Chapter 4: The Dialectic Is What Gives A Marxist Their Power: It Surrounds Us, Penetrates Us, Binds The Galaxy Together: Part III

But the fact that he was human, and humans have failings, has led the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and their primary theorists the Kims to try to place the concept of the personality cult on a firmer footing. This may come as a surprise to Americans who are raised to believe that all Best Koreans pray five times a day in the direction of Pyongyang, but the Kims have increasingly eschewed their own personality cult with every successive generation in much the same way as they've increasingly eschewed the pinnacles of state power with every generation. Kim Jong-un's "power," such as it is, derives from his family's legacy and his preeminence as a theorist moreso than it does from the offices he holds, which are fairly minor in the organizational chart of the Democratic People's Republic. But as theorists, he and his forebears have developed the concept of "juche," a Korean term translated as "self-reliance." One of juche's foundations that differs it from mainstream Marxism-Leninism is asserting the primacy of ideology over materialism, and the particular ideology juche has in mind is a "man-centered socialism." Juche is the atheistic worship of the masses, who implement their will through a leader they are organically close to. Kim Jong-il specifically attributed the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe to the fact that they "imitated the Soviet experience in a mechanical manner" (Gi-wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy, p. 91), contrasting that with the organic application of the dialectic that saved the DPRK from a similar collapse.

It is this organic principle, this tradition, this dialectic, that unites conservatives and communists. The fact that juche chooses the masses themselves as the object of the personality cult is just an elaboration on the Stalinist personality cult; Stalin only acquiesced to such otherwise patent egotism because he too saw it as the most organic way to empower the working class through his rule. (It is important to note that there is a difference between "masses" and "the working class," and I believe it is more accurate to say "the working class" or "proles." But the DPRK's use of "masses" has to do with their foreign policy need to uphold Maoism, which used such class-free language, rather than any real desire to pursue a capitalist course like their Chinese nuclear umbrella has. In any case, the terms are interchangeable for the purposes of this particular passage.)

In Korea's material conditions, juche makes sense, as it is an organic outgrowth of their Confucian society and Koreans have a millennia-old tradition of ideological civil religion. The adherents of juche themselves would be the first to admit that juche as practiced in Korea might not work in other material conditions, although they (and I) do believe its basic principles have universal applications. Juche as applied to the Americas would not be called juche though. It might look more like liberation theology Christianity, which indeed is a foundation of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. It might look like the abolitionist Christianity on the lips of Sherman's soldiers as they sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic marching to the sea, the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. as he bent the moral arc of history towards justice. There has been no tradition of ideological civil religion in the West since early Christianity fought emperor-worship to the death and emerged victorious. One way or another, a Western juche would have to grow organically out of the West's own socialist and proto-socialist traditions.

Most religions that have a broad appeal among the proles do so because they address prole needs. They were founded by people who called upon the power of faith to deliver them from the rich. It works to a degree; countries where a majority of citizens believe in a hell have stronger economies than countries where the majority do not, presumably because it keeps the rich honest. Whatever else religion and the religious do today, they do serve as a fount of organic tradition that helps the proles survive capitalism. This is why proles who cannot be socialists are conservatives of one sort or another. Even non-socialist African-American proles, who generally vote Democrat because the Republicans hate them, are still a sort of conservative: they go to church, they voted for Proposition 8, they organically balance their desire for relief from capitalism with their material need for the (probably reactionary) victor of the primary to owe them something.

Continue on to Part IV