On a Most Indolent Thesis Against the Congruity of Stalinism in the DPRK

The people-centered worldview

The most vivacious assault on the people-centered worldview of the Juche idea comes when Schmitz cites cites Oh Sei-chull, of the “left”-communist ICP based in the American-occupied zone commonly known as south Korea.

Oh Sei-chull rightly points out that Kim Jong Il’s people-centered focus can even be found in Feuerbach, who clarifies human beings as rational beings over others, and, thus, Juche is not new or innovative at all (Oh 2012). “After all, the ‘person-centered’ world-view and the so-called human (attribute) theory are not new rational elements absent from Marxism that emerge along with the ‘development of the times’. They are nothing more than an ‘irrational element’ that Marx had already learned from Feuerbach in the 1840s and criticized and discarded with the development of his own ideas” (ibid.). Even further, the human being in a Jucheist view becomes an abstract and metaphysical being (ibid.).

Thus, Oh’s problem when it comes to the people-centered worldview is that it is a reversion back to Feuerbach’s “essence of man” that Marx criticized in the Theses on Feuerbach. Both Oh and Schmitz would do well to actually read what they cite, because if they did they would notice that Marx’s criticism was squarely about the notion of an “essence of man” taken independent of the social being thereof.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.

—Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.

Evidently, Marx is rejecting Feuerbach’s assumption that it is possible to reason about the abstract nature of man for all time; he is not saying that generalizations of man cannot be made with a specific historical epoch in mind. This specificity of Marx’s attack can be seen in further exposition thereupon in The German Ideology:

Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the “pure” materialists in that he realises how man too is an “object of the senses.” But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an “object of the senses, not as sensuous activity,” because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at the abstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognising “the true, individual, corporeal man,” emotionally, i.e. he knows no other “human relationships” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even then idealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it;

—Marx, The German Ideology (emphasis in the original).

The exact failure of Feuerbach’s materialism is made apparent here: it is not simply that he dared to made an abstraction of man, but that his abstraction was detached from the situation of the social existence of men in the real world. In doing so he fails to raise humanity above the level of rodents, so utterly enslaved are we to our “essence”. The practical outcome of such ponderous metaphysics in Feuerbach is predictable, being a total inability to desire or even to conceive of progressive change.

Here every exception is expressly conceived as an unhappy chance, as an abnormality which cannot be altered. Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with their living conditions, if their “existence” does not in the least correspond to their “essence,” then, according to the passage quoted, this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly.

Conversely, if we actually take a look at the foundational works to Juche, it becomes clear that the conception of man with the aforementioned characteristics is understood only to apply under socialism – i.e., within a definite ensemble of the social relations.

We are fighting against imperialism in order to liberate our nation completely from its yoke and enable it to enjoy freedom as a sovereign nation. In a word, all revolutionary struggles aim to attain freedom from either class or national subjugation; they are struggles of the people in defence of their independence. Our struggle for the building of socialism and communism is, also, in the long run, to enable the people to extricate themselves from many forms of subjugation and lead independent and creative lives as masters of nature and society.

—Kim Il-sung, On Some Problems of Our Party's Juche Idea and the Government of the Republic's Internal and External Policies, in: On Some Points of the Juche Idea.

Even Schmitz should have been able to observe that when Kim Il-sung speaks of the “independence”, “creativity” and mastery of the people, he does so with the acknowledgement that these attributes only fully come into effect when his goals of independence and socialism are realized. He made these observations about his people early on in the Korean anti-imperial struggle, and generalizes them to the popular masses under the conditions of a fight for national liberation. This is somehow put even more plainly by Kim Jong-il.

The transformation of nature and man, that is, the historic cause of freeing the popular masses from the fetters of nature and outdated ideas and culture and developing them to be powerful beings capable of dominating nature and real possessors of revolutionary ideas and culture, can be fully undertaken and achieved with success only under socialism where the working masses are masters of society.

—Kim Jong-il, On the Juche Idea, chapter 3.

Clearly for Kim Jong-il, the qualities which Juche attributes to humanity – the most important of which is their status as the masters of their destiny – are far from the inner ‘dumb’ generality that Feuerbach’s essence of man entails; they are socially contingent, fully undertaken and achieved with success only under socialism.

We can distinguish trees by their fruit, and Juche’s fruit looks nothing like Feuerbach’s. The result of Feuerbach’s universal abstract man is that he is immutably destined to the “unavoidable misfortune” of capitalism; Juche, at every step of the way, exhorts the people to revolution, to socialism. Yet Schmitz’s ability to discern fruit is on the level of Zhu Baijie. He is content to observe that both trees grow from saplings, and conclude that they are of the same stock. This is the kind philosophical breakthrough we have come to expect from western European academia!

The Suryŏng Principle

Schmitz’s critique of the Suryŏng, or “Great Leader” Principle is based on that made by Oh. Amidst his many bumblings, Oh does correctly locate the contradiction between materialist predispositions and the Suryŏng principle, as well as the latter’s origins in Stalinist and Maoist politics.

Schmitz demonstrates to us his philosophical pedigree by taking one of the correct things that Oh said, and dumping it in the refuse. According to Schmitz, the cults of personality in the Soviet Union and socialist China were simply coincidental with that in north Korea. In terms of evidence, he points to the purging of the Stalinists and Maoists from the Workers’ Party of Korea in the 1950s. He contests the suggestion that these were merely political expediencies by bringing up Kim’s ideological criticism of them. Therefore, he reasons, Kim’s Juche must have nothing to do with Stalinism. The switching of gears on the part of Schmitz here is remarkable, for he is entirely dismissive of Kim’s claim that Juche is rooted in Marxism, yet takes Kim at his word in this case.

Schmitz then goes on to reiterate the well-worn refrain that the Suryŏng principle is descended from feudalistic notions of hierarchy. Besides the aforementioned, I have little disagreement with him here.

Neo-feudalism

In the fifth and penultimate section, Schmitz not only rejects Lale’s claim that the programme of the DPRK administration, but that the ideological basis of the north Korean state tradition is characteristically socialist at all. He claims to intend to argue that the principles of socialism existed “only on paper” and was never actively present in the political or economic life in Korea. I say “intend”, because he never offers any factual evidence refuting Lale’s account of socialist reform under Kim Il-sung.

He then claims to “demonstrate” that Kim’s “Socialism of Our Style” was never socialist at all. He quotes Lale’s description of Juche ideology and its influence from Confucianism in its strong collectivism, and makes simple remark.

As she points out herself, “The most important contribution of Confucian thought, one of the most fundamental elements of the Korean political past, to Juche ideology is the disregard of individual interests and the foregrounding of community interests. It is aimed for the society to be together and act as a whole in the light of Confucian principles” (2019, 78; translation mine). This strongly disregards the common principles of socialism in which everyone is equally free.

How such “analysis” made it into publication in a journal ostensibly dedicated to Marxism is a matter requiring further investigation. Here Schmitz is pulling clumsy a sleight of hand, by conflating Marxism–Leninism with the nebulous word “socialism”, and upon that fulcrum, pivoting into the utopian idealism in contention to which Marxism originally arose.

If it is in any doubt to the reader, the bourgeois conceptions of “freedom”, egalitarianism and libertarianism that Schmitz casually thrusts upon us has ample criticism in the Marxist tradition, dating back to before the October Revolution.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.

—Lenin, State and Revolution.

But Schmitz is not finished! Riding hot on the tails of this refutation of Korean socialism, and his earlier “debunking” of Oh’s Maoism and Stalinism, he bedazzles us with the thesis that, due to the feudalistic hierarchy of Juche, the ideology as a whole is in fact neo-feudalist rather than socialist.

The End

Without a moments’ notice, we are then thrust into his conclusion, wherein he presupposes as a settled matter not only the characteristic feudalism of Juche, but of the north Korean political system as a whole. Having made his ideological critique, he extends its conclusions to not only the state, but implicitly to the economy of the DPRK. How Marxist!

It is important to note that Schmitz’s description of the DPRK politically as a full-on feudal monarchy, although not unique, is a synthesis: it differs markedly from Oh’s characterization of north Korea as a bureaucratic state capitalist formation, a special form of Stalinism with feudalist political features.

Having seen all this, it is apparent that Schmitz is trying to employ the famously effective approach of fighting fire with fire; in this case, he makes a rather feeble attempt to prove Juche as being metaphysics, by using metaphysics himself. The editors of Cultural Logic may want to consider removing the subtitle of Marxist Theory & Practice, seeing as they have demonstrated every intention to publish papers that are neither Marxist, nor theoretical, nor practical.