I'll briefly address both possibilities: If they are, then it may well be a case of a NEP-esque situation, where a worker state is forced to permit capitalist production in order to compensate for complete isolation and lack of resources. Still, it does beg the question of how it would all fit into a market if the market is basically cordoned off in one area. Workers aren't forced, as they are in capitalism, to work for one capitalist boss or the other. This, really, can't be called capitalism in any meaningful sense. If the workers aren't so employed, then perhaps it is a matter of the DPRK cooperating with capitalist firms in the same way the USSR did at times...keeping control of the societal relations as between workers and their own worker state and not workers and a capitalist boss.Well, firstly, citing the USSR is not really going to help your case, given that my arguments here apply generally to the Marxist-Leninist and ML-derived models, as well as to the DPRK in particular.
Secondly, aren't you essentially arguing, in this paragraph, that a majority-public sector economy is what determines the existence of socialism? That the fact that most of North Korean economy is still under state-monopoly means that it is not capitalist? :confused: Again, I have to stress that the fundamental social relations of a society are what determine the social formation, not the particular forms of organisation and distribution built upon those foundations; if part of North Korean society is capitalist (and it is not possible to pretend that these special administrative zones, however isolated, are not part of North Korean society), then it all must be capitalist by definition.


Wages are not the same as wage labor. Wage labor presupposes generalized commodity production as the cell of society.So wages are exchanged for labour power, but don't worry, that's not the same thing as wages being exchange for labour power? :confused:


What I'm trying to argue is that not only is there a dead-end when it comes to capitalist social relations (because it's simply incompatible with the system there), but that the "who" is nowhere to be found. They go hand-in-hand, as you're saying.If capitalist social relations were incompatible with the North Korean system, then we would not see capitalist relations existing in North Korea, as we so very clearly are. So you might want to re-think that one.


Not necessary but definitely desirable. What kind of movement would we be if we didn't have the courage to laud and honor the accomplishments of our most distinguished comrades? We'd be aimless at the very least, not to mention lacking in pride and perspective.But, again, why does that suggest the necessity of "upholding" some doctrine or other? Should Marxism not, as Luxemburg had it, "abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form"?


Legal institutions arise from social relationships. We can therefore use them as indicators of what sort of society we're confronted with.But how can we know what legal institutions signify what social formations, if we simply examine the institutions first, and then presume social relationships from them? It is necessary, as Marxists addressing a new legal-political model, to start at the fundamental level, and then work our way up from there; that is, after all, what Marx did with European "free market" capitalism.

[StalinFanboy]

I don't see a problem with having people take time out from academic study to do practical work in constructing the country, especially considering the state North Korea is in right now. Its important not to have a complete divide between mental and manual labour. This is why China encouraged students to go to the countryside and factories during the Cultural Revolution. It may be a bit bothersome for the students but in the long term it will be make them more proletarian and develop the country. Maybe 10 months is too long, but the principle is not a bad one.
This is a joke right?

[manic expression]

Of course it's a contradiction: the contradiction of capital and labour, which leads to the dissolution of capitalist relations and the establishment of communist social relations. What is revolution, after all, but the heightening of the internal contradictions of capitalism to the point at which capitalism is undone?
So capital isn't "universalizing" after all.


Marx discusses "phases", but at no point does he suggest the existence of distinct social formations. In both cases, production is for use, it is merely applied differently, in that the products of production are distributed in a different manner. Again, does state-mandated rationing constitute a distinct social formation from capitalism, simply because it involves the distribution of goods along non-market lines?
I've already answered that: it depends on the society the rationing exists in. Surely you don't think both the rationing of the US and USSR during WWII were both equally capitalist.


No, it isn't: it's an idealist and therefore fundamentally unMarxian way of doing that. Marx very clearly goes through a process of analysis which begins with the abstract and from there moves onto the concrete, something which you completely abandon in favour of swooning over red flags and partial state monopolies.
It's far from idealist, it's looking at smoke and saying there's fire. Basic logic: in the absence of capitalist institutions, capitalist production cannot exist on a widescale basis.


Well, firstly, citing the USSR is not really going to help your case, given that my arguments here apply generally to the Marxist-Leninist and ML-derived models, as well as to the DPRK in particular.
It does help my case in that I'm quite sure those workers weren't employed directly by Fiat.


Secondly, aren't you essentially arguing, in this paragraph, that a majority-public sector economy is what determines the existence of socialism? That the fact that most of North Korean economy is still under state-monopoly means that it is not capitalist? :confused: Again, I have to stress that the fundamental social relations of a society are what determine the social formation, not the particular forms of organisation and distribution built upon those foundations; if part of North Korean society is capitalist (and it is not possible to pretend that these special administrative zones, however isolated, are not part of North Korean society), then it all must be capitalist by definition.
Not really, I'm saying that a state monopoly on the vast majority of production and foreign trade, as well as the structure of that state, shows us that there isn't an empowered capitalist class in the DPRK. If there isn't an empowered capitalist class in the DPRK then how is there capitalism?


So wages are exchanged for labour power, but don't worry, that's not the same thing as wages being exchange for labour power? :confused:
From an earlier post on the Soviet Union:

To have a system of wage-labor in any meaningful sense of the term, we musn't look far. Capital is the defining aspect of capitalism. Workers, then, would be chained to capital in capitalism. Capital, of course, would be used to directly exploit labor-power. However, this only occurred in marginal and illegal circumstances in the Soviet Union, the black market being a notable example. Thus, the wage system in the USSR cannot be compared to that of capitalism in any serious sense.

We should go deeper than this. This is what Mandel had to say about it:

So long as only partial commodity production survives, money does not and cannot have the same functions as under capitalism or even under petty commodity production; it cannot become large-scale capital, and only in marginal cases (“black market production”) does it become a means of direct exploitation of labor-power.

This brings up the point of commodity production and its relation to labor, which is key to understanding the nature of wages. The point is that while wages exist, their position, their purpose and their consequences are entirely different. As Mandel pointed out, so-called "partial commodity production" had not the potential to exploit workers. Marx saw the commodity as the "cell" of bourgeois society, it drives everything, centers everything upon itself. In the USSR, the economy was centrally planned by people who owned no property; in this case, how are we to believe commodity production was generalized, and therefore the "cell" of society? The commodity production formula put forth by Marx in Capital are nowhere to be found in the USSR.

From Capital:

"First stage: The capitalist appears as a buyer on the commodity- and the labour-market; his money is transformed into commodities, or it goes through the circulation act M — C. Second Stage: Productive consumption of the purchased commodities by the capitalist. He acts as a capitalist producer of commodities; his capital passes through the process of production. The result is a commodity of more value than that of the elements entering into its production.
Third Stage: The capitalist returns to the market as a seller; his commodities are turned into money; or they pass through the circulation act C — M."

This was simply nonexistent in the Soviet Union. Further, as Mandel put it briefly:

There is neither a market for large means of production nor for manpower, and labor-power has ceased to be a commodity.

Due to this, wage labor, as it exists in capitalist society, had no basis with which to exist in the Soviet Union.


If capitalist social relations were incompatible with the North Korean system, then we would not see capitalist relations existing in North Korea, as we so very clearly are. So you might want to re-think that one.
They exist as a sharp exception, one that proves the rule. These "zones" are legally and functionally cut off from the rest of the country.


But, again, why does that suggest the necessity of "upholding" some doctrine or other? Should Marxism not, as Luxemburg had it, "abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form"?
I just said it wasn't necessary. Please try to pay attention to what I write and not to what I don't. Further, IIRC Luxemburg was speaking of a very different "Marxism", one that cheered as workers were sent to their deaths in the trenches. Among her contributions to the legacy of our movement was her fight against that.


But how can we know what legal institutions signify what social formations, if we simply examine the institutions first, and then presume social relationships from them? It is necessary, as Marxists addressing a new legal-political model, to start at the fundamental level, and then work our way up from there; that is, after all, what Marx did with European "free market" capitalism.
By simple deduction. We know what capitalism is and what institutions it produces. If we do not find such institutions then it is reasonable to say that there is no capitalism.

In other words, if I know the symptoms of a fever and someone doesn't show them, then it's quite reasonable to say they aren't running a fever at the time. Symptoms are used by doctors all the time in scientific analyses.

[Jose Gracchus]

No, you define "capitalism" as a grab-bag of characteristics you find undesirable and then go about (surprise!) identifying societies without them as "non-capitalist". Capital is nothing but the separation of the laborers from the conditions of labor, manifested as wage-labor, and production of commodities for the aggrandizement of value. All of the above existed in the USSR and all "central planning" (in fact not, since the plans could not and did not have scientific basis) economies/

[Red_Struggle]

You know what this thread needs...?

SOME ALBANIA!!!!


“Courses in Marxism-Leninism were made a living part of the curriculum and not just a routine subject to be got through in a mechanical way. Texts and lectures on dialectical and historical materialism were related to Albania’s own revolutionary history and students and teachers learned to apply the principles of scientific socialism to their own problems and those of their society. And since practice is the essence of Marxism-Leninism, students and teachers began to participate more actively in the political and economic life of the country, leaving their books and laboratories to study the application of theory on the production and social front.” - Pickaxe and Rifle, pg. 227

“In the schools and in the University teachers and professors had to adopt new methods and learn to accept the criticism of students as part of their own socialist rehabilitation. A few found the extension of democratic centralism to the educational system, with students aking an active role in organizing school life, too much of a break with the old academic traditions they had hoped to see re-established. They were released to go into production work, perhaps, to return to teaching when they have learned from workers the socialist ideology of the working class. And students, too, had to learn more thoroughly that socialist education has nothing to do with getting a degree in order to become ‘a man of authority’ or to ‘secure a comfortable post with a fat salary’. - pg. 227

Yeah, it has nothing to do with the DPRK's initiative to close schools, but it's an example of how education was carried out differently between the two states. I wouldn't say closing school is a good thing (Socialist Albania's schools were never closed), rather it's good to mix manual and mental labor simultaneously. Maybe three days of subjects and two days of labor or something like that. It provides a nice break, getting out of the classroom and into the fields and factories, creating ties between students, workers, and farmers, and having some good times all the while. Having a purely academic mindset doesn't create balance or class consciousness, and I think this would be a good way to switch things up.

[Ostrinski]

Can't believe I'm seeing people in support of North Korea.

[KC]

Uh, yeah, sure. For your info, there are easier ways of saying "I don't care for Lenin's contributions to Marxism"...

Only to a cultist does inquiry equate to heresy.

Your post is complete dismissal of the questions raised; as I already said before you are not interested in seriously engaging with them as that would require independent thought which goes against the dogmatism you preach.

As for "Lenin's contributions to Marxism," his pamphlet on Imperialism wasn't "his". The theories were already developed and studied in more extensive detail by other writers (Hilferding primarily, but also some Bukharin and others). Though I'm certain you haven't looked into these other writers, and have just taken Lenin's short, shallow pamphlet at face value.

But hey, feel free to write a pointless response to this post calling me an imperialist as you are really that predictable.

[Cleansing Conspiratorial Revolutionary Flame]

You know what this thread needs...?

SOME ALBANIA!!!!


“Courses in Marxism-Leninism were made a living part of the curriculum and not just a routine subject to be got through in a mechanical way. Texts and lectures on dialectical and historical materialism were related to Albania’s own revolutionary history and students and teachers learned to apply the principles of scientific socialism to their own problems and those of their society. And since practice is the essence of Marxism-Leninism, students and teachers began to participate more actively in the political and economic life of the country, leaving their books and laboratories to study the application of theory on the production and social front.” - Pickaxe and Rifle, pg. 227

“In the schools and in the University teachers and professors had to adopt new methods and learn to accept the criticism of students as part of their own socialist rehabilitation. A few found the extension of democratic centralism to the educational system, with students aking an active role in organizing school life, too much of a break with the old academic traditions they had hoped to see re-established. They were released to go into production work, perhaps, to return to teaching when they have learned from workers the socialist ideology of the working class. And students, too, had to learn more thoroughly that socialist education has nothing to do with getting a degree in order to become ‘a man of authority’ or to ‘secure a comfortable post with a fat salary’. - pg. 227

Yeah, it has nothing to do with the DPRK's initiative to close schools, but it's an example of how education was carried out differently between the two states. I wouldn't say closing school is a good thing (Socialist Albania's schools were never closed), rather it's good to mix manual and mental labor simultaneously. Maybe three days of subjects and two days of labor or something like that. It provides a nice break, getting out of the classroom and into the fields and factories, creating ties between students, workers, and farmers, and having some good times all the while. Having a purely academic mindset doesn't create balance or class consciousness, and I think this would be a good way to switch things up.

Not only this but the DPRK should be using its 'People's Army' in order to increase production within the DPRK and labor alongside the people in order to truly form a working class armed force.

[manic expression]

No, you define "capitalism" as a grab-bag of characteristics you find undesirable and then go about (surprise!) identifying societies without them as "non-capitalist".
Re-read my post. Then try to find the process of wage labor in socialist countries. Then maybe you'll have something resembling a point. Anyway, perhaps you could take notice that that "grab-bag" includes the private ownership of the means of production, a bourgeoisie with state power...you know, the stuff that capitalism materially is.

I suppose it doesn't measure up to your method of blindly screaming that everything is capitalist because there were purges in the late 1930's that you don't agree with. :lol:


Only to a cultist does inquiry equate to heresy.

Your post is complete dismissal of the questions raised; as I already said before you are not interested in seriously engaging with them as that would require independent thought which goes against the dogmatism you preach.

As for "Lenin's contributions to Marxism," his pamphlet on Imperialism wasn't "his". The theories were already developed and studied in more extensive detail by other writers (Hilferding primarily, but also some Bukharin and others). Though I'm certain you haven't looked into these other writers, and have just taken Lenin's short, shallow pamphlet at face value.

But hey, feel free to write a pointless response to this post calling me an imperialist as you are really that predictable.
Enjoy your Camusian anti-communism, it goes well with the innocence of impotence.

[Tim Finnegan]

So capital isn't "universalizing" after all.
It's universalising, but it's not necessarily successfully universalising, especially not when experiencing the heightened contradictions that give rise to revolution. After all, not ever imperial expedition succeeded; does that mean that capitalism was not a force that, by its nature, drove capitalist powers to imperialist expansion?


I've already answered that: it depends on the society the rationing exists in. Surely you don't think both the rationing of the US and USSR during WWII were both equally capitalist.
But you are arguing for the inference of social formations from just this kind of superstructural content; does not a significant departure in superstructural content, by your logic, indicate a significant a significant change in social formation? If it did not, then how we could take your claims of "no private property, therefore no capitalism" seriously?


It's far from idealist, it's looking at smoke and saying there's fire.
Smoke machines.

:D


Basic logic: in the absence of capitalist institutions, capitalist production cannot exist on a widescale basis.
Right, and my criticism is that you define "capitalist institutions" solely in terms of privately-owned market enterprises, which is entirely superficial. Again, was the 1984-85 British miners' strike somehow not an example of class struggle, because the employing entity, the National Coal Board, was a publicly-owned enterprise that did not operate under "free" market conditions?


It does help my case in that I'm quite sure those workers weren't employed directly by Fiat.
Commodity production for wage labour is commodity production for wage labour, whether or not the state acts as an intermediary.


Not really, I'm saying that a state monopoly on the vast majority of production and foreign trade, as well as the structure of that state, shows us that there isn't an empowered capitalist class in the DPRK. If there isn't an empowered capitalist class in the DPRK then how is there capitalism?
Firstly, I would've thought that you were well aware, by now, that state capitalist theory holds the state bureaucracy to constitute the capitalist class in such societies.
Secondly, even if we accept your proposition that there is no empowered capitalist class in North Korea, in what sense does political empowerment indicate social relations? Have you notread Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte? He makes it quite clear that there is a distinction between the distribution of political power and the form of hegemonic social relations; the latter dictate the context in which the latter arises, but it does not determine it in an fatalistic and mechanical manner.
Of course, you're going to fart out some stock reply about how the workers are in control of North Korea, and you can tell because the flag has lots and lots of red on it, but that's a discussion so very tired as to barely warrant repetition anywhere, let alone here.



From an earlier post on the Soviet Union:

To have a system of wage-labor in any meaningful sense of the term, we musn't look far. Capital is the defining aspect of capitalism. Workers, then, would be chained to capital in capitalism. Capital, of course, would be used to directly exploit labor-power. However, this only occurred in marginal and illegal circumstances in the Soviet Union, the black market being a notable example. Thus, the wage system in the USSR cannot be compared to that of capitalism in any serious sense.

We should go deeper than this. This is what Mandel had to say about it:

So long as only partial commodity production survives, money does not and cannot have the same functions as under capitalism or even under petty commodity production; it cannot become large-scale capital, and only in marginal cases (“black market production”) does it become a means of direct exploitation of labor-power.

This brings up the point of commodity production and its relation to labor, which is key to understanding the nature of wages. The point is that while wages exist, their position, their purpose and their consequences are entirely different. As Mandel pointed out, so-called "partial commodity production" had not the potential to exploit workers. Marx saw the commodity as the "cell" of bourgeois society, it drives everything, centers everything upon itself. In the USSR, the economy was centrally planned by people who owned no property; in this case, how are we to believe commodity production was generalized, and therefore the "cell" of society? The commodity production formula put forth by Marx in Capital are nowhere to be found in the USSR.

From Capital:

"First stage: The capitalist appears as a buyer on the commodity- and the labour-market; his money is transformed into commodities, or it goes through the circulation act M — C. Second Stage: Productive consumption of the purchased commodities by the capitalist. He acts as a capitalist producer of commodities; his capital passes through the process of production. The result is a commodity of more value than that of the elements entering into its production.
Third Stage: The capitalist returns to the market as a seller; his commodities are turned into money; or they pass through the circulation act C — M."

This was simply nonexistent in the Soviet Union. Further, as Mandel put it briefly:

There is neither a market for large means of production nor for manpower, and labor-power has ceased to be a commodity.

Due to this, wage labor, as it exists in capitalist society, had no basis with which to exist in the Soviet Union.
You're going to have to demonstrate this "partial commodity production" assumption you're working on. In my understanding, Chattopadhyayian as it is, generalised commodity production continued unrelentingly in the USSR.


They exist as a sharp exception, one that proves the rule. These "zones" are legally and functionally cut off from the rest of the country.
That would imply that there is no economic interaction between these areas and North Korean society, which is quite clearly nonsense. They employ North Korean workers, do they not? The North Korean state is a financial beneficiary of this project, is it not? The zones, therefore, possess a very real economic and therefore social (we are Marxists, after all) connection to the rest of the DPRK, do they not? A bunch of chain-link fences and watch-towers hardly change that.


I just said it wasn't necessary. Please try to pay attention to what I write and not to what I don't. Further, IIRC Luxemburg was speaking of a very different "Marxism", one that cheered as workers were sent to their deaths in the trenches. Among her contributions to the legacy of our movement was her fight against that.
Sure, whatever. This tangent has pretty much fulfilled any use it may have.


By simple deduction. We know what capitalism is and what institutions it produces. If we do not find such institutions then it is reasonable to say that there is no capitalism.

In other words, if I know the symptoms of a fever and someone doesn't show them, then it's quite reasonable to say they aren't running a fever at the time. Symptoms are used by doctors all the time in scientific analyses.
You know one set of institutions, yes, but you'd have to be an intellectual midget to believe that those institutions were thrown up in a purely mechanical fashion, irrespective of the social, political, economic, ideological, cultural and above all material conditions of the society in which the emerged. Or does the fact that Scottish Highlanders organised themselves on the basis of extended kinship groups under appointed chieftains, rather than on the basis of hereditary vassalage, indicate that the social relations in that society were somehow something other than feudal?

Again, if we are to be in any way Marxian, we are to begin with any given set of relations in its most fundamental form, and from there work towards the concrete. We don't just look at the superficial, assume what we wish to assume, and proceed from there.

[manic expression]

It's universalising, but it's not necessarily successfully universalising, especially not when experiencing the heightened contradictions that give rise to revolution. After all, not ever imperial expedition succeeded; does that mean that capitalism was not a force that, by its nature, drove capitalist powers to imperialist expansion?
So why, then, are you saying that a single drop of capitalist production in the DPRK means the whole thing is capitalist?


But you are arguing for the inference of social formations from just this kind of superstructural content; does not a significant departure in superstructural content, by your logic, indicate a significant a significant change in social formation? If it did not, then how we could take your claims of "no private property, therefore no capitalism" seriously?
No, I am saying that looking at what a society creates tells us a great deal about the foundation of that same society. Just as doctors look at symptoms to make a diagnosis, we can look at the absence of capitalist institutions and rest assured that it is not a capitalist society. Im not sure what kind of departure of "superstructural content" youre talking about, bring up an example and we can discuss it.


Smoke machines.
...controlled by a worker state. :D


Right, and my criticism is that you define "capitalist institutions" solely in terms of privately-owned market enterprises, which is entirely superficial. Again, was the 1984-85 British miners' strike somehow not an example of class struggle, because the employing entity, the National Coal Board, was a publicly-owned enterprise that did not operate under "free" market conditions?
That would not be a full view of the situation at all. If we look at the British state at the time, we find no shortage of pillars of capitalism: capitalist control of the political process, capitalist control of the media, imperialist policies and so on and so forth. A struggle against a capitalist state is class struggle.


Commodity production for wage labour is commodity production for wage labour, whether or not the state acts as an intermediary.
The state isnt merely an intermediary if no one is employed by a private firm.


Firstly, I would've thought that you were well aware, by now, that state capitalist theory holds the state bureaucracy to constitute the capitalist class in such societies.
Well its false. A bureaucracy does not constitute a class by any sane definition.


Secondly, even if we accept your proposition that there is no empowered capitalist class in North Korea, in what sense does political empowerment indicate social relations? Have you notread Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte? He makes it quite clear that there is a distinction between the distribution of political power and the form of hegemonic social relations; the latter dictate the context in which the latter arises, but it does not determine it in an fatalistic and mechanical manner.
Marx´s writings in 18th Brumaire show us that a state can indeed become detached from class and rule over all classes...however, that the society that the state exists in determines its character is something that does not change fundamentally. Bonapartism did not do away with capitalism, it simply wrestled direct power from the capitalist class in a time of crisis.


Of course, you're going to fart out some stock reply about how the workers are in control of North Korea, and you can tell because the flag has lots and lots of red on it, but that's a discussion so very tired as to barely warrant repetition anywhere, let alone here.
The idea that workers are in control of the state is a "tired" concept? I suppose you think socialism itself is similarly "tired". Why not just come out and say that revolution is "tired"?


You're going to have to demonstrate this "partial commodity production" assumption you're working on. In my understanding, Chattopadhyayian as it is, generalised commodity production continued unrelentingly in the USSR.
It is what Marx wrote about in regard to ’simple commodity production’ or ’petty commodity production’ - ’einfache Waren-produktion’. It means, in other words, that commodity production does not drive and direct the main of society. You cannot say that there was generalized commodity production because it does not square with the historical record. Are we to say that there was commodity production when the majority of production was not subject to a market? When there was no largescale market for labor power?


That would imply that there is no economic interaction between these areas and North Korean society, which is quite clearly nonsense. They employ North Korean workers, do they not? The North Korean state is a financial beneficiary of this project, is it not? The zones, therefore, possess a very real economic and therefore social (we are Marxists, after all) connection to the rest of the DPRK, do they not? A bunch of chain-link fences and watch-towers hardly change that.
Youre pushing "economic interaction" into the abstract, when the facts are quite concrete. The zones are exceptions to the rule, exceptions that indeed prove the rule. Unless you are again going for your "one drop theory", you will have to grapple with the reality that the zones are in stark contrast to what exists in the vast majority of the country.


You know one set of institutions, yes, but you'd have to be an intellectual midget to believe that those institutions were thrown up in a purely mechanical fashion, irrespective of the social, political, economic, ideological, cultural and above all material conditions of the society in which the emerged. Or does the fact that Scottish Highlanders organised themselves on the basis of extended kinship groups under appointed chieftains, rather than on the basis of hereditary vassalage, indicate that the social relations in that society were somehow something other than feudal?
I thought capitalism differed from such epochs in that it was "universalizing"...guess not.

But let us look at what you have posed. If we take, say, France at around 1000, there would not be a "France". The crown was particularly weak, and local lords were far more important and powerful. When the First Crusade was called, the king had already been excommunicated and no one seemed to care too much. If we then compare this to France at around 1314, we find it greatly changed to be far more under the authority of the crown and with a severe decline in noble rights. However, the fundamental institutions have not changed. The crown did not appear, it simply took in more lands and with it more authority and with it more power. Feudalism remained, as production predominately remained feudal.

What you are trying to do is compare medieval France with republican France and tell us they´re the same because, well, people still work other people´s land and that is the be-all-end-all of feudalism, right? And when anyone points out that feudalism cannot possibly function in a republican system simply by virtue of incompatibility with the institutions and mode of production in place, you say it doesnt matter.


Again, if we are to be in any way Marxian, we are to begin with any given set of relations in its most fundamental form, and from there work towards the concrete. We don't just look at the superficial, assume what we wish to assume, and proceed from there.
Except Im not working with the superficial, Im looking at the absence of capitalist necessities. What you´re trying to do is tell yourself commodity production exists because of a handful of factories instead of looking at the society at hand.

[Tim Finnegan]

So why, then, are you saying that a single drop of capitalist production in the DPRK means the whole thing is capitalist?
Because the universalising character of each means that anything approaching stable co-existence is by definition impossible. If capitalist social relations were really to be inserted into a socialist society, then they would enter into immediate conflict. The fact that they are not doing, as in DPRK, indicates that the more obviously capitalistic social relations of the special zones does not fundamentally depart from those within the DPRK at large.


No, I am saying that looking at what a society creates tells us a great deal about the foundation of that same society. Just as doctors look at symptoms to make a diagnosis, we can look at the absence of capitalist institutions and rest assured that it is not a capitalist society. Im not sure what kind of departure of "superstructural content" youre talking about, bring up an example and we can discuss it.
But such an absence is simply assumed based on the proclaimed nature of these institutions, on an analysis of the fundamental social relations. There is, on the part of Marxism-Leninism, no body of analytical work which allow them to distinguish a genuine workers' party-state (should such a thing be feasible) from the state-capitalist party-state in red garb. It's the equivalent of doctors deciding, amongst themselves, that a runny nose meant that your lungs were full of tiny wildebeest, and proceeding from there.


...controlled by a worker state. :D
I thought that the workers' state was the smoke? :rolleyes:


That would not be a full view of the situation at all. If we look at the British state at the time, we find no shortage of pillars of capitalism: capitalist control of the political process, capitalist control of the media, imperialist policies and so on and so forth. A struggle against a capitalist state is class struggle.
But if we were to look at the DPRK with the presumption that it was a capitalist entity, then we would also see such pillars there- they are not self-evidently distinct from each other- so that's clearly not the basis of a solid definition one way or the other. You're going to have to dig a bit deeper than that.


The state isnt merely an intermediary if no one is employed by a private firm.
Then the Soviet factories were not producing commodities for a consumer market, but producing use-values that somehow ended up in the hands of a foreign capitalist entity? :confused:


Well its false. A bureaucracy does not constitute a class by any sane definition.
Again with the superficialities... :rolleyes:


Marx´s writings in 18th Brumaire show us that a state can indeed become detached from class and rule over all classes...however, that the society that the state exists in determines its character is something that does not change fundamentally. Bonapartism did not do away with capitalism, it simply wrestled direct power from the capitalist class in a time of crisis.
Exactly my point, yes. An "empowered capitalist class" is not what defines the existence of capitalist social relations.


The idea that workers are in control of the state is a "tired" concept? I suppose you think socialism itself is similarly "tired". Why not just come out and say that revolution is "tired"?
I'm sorry, I honestly don't follow; how does tiring of Stalinist apologism imply tiring of socialism? Are you actually trying to make a constructive point, here, or is this just a lazy and ill-considered attempt to discredit me as a leftist? :confused:

("I don't like Coldplay." "YOU HATE ALL MUSIC." Seriously. :rolleyes:)


It is what Marx wrote about in regard to ’simple commodity production’ or ’petty commodity production’ - ’einfache Waren-produktion’. It means, in other words, that commodity production does not drive and direct the main of society. You cannot say that there was generalized commodity production because it does not square with the historical record. Are we to say that there was commodity production when the majority of production was not subject to a market? When there was no largescale market for labor power?
Firstly, Marx's discussion of simple commodity production was entirely in reference to the pre-capitalist era. When does he ever suggest that it would continue under communism? :confused:
Secondly, I'm saying that there was market, as much as there was anywhere; just because there wasn't a stock exchange doesn't change that. Read a book (http://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience).


Youre pushing "economic interaction" into the abstract, when the facts are quite concrete. The zones are exceptions to the rule, exceptions that indeed prove the rule. Unless you are again going for your "one drop theory", you will have to grapple with the reality that the zones are in stark contrast to what exists in the vast majority of the country.
They may be, in many respects, exceptions, I acknowledge that, but the fact that they are stable exceptions, exceptions which do not exist in contradiction to the "socialism" of the DPRK, means that the social relations on either side of the line are not fundamentally distinct.


I thought capitalism differed from such epochs in that it was "universalizing"...guess not.
How does it being universalising suggest that it expands in a deterministic and mechanical fashion? :confused:


But let us look at what you have posed. If we take, say, France at around 1000, there would not be a "France". The crown was particularly weak, and local lords were far more important and powerful. When the First Crusade was called, the king had already been excommunicated and no one seemed to care too much. If we then compare this to France at around 1314, we find it greatly changed to be far more under the authority of the crown and with a severe decline in noble rights. However, the fundamental institutions have not changed. The crown did not appear, it simply took in more lands and with it more authority and with it more power. Feudalism remained, as production predominately remained feudal.

What you are trying to do is compare medieval France with republican France and tell us they´re the same because, well, people still work other people´s land and that is the be-all-end-all of feudalism, right? And when anyone points out that feudalism cannot possibly function in a republican system simply by virtue of incompatibility with the institutions and mode of production in place, you say it doesnt matter.
But we say that feudalism had been superseded by capitalism because feudal social relations had broken and replaced with capitalist ones, not because they had a parliament and a tricolour. So I don't really follow.


Except Im not working with the superficial, Im looking at the absence of capitalist necessities. What you´re trying to do is tell yourself commodity production exists because of a handful of factories instead of looking at the society at hand.
"Capitalist necessities" do not exist; social relations create the institutions which allow them to operate as a matter of course. If you honestly think that banks and stock precede capitalism, then you are not a Marxist.

[manic expression]

Because the universalising character of each means that anything approaching stable co-existence is by definition impossible. If capitalist social relations were really to be inserted into a socialist society, then they would enter into immediate conflict. The fact that they are not doing, as in DPRK, indicates that the more obviously capitalistic social relations of the special zones does not fundamentally depart from those within the DPRK at large.
There isn't a stable coexistence, there is a tactical retreat by the worker state in order to avert disaster.


But such an absence is simply assumed based on the proclaimed nature of these institutions, on an analysis of the fundamental social relations. There is, on the part of Marxism-Leninism, no body of analytical work which allow them to distinguish a genuine workers' party-state (should such a thing be feasible) from the state-capitalist party-state in red garb. It's the equivalent of doctors deciding, amongst themselves, that a runny nose meant that your lungs were full of tiny wildebeest, and proceeding from there.
What I'm doing is looking at what the DPRK is and what it isn't, and then going from there. That's how we can see that since there is no functional capitalist market, no empowered capitalist class, no widescale capitalist production...then there is no capitalism. It's just like seeing a person and concluding that they're not a wildebeest.


I thought that the workers' state was the smoke? :rolleyes:
No, that'd be what the worker state does...like the abolition of private property and all that jazz.


But if we were to look at the DPRK with the presumption that it was a capitalist entity, then we would also see such pillars there- they are not self-evidently distinct from each other- so that's clearly not the basis of a solid definition one way or the other. You're going to have to dig a bit deeper than that.
No, you would see nothing of the sort because the fundamentals are entirely opposed.


Then the Soviet factories were not producing commodities for a consumer market, but producing use-values that somehow ended up in the hands of a foreign capitalist entity? :confused:
There you go with your one drop theory again. The workers in that case were not employed by any capitalist company, the factories were not actually owned by the capitalist company (IIRC)...just because something from a socialist country ends up in a capitalist country means nothing, it just means there's trade between the two. This is no contradiction of socialism unless you think working-class societies should board themselves up, go to sleep and hope the whole world is in full-on revolution when they wake up.


Again with the superficialities... :rolleyes:
It's not superficial, it's material fact. A capitalist class and a bureaucracy are very different things. A bureaucracy might be part of a capitalist class, but it cannot be a capitalist class all on its own. Why? Bureaucrats don't hire and fire workers, they don't invest their money in anything, they don't privately own the means of production. For all your gasps about "superficialities", you're the one applying the most superficial analysis imaginable.


Exactly my point, yes. An "empowered capitalist class" is not what defines the existence of capitalist social relations.
Not quite. The capitalists of the Second Empire were not illegalized as they are in the DPRK. The comparison falls flat because of this.


I'm sorry, I honestly don't follow; how does tiring of Stalinist apologism imply tiring of socialism? Are you actually trying to make a constructive point, here, or is this just a lazy and ill-considered attempt to discredit me as a leftist? :confused:

("I don't like Coldplay." "YOU HATE ALL MUSIC." Seriously. :rolleyes:)
You're the one who said it, so I can't be expected to tell you why. Why do you "tire" of talk of workers controlling their society?


Firstly, Marx's discussion of simple commodity production was entirely in reference to the pre-capitalist era. When does he ever suggest that it would continue under communism? :confused:
Socialism wasn't achieved in his lifetime and he wrote very little of what socialism would specifically look like so that's no surprise.


Secondly, I'm saying that there was market, as much as there was anywhere; just because there wasn't a stock exchange doesn't change that. Read a book (http://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience).
There isn't a capitalist market in the DPRK. Plain and simple. Further, if you can't sum up arguments yourself then that's not my problem.


They may be, in many respects, exceptions, I acknowledge that, but the fact that they are stable exceptions, exceptions which do not exist in contradiction to the "socialism" of the DPRK, means that the social relations on either side of the line are not fundamentally distinct.
Wait, so you're saying that even though legally and functionally, the zones are sharply (if not diametrically) different from the vast majority of DPRK society...the zones determine everything? That does not follow at all.


How does it being universalising suggest that it expands in a deterministic and mechanical fashion? :confused:
Suggesting that capitalism needs a market and a capitalist class that isn't illegalized and commodity production isn't deterministic.


But we say that feudalism had been superseded by capitalism because feudal social relations had broken and replaced with capitalist ones, not because they had a parliament and a tricolour. So I don't really follow.
But no one would be so foolish to say that the Republic was feudalist. Why? Because almost everything about that society was incompatible with feudalist society. Precisely my point.


"Capitalist necessities" do not exist; social relations create the institutions which allow them to operate as a matter of course. If you honestly think that banks and stock precede capitalism, then you are not a Marxist.
You have it backwards there. Banks and stock depend upon the foundation of capitalist society. Without the latter, there is no former. Thus, you can't have capitalist banks and stock when you're sitting in 820 CE Sweden because capitalist production doesn't exist. Likewise, you can't have capitalist banks and stock when you're sitting in present-day Pyongyang, because capitalism has been abolished through the gains of the working class.

[Tim Finnegan]

Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, I really can't be bothered shouting at this brick wall any longer. Have your little shit-stain of a "workers' state" for all I care; I'm sure you'll have fun trying to rationalise away its inevitable transformation into a neo-colonial gulag-state.

[RED DAVE]

A capitalist class and a bureaucracy are very different things.Except when the bureaucracy functions as a capitalist class as in state capitalism.


A bureaucracy might be part of a capitalist class, but it cannot be a capitalist class all on its own.Why not? If the state owns the economy and the bureaucracy controls the state, then the bureaucracy is functioning as a state capitalist ruling class.


Why? Bureaucrats don't hire and fire workersThey certainly do in state capitalism. Who do you think does it, the workers themselves?


they don't invest their money in anythingNo, they invest state money, which they control.


they don't privately own the means of production.No they don't. They "own" it as a class through their control of the state.

And, starting in the enterprise zones, private capitalism is coming in. In a decade or so, the DPRK will be a mini-China. This is the fruit of Maoist.

RED DAVE

[Tim Finnegan]

And, starting in the enterprise zones, private capitalism is coming in. In a decade or so, the DPRK will be a mini-China. This is the fruit of Maoist.

RED DAVE
The only criticism I would have here is that "mini-China" is far too optimistic; China has both the resources and the competence of leadership to become an economic power in its own right, but all North Korea will ever amount to is a source of cheap, docile labour for international capital, and particularly for South Korean capital. The great irony is that this will quite likely lead the Brezhenvites to become yet more entrenched in their convictions, because the retention of a ruthless party-state apparatus, now serving as the prison staff of a capitalist gulag-state, will allow them to fool themselves as to its "socialist" character for longer than they were able to with China.

[Blackscare]

It's the equivalent of doctors deciding, amongst themselves, that a runny nose meant that your lungs were full of tiny wildebeest, and proceeding from there.

So thats whats been going on. Jesus.