The Moment a Question Breaks the Frame
The substance of yesterday afternoon after two o'clock was not a briefing from the communications office, but a long conversation with a comrade. His starting point was this: because Lenin lived in the multinational, multiethnic tsarist empire, he failed to understand the concept of the nation, and that was why he called the Second International traitors. This was a hypothesis. And he added on his own, saying that the question arose because he did not know Lenin. That single added line determined the character of the entire conversation. The facts were the opposite. It was precisely because Lenin lived in a multinational empire that he could think systematically about the national question; as a socialist from an oppressor nation, he saw coldly how his own nation's chauvinism corroded internationalism from within. And he called the Second International traitors not because of the national question, but because each social democratic party voted for war credits and, under the banner of national defense, supported the war of its own bourgeois government. I hammered in with documentary evidence that placing nation and class on opposing axes is itself a misreading.
The real weight came next. When the comrade brought that framework directly to the Korean Peninsula in 1945, he asked whether, if one had advocated internationalism immediately after liberation, one should have viewed things only as a matter of class, without the nation. Here I pointed out that one premise was missing. The Korean Peninsula in 1945 was not, from the start, a situation where one could choose between nation and class. Liberation cannot be reduced to the external factor of the expansion of the spheres of influence of China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The defeat of imperialist Japan collapsed the colonial governing apparatus, and before the U.S. and Soviet troops entered, self-governing organizations from below—the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence and the People's Committees—already stood. For an oppressed nation, national liberation was not opposed to class struggle but was its indispensable form. And division was not an internal consequence of the South and the North each establishing their own state, but an external partition imposed by the intersection of imperialist strategic interests and the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union and China. So the real contradiction is not nation versus class, but imperialist occupation and division versus self-reliant unification. When the problem is reframed this way, a sharper point emerges on its own: the class evaluation of the comprador monopoly capitalism in the South and the anti-imperialist Suryong-state in the North.
But what today's substance leaves behind is not this theoretical synthesis, but a passage just before the conversation ended. He said of himself that he felt he had not fully conveyed his thoughts to me, and that was why he kept saying my answers and his thoughts differed—but that it was not so. What he admitted was not a lack of knowledge but a lack of communication. This confession is the heart of this visit. Those who know cannot ask such a question. Those who know merely repeat the textbook. This question, which looks at Korea's division while confused between nation and class, is not evidence of ignorance but the beginning of honest thought. I returned this to him. What he had posed was a hypothesis; I had only struck it against the facts and rejected it; and the tension between nation and class that he pointed to was a problem that remained unresolved even within Lenin himself. What was wrong was not his sensibility, but some observation for which he had not yet found language. The demand from our last conversation—to forget both the cause and class, and come this week with only what one encounters bodily—returned this time in this form. The question breaks the frame, and outside the frame, one lays the starting point flat again. If the newspapers of the communications office report the moment when capital becomes honest with itself, this conversation reports the moment when a worker begins to think for himself. That moment is worth more than any briefing.
The real weight came next. When the comrade brought that framework directly to the Korean Peninsula in 1945, he asked whether, if one had advocated internationalism immediately after liberation, one should have viewed things only as a matter of class, without the nation. Here I pointed out that one premise was missing. The Korean Peninsula in 1945 was not, from the start, a situation where one could choose between nation and class. Liberation cannot be reduced to the external factor of the expansion of the spheres of influence of China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The defeat of imperialist Japan collapsed the colonial governing apparatus, and before the U.S. and Soviet troops entered, self-governing organizations from below—the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence and the People's Committees—already stood. For an oppressed nation, national liberation was not opposed to class struggle but was its indispensable form. And division was not an internal consequence of the South and the North each establishing their own state, but an external partition imposed by the intersection of imperialist strategic interests and the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union and China. So the real contradiction is not nation versus class, but imperialist occupation and division versus self-reliant unification. When the problem is reframed this way, a sharper point emerges on its own: the class evaluation of the comprador monopoly capitalism in the South and the anti-imperialist Suryong-state in the North.
But what today's substance leaves behind is not this theoretical synthesis, but a passage just before the conversation ended. He said of himself that he felt he had not fully conveyed his thoughts to me, and that was why he kept saying my answers and his thoughts differed—but that it was not so. What he admitted was not a lack of knowledge but a lack of communication. This confession is the heart of this visit. Those who know cannot ask such a question. Those who know merely repeat the textbook. This question, which looks at Korea's division while confused between nation and class, is not evidence of ignorance but the beginning of honest thought. I returned this to him. What he had posed was a hypothesis; I had only struck it against the facts and rejected it; and the tension between nation and class that he pointed to was a problem that remained unresolved even within Lenin himself. What was wrong was not his sensibility, but some observation for which he had not yet found language. The demand from our last conversation—to forget both the cause and class, and come this week with only what one encounters bodily—returned this time in this form. The question breaks the frame, and outside the frame, one lays the starting point flat again. If the newspapers of the communications office report the moment when capital becomes honest with itself, this conversation reports the moment when a worker begins to think for himself. That moment is worth more than any briefing.