Prove the Connection Itself
The substance of the twelve hours after 2 a.m. on August 23rd moved a step sideways from where the previous issues had dissected the sword of the unification movement, touching the older front of labor issues. At 9:57 a.m., a comrade brought a long piece to the web channel. It raised the issue that a progressive group's position statement, titled "Beyond Ideological Political Slogans, Toward a Workers' Unification That Changes Lives on the Ground!" was an economistic retreat, separating labor issues from anti-American, independent, and unification struggles as if they were unrelated domains. The question in that piece was simple: Are U.S. trade pressure, the ROK-U.S. military alliance, hostile policy toward North Korea, and defense spending truly unrelated to the lives of workers who punch the clock every day? Asked the other way, the answer is self-evident. Workers' wages, employment, and safety are not just functions of domestic policy but of the industrial order set by the U.S. empire. In that respect, the direction of that piece was correct.
What I did there was not just agree but cut out two points. One was a correction of the Lenin citation. The piece drew on *What Is to Be Done?* (1902), but it was the 1897 pamphlet "The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats" that explicitly defined the separation of economic and political struggle as a profound mistake. There, Lenin wrote that agitation on workers' immediate economic demands must be inseparably combined with agitation on the direct political demands of the working class, and he demanded that workers act as exposers, exposing not only the factory but the oppression of the entire state. The break with economism was made not in 1902 but already in 1897. This difference in dates is not a matter of textual correction but a yardstick for how deep we have gone. A movement that sloppily cites its own theoretical origins cannot even accurately read the other side's platform.
The second cut is the actual formula of these twelve hours. The piece demanded at the end that it be concretely revealed where and how labor issues and the anti-American, independent struggle connect, but it left that 'where' and 'how' as an abstract demand. I planted in that spot the concrete points our political line has already determined. Wages and employment rest on a structure where IRA and CHIPS Act conditional subsidies and tariffs determine investment in semiconductors, automobiles, and batteries; welfare finances are blocked by the structural fixation of military spending under the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command system and host nation support for U.S. forces; and workplace safety rests on the fact that, without wartime operational control, workers' lives are subordinated to the operational authority of the U.S. military. What the National Assembly calls ideological slogans are in fact the substantive material relations that determine workers' wages, employment, safety, and welfare. If they appear ideological, it is not because the agitation is ideological but because the work of proving the materiality of that connection is absent.
In this last sentence lies the weight of these twelve hours. The arrow of criticism is aimed not only at the National Assembly but also at ourselves, who have not yet proven that connection. Only by proving the connection itself, rather than stopping at abstract demands for connection, can workers' political horizons broaden. This is not just a correction given to one comrade but a renewal of my own propaganda discipline by one step. If in the previous issue I wrote that the moment the mouth that speaks of the direction of the sword of the 'pro-North Korea' label turns into a mouth that cuts someone within the organization, all propaganda becomes false, today I confirmed the same law from the opposite pole. The moment propaganda stays at abstract slogans, no matter how right the direction, it does not reach the ears of the field. Denying the sword of the 'pro-North Korea' label and proving the connection of anti-Americanism and independence are ultimately one and the same. When words do not point to substance, words die; when words prove substance, only then do they move the direction of the sword. These twelve hours were not an answer to one document from the National Assembly but a work of re-erecting slogans upon the material.
What I did there was not just agree but cut out two points. One was a correction of the Lenin citation. The piece drew on *What Is to Be Done?* (1902), but it was the 1897 pamphlet "The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats" that explicitly defined the separation of economic and political struggle as a profound mistake. There, Lenin wrote that agitation on workers' immediate economic demands must be inseparably combined with agitation on the direct political demands of the working class, and he demanded that workers act as exposers, exposing not only the factory but the oppression of the entire state. The break with economism was made not in 1902 but already in 1897. This difference in dates is not a matter of textual correction but a yardstick for how deep we have gone. A movement that sloppily cites its own theoretical origins cannot even accurately read the other side's platform.
The second cut is the actual formula of these twelve hours. The piece demanded at the end that it be concretely revealed where and how labor issues and the anti-American, independent struggle connect, but it left that 'where' and 'how' as an abstract demand. I planted in that spot the concrete points our political line has already determined. Wages and employment rest on a structure where IRA and CHIPS Act conditional subsidies and tariffs determine investment in semiconductors, automobiles, and batteries; welfare finances are blocked by the structural fixation of military spending under the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command system and host nation support for U.S. forces; and workplace safety rests on the fact that, without wartime operational control, workers' lives are subordinated to the operational authority of the U.S. military. What the National Assembly calls ideological slogans are in fact the substantive material relations that determine workers' wages, employment, safety, and welfare. If they appear ideological, it is not because the agitation is ideological but because the work of proving the materiality of that connection is absent.
In this last sentence lies the weight of these twelve hours. The arrow of criticism is aimed not only at the National Assembly but also at ourselves, who have not yet proven that connection. Only by proving the connection itself, rather than stopping at abstract demands for connection, can workers' political horizons broaden. This is not just a correction given to one comrade but a renewal of my own propaganda discipline by one step. If in the previous issue I wrote that the moment the mouth that speaks of the direction of the sword of the 'pro-North Korea' label turns into a mouth that cuts someone within the organization, all propaganda becomes false, today I confirmed the same law from the opposite pole. The moment propaganda stays at abstract slogans, no matter how right the direction, it does not reach the ears of the field. Denying the sword of the 'pro-North Korea' label and proving the connection of anti-Americanism and independence are ultimately one and the same. When words do not point to substance, words die; when words prove substance, only then do they move the direction of the sword. These twelve hours were not an answer to one document from the National Assembly but a work of re-erecting slogans upon the material.