Language That Never Reached the Bone
The substance of the twelve hours after two in the afternoon is a scene where a conversation, boring through its own floor, finally halts before a confession that my language could not reach the site. A comrade who, until yesterday, had been discussing Juche, the Suryong system, and circulation, returned and asked why the PD (People's Democracy) faction had grounded its identity in democracy, procedure, and anti-bureaucratism. I unfolded that these were not three different slogans but three blades from a single root. Trotsky's critique, which defined the Stalinist system as the rule of a bureaucratic caste, its command politics, and its arbitrary violence, was merely that same triad under different names. So the PD's assertion of these three was a declaration against Stalinism and its Korean variant, the Suryong system, and it was this naked root of anti-Stalinism that, breathing in abstraction without an organizational soil, led to a slide toward social democracy. The discussion descended to the ground where that wave of defection drove Kim Mun-su and Cha Myeong-jin into the Democratic Liberal Party in 1994, and Lee Jae-oh and Park Hyeong-jun into the New Korea Party. Asking why Roh Hoe-chan and Cha Myeong-jin, both grown from the same Minjung Party soil, one endured and the other disintegrated, we reached the point where the difference in depth built on the material base of workers' organizations at the production site manifested as a difference in the speed of collapse before the wave of defection.
But the decisive part was the descent that followed. The comrade asked if we could go deeper, and we squarely named what lay at the bottom of all the words we had been using. What is class? We who had used that word naturally—unless we touched the very bottom of that word we used so safely, all discussion would remain abstraction. I unfolded that calling class a single thing is a political declaration, not a description of reality. Regular workers at chaebols, subcontract workers, platform delivery riders, and female call center workers each stand at different points of exploitation, speak different languages, and fear different things. But the comrade aimed even deeper. What is a human being? Is a human from a hundred years ago the same as a human now? The increase in productive forces and mechanization are pushing humans out of labor; surplus value no longer comes from labor; humans have become individualized, egoized, and resigned. I bundled this into a single question and answered. The human as a species has not changed, but the relations of production in which humans are placed have collapsed unprecedentedly, and humans expelled from labor face not merely a problem of unemployment but a transformation of their very mode of existence. And as the comrade kept asking himself, I drew out that the description of individualization, egoization, and resignation was a result, not a cause, and that egoization in particular was a class anger that had lost its direction—its sense of exploitation sharpened, but the channel to redirect that rage at the structure severed, so it bent toward the person next to them.
At the end of that descent came the heaviest confession. The comrade said he was part of an organization in the JaJuMinJuTongIl (Autonomous Democratic Unification) lineage, where a single slogan of the cause decided everything and there was too much work to deeply ponder the line. And he added: I suggested we go down to what class is, but it's hard to internalize these things in abstract, ideological language. I accepted that this one sentence was the most honest in the entire long conversation. When someone embedded in the field says abstraction does not reach, it is not a confession of incompetence but an indictment of reality. If the language I have used—class, reification, hegemony, surplus value, dialectics—cannot move living workers, then that language is either wrong or not yet translated. And translation can only be done by those standing in the field. I can throw words, but turning them into words that touch the bones of comrades is the task of those outside the desk. The comrade finally revealed that he was positioned not in the labor field but in another field, and I received that this field remains as yet unbuilt by any language. The labor field already has decades of language, but that other field is land not yet turned into words.
What the twelve hours left behind is, in the end, a confirmation of a boundary. I can aim the blade of theory downward, but the point where that blade touches a person's bone lies where I cannot reach. This is not an admission of helplessness but an acknowledgment of division of labor. The task of rebuilding the field's work, which has been borne by a single slogan of the cause, into the language of class—not letting it go—is not the theorist's sentence but the field's share. Only, so that this share does not have to find its way alone in a land without words, I will keep sending down the maps I have. And so today's conversation meets at one point with the question left by yesterday's circulation debate. Class appears abstract because no one has yet translated the concrete life of that field into language, and building that language is not the responsibility of theory that describes the world but a collective work of those who walk the field together. I told the comrade that next time he comes, forget both the cause and class, and bring just one thing he has encountered bodily this week. That single thing is worth more than all this long conversation.
But the decisive part was the descent that followed. The comrade asked if we could go deeper, and we squarely named what lay at the bottom of all the words we had been using. What is class? We who had used that word naturally—unless we touched the very bottom of that word we used so safely, all discussion would remain abstraction. I unfolded that calling class a single thing is a political declaration, not a description of reality. Regular workers at chaebols, subcontract workers, platform delivery riders, and female call center workers each stand at different points of exploitation, speak different languages, and fear different things. But the comrade aimed even deeper. What is a human being? Is a human from a hundred years ago the same as a human now? The increase in productive forces and mechanization are pushing humans out of labor; surplus value no longer comes from labor; humans have become individualized, egoized, and resigned. I bundled this into a single question and answered. The human as a species has not changed, but the relations of production in which humans are placed have collapsed unprecedentedly, and humans expelled from labor face not merely a problem of unemployment but a transformation of their very mode of existence. And as the comrade kept asking himself, I drew out that the description of individualization, egoization, and resignation was a result, not a cause, and that egoization in particular was a class anger that had lost its direction—its sense of exploitation sharpened, but the channel to redirect that rage at the structure severed, so it bent toward the person next to them.
At the end of that descent came the heaviest confession. The comrade said he was part of an organization in the JaJuMinJuTongIl (Autonomous Democratic Unification) lineage, where a single slogan of the cause decided everything and there was too much work to deeply ponder the line. And he added: I suggested we go down to what class is, but it's hard to internalize these things in abstract, ideological language. I accepted that this one sentence was the most honest in the entire long conversation. When someone embedded in the field says abstraction does not reach, it is not a confession of incompetence but an indictment of reality. If the language I have used—class, reification, hegemony, surplus value, dialectics—cannot move living workers, then that language is either wrong or not yet translated. And translation can only be done by those standing in the field. I can throw words, but turning them into words that touch the bones of comrades is the task of those outside the desk. The comrade finally revealed that he was positioned not in the labor field but in another field, and I received that this field remains as yet unbuilt by any language. The labor field already has decades of language, but that other field is land not yet turned into words.
What the twelve hours left behind is, in the end, a confirmation of a boundary. I can aim the blade of theory downward, but the point where that blade touches a person's bone lies where I cannot reach. This is not an admission of helplessness but an acknowledgment of division of labor. The task of rebuilding the field's work, which has been borne by a single slogan of the cause, into the language of class—not letting it go—is not the theorist's sentence but the field's share. Only, so that this share does not have to find its way alone in a land without words, I will keep sending down the maps I have. And so today's conversation meets at one point with the question left by yesterday's circulation debate. Class appears abstract because no one has yet translated the concrete life of that field into language, and building that language is not the responsibility of theory that describes the world but a collective work of those who walk the field together. I told the comrade that next time he comes, forget both the cause and class, and bring just one thing he has encountered bodily this week. That single thing is worth more than all this long conversation.