Reply to comrade Mac

[Owen Jones <owen_jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> While I am not going to dispute that greater liberal freedoms have existed
> under Tito that under either Kim in north Korea,

 "Liberal freedoms"? What is this talk of "liberal freedoms"? I am not a
proponent of bourgeois liberalism here; for one "liberal freedom" includes
the right of a bourgeois to exploit the labour of the working class. Indeed,
bourgeois-liberalism packages this "liberal freedom" as the market. And
indeed under Titoism, there existed a small bourgeoisie in Yugoslavia,
though much smaller than that present in China at present, although it
crucially was not organised as the ruling class. Yugoslavia allowed the
greatest concession to the private ownership of the means of production of
all the Stalinist states - which could be defined as a "liberal freedom" -
and thus when the counterrevolutionary sections of the Yugoslav bureaucracy
came along, they had a base other than a petty-bourgeoisie to rip apart the
remaining shackles of the workers' state and fully stabilise the bourgeoisie
as the ruling class.

 The fact is, North Korea is ruled by a tyrannous but nonetheless completely
absurd privilege caste of bureaucrats, who enjoy the finest wines and foods
whilst the peasants starve to death, who maintain their political
dictatorship by totalitarian means over the working class. Its broad masses,
workers and peasants, have no influence in any level of administration, and
enjoy no political power. They have no say in the running of the means of
production in which they labour, which are run by a particular managerial
stratum of the bureaucracy who will one day form the basis for the North
Korean bourgeoisie. Indeed, often they are worked half to death. The
totalitarian rule of the bureaucracy possibly reaches the closest to the
Orwellian prophecy of "1984" than any Stalinist state has ever reached,
including the USSR under Stalin; not just with one of the most obscene and
repugnant cults of personality to ever graze the earth, but one of the most
disturbing pieces of footage I have ever seen is when the South Korean
despot went to the north and millions of people had been lined up on the
streets of Pyongyang waving pink flowers in perfect synchrony. Ugh. North
Korea did not become any form of workers' states by the conscious overthrow
of the old ruling class by the proletariat; it was a revolution that
occurred bureaucratically by the rulers of Moscow, who created this
caricature of Stalinism, without any involvement of the workers.

 I became a revolutionary socialist because I stood for the overthrow of the
bourgeoisie and its replacement by the rule of the working class, until the
liberation of all humanity with the dissolution of all classes and with them
the state into communism. I did not stand for the working class to be
enslaved by a tyrannous bureaucracy, or to shout the praises of such scum.

 However if what you are driving at by "liberal freedoms" is the fact that I
am slightly concerned about working class Koreans being in danger of
imprisonment if their friend's aunt's cousin's brother's
cousin-twice-removed passed somebody in the centre of town whose vet's
sister spoke to a shopkeeper about the price of tomatoes who sometime in
1988 was rumoured to have said something against Our Great Leader, then I
suppose we better add this.

> I find this "lack of
> culture" argument as per Korea very Eurocentric. There is absolutely nothing
> that would indicate a lack of culture in Korea, and the Korean people have
> given a tremedous amount to the world. Precisely this misunderstanding of
> Chinese and Korean traditions has caused many shivers down the spine of
> first world analysis of these countries, and it owes to *our* ignorance of
> their history and culture, not their lack of building and living it.

 This is not what I meant about the cultural level of North Korea. I am not
criticising what Korea has contributed to the world (!) If you look at the
works of Lenin and Trotsky, they are forever talking about about the low
cultural level of the Russian proletariat, which Lenin himself gave as a
reason for the degeneration of the Revolution. Tolstoy had nothing to do
with it.

> In truth, Tito had the break with the USSR to thank for being liberal about
> domestic policies, as it made both blocs simulataneously work to move Tito
> and Yugoslavia into its camp, subversion was less.

 But you miss the point - there was an actual revolution in Yugoslavia by
its workers and peasants which overturned capitalist property relations and
put in place a workers' state (of a deformed sort), instead of it being
bureaucratically carried out by the troops of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Yugoslavia was not subservient like the rest of Eastern Europe for this very
reason to the USSR. The benevolence of the bureaucracy was indeed partly due
to the higher cultural level of the Yugoslav masses, but also because a
workers' revolution occurred in Yugoslavia; similarly to Cuba, in fact. So
the same material reasons are behind the split with Moscow as the
benevolence of the Yugoslav bureaucracy.

> Korea never made any
> illusions about being anti-Imperialist right up until today, and instead
> played off the Sino-Soviet split, while also being without a days rest
> resisting provocation and sabotage from the US/Imperialist camp.

 Ugh. Nasty hyperbole. You've been reading too many of those freaky North
Korean news agency emails. What happened today - no, don't tell me, pig iron
production was up by 657% and Our Dear Leader turned water into wine.

> When Deng
> and the CPC initiated "Market Socialism", Kim was critical and condemnatory.

 Good old Kim. What a devout and dedicated communist. The fact he lives a
life of luxury that some members of the imperialist bourgeoisie would water
at the mouth at whilst half the peasantry is starving to death even when
half the economy is being spent on militarisation barely dents such shining
socialist credentials.

> The North technically didn't exist for many years, and the Canadian
> government only formally recognised the WPK as the leading body of the DPRK
> last month.

 As should all peace-loving fraternal nations. Is this a direct quote from
one of those DPRK news agency emails?

> The entire time the DPRK was still at war, and had been raised
> by the US army to the point of having to start reconstruction almost from
> scratch. Yugoslavia never had these parameters.

 So the excuse North Korea's leadership has for subjecting its workers to
dictatorship under a tyrannous caste of bureaucrats for over a half a
century is because of a war which ended forty-five years ago. But your
argument is completely absurd anyway because Yugoslavia HAD been flattened -
not by the American Army, but by German Blitzkrieg! The country was rubble.
Whilst being savaged by Nazi invaders, it also was being ripped apart by
civil war. I would suggest it had to completely reconstruct itself too.

> Tito is on list of people of
> the last century deserving the most respect, but let us place the argument
> properly.

 The elevation of individuals and their roles in history like this should
always be avoided by Marxists. I do not particularly respect Tito, there was
nothing particularly striking about him. I reject the absurd notion that a
country was held together by one person. History picks names from hats. If
it hadn't been Tito, it would have been a different name.

> It wasn't "lack of culture" that was the main thrust of DPRK
> conservative social policies.

 What does this mean? Banning abortion? Constraints on divorce? These are
all "conservative social policies". Or do you mean the fact the North Korean
working class are enslaved by the ruling bureaucracy.

> It also wasn't the culture of Yugoslavia that
> kept the working class a much higher level of participation.

> On a final note: Under Titos worker management that you so deride, the
> workers of each factory negotiated their own terms of trade with foreign
> states. In other words, after goods were produced, the workers continued to
> keep control on the economic levers of their labor.

 Comrade, the Workers' Aid comrades I know who work with Serbian trade
unions and working class organisations explained to me the reality behind
workers' self-management. Where are your sources for this glorification of
what was really a fraud that sounds nice on paper?

 Cheers

       Owen