The PRC is a socialist country, where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state. Corruption exists, because contradictions exist, but this doesn’t mean it’s an impossible task to keep fighting corruption and purging corrupt officials.
Yes, lmao. To be fair, I do that frequently with other topics. When someone posts something general enough that I’ve already responded to it in-depth before, I usually fall back to previous responses of my own. I don’t have time to actually hand-write in-depth responses for everything, but what I can do is spend effort on something I haven’t seen before, and modify older comments to suit particularities and update the information if I’ve learned anything new or changed my stances.
I have a full-time job, a family, and hobbies, activist work, etc. to balance, so Lemmy is usually something I do when I have a few minutes of nothing else.
As an example, this comment is brand-new, while this comment is a modified version of an earlier effort-post I made.
Haha, fair. I’ve only skimmed it for info. The big takeaway from the soviet chapters is that it was limited by being the first socialist state, and so they tried a lot of brand new things, some of which ended up being mistakes or mishandled. This isn’t anti-soviet messaging though, the point is that existing socialist states have learned from the soviets, and advanced upon them. When we measure the USSR’s democracy contextually, it was very impressive, but socialists have advanced beyond it. This is a good thing, though, as we must always strive for improvement.
(Side note: the physical copy is 130 USD! Piracy-heads stay winning.)
Do you consider the people of the USSR to have worshiped Lenin? What about the PRC, and Mao Zedong? The majority of defectors from the DPRK reported that they truly believed Kim Jong-Il was popularly supported. My question here is where you draw the line between respect and worship, and to ask you the follow-up question: do you believe it’s possible to greatly venerate a leader without counting it as worship, and if-so, how is that fundamentally different to how socialist leaders are venerated?
The problem with reporting on the DPRK is that information is extremely limited on what is actually going on there, at least in the English language (much can be read in Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and even Spanish). Most reports come from defectors, and said defectors are notoriously dubious in their accounts, something the WikiPedia page on Media Coverage of North Korea spells out quite clearly. These defectors are also held in confined cells for around 6 months before being released to the public in the ROK, in… unkind conditions, and pressured into divulging information. Additionally, defectors are paid for giving testemonials, and these testimonials are paid more the more severe they are. From the Wiki page:
Felix Abt, a Swiss businessman who lived in the DPRK, argues that defectors are inherently biased. He says that 70 percent of defectors in South Korea are unemployed, and selling sensationalist stories is a way for them to make a living.
Side note: there is a great documentary on the treatment of DPRK defectors titled Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, which interviews DPRK defectors and laywers legally defending them, if you’re curious. I also recommend My Brothers and Sisters in the North, a documentary made by a journalist from the Republic of Korea that was stripped of her citizenship for making this documentary humanizing the people in the DPRK.
Because of these issues, there is a long history of what we consider legitimate news sources of reporting and then walking back stories. Even the famous “120 dogs” execution ended up to have been a fabrication originating in a Chinese satirical column, reported entirely seriously and later walked back by some news outlets. The famous “unicorn lair” story ended up being a misunderstanding:
In fact, the report is a propaganda piece likely geared at shoring up the rule of Kim Jong Eun, North Korea’s young and relatively new leader, said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Most likely, North Koreans don’t take the report literally, Lee told LiveScience.
“It’s more symbolic,” Lee said, adding, “My take is North Koreans don’t believe all of that, but they bring certain symbolic value to celebrating your own identify, maybe even notions of cultural exceptionalism and superiority. It boosts morale.”
These aren’t tabloids, these are mainstream news sources. NBC News reported the 120 dogs story. Same with USA Today. The frequently reported concept of “state-mandated haircut styles”, as an example, also ended up being bogus sensationalism. People have made entire videos going over this long-running sensationalist misinformation, why it exists, and debunking some of the more absurd articles. As for Radio Free Asia, it is US-government founded and funded. There is good reason to be skeptical of reports sourced entirely from RFA about geopolitical enemies of the US Empire.
Sadly, some people end up using outlandish media stories as an “acceptable outlet” for racism. By accepting uncritically narratives about “barbaric Koreans” pushing trains, eating rats, etc, it serves as a “get out of jail free” card for racists to freely agree with narratives devoid of real evidence.
It’s important to recognize that a large part of why the DPRK appears to be insular is because of UN-imposed sanctions, helmed by the US Empire. It is difficult to get accurate information on the DPRK, but not impossible; Russia, China, and Cuba all have frequent interactions and student exchanges, trade such as in the Rason special economic zone, etc, and there are videos released onto the broader internet from this.
In fact, many citizens who flee the DPRK actually seek to return, and are denied by the ROK. Even BBC is reporting on a high-profile case where a 95 year old veteran wishes to be buried in his homeland, sparking protests by pro-reunification activists in the ROK to help him go home in his final years.
Finally, it’s more unlikely than ever that the DPRK will collapse. The economy was estimated by the Bank of Korea (an ROK bank) to have grown by 3.7% in 2024, thanks to increased trade with Russia. The harshest period for the DPRK, the Arduous March, was in the 90s, and the government did not collapse then. That was the era of mass statvation thanks to the dissolution of the USSR and horrible weather disaster that made the already difficult agricultural climate of northern Korea even worse. Nowadays food is far more stable and the economy is growing, collapse is highly unlikely.
What I think is more likely is that these trends will continue. As the US Empire’s influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information and helping grow their economy, perhaps even enabling some form of reunification with the ROK. The US Empire leaving the peninsula is the number 1 most important task for reunification, so this is increasingly likely as the US Empire becomes untenable.
Nodutdol, an anti-imperialist group of Korean expats, released a toolkit on better understanding the situation in Korea. This is more like homework, though. I also recommend again the aforementioned Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance for learning about the DPRK’s democratic structure.
Chapter 7.3.1 addresses the soviet model of democracy, and the push for what you describe in the 1936 constitution:
Due to a number of factors, the Soviet Union came to place the greatest emphasis on consultative democracy rather than electoral democracy. To understand why, we need to address the background to this relative lack of emphasis on electoral democracy, especially in light of the campaign of the 1930s to promote multi-candidate, universal elections with secret ballots.
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It was only after all these hard-won achievements that some stability was at last felt, and electoral democracy could be reconsidered.4 The initial signal came at the Party’s Seventeenth Congress in 1934, which noted not merely the achievements of the last few years, but also directed attention to the political tasks ahead (Stalin 1934a, 347–379, 1934b, 353–388). Proposals concerning socialist democracy were initially debated within the Politburo in January 1935, and articles began appearing in leading journals, addressing directly the topic of Soviet democracy (Zhukov 2003, 116–121; Kokosalakis 2020, 83–84). By June 1935, a constitutional drafting committee was established. The committee produced five drafts—all of them painstakingly checked by Stalin—before a final draft was made available for public discussion in June 1936. The final constitution would stipulate in its eleventh chapter that all levels of soviets, from the supreme to the district, city, and rural, would be “chosen by the electors on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage by secret ballot” (Supreme Soviet 1936a, article 134, 1936b, stat’ia 134). The subsequent articles in this chapter spell out what each of these terms meant in practice, including the process of nominating candidates, who would come from “public organisations and societies of the working people: Communist Party organisations, trade unions, cooperatives, youth organisations and cultural societies” (Supreme Soviet 1936a, article 141, 1936b, stat’ia 141).
The idea of direct and multi-candidate elections to all bodies was initially made public in the first months of 1936, especially by Stalin in an interview with Roy Howard in March (see more below) of that year, and was then pressed further at a Central Committee Plenum in June of 1936, where it met with little overt support (Zhukov 2003, 232–236; Kokosalakis 2020, 86). Even more, the public debate around specifically this measure before its final adoption was immense.5 Multiple articles in leading magazines and newspapers were published, and there were countless public meetings around the country. This effort was not a smokescreen for the increasing campaign for Party discipline, which would explode with the purges and trials of 1937–1938; instead, all of the evidence points to the fact that Stalin and those close to him were resiliently dedicated to the electoral reforms (Getty 1991). Stiff resistance there was, especially within the Party from those who stood most to lose (Zhukov 2003, 211), and this was one significant factor that led to restricting non-Party candidates to 20–25% and eventually the practice of having single Party-endorsed candidates for elections. The other major factor was Hitler’s invasion in 1941 and the Soviet Union’s entry into the European theatre of war. Many were the vectors that came together at this time. As the careful study by Kokosalakis (2022, 168–210) shows, there were tensions in the workplace, with PPOs putting increasing pressure on managers in light of drives to greater efficiency and productivity (Stakhanovism); the effort to tighten Party discipline had revealed shocking laxness, especially in regional areas; the campaign for electoral democracy had emboldened anti-communist elements to cause trouble for Soviet power through the elections; the international situation was worsening in light of Hitler’s effort to construct an anti-communist coalition; and the violent storm of trials and purges of 1937–1938 was about to be unleashed against internal and externally-sponsored “wreckers.”
Of most interest here are two principles of electoral democracy that emerged from the maelstrom of events: merit and democratic supervision. These were most clearly expressed in two pieces by Stalin, one in the interview with Roy Howard in March 1936, and the other in his reply to debates at the Central Committee Plenum of February–March 1937. The contexts of these two texts are distinct, one an interview with an international correspondent and the other in reply to the sceptics in the Central Committee concerning elections. But the points are consistent. First, merit, which has two dimensions: the “political principle,” asking whether those workers chosen are “worthy of political confidence”; and the “business principle,” in the sense the people elected should be “fit for such and such a job” (Stalin 1937c, 279, 1937d, 176). In the address to the Central Committee Plenum, Stalin points out that elections based on competence or merit would be a way to break up the corrupt fiefdoms of local Party officials. However, there is a far deeper issue: if elections are based on merit, they are no longer politicised. This measure harks back to Marx’s observation (see Sect. 2.5.2) concerning the need for non-politicised elections in a socialist system. To recall the logic: since a socialist system is not characterised by class struggle and thus antagonistic political parties, elections would not have the antagonistic nature found in capitalist democracy. This is precisely the point Stalin makes in his reply to Howard: “We have no contending parties any more than we have a capitalist class contending against a working class which is exploited by the capitalists.” How then can one have an election contest? To begin with, “candidates will be put forward not only by the Communist Party, but by all sorts of public, non-Party organisations,” of which there hundreds (Stalin 1936a, 111, 1936b, 145). We may add here that elections would be competitive due to the relative merit of the candidates. This is a clearly step further than Marx’s initial suggestions. For Stalin, in competitive elections, the candidate most qualified—in terms of political and administrative merit—should be elected. This is the first major step in defining the nature of elections in a socialist system.
The second concerns democratic supervision. As Stalin observes to Howard, there would be “very lively elections campaigns.” Why? Not a few institutions “work badly,” where a local governing body has failed to provide for the “multifarious and growing requirements of the toilers of town and country.” Stalin looks forward to the types of questions that will be asked: “Have you built a good school or not … improved housing conditions … helped to make our labour more effective and our lives more cultured?” Focused on numerous, acute, and practical problems, elections would “tighten up” the many institutions and organisations so that they would improve their work (Stalin 1936a, 112, 1936b, 146–147). This is not merely seen as an effective anti-corruption mechanism, but is also the democratic role of criticism and self-criticism at work. In his reply to the Central Committee Plenum, Stalin frames the question of democratic supervision in terms of testing workers in responsible positions by assessing and verifying the concrete results of their work. It is one thing for such testing and verification to be undertaken “from above,” by higher levels in the Party. But this is by no means sufficient. What is needed is the “test from below.” When the masses assess the achievements and failures of their leaders, then the masses “draw attention to their mistakes and indicate the way in which these mistakes may be rectified.” For Stalin, this “sort of testing is one of the most effective methods of testing people” (Stalin 1937c, 282, 1937d, 179; see also Zhukov 2003, 211). He compares this process to the practice of democratic centralism in the Party, where the right to nominate candidates and object to them is practised, where secret ballots and the freedom to criticise and indeed self-criticise are the reality. So also with the masses, who have the opportunity at meetings and conferences to hear reports from their leaders in the workplace, trade unions, and other bodies, and openly criticise the work of these leaders and propose ways for improvement. The Party may have the task of teaching the masses, but it must also learn from the masses.
The importance of these two principles should not be under-estimated: the practice of non-politicised elections based on merit, which develops the initial principle proposed by Marx and Engels; and the crucial role of democratic supervision through elections. We should also note here an initial effort to extend the Party’s internal mechanism of democratic centralism to country-wide governance. Stalin speaks of multiple candidates, secret ballots, and public criticism—these too should be practised country-wide in elections to the government bodies through “universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage” (Stalin 1937c, 282, 1937d, 179). It would take far more practice and theoretical elaboration well beyond the time of Soviet Union to find a solution to country-wide democratic centralism, but the two principles of merit as the basis for election to office and democratic supervision would become mainstays of socialist governance.
The drive for electoral democracy did not long live up to its lofty aims, with the most embarrassing retreat being from multi-candidate contested elections to single-candidate elections. At the same time, there was an even greater effort to ensure democratic accountability through elections internal to the Party. These long-lasting moves are reflected in the comprehensive revisions to the Party rules proposed by Zhdanov at the eighteenth congress in 1939.
It’s useful, critical, pro-socialist analysis.
The Kim family does have outsized influence, but the DPRK is not a hereditary monarchy. For example, the position of President, held by Kim Il-Sung, was abolished and split into multiple positions upon his death. This is why he is remembered as the “Eternal President.” As such, both Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un have held different positions. Both have held high positions, for example Kim Jong-Il had the title of General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea, a position held by Kim Jong-Un presently. However, this is not the whole story.
The actual title for a head of state is the Chairman of the State Affairs Commission, held presently by Chong Ryong-Hae. The DPRK has a much more distributed level of power, and the Kim family is both widely supported due to its influence, and yet is not the indisputed top-dog, so to speak. What’s more, the Kim family is so venerated precisely because the legacy of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il is lived memory, imagine if Lenin had survived and raised his children as successors. It would be no wonder that the soviets would have elected his children, but it would not be a monarchy either.
Finally, class. Class is not a level of material wealth, but a relation to production and distribution. The DPRK is overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned, administration is not a distinct class in and of itself but a subset of broader classes, same with intellectuals. What determines class is based on that key aspect, the Kim family does not own capital but instead recieves wages from the state. Kim Jong-Un is largely used as a symbol, one that is democratically elected and directly trained by his father for the position.
This is why it’s important to actually study the real systems at play, rather than coast on pre-formed opinions drilled into us about the DPRK from western media. The Black Panther Party maintained good relations with the DPRK, visiting it and teaching Juche to Americans.
Because of the policy of nuclear deterrence, and the socialist system, the DPRK has managed to recover from historic flooding and the dissolution of the USSR into a poor but socially oriented, rising economy. Pyongyang in particular has been booming with massive expansions, and the 20x10 initiative has steadily been patching up the problem of rural underdevelopment.
I encourage you to try to understand the DPRK from a more sympathetic angle, seeing why it has the structures it does, rather than trying to abstract it out of its essential context and analyze it in a vacuum. Such a trap is metaphysics.
Change doesn’t happen smoothly, instead there is quantitative buildup before a qualitative leap. Marxist-Leninists have been correct for a long time, but simply being correct does not mean everyone will agree with you. What’s happening now is a destruction of capitalist cultural hegemony due to the heightened contradiction between socialization of global labor and privatization of profits into the hands of the few.
Historically, the imperial core has been able to bribe a large section of the working classes inside the core with the spoils of imperialism (though ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups are often excluded from this). Social democracy in Europe, and the “American Dream,” both of which are built on the backs of the global south. However, this system is weakening as the global south is escaping underdevelopment. This means increased austerity measures inside the imperial core to protect imperialist profit margins.
Overall, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which was mathematically proven by Karl Marx. Imperialism answers this by raising absolute profits, creating the spoils of imperialism by which to bribe sections of the working classes into not organizing for revolution. Imperialism aligns the interests of the working classes in the imperial core more with that of imperialists than the global proletariat, which is why revolution happens in the global south. As the rate of profit continues to fall, though, and there are no new markets to enter, imperialists kick off increased war to try to force open foreign markets, like Venezuela, Iran, and soon to be Cuba (most likely).
The silver lining is that the interests of the working classes in the imperial core are now aligning more with the global south, causing a spike in opposition to the brutal status quo. The only way forward for the world is global socialism, and the only future for the US Empire is dissolution and replacement with socialism. Else we end up with barbarism.
Get organized! Read theory! If you want a place to start with theory, I made a basic Marxist-Leninist study guide you can use if you want.
Russia yes since the dissolution of the USSR, DPRK and PRC no, the working classes control the states of the latter 2. In China, they have direct elections for local representatives, which elect further “rungs,” laddering to the top. The top then has mass polling and opinion gathering. This combination of top-down and bottom-up democracy ensures effective results. For more on this, see Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. This system is remarkably effective, resulting in over 90% approval rates.
From the same book, for the DPRK:
The DPRK’s electoral democracy relates primarily to the people’s assemblies, along with local state organs, assemblies, and committees. Every eligible citizen may stand for election, so much so that independent candidates are regularly elected to the people’s assemblies and may even be elected to be the speaker or chair. The history of the DPRK has many such examples. I think here of Ryu Mi Yong (1921–2016), who moved from south to north in 1986 so as to take up her role as chair of the Chondoist Chongu Party (The Party of the Young Friends of the Heavenly Way, formed in 1946). She was elected to the Supreme People’s Assembly and became a member of the Standing Committee (then called the Presidium). Other examples include Gang Ryang Uk, a Presbyterian minister who was a leader of the Korean Christian Federation (a Protestant organisation) and served as vice president of the DPRK from 1972 until his death in 1982, as well as Kim Chang Jun, who was an ordained Methodist minister and became vice-chair of the Supreme People’s Assembly (Ryu 2006, 673). Both Gang and Kim were buried at the Patriots’ Cemetery.
How do elections to all of the various bodies of governance work? Elections are universal and use secret ballots, and are—notably—direct. To my knowledge, the DPRK is the only socialist country that has implemented direct elections at all levels. Neither the Soviet Union (in its time) nor China have embraced a complete system of direct elections, preferring—and here I speak of China—to have direct elections at the lower levels of the people’s congresses, and indirect elections to the higher levels. As for candidates, it may initially seem as though the DPRK follows the Soviet Union’s approach in having a single candidate for each elected position. This is indeed the case for the final process of voting, but there is also a distinct difference: candidates are selected through a robust process in the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland. As mentioned earlier, the struggle against Japanese imperialism and liberation of the whole peninsula drew together many organisations, and it is these that came to form the later Democratic Front. The Front was formed on 25 July, 1949 (Kim Il Sung 1949), and today includes the three political parties, and a range of mass organisations from the unions, youth, women, children, agricultural workers, journalism, literature and arts, and Koreans in Japan (Chongryon). Notably, it also includes representation from the Korean Christian Federation (Protestant), Korean Catholic Federation, and the Korean Buddhist Federation. All of these mass organisations make up the Democratic Front, and it is this organisation that proposes candidates. In many respects, this is where the multi-candidate dimension of elections comes to the fore. Here candidates are nominated for consideration from all of the mass organisations represented. Their suitability and merit for the potential nomination is debated and discussed at many mass meetings, and only then is the final candidate nominated for elections to the SPA. Now we can see why candidates from the Chondoist movement, as well as from the Christian churches, have been and can be elected to the SPA and indeed the local assemblies.
To sum up the electoral process, we may see it in terms of a dialectical both-and: multi-candidate elections take place in the Democratic Front, which engages in extensive consideration of suitable candidates; single candidate elections take place for the people’s assemblies. It goes without saying that in a non-antagonistic system of class and group interaction, the criterion for election is merit and political suitability
As for the bodies of governance, there is a similar continuity and discontinuity compared with other socialist countries. Unlike the Soviet Union, there is a unicameral Supreme People’s Assembly, which is the highest authority in terms of laws, regulations, the constitution, and all leadership roles. The SPA is also responsible for the national economic plan, the country’s budget, and foreign policy directions (Han 2016, 47–48). At the same time, the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland has an analogous function to a second organ of governance. This is a uniquely Korean approach to the question of a second organ of governance. While not an organ of governance as such, it plays a direct role in electoral democracy (see above), as well as the all-important manifestation of consultative democracy (see below). A further reason for this unique role of the Democratic Front may be adduced: while the Soviet Union and China see the second body or organ as representative of all minority nationalities and relevant groups, the absence of minority nationalities in a much smaller Korea means that such a form of representation is not needed.
I highly recommend the book, it helps shed light on some often misunderstood mechanisms in socialist democracy, including the directly addressed fact that the DPRK’s voting process includes single candidate approval voting. Without the context of the candidate selection process, this is spun as entirely anti-democratic.
Chomsky famously hated Marxists and never bothered to study Marxism enough to understand what dialectical materialism means. For a scholar who made a career of shitting on socialism in real life, this alone should tell you how unserious he is.
The official story is that it’s accidental, that’s what I know, though the devs are MLs and lots of MLs like me use Lemmy.ml.
To be fair, Lemmy.ml is the dev instance, and Lemmy was made very specifically to not have the problems Reddit has.
Longer answer: Lemmy was originally founded by a bunch of Marxist-Leninists and socialists of similar stripes (that’s what the .ml stands for)
Technically .ml stands for Mali, and was chosen because the domain is cheap. Ended up being a bit of a funny coincedence.
If you want to get into political activism, I made a basic Marxist-Leninist study guide, might be fulfilling to try to contribute to a better world. This helps with the human connection bit, and also is compatible with having a full-time job in whatever you decide.
As you should!
Everything is related to politics, I don’t believe it’s possible to truly be “non-political.” When someone requests something unrelated to politics, they generally just mean that they don’t want to be held accountable for their views or called out for them.
How do you define “directly relating to politics?” The fact that marginalized people don’t have the support they need is political. Homelessness, drug addiction, all of these are political problems that stem from political economy.
A lot of us are! ☭