The bizarre video, broadcasted on the country’s state media channel Uriminzokkiri TV, shows superimposed footage of missiles blowing up military ships and planes.

It was published after a statement was released by North Korea in response to continued military drills carried out by the US and South Korea.

Leader Kim Jong-Un had released a comment saying North Korea would reduce the US to “ashes” if “a single bullet” was fired at his country

...

The previous statement, realeased earlier this month from Kim Jong-Un's Foreign Office, said: "The Korean People's Army will reduce the bases of aggression and provocation to ashes with its invincible Hwasong rockets tipped with nuclear warheads and reliably defend the security of the country and its people's happiness in case the US and the south Korean puppet forces fire even a single bullet at the territory of the DPRK." http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/north-korea-releases-bizarre-propaganda-film-showing-rockets-blowing-up-us-aircraft-carrier-a3494861.html

I understand the need to deter western imperialism with nuclear development but this is like... eh what?

Synergy posted:

The bizarre video, broadcasted on the country’s state media channel Uriminzokkiri TV, shows superimposed footage of missiles blowing up military ships and planes.

It was published after a statement was released by North Korea in response to continued military drills carried out by the US and South Korea.

Leader Kim Jong-Un had released a comment saying North Korea would reduce the US to “ashes” if “a single bullet” was fired at his country

...

The previous statement, realeased earlier this month from Kim Jong-Un's Foreign Office, said: "The Korean People's Army will reduce the bases of aggression and provocation to ashes with its invincible Hwasong rockets tipped with nuclear warheads and reliably defend the security of the country and its people's happiness in case the US and the south Korean puppet forces fire even a single bullet at the territory of the DPRK." http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/north-korea-releases-bizarre-propaganda-film-showing-rockets-blowing-up-us-aircraft-carrier-a3494861.html

I understand the need to deter western imperialism with nuclear development but this is like... eh what?

Yeah the DPRK are the crazy ones for saying they will defend themselves against an aggressive war when the US just threatened a pre emptive attack on them.

pogfan1996 posted:

Synergy posted:

The bizarre video, broadcasted on the country’s state media channel Uriminzokkiri TV, shows superimposed footage of missiles blowing up military ships and planes.

It was published after a statement was released by North Korea in response to continued military drills carried out by the US and South Korea.

Leader Kim Jong-Un had released a comment saying North Korea would reduce the US to “ashes” if “a single bullet” was fired at his country

...

The previous statement, realeased earlier this month from Kim Jong-Un's Foreign Office, said: "The Korean People's Army will reduce the bases of aggression and provocation to ashes with its invincible Hwasong rockets tipped with nuclear warheads and reliably defend the security of the country and its people's happiness in case the US and the south Korean puppet forces fire even a single bullet at the territory of the DPRK." http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/north-korea-releases-bizarre-propaganda-film-showing-rockets-blowing-up-us-aircraft-carrier-a3494861.html

I understand the need to deter western imperialism with nuclear development but this is like... eh what?

Yeah the DPRK are the crazy ones for saying they will defend themselves against an aggressive war when the US just threatened a pre emptive attack on them.

They're actually being very lenient here. When dealing with a nation as belligerent and aggressive as the United States, you have to admit a preemptive attack would be justified. Maybe they'll take such an action once they've accumulated a large enough arsenal and perfected their long-range missiles. We may take them down with us but it will be for the good of mankind. The resulting nuclear winter may also help offset manmade global warming.

Photography and interaction with local people have historically been tightly controlled; however, from photos seen around the internet and evidence from travelers to North Korea, those restrictions seem to have been relaxed slightly in the past few years

Reads more like "our stupid bullshit propaganda was exposed by actual people visiting dprk and their what they've documented debunked our lies"

Synergy posted:

Just a reminder, it's OK not to agree 100% with every action of a socialist country.

Synergy posted:

i read that Cuban article someone posted on here and it had a lot of great details on how their system works.

Richard Levins, in that article, posted:

Revolutionary Criticism

As C. Wright Mills famously said in Listen, Yankee! “I am for the Cuban revolution. I do not worry about it, I worry for it, and with it.”5 We can take this as a general principle. The starting point for looking at an emerging socialist society is 100 percent solidarity with the revolution, an appreciation of its world historic significance, and a deeply felt enjoyment of its achievements. This requires unconditional defense of the revolution, against all attempts to reestablish capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination.

A 100 percent commitment to the revolution does not require agreement with all its decisions or satisfaction with everything going on there, nor even a full appreciation of all its leaders. Criticism is an integral part of the revolutionary’s commitment, and the willingness to look critically should be regarded as one of the requirements for membership in revolutionary organizations. But criticism of the revolution has, as its main purpose, the correction of its weaknesses. It should not be avoided, but neither can it become someone’s main way of participating. The visitor should support, learn from, and enjoy the revolution.

There are three main prerequisites for meaningful, revolutionary criticism:

1. Criticism must come out of supportive participation. To the extent that one participates as an ally and has actually helped achieve shared goals, critical insights from visitors can be useful and welcome. Remember two things at the same time: that it is their revolution, being undertaken by people much like ourselves, confronting tasks that nobody is ever fully prepared to confront, and facing long-term chronic hostility and immediate, day-to-day hardship and frustration. We look at their efforts with admiration, sympathy, and love. But remember also that it is our revolution too, part of a global process in which we all have a stake, obligations, and rights.

2. Criticism has to be grounded in knowledge and understanding of the place and times. The first element of understanding is knowledge of the country’s history and culture, where it is coming from, what it is attempting to accomplish, what are its major obstacles. We have to know if what we see is a hangover from the past, a partial advance, a concession to retrograde forces, or an unrecognized problem. And if it is a concession, is it recognized as such or paraded as creative socialism? It is important to know the contexts for each decision. Criticism has to be grounded in the social, historical, and intellectual realities of a country, so that observations can be placed in context and the silly and arrogant errors of ignorance can be avoided. The deeper the knowledge and sympathetic understanding, the ability to distinguish between long-term socialist development and the zigzags of fortune—the more accurate and useful the criticism.

3. Criticism has to be informed by theory to protect us from being overwhelmed by, but not indifferent to, the immediate. The Cuban experience will allow us to look more skeptically at the slogans of liberal democracy, not in order to trash them, but to see them in their relative validity and ultimate limitation. Helping to place incipient socialism in the context of world history and the survival of our species, seeing both the continuity and discontinuity of our social evolution, will also inform our own struggles for our own country.

if all of the above prerequisites are being met, we don't need such "reminders"; if they aren't, we should keep quiet anyway. constructive and well-informed criticism among people committed to the defense of the revolution is worlds apart from running one's mouth off in a public venue in a way that can be utilized for imperialist ends. this holds doubly if the latter criticism is based on nothing more than what we hear in the bourgeois press and feelings driven by abstract ideal.

thirdplace posted:

half the time that kind of shit is just in the translation

how disapointing

Those for whom socialism is essentially defined by legal form of ownership—by the fact that private ownership of means of production has been replaced by collective (state) ownership—can certainly see the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a “socialist country” (although the economic reforms implemented over the past ten years have seriously undermined the state model). However, this does not render service to the world proletariat, who need the greatest clarity on these issues, nor to the legitimate struggle of the Korean people against US imperialism—which has never abandoned its goal to control the Korean peninsula.

They are wise enough to acknowledge that this definition exists. Rather than explain why collective ownership is not socialism however, they give two absurd qualifications: North Korea doesn't "render service to the world proletariat" and they don't properly struggle against U.S. imperialism (this second is vague and could also be interpreted as saying they do struggle against imperialism but don't properly justify it to western communists). You can imagine the amount of arrogance to think that North Korea has any obligation to justify itself to tiny communist sects in the west and that this task is part of the fundamental definition of socialism itself. And this is the charitable reading because read straight both accusations are simply lies: North Korea in fact has an outstanding record of helping third world liberation movements and even today maintains great respect in Africa and it's hard to find a better example of resistance to US imperialism than North Korea. This is an odd point to hit on as well since Maoist China and the Western Maoist movement had a very mixed record on imperialism, something you can't get around by proclaiming it "pre-maoist" and therefore not relevant.

The next paragraph is even more interesting:

The bureaucratic bourgeoisie around the army and in the state apparatus is the real ruling class in North Korea. It oppresses the proletarian and peasant masses as it maintains a lead weight on them and collectively benefits from the exploitation of their labour, without even giving them any possibility of autonomous organization. Only the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of the whole peninsula will allow for the establishment of a free Korea stripped from any form of imperialist domination whatsoever—whether US, Russian, or Chinese.

Where did the army come into the analysis suddenly? If you're familiar, this is actually identical to Tony Cliff's theory of the "permanent arms economy." The call for "autonomous organization" is also Trotskyist (at best), either calling for independent factions to openly resist the state ala the Worker's Opposition, a multiparty system ala non-Communist socialists who considered Solidarity in Poland and similar organizations to be "progressive," or a full blown resistance attempting to overthrow the state ala former trots turned neoconservatives, an ideology which has gotten second wind with ideological support of the "revolutionaries" in Libya and Syria by certain communist groups. The reference to Chinese and Russian imperialism is also odd, after a whole article pointing out the literal genocide America committed in Korea, Russia and China are brought up out of nowhere and made equivalent to the United States. No previous evidence was provided that Russia and China have any influence on North Korea at all, the actual analysis has been of the words of Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un as well as the unusual place "intellectuals" serve in Juche ideology (though if you read carefully it's already clear that this comes from the legitimacy of the March 1st movement in Korean history and intellectuals have no real influence on North Korea or even exist as a class of intelligentsia).

In general, the only difference between the Trotskyist definition of state capitalism and the 'Maoist' one, going beyond superficial analysis of words, is that North Korea never had a cultural revolution ala China. This leads to some unfortunate consequences though since by the same definition China was not socialist until the cultural revolution, and giving it a little time to develop into more than big character posters and assuming it ended in 1971, China was only socialist for at most 3 years. This is necessarily so since unlike the USSR, which Mao gave a blessing to as being divided by the death of Stalin into socialist and state capitalist, North Korea had no such moment to divide between 'revisionism' and 'socialism' (unless you want to claim North Korea was socialist until 1994), therefore:

For Maoists, the regime established on the territory known as North Korea has never been socialist.

Even if you believe this, if China was only socialist for 3 years then the USSR was probably never socialist and was surely not socialist when Lenin was alive. Obviously every other country is immediately excluded. Go deep enough and it's even difficult to justify the cultural revolution as socialist since Mao specifically defended the party as mostly good and opposed any claim that China was social-imperialist or state-capitalist. This is what has actually happened and leads to the absurd claim by Gonzalo that maoism only began after Mao was dead and has never actually gained state power or replicated the cultural revolution (Nepal, the one what won, was immediately abandoned as revisionist), leading the utterly generic parts of Mao's thoughts like 'people's war' and the 'mass line' as 'universally significant'.

Also if you're familiar, this is nothing new. Althusser faced the same problem attempting to reread Marx through Maoism, discarding more and more of Marx as 'non-Marxist' until only Critique of the Gotha Programme was the only work left that was Marxist (until Marxism was entirely abandoned by Althusser and his followers for variations of the "undercurrent of the materialism of the encounter" which ironically in the hands of Badiou and others has no relation to materialism at all). In general, I think Badiou's description of maoism in France applies to the United States (or Canada) as well:

I believe there have been three different interpretations of Maoism in France. The first, and the oldest, was that, contrary to the USSR under Khrushchev, China held on to an original hardline Stalinism—and that the abandonment of Stalinism would lead sooner or later to a general dissolution (in which regard they weren’t mistaken). These people started the PCMLF believing they would rebuild a genuine Communist party of class struggle, against the revisionism of the official PCF and the USSR. It was both a dogmatic and a nostalgic interpretation. But it was also the only place where you found old working-class activists—there were young people in all the Maoist groups, but not older ones, nostalgic for the great era of Thorez, the 1950s, when the Party ruled in the factories and housing estates. It was really a conservative interpretation. At the other extreme there was the ultra-left interpretation of the GP, which was almost anarchist: you launched bold attacks, set up stunts, made ‘revolution in the head’, ‘melted into the masses’, always with a very keen eye to the media. The organization was highly centralized—in secret; in public it dissolved itself every five minutes in order to ‘liberate’ the energy of the masses.
As for us, the UCFML, I would say that we were a centre-left organization, in the sense always advocated by Mao, who described himself as a ‘centrist’.

There were three essential points of Maoist provenance that we practised: the first was that you always had to link up with the people, that politics for intellectuals was a journey into society and not a discussion in a closed room. Political work was defined as work in factories, housing estates, hostels. It was always a matter of setting up political organizations in the midst of people’s actual life. The second was that you should not take part in the institutions of the bourgeois state: we were against the traditional trade unions and the electoral mechanism. No infiltration of the so-called workers’ bureaucracies, no participation in elections; that distinguished us radically from the Trotskyists. The third point was that we should be in no hurry to call ourselves a party, to take up old forms of organization; we had to remain very close to actual political processes. As a result of all this, we found ourselves sharply opposed to the two other main currents. Our founding pamphlet attacked both the PCMLF on the right and the GP ‘on the left’. A struggle on two fronts...

Alain Badiou: Yes, and me too, if I hadn’t been put off early on by the element of flagrant posturing—boasting of things that didn’t really exist—and a kind of hystericization of activism, which I sensed very quickly would not stay the course. For my part, I made a permanent commitment, it wasn’t a youthful prank. Theirs was an adventurist and fallacious style of action, but one that was exciting at the same time, a politics that was also a fashion, its personal roots in actual fact not very deep—all this, in the GP, made possible those spectacular reversals that we have now seen.

https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/badiou-on-different-streams-within-french-maoism/

That last paragraph sounds exactly like the PCP-RCP and the Red Guards Austin. Obviously you need to read that article with the understanding that Badiou is going to portray himself in the best possible light and that I am happy to be called a "conservative" by him for defending Stalin in 2017 (though in 1968 the charge probably did describe a serious flaw).

As for myself, as I just implied, I think that form of Maoist adventurism, whether in China or in the West, was absolutely necessary. Despite Althusser's ultimate degeneration, I sympathize with his ideological project more than any other Marxist current and still see the GPCR as something significant which is not the case in North Korea. However, I think that form of adventurism has not changed since 1968 and has degenerated into a pure disavowal of reality. What is there to be gained by claiming that Cuba and North Korea are revisionist when the 'anti-revisionist' states not only don't exist, but became even more capitalistic than the states they were criticizing? It's possible it's theoretically correct and will appear as such over the long arc of history but I highly doubt it, the actual 'innovations' of the cultural revolution have almost no place in this discourse compared to the symbolic function of a very short period of time. Despite calling for North Korea to have independent political forms, they are careful to not say 'mass organizations' because those particularly had both the army and the party as part of the '3-in-1' combination, the so-called foundation of revisionism in North Korea.

Pinpointing the material cause of North Korean revisionism is difficult (and I consider revisionism to still be socialism), I would imagine it is related to the particular history of Korean communism (remember that while Kim Il-sung's guerrillas were communists, the had basically no connection the the communist party which was purged from power in 1956 after uneasy coexistence with other factions that emerged from the war) and the broader history of anti-Japanese nationalism (hence the unusual multi-party system in North Korea and the particular reverence for individual acts of heroism such as An Jung-gung, Kim Gu, Yu un-hyong and in the South Jeon Tae-il). That's a historical argument but not a materialist one, and ultimately I would imagine the 'revisionism' of North Korea is related to their extreme economic isolationism which set a ceiling on development. Though this has some relation to Trotsky's claim that degeneration came from a scarcity of resources and leads to some odd paths, such as considering Albanian 'self-reliance' and North Korea 'juche' nearly identical despite normally being seen as opposite ends of the revisionism spectrum. Ultimately I'm not so concerned with understanding North Korean revisionism, which seems pretty stable, as I am with the 'flagrant posturing' I see among Maoists and anti-revisionists which will not survive the 'youthful pranks' that the internet only amplifies since Badiou's day.

blinkandwheeze posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

This is what has actually happened and leads to the absurd claim by Gonzalo that maoism only began after Mao was dead and has never actually gained state power or replicated the cultural revolution

This is not an "absurd claim," it's a completely uncontroversial one held by practically every single existing maoist party. no marxist-leninist party called themselves maoists or advocated for maoism until 1980 or so. it is true that the discontinuity of mao tse-tung thought and maoism is exaggerated by adherents in the west but gonzalo is not guilty of this. it's simply an evident truth that mao tse-tung thought was developed into maoism by the international communist movement in the years following mao's death. these were identical in content but maoism was advanced as a more sophisticated formalisation of such to allow more precise theoretical understanding

it's fine colloquially or for the purposes of shorthand to refer to movements prior to this shift "maoist" but it's still anachronous. the usage you are decrying as absurd is the historically correct one

there's a difference between claiming that 'maoism' is something which synthesized the Chinese experience and the life and thought of Mao (similar to Stalin codifying 'Marxism-Leninism') and claiming that maoism is something entirely separate from China and Mao himself. you may not think that but to me it's the same thing since the theoretical 'advance' of maoism is the cultural revolution. if that's the case then what exactly makes any 'maoism' past that moment new at all? the other things that are upheld are either incorrect: the theories of social-imperialism and state capitalism or already existed in the Marxist-Leninist tradition: the mass line, people's war, class struggle continues under socialism. to me it seems like these groups are maoist because it was a significant policy at the time to uphold the cultural revolution while it was occuring. but I have no idea what the ideology is supposed to mean today and further many of the ideas about revisionism which could at least be justified at the time are downright reactionary today (such as that RCP article).

babyhueypnewton posted:

there's a difference between claiming that 'maoism' is something which synthesized the Chinese experience and the life and thought of Mao (similar to Stalin codifying 'Marxism-Leninism') and claiming that maoism is something entirely separate from China and Mao himself.

what do you mean by "entirely seperate"? it is of course not the case that the chinese experience is entirely seperate from maoism because the latter was developed through the study of mao and his revolution. but it is true that the development of mao tse-tung though within china itself was relatively minor - this never happened beyond a brief period of left political outlets in a few years of the cultural revolution. most of the codification of these principles occurred outside china.

there was no "chinese stalin" to codify mao tse-tung thought within china itself and such attempts were only embryonic

babyhueypnewton posted:

you may not think that but to me it's the same thing since the theoretical 'advance' of maoism is the cultural revolution. if that's the case then what exactly makes any 'maoism' past that moment new at all?

you are reading the western, or your own, ultraleft line on the gpcr into that of maoists. while the gpcr is recognised as a higher and necessary development of socialism this has never been insisted as a uniquely determinate concept in delineating maoism. national democracy, protracted people's war and analysis of semi-colonialism and the peasantry are generally granted more attention because they are more relevant to the immediate concerns of revolutionary movements in the developing world

babyhueypnewton posted:

the other things that are upheld are either incorrect: the theories of social-imperialism and state capitalism

maoists do not use the concept of "state capitalism" and social-imperialism is and was correct

babyhueypnewton posted:

or already existed in the Marxist-Leninist tradition: the mass line, people's war, class struggle continues under socialism.

the equivalent to this is suggesting that marxism-leninism is redundant because its principles were already existent in the marxist tradition. yes, these concepts were elaborated in the practical experiences of marxist revolutionary politics - mao tse-tung thought and maoism constituted their codification and systematisation

you are being inconsistent here because you already acknowledge the important contribution of stalin in codifying marxism-leninism but believe this does not hold for maoism, for some reason

babyhueypnewton posted:

to me it seems like these groups are maoist because it was a significant policy at the time to uphold the cultural revolution while it was occuring. but I have no idea what the ideology is supposed to mean today and further many of the ideas about revisionism which could at least be justified at the time are downright reactionary today (such as that RCP article).

this is again the issue i have raised repeatedly on these forums to the point that it's getting tired. you are understanding maoism based on making deductions from reading minor western sects instead of taking the time to research what maoists actually forwarded or forward

babyhueypnewton posted:

and objectively there are probably 1000 maoists in total in the west so who really cares what they think?

you say a lot of things after this but i don't think any of them answer this question substantially. maoism in the developed world has been repeatedly the purview of petit-bourgeois adventurists attracted to it primarily because of aesthetic concerns. even if i believe maoism is ultimately correct being humble, listening to and building links with the masses are far more important than engaging with these debates for most parties in the developed world

babyhueypnewton posted:

and this is particularly relevant since maoism, at least for a time, had pretensions of an international movement and actually listened to what the RCP-USA had to say to the CP-Nepal.

the rcp-usa only had any significant influence in the international communist movement to the extent that held the same political line as maoists internationally. their alienation from maoism was likely the most significant factor in the dissolution of the rim and the rise of more focused international groups such as the ccomposa. avakianite revisionism had been dismissed long before prachanda

blinkandwheeze posted:

social-imperialism is and was correct

actually it's revisionist complete nonsense that mao made up to try and justify allying china with the united states. that's why maoist foreign policy is all extremely CIA shit like helping women-hating religious extremists perform a counterrevolution in Afghanistan

Horselord posted:

ah yes, Khrushchev, an extremely normal soviet leader

Ok so mao's accusations of soviet social-imperialism were wrong, except when regarding the person he accused of social-imperialism

blinkandwheeze posted:

Ok so mao's accusations of soviet social-imperialism were wrong, except when regarding the person he accused of social-imperialism

if maoist conception of social imperialism was strictly that you'd have a point. but it could rain and maoists would call it social-imperialism, which is why maoists and the cia were such good friends with the mujahideen and Khmer rouge

blinkandwheeze posted:

in any case, the revisionist ussr exported loan capital in the millions to developing nations at market interest rates in the guise of foreign aid. such loans were also double bound and contractually could only be spent on the acquisition of soviet industrial capital which were provided at significantly higher rates than market competitors.

the revisionist ussr held no illusion about the motivation behind such export, as khruschev in 1958 stated that the financing of the aswan high dam was determined by whether it was a "profitable business transaction," whether they could be sure "the Egyptians could repay us in regular deliveries of their best long-fibre cotton, rice and other goods"

this is entirely consistent with lenin's understanding of imperialism. the export of loan capital is the export of capital in an imperialist sense. as in the "usury imperialism" lenin identified in france. this is the accumulation of surplus value from developing nations procured through the export of financial capital

here's an article i uploaded that i recommend people read

this is an interesting post but i want to tease out a couple of points that bother me.

the first is that i think your interpretation of USSR motives for these loans is harsher than the article supports. the khrushchev quote, for instance - you've plucked out the bits that admittedly sound damning and pretended the rest isn't there. and i say that as someone who is not exactly his biggest fan. in short, i think the situation was more nuanced than you interpret it to have been.

the second is that i am not sure lenin's idea of 'usury capitalism' was really developed enough to be relied upon as a kind of formula (export of loan capital = imperialism). this is too theoretically crude.

to be clear i am not arguing that the USSR in this period was not 'social imperialist' as i don't feel i know enough about the argument, i'm just raising issues i have with the post because i find the topic interesting, and i think it deserves more careful analysis

your_not_aleksandr posted:

Something like the worm from Richard Scarry??

let me know if this is ok. fyi i am reaching the outer limits of my abilities with mspaint