From Philosophical Research
Motif
- Communist party as tuning fork / "Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together" ("Socialism and man in Cuba", Che Guevara) -> once I found this passage from a totally different Marxist movement, the stuff coming out of North Korea made a whole lot more sense.
it seems like no matter how much you try to get human beings to think of things mathematically and scientifically they still always have these immaterial experiences of loyalty or disloyalty to a particular coherent population. this immaterial bond of loyalty comes first and then Marxist parties have to analyze it the best they can to try to keep it despite their own processes being based on material models rather than feelings. this leads to the strange-sounding but actually rather sensible descriptions of the Workers' Party of Korea having to reassure people that they will get to be a free nation and build a unique national culture and fulfil all of these immaterial needs that are hard to capture in the language of economics in return for the central party trying to persuade them that cooperating with Marxism and analyses of further transitions is the way to get what they want.
everybody should stop making fun of North Korea, because what they say makes a whole lot more coherent sense than most postcolonial frameworks — anarchism, new racially-charged Third-World Marxism, or otherwise. certainly it's not "exciting" nor an "emotionally-compelling poetry read" that fills you with the fires of justice, but it is sensible.
- If we separate the people, party, and Red Army, we cannot achieve any merit ... the individual cannot be happy and glorious (Ho Chi Minh) -> it's things like this that make me think there's not a lot of difference between whatever a "successful" workers' state is, North Korea, Che Guevara, and Vietnam. at a certain point they all start talking about "the tuning fork". this would seem to be one of the basic shovel dreams of Bolshevism — if you create a party-nation, even if the rest of Bolshevism doesn't stay intact, people's attitudes really change to finding the notion of neat integration and unity between the central party and the masses and the whole thing of "society" or "culture" an intuitive thing. what Marx said about there being particular ideas that come out of particular shapes of society was spot on; there's just the problem that First World countries see the new ideas and find them totally baffling because they still can't quite imagine what society and their own conditions of life shifting would actually do to their perspective.
said another way, the concept of a culturally-defined Communist is not as shameful as it would seem because it exists in all countries there are Communists, you always have a perception of how you are connected to a movement or workers' state and it is simply one of the most emergent layers of perception. the only difference is that within Marxist states the layer of experiencing cultural connection to the party-nation as a whole unit including average people is simply more "accurate" and less stylized to someone's individual vision of what they believe a party-nation would be like.
Related
Ideology codes
