If you wish to continue to troll I think we should end this here. Citizens of the DPRK are allowed to travel (just not defect to a country they are at war with) what stops them is visa refusals due to UN sanctions. The US and USSR were never at war that’s why it was the cold war. India and Pakistan have normalcy as core parts of their ceasefire terms from the most recent scuffle (which never did escalate to all our war). Funny you bring up Iran who the US never declared war on but do you know where they aren’t allowed travel by the American government, the DPRK because they are at war with them. Please educate yourself and grow up trolling is unbecoming once you mature past 12.
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First off no. That was not the core question. You said:
Take, for example, the claim that North Koreans are permitted to leave the country.
The answer is yes they are permitted. Despite how you attempt to twist what the law says and what we were talking about to dodge this fact.
Secondly obviously you can’t move to a hostile power during wartime that’s called defecting. No country on Earth currently or has ever allowed that.
Are you trolling?
That’s a disgustingly bad faith interpretation of what is said and is patently false. They have laws surrounding surrender that are inline with international norms same with defection and espionage none of these apply to leaving legally as you would know if you went to university in China plenty of non 30 year olds learning there. Citizens of the DPRK are permitted to travel by the government it’s the UN sanctions stopping them travelling beyond China and Russia.
I don’t see any reason to believe it wouldn’t also continue into the reserve period or even after
Because surrender has a specific meaning that requires the person in question be an active combatant. The law applies to citizens as it cover this but also espionage and defection which do not require this caveat.
What do you mean by taking the class character of the revolution as primary. The revolution is not an abstract event. It is the process by which a class seizes or establishes state power. To treat the revolution’s class character as separate from the state it produces seems to detach the act of seizure from the instrument seized. Can you clarify how you understand the relationship between the revolutionary moment and the state form that follows?
Also you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what “abolishing all classes” means in socialist theory and practice. It is not a moral injunction or an immediate erasure of social differentiation. It is a historical process where class distinctions disappear through the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, whose members are then, together with the peasantry, gradually folded into the proletariat through transformed relations of production. Once there is a single class, there is effectively no class antagonism. That is the endpoint.
Your phrasing that the proletariat “may be likely to democratize the economy” reveals an idealist lens on a structural question. This is not about likelihood or moral inclination. It is about material interest. The proletariat, as a class, has an objective interest in expropriating the petty and large bourgeoisie because its own emancipation requires the abolition of capitalist property relations. This interest does not depend on goodwill. It is inscribed in the position of the proletariat within the mode of production. To treat it as contingent is to substitute voluntarism for political economy.
Finally, the state is not an abstract motivator. It is the concrete instrument by which one class exercises rule over others and advances its class interest. Under bourgeois rule, the state organizes the accumulation of capital, reproduces wage labor, and suppresses challenges to private property. Under proletarian rule, the same apparatus, transformed in class content, organizes the socialization of production and the proletarianization of any remaining classes. The direction of transformation follows from which class commands the levers.
I’m not saying this to be accusatory, and I hope it lands as intended. It just feels like your grasp of communist theory and the history of socialist practice is shallow to put it mildly. I can give you some book recommendations that might clear some of this up if it would help.
No the petty bourgeoisie often do hire workers to supplement their own labour. The bourgeoisie own the major means of production and live by extracting surplus value from wage labor, they do not need to work themselves. Petty bourgeoisie own small-scale means of production (a shop, a workshop, a plot of land) and still rely on their own labor, however often employing workers to supplement their labour.
In periods of socialist momentum, the petty bourgeoisie frequently become the most zealous allies of reaction because their precarious ownership of small-scale means of production places them in direct fear of expropriation and descent into the proletariat. Unlike the bourgeoisie, who may calculate accommodation with a rising revolutionary order, the petty bourgeois sees their individual livelihood, status, and slim hope of advancement threatened by collective transformation; this material anxiety drives them to support reactionary and often fascist forces that promise to defend private property and social “order” against the working class. Their reaction is not an ideological accident but class instinct: when the choice appears to be between losing their small capital or joining the stable exploiters, many choose reaction striving to join the exploiters.
No, socialization of the economy is not the only metric. It is not even the key metric. The class character of the state is primary. Socialization is a single, highly important factor within that determination, but it remains derivative. A nationalized industry under bourgeois state command functions as state monopoly capital.
Evaluation proceeds from the principal contradiction to its secondary aspects. The principal question: which class holds monopoly over political power and the means of coercion? This determines the direction of all other processes. Secondary metrics, the rate and depth of socialization, the trajectory of productive forces, the composition of administrative personnel, the character of ideological struggle, these are not irrelevant. They are conditional. They either consolidate proletarian state power or undermine it. There is no neutral technical criterion. The same policy, e.g. grain procurement or industrial planning, produces opposite class effects depending on which class commands the state apparatus.
The state is not a passive vessel for economic measures. It is the organized expression of class rule. Transitionary societies contain multiple modes of production in contradiction. The state resolves which mode dominates. Empirical assessment must therefore begin with the class basis of political power.
No reserves are not active combatants unless called upon just like in every country that has reservese (I can’t think of one that doesn’t). And even if it did the law itself as written is perfectly inline with international norms the fact they have universal conscription or a possible large reserve force doesn’t change that.
This isn’t relevant anyway the fact is the laws you posted are seemingly entirely normal laws that are common around the world, and you were wrong that they aren’t allowed to travel abroad by the government.
Universal conscription doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It’s simply a mandatory service term, not permanent combatant status. Much like in the ROK, Thailand, etc., eligible citizens serve a set period then return to civilian life, they aren’t subject to surrender laws before or after their term.
Surrender specifically is a combatant concept (defecting and espionage are not), non-combatants don’t surrender under military law, they migrate or seek asylum. E.g. to surrender you must be a combatant in this case an active service member.
No that’s not at all what I said.
I know you didn’t ask but 3 and 4 seem normal to me defecting during wartime and espionage are punished everywhere on Earth for a reason it makes them no better or worse than any other country.
As for surrender I have a feeling it’s a purposely unflattering translation whose real meaning is likely more inline with international norms such as
Article 99 of the UCMJ
Section 2 of the Armed Forces Act 2006
Section 74 of the National Defence Act
Section 15 of the Defence Force Discipline Act 1982
Section 34 of the Army Act 1950
and so on.
I replied to another comment but to reiterate
1 implies that escaping to another country is a betrayal of the state
This is categorically false it states if you commit treason and then escape it is a crime. The key word being AND.
Take, for example, the claim that North Koreans are permitted to leave the country.
They absolutely are. I met more than one during my many years in university.
betraying the State and escaping
You very clearly misread this. It’s a crime to commit treason and then escape. AND. “escaping” to another country is not a crime.
While generally true that people rarely argue from the position of being a freethinker as a vocal core of their argument. What is not rare, however, is the habit of many calling anyone who points out that English sphere narratives about the DPRK are manufactured nonsense brainwashed. To label someone brainwashed on a given issue rests on the presupposition that you yourself are not. It assumes you operate as a free thinker. This posture persists even while their views align almost entirely with propaganda generated and circulated by the imperialist hegemon against an ideological enemy they remain at war with. Claiming intellectual immunity while repeating hegemonic talking points with little to no evidence (The core of the joke.).
11·1 day agoTypical chauvinist
Why can’t you people just vouch for Scandinavian democratic socialism? It’s clearly the only thing that’s working in this fucked world.
Probably because they fund their social democracy through pillaging the third world. Or the fact it does nothing to address the root issues of modern society (imperialism and the contradictions of capital). Among other issues.
rounded up the others to harass, torture, and deport (maybe to their birth country, maybe to a gulag, who knows) like this guy
How much was ICE funding raised under Obama and Biden? How many extra ICE agents did they higher? How many camps did they build? It didn’t all materialize into existence under Trump you historically illiterate idiot. Kids in cages only matter to you people when its the red team doing it it’s crazy.
I’m thinking this level of cruelty is a 100-year problem, and that anyone else on the planet except another craven dictator would’ve been a better choice.
The people of Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia etc. and those who remained in Guantanamo (which the deporter in chief lied about planning to close) would probably disagree with you. Trump is simply showing the true face of Amerikkka which is arguably better for the third world than the better planned imperialism with good pr to now.
You still have not answered the actual question I posed.
I asked how the class character of the revolution operates independently of the state it produces. You did not explain that mechanism. Instead, you restated your preference for a democratic outcome after the revolution and described conditions you think make that outcome likely. That does not resolve the point. A revolution is not a free-floating event. It is the seizure or construction of political power by a class. If you say the revolution’s class character is primary, but then detach that from the state form that emerges from it, you are asserting a cause while refusing to identify its concrete political expression.
Your reply also shifts from class analysis to normative preference. You say you would only consider a class to have gained power if it succeeds in doing so in a democratic context. But that is not a meaningful definition of class power. It is an external political criterion you are imposing onto the analysis. The state is not validated by whether it conforms to an abstract democratic ideal. It is analyzed by which class holds power, through what institutions, in whose interests, and against which opposing classes.
You also continue to treat class as though it were mainly a question of sentiment, solidarity, or personal disposition. It is not. Class is defined by a group’s place within the social relations of production, its relation to the means of production, and its role in the social organization of labor. Individuals can move between classes, yes. Political degeneration is possible, yes. But none of that abolishes the category itself.
On your use of probabilistic language, the issue is that you retreat from determinate analysis into vague possibility. Substituting schema, impression, or what one finds unconvincing for concrete engagement with the real movement of social forces. To say the proletariat may or may not act in accordance with its structural position, and to leave it there, is not nuance. It is a refusal to complete the analysis. It is ridiculous to proceed by asking whether a development feels persuasive at the level of personal intuition. Instead one must ask what contradictions are operative, what class interests are materially constituted, and how they express themselves through political organization, struggle, and state form.
You also still do not understand class in a rigorous way. Administrator is not a class category. Administration is a function. Class is determined by relation to the means of production and to the appropriation of social surplus. So long as those administering do not privately own the means of production and do not expropriate surplus value as a distinct property-owning stratum, they do not thereby cease to be proletarian simply because they hold office or carry out administrative tasks. The socialist transition does not abolish the proletariat the moment it takes power. It is the period in which proletarian rule continues the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, suppresses restoration, and transforms the relations of production until class antagonisms are rendered void through the abolition of class society itself. The endpoint is not your abstract democratic test. The endpoint is the historical supersession of antagonistic classes through there ultimately being only the associated producers, at which point class in the antagonistic sense disappears.
On not being “hard science”. This is not a matter of arbitrary plausibility. Dialectical and historical materialism have repeatedly proven their explanatory force precisely because antagonisms and contradictions are the drivers of history. The contradiction between forces and relations of production, between exploited and exploiting classes, between an emergent mode of production and the decaying order that contains it, is the motor of historical development. That is why Marxism can explain the rise, development, crisis, and replacement of social orders with a seriousness your framework cannot match. Once you reduce these determinate antagonisms to mere probabilistic tendencies, you empty the theory of its strongest content and replace analysis with hesitation.
The problem is not heterodoxy as such. The problem is that you have tossed aside the core of the theoretical framework and replaced it with an eclectic mix of idealism and materialism, despite the fact that the two are incompatible as methods. You want to retain Marxist terminology while hollowing out what makes it coherent: class without a stable relation to production, revolution without determinate state expression, and political power judged by external moral-democratic criteria rather than by its material class content. That is not a serious reinterpretation. It is a conceptual patchwork. And eclecticism of that sort cannot critique Marxism from within because it has already abandoned the premises that make Marxist analysis possible in the first place.
Some books:
Lenin, The State and Revolution
Marx, The Civil War in France
Lenin, A Great Beginning
Mao, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Mao, On Contradiction
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific