From article by Aidan Foster Carter on North Korea, who wrote a great article in NLR on articulation of modes of production, who came to speak at the Wallerstein class I took @ UCSC. One of his students was Andy Gill from Gang of Four. Sad to see he's an ex-marxist. <URL: http://www.atimes.com/koreas/DA12Dg01.html >
Let the German communist poet Bertolt Brecht have the last word. In 1953, East Germany put down a workers' uprising - and then had the nerve to tell the people that they had forfeited its confidence. Quipped Brecht, "Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"
PYONGYANG WATCH Karl Marx 4, Kim Jong-il 0 By Aidan Foster-Carter No, not another article about football. The title is just a cheap trick to get your attention. Brace yourself for something you've been spared here for a while: a heavy dose of Marxist theory. I'll try to keep it light. Blame North Korea, anyway. It's all their fault. It always is. So what have they done now? Only kicked - oops, there goes that ball again - away one of the few remaining pillars linking them to the doctrine on which the DPRK claims to be founded. Or used to claim, until a decade ago when it revised the constitution. Out went the last mention of Marxism, leaving just North Korea's own Juche (self-reliance) ideology as a guiding light. Yet Karl Marx's portrait still hangs in Pyongyang's main square. North Korea still claims to be socialist and revolutionary, with sovereignty vested in the working people. And DPRK rhetoric - I won't dignify it with the name of theory - still uses terms like class and imperialism whose provenance is clearly Marxist. But hang on. Article 11 of the constitution says that the DPRK "carries out all its activities under the leadership of the Korean Workers Party". And the very first sentence of the KWP's charter proclaims it as a "Juche-type, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party created by the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung". Mind you, that was at the 6th Congress back in 1980. The KWP hasn't got around to holding one since, although Article 21 stipulates a party congress every five years. What's more, the Central Committee (CC) has to give three months' notice. But then Article 24 says the CC also elects the party general-secretary. Yet it never elected Kim Jong-il, who got the job in 1997 by acclamation of provincial KWP assemblies. Most irregular. Come to that, it's not even clear if the CC has met at all since Kim Il-sung died - back in 1994. You get the idea. That Marxist nostrum, the unity of theory and practice, gets short shrift in North Korea. Some might say: So what? It's a neo-feudal dictatorship with a bizarre family history, and any vestigial traces of Marxism are just used for decoration - or as a figleaf. Not quite. In a regime like this, theory does still matter up to a point. As witness that every so often they make some attempt to bring it up to date. Which is why I choose this topic now. On December 21, Rodong Sinmun, North Korea's leading daily, published a lengthy editorial praising the Korean People's Army (KPA). Nothing new there: the DPRK has proclaimed an "army-first" policy for several years. Even before that, especially after Kim Il-sung died, the top brass were visibly rising up the ranks of Pyongyang's political elite. And where practice leads, can theory be far behind? According to Rod Sin (as I like to abbreviate it), "In the past, the theory of revolution has stipulated the role of the working class as the main driving force ... But today the key driving force must naturally be the revolutionary army ... because the revolutionary troops are more loyal to the Party and Leader and more faithful to their organization ... than any other group." Wow. In Marxist terms, that is some heresy - and travesty. In Marx's schema, the key role of the working class had nothing to do with loyalty. It derived from their objective position in the economy, as producers of surplus value which capitalists rip off. But there was a problem here from the start. Once workers won the vote, and better wages and conditions, most chose to be part of the system rather than overthrow it. "False consciousness" was the arrogant term coined for this reluctance to revolt. With Lenin, an insidious substitution began. If the workers won't rebel, a party must lead them to think and act correctly. Once the party gained power in 1917, woe betide any real workers who defied its (mostly middle-class) leaders. A new dictatorship replaced the old: not of the proletariat as it claimed, but over the proletariat by the party. The substitutions continued: party for people, then one party faction over the rest, and finally the leader. Yet even Stalin paid lip-service to the workers - and peasants, since from Russia onward the revolution only happened (contra Marx) in less developed countries. The problem for Leninists in dealing with this, let alone their own role, was well put by a scholar, Teodor Shanin: hypothetical proletariat, real peasants - and evasive intelligentsia. So Kim Jong-il is heir to a long history of - shall we say false consciousness? Even so, this absurd new "theory" shows how utterly North Korea has betrayed its roots. It turns Marxism upside down. The workers were central for a reason: not just their oppression, but their objective role as creators of economic value. By contrast, the KPA is just a huge drain on resources: the only good thing it does is a bit of building. Moreover, as a largely male body, to elevate it to main force is a blow to North Korea's otherwise good record on equality for women - who by contrast are the majority of the workforce (since the KPA takes out a million men). And to make loyalty the touchstone is subjectivism gone mad. Why do I care? Because I was a Marxist once, and we had noble dreams. How dare a party tell people to serve it, rather than vice versa? As for the leader, he has no place in Marxism. (Pyongyang propaganda is best read in German: all that Der Fuehrer stuff tells you where this regime really belongs politically.) Let the German communist poet Bertolt Brecht have the last word. In 1953, East Germany put down a workers' uprising - and then had the nerve to tell the people that they had forfeited its confidence. Quipped Brecht, "Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?" ((c) 2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact ads at atimes.comfor information on our sales and syndication policies.)
-- Michael Pugliese