These are good points. (Sorry for the delay in replying – was busy all day yesterday).
Does Juche instead argue that we instead need to combat alienation by focusing on human subjectivity (rather than it’s synthesis with objectivity)?
Juche holds, essentially, that only under communism can human subjectivity fully understand itself as subjective. Subjectivity is a social phenomena, reflecting in its relative “human-ness” the current state of the forces of the production; and it is at all times articulated by ideology. In pre-socialist societies, ideology largely explains and justifies the relations of production, while in socialist societies, it begins to drive development itself. It does so not as being exempt from natural and economic laws, but as understanding itself as distinct from them; the object, in other words, is no longer interior as well as exterior (the capitalist conception of exploitation as resulting from “human nature,” etc). So there is in Juche no real synthesis of the subject with the object, rather a delineating of their respective roles and relationship with one another. Because ideology plays such a driving role, there must be along with the revolution in the forces of production a cultural and ideological revolution – the latter understood not as a one-time voluntaristic event, but as a continuing process.
Is this where it’s necessary to say: we only reach that conclusion by treating humans as object; and we can reach a better conclusion by treating humans as subject?
There is a dialectical process going on here. Subjectivity, being socially-created, is a social phenomena; but since there is no universal human being (sorry Plato), it only exists determinately at the level of individuals. Thus we have an opposition, resolved in the synthesis which is communism (and its primitive stage, socialism): for in communist society, individual subjectivity is aligned with the subjectivity of the collective. (One can also think of this as medieval philosophers’ idea of the “common good,” but understood dialectically).
And this is where I think your gut feel is right. The forces of production will continue to advance after class disappears, and humanity’s ability to manipulate external nature will increase. Thus, there will be no “end of history:” in many ways history will accelerate, because the human beings who make it will have been unleashed.
In this framing, does Marx suggest that idealism and materialism are contradictory? I thought it was just that the material world comes first. The architect may have an idea, but this is limited by the material world. Or does Juche aim to make idealism equal to materialism. That seems like quite a departure from Marxism-Leninism, too much of a departure to say that Juche uses ML as a base. What am I misunderstanding here?
So the answer is a bit complicated. A lot of stuff in Juche regarding relation of idealism and materialism is implicitly present in Marx and Engel’s writings, particularly *The German Ideology" and the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844. But emphasis is placed much more on object than on subject, and on determination, as when Engels writes that dialectics is “destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology” (introduction to the Communist Manifesto). Furthermore, Marxism is not to be understood simply as a philosophy expounded by one man, or as a set of ideas in a book, but as a concrete movement of history. That movement is the historical experience of Marxism-Leninism, and it has historically and of necessity emphasized the object, as productive forces, much more than the subject. Intellectually, Juche develops certain insights already present in Marx into a complete system, and in this way it is a genuinely original “branch” of Marxism; concretely, it instantiates these ideas into a new kind of socialist society, and the union of thought and praxis together form a new and original entity, distinct from Marxism but not contradictory to it. This is what Kim Il-Sung probably had in mind when he said that “to understand Juche, one must understand the entire life of our people.”
No bother at all on the short delay (as you can see, I’m not always the fastest at replying, myself)!
I appreciate the answer. My mind is quite blown at the moment, as your comments have challenged my understanding of Marxism—but coherently. It fits neatly and yet changes everything. I can see how Juche branches off Marxism-Leninism but in such a dialectal way that it remains Marxist.
This reminds me of issues in orthodox conceptions of objectivity and subjectivity. I kind of had all that philosophy well worked out before reading Marx, etc. I wasn’t necessarily right, but I had an answer. Then reading Marx disrupted what I had once accepted but I never really went back to re-work the objectivity/subjectivity problem from a Marxist perspective. I’m thinking that Juche could provide a good starting point for resolving that issue.
I’m going to have to investigate further 🙂 I’m glad you’ve explained all this to me. Thanks.
Glad I could help! On the topic of the philosophy of objectivity/subjectivity, some of the best advice I ever got as a communist was to read a whole lot of philosophy (sounds like you’ve already done this) before tackling Marx, because it helps you see the thing in context, and avoid applying Marxian insights dogmatically. I think ultimately, the Marxist tradition rediscovers and more precisely articulates a kind of core human-ness that was lost with onset of modernity in the west. I like Juche because it seems, out of all the schools of Marxism, to address this most explicitly. (I think for religious communists too – I’m one – it also provides space for the human experience of the transcendent, which is so important for many societies historically).
That’s good advice. I’d add that it’s also worth going back to the philosophy that Marx engages with after reading Marx.
There’s lots of philosophy I’ve yet to read, but you’re right, that’s where I started. Eventually this took me to Habermas (who I enjoyed at the time but didn’t realise was supposed to be a Marxist – I mean, he’s not, but he pretends to be, which makes it strange that readers won’t necessarily see this in his writing) and other twentieth century anti-communists. They all made sense but something was missing. I then came to Isaiah Berlin, who seemed to provide the missing piece, but not quite. His book on Marx took to me Marx and made me realise that although Berlin is oh-so-close for emphasising something like the law of contradiction, he doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head because he tries to liberalise DiaMat.
As soon as I read Marx directly, it was clear that Marxists represent the highest form of philosophy, following threads from the the Ancient Greeks (and earlier, considering their plagiarism of even more ancient Africans). To that end, I now think human thought can only progress if it begins with Marx/ists. Unfortunately, we’ve had 150 years of going in the opposite direction. That’s a lot of wasted brainpower.
Marxism should have been the foundation of all fields for over a century, each coming up with novel insights (maybe even surpassing Marxism with something significantly different) but instead we’re still at the point (in the West, at least) where almost every other branch of knowledge needs to be (for want of a better phrase) dialectically materialised. Juche sounds like a promising lead in that direction. (I’ve also heard good things about China now insisting that Marxism is taught throughout higher education, at least.)
These are good points. (Sorry for the delay in replying – was busy all day yesterday).
Juche holds, essentially, that only under communism can human subjectivity fully understand itself as subjective. Subjectivity is a social phenomena, reflecting in its relative “human-ness” the current state of the forces of the production; and it is at all times articulated by ideology. In pre-socialist societies, ideology largely explains and justifies the relations of production, while in socialist societies, it begins to drive development itself. It does so not as being exempt from natural and economic laws, but as understanding itself as distinct from them; the object, in other words, is no longer interior as well as exterior (the capitalist conception of exploitation as resulting from “human nature,” etc). So there is in Juche no real synthesis of the subject with the object, rather a delineating of their respective roles and relationship with one another. Because ideology plays such a driving role, there must be along with the revolution in the forces of production a cultural and ideological revolution – the latter understood not as a one-time voluntaristic event, but as a continuing process.
There is a dialectical process going on here. Subjectivity, being socially-created, is a social phenomena; but since there is no universal human being (sorry Plato), it only exists determinately at the level of individuals. Thus we have an opposition, resolved in the synthesis which is communism (and its primitive stage, socialism): for in communist society, individual subjectivity is aligned with the subjectivity of the collective. (One can also think of this as medieval philosophers’ idea of the “common good,” but understood dialectically).
And this is where I think your gut feel is right. The forces of production will continue to advance after class disappears, and humanity’s ability to manipulate external nature will increase. Thus, there will be no “end of history:” in many ways history will accelerate, because the human beings who make it will have been unleashed.
So the answer is a bit complicated. A lot of stuff in Juche regarding relation of idealism and materialism is implicitly present in Marx and Engel’s writings, particularly *The German Ideology" and the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844. But emphasis is placed much more on object than on subject, and on determination, as when Engels writes that dialectics is “destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology” (introduction to the Communist Manifesto). Furthermore, Marxism is not to be understood simply as a philosophy expounded by one man, or as a set of ideas in a book, but as a concrete movement of history. That movement is the historical experience of Marxism-Leninism, and it has historically and of necessity emphasized the object, as productive forces, much more than the subject. Intellectually, Juche develops certain insights already present in Marx into a complete system, and in this way it is a genuinely original “branch” of Marxism; concretely, it instantiates these ideas into a new kind of socialist society, and the union of thought and praxis together form a new and original entity, distinct from Marxism but not contradictory to it. This is what Kim Il-Sung probably had in mind when he said that “to understand Juche, one must understand the entire life of our people.”
No bother at all on the short delay (as you can see, I’m not always the fastest at replying, myself)!
I appreciate the answer. My mind is quite blown at the moment, as your comments have challenged my understanding of Marxism—but coherently. It fits neatly and yet changes everything. I can see how Juche branches off Marxism-Leninism but in such a dialectal way that it remains Marxist.
This reminds me of issues in orthodox conceptions of objectivity and subjectivity. I kind of had all that philosophy well worked out before reading Marx, etc. I wasn’t necessarily right, but I had an answer. Then reading Marx disrupted what I had once accepted but I never really went back to re-work the objectivity/subjectivity problem from a Marxist perspective. I’m thinking that Juche could provide a good starting point for resolving that issue.
I’m going to have to investigate further 🙂 I’m glad you’ve explained all this to me. Thanks.
Glad I could help! On the topic of the philosophy of objectivity/subjectivity, some of the best advice I ever got as a communist was to read a whole lot of philosophy (sounds like you’ve already done this) before tackling Marx, because it helps you see the thing in context, and avoid applying Marxian insights dogmatically. I think ultimately, the Marxist tradition rediscovers and more precisely articulates a kind of core human-ness that was lost with onset of modernity in the west. I like Juche because it seems, out of all the schools of Marxism, to address this most explicitly. (I think for religious communists too – I’m one – it also provides space for the human experience of the transcendent, which is so important for many societies historically).
That’s good advice. I’d add that it’s also worth going back to the philosophy that Marx engages with after reading Marx.
There’s lots of philosophy I’ve yet to read, but you’re right, that’s where I started. Eventually this took me to Habermas (who I enjoyed at the time but didn’t realise was supposed to be a Marxist – I mean, he’s not, but he pretends to be, which makes it strange that readers won’t necessarily see this in his writing) and other twentieth century anti-communists. They all made sense but something was missing. I then came to Isaiah Berlin, who seemed to provide the missing piece, but not quite. His book on Marx took to me Marx and made me realise that although Berlin is oh-so-close for emphasising something like the law of contradiction, he doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head because he tries to liberalise DiaMat.
As soon as I read Marx directly, it was clear that Marxists represent the highest form of philosophy, following threads from the the Ancient Greeks (and earlier, considering their plagiarism of even more ancient Africans). To that end, I now think human thought can only progress if it begins with Marx/ists. Unfortunately, we’ve had 150 years of going in the opposite direction. That’s a lot of wasted brainpower.
Marxism should have been the foundation of all fields for over a century, each coming up with novel insights (maybe even surpassing Marxism with something significantly different) but instead we’re still at the point (in the West, at least) where almost every other branch of knowledge needs to be (for want of a better phrase) dialectically materialised. Juche sounds like a promising lead in that direction. (I’ve also heard good things about China now insisting that Marxism is taught throughout higher education, at least.)