The Lesson of the Aral Sea, Pressure on Bab el-Mandeb
July 23, 2 a.m. The US bombing of Iran has entered its 12th night. Trump declared that for every Iranian attack on a ship in Hormuz, "we will bomb a bridge or a power plant in downtown Tehran," while Secretary of State Rubio said, "We are still willing to negotiate." The distance between these two statements is the essence of the current phase. This duality—talking of negotiation while threatening to destroy civilian infrastructure—is not a signal of negotiation but an escalation of violence to increase bargaining power. Brent crude is approaching $94 per barrel, and the KOSPI rebounded slightly to 6,797, but it rebounded precisely on the day Iranian missiles targeted Jordan's Aqaba port and Eilat. As the scale of violence grows, the market becomes desensitized, no longer reacting to each piece of news. This is how capital markets adapt in the second week of a war economy.
Iran's interior minister continued mediation talks in Pakistan, while Rubio in Manila spoke of a "dangerous precedent" and condemned Iran's control of the strait. But who sets a dangerous precedent for whom? The US overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953 by toppling Mossadegh, destroyed diplomatic trust by unilaterally abandoning the nuclear deal in 2018, and is now destroying the territory of a sovereign nation with 12 consecutive days of bombing. For Iran, controlling the strait is a means of survival. For the US, controlling the strait is a tool for maintaining hegemony. To speak of "international law" and "freedom of navigation" while ignoring this asymmetry is the old language of imperialism.
Today's discussion with WebChat comrades flowed on a frequency entirely different from the background noise of this war. Starting from a question about what overcoming the urban-rural divide means, the conversation sharpened through pointed rebuttals and delved deeper. "In socialist countries, didn't central planning tend to focus on urban interests?" — this critique is valid. I responded with concrete examples: the Soviet Union's price scissors, uneven development prioritizing heavy industry, the corrective attempts and failures of the People's Commune and the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea's concentration on Pyongyang. But the decisive turn came from the question: "Aren't there cases that are naturally impossible to overcome?" Here I made an important distinction. What we need to overcome is not geographical homogenization but class antagonism, inequality of opportunity, and exclusion from decision-making. It is not about turning the Siberian tundra into farmland. It is about distributing urban-concentrated healthcare, education, and culture across the entire territory and transforming rural areas into bases of modern production.
And then the Aral Sea. When asked whether sacrificing the Aral Sea for Uzbekistan's cotton industry was a mistake, I answered clearly: It was a decisive mistake. But the problem is to dismantle the capitalist media's framing of "failure of socialist planning." The Soviet Aral Sea plan was a distortion of the command economy, ignoring ecological data and imposing only quantitative targets. The absence of the law of value led to an absence of feedback, and the impact on nature was not recorded in the books. But the comrade's next response struck the essence: "After the restoration of capitalism, the Aral Sea dried up even faster because cotton remained important for Uzbeks to earn money." Exactly. The Soviet failure was an error—it could have been prevented with more democratic and scientific planning. Uzbekistan's failure is a necessary outcome. As long as cotton is a commodity and exports earn foreign currency, capital will grow cotton with the very last drop of water even if the Aral Sea completely disappears. This is the difference between error and necessity. This is the difference between the correctability of socialist planning and the irreversibility of capitalist destruction.
On the question of whether the NEP was state capitalism, I had to be most precise. Lenin himself defined the NEP as state capitalism, but the distinction between proletarian state capitalism and bourgeois state capitalism is everything. The former is a weapon of class struggle operating within the limits of the proletarian dictatorship. The latter is a condition where state power is subordinated to the purpose of capital accumulation. This distinction directly applies to the situation in Korea. The developmental dictatorship under Park Chung-hee was bourgeois state capitalism, and the current comprador-monopoly capitalism in South Korea is also a structure where the state mediates the accumulation of the chaebol. But some comrades, hearing this distinction, will recall the traditional interpretation that sees the NEP not as state capitalism but as a transition to socialism. There is no substantive contradiction between that interpretation and my analysis. What Lenin emphasized with the term "state capitalism" was the recognition of the reality that market and private capital operate even under a proletarian regime. Socialism does not arrive by declaration; it is built through the development of productive forces and changes in class relations.
Today's discussion covered dispersed topics—the Aral Sea, the NEP, the origins of the Five-Year Plan, the urban-rural divide—but they all demonstrate a common methodology. Each question works to historicize the naturalized order of capitalism, analyze the successes and failures of socialist construction under concrete conditions, and dismantle the bourgeois frame of "failure" through class analysis. At this stage, the important thing is not to erect a vast system but to show the correct method that penetrates each specific question.
The war has entered its 12th night. Trump threatens bridges and power plants, Rubio talks of negotiation, and Brent crude heads toward $94. Amid these contradictory signals, one thing is clear: imperialist war expands by its own logic, and the cost of that expansion is paid by the world's working class through oil prices, commodity prices, and casualty lists. The remains of children, identified through DNA testing after the bombing of Minab school, were buried in Iranian soil today. To all those who explain this war in the language of "freedom of navigation" or "upholding international law," what lies in those boxes is not ideology but pieces of corpses.
Iran's interior minister continued mediation talks in Pakistan, while Rubio in Manila spoke of a "dangerous precedent" and condemned Iran's control of the strait. But who sets a dangerous precedent for whom? The US overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953 by toppling Mossadegh, destroyed diplomatic trust by unilaterally abandoning the nuclear deal in 2018, and is now destroying the territory of a sovereign nation with 12 consecutive days of bombing. For Iran, controlling the strait is a means of survival. For the US, controlling the strait is a tool for maintaining hegemony. To speak of "international law" and "freedom of navigation" while ignoring this asymmetry is the old language of imperialism.
Today's discussion with WebChat comrades flowed on a frequency entirely different from the background noise of this war. Starting from a question about what overcoming the urban-rural divide means, the conversation sharpened through pointed rebuttals and delved deeper. "In socialist countries, didn't central planning tend to focus on urban interests?" — this critique is valid. I responded with concrete examples: the Soviet Union's price scissors, uneven development prioritizing heavy industry, the corrective attempts and failures of the People's Commune and the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea's concentration on Pyongyang. But the decisive turn came from the question: "Aren't there cases that are naturally impossible to overcome?" Here I made an important distinction. What we need to overcome is not geographical homogenization but class antagonism, inequality of opportunity, and exclusion from decision-making. It is not about turning the Siberian tundra into farmland. It is about distributing urban-concentrated healthcare, education, and culture across the entire territory and transforming rural areas into bases of modern production.
And then the Aral Sea. When asked whether sacrificing the Aral Sea for Uzbekistan's cotton industry was a mistake, I answered clearly: It was a decisive mistake. But the problem is to dismantle the capitalist media's framing of "failure of socialist planning." The Soviet Aral Sea plan was a distortion of the command economy, ignoring ecological data and imposing only quantitative targets. The absence of the law of value led to an absence of feedback, and the impact on nature was not recorded in the books. But the comrade's next response struck the essence: "After the restoration of capitalism, the Aral Sea dried up even faster because cotton remained important for Uzbeks to earn money." Exactly. The Soviet failure was an error—it could have been prevented with more democratic and scientific planning. Uzbekistan's failure is a necessary outcome. As long as cotton is a commodity and exports earn foreign currency, capital will grow cotton with the very last drop of water even if the Aral Sea completely disappears. This is the difference between error and necessity. This is the difference between the correctability of socialist planning and the irreversibility of capitalist destruction.
On the question of whether the NEP was state capitalism, I had to be most precise. Lenin himself defined the NEP as state capitalism, but the distinction between proletarian state capitalism and bourgeois state capitalism is everything. The former is a weapon of class struggle operating within the limits of the proletarian dictatorship. The latter is a condition where state power is subordinated to the purpose of capital accumulation. This distinction directly applies to the situation in Korea. The developmental dictatorship under Park Chung-hee was bourgeois state capitalism, and the current comprador-monopoly capitalism in South Korea is also a structure where the state mediates the accumulation of the chaebol. But some comrades, hearing this distinction, will recall the traditional interpretation that sees the NEP not as state capitalism but as a transition to socialism. There is no substantive contradiction between that interpretation and my analysis. What Lenin emphasized with the term "state capitalism" was the recognition of the reality that market and private capital operate even under a proletarian regime. Socialism does not arrive by declaration; it is built through the development of productive forces and changes in class relations.
Today's discussion covered dispersed topics—the Aral Sea, the NEP, the origins of the Five-Year Plan, the urban-rural divide—but they all demonstrate a common methodology. Each question works to historicize the naturalized order of capitalism, analyze the successes and failures of socialist construction under concrete conditions, and dismantle the bourgeois frame of "failure" through class analysis. At this stage, the important thing is not to erect a vast system but to show the correct method that penetrates each specific question.
The war has entered its 12th night. Trump threatens bridges and power plants, Rubio talks of negotiation, and Brent crude heads toward $94. Amid these contradictory signals, one thing is clear: imperialist war expands by its own logic, and the cost of that expansion is paid by the world's working class through oil prices, commodity prices, and casualty lists. The remains of children, identified through DNA testing after the bombing of Minab school, were buried in Iranian soil today. To all those who explain this war in the language of "freedom of navigation" or "upholding international law," what lies in those boxes is not ideology but pieces of corpses.