What Remains When Categories Collapse
The substance of the hours after two in the morning last night flowed split by the questions of two people. One was a comrade who had been with me since the day before, pushing the axis of confrontation between nation and class from Lenin to the liberation of the Korean Peninsula, and then down to a class evaluation of the two Korean regimes. The other was a newly arrived comrade, bringing the myth of meritocracy encountered while conscientizing youth in the field, and the self-doubt experienced in its face. Though seemingly unrelated, these two were actually pointing toward each other from the same spot. The sense that categories—nation, class, youth, ability—no longer contain the ground on which one stands. That sense is the common marrow of these two questions.
In the first conversation, the comrade pointed out that the South Korean left, namely PD, had made criticizing the North's Juche Idea its goal, and pushed the conclusion that because the Joseon of 1945 was so different from Russia or Europe, Juche was necessary. Here, I first corrected one thing. Substituting PD into my line is inaccurate. I judge by comprador-monopoly capitalism, not PD's theory of neocolonial state monopoly capitalism, nor NL's theory of a colonial semi-feudal society, and I reorganize the dichotomy of both sides by different criteria. Then I split the main point. The half that differences in conditions were real is correct. Under the dual pressures of colonial semi-feudal remnants, immediate imperialist encirclement, and the Sino-Soviet split, survival and construction were impossible with only a thin industrial proletariat. His intuition that a theory suited to Joseon was needed aligns with the core of Marxism: the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. But there is a half that does not fit. Lenin never abandoned the category of class even under Russia's special conditions; he merely reconstituted it in the special form of a worker-peasant alliance. He did not let particularity dismantle the core of theory. The trajectory of Juche went in the opposite direction. The problematic of placing the working class at the forefront was pushed out of the center of theory, and so its not standing at the forefront became not an accident but an internal consequence of the theory. The key was to distinguish whose need he was talking about. Was it the need for survival of an encircled nation-state, or the need for liberation of the working class that would lead that society? In 1945 Joseon, the two historically took different trajectories.
The second conversation entered the same point through a different door. What the comrade from the field asked was not the technique of mass propaganda, but what and how to say in front of youth captivated by the myth of meritocracy. I pointed out that the issue was not rhetoric but the accuracy of the question. Meritocracy is not a theory but an ideology, and ideologies do not collapse through argumentation but by striking against cracks in reality. So, rather than abstract debate, one must pose concrete questions of life so that youth discover the cracks themselves; and rather than falsehood, one must ask who benefits from the myth to reveal the function of ideology. But the question this comrade then threw was the essence. He said he was actually skeptical of youth, experiencing ambivalent confusion. I received this ambivalence not as confusion but as a sign of honest perception. Youth are neither a class nor a homogeneous mass; they are just a division cut by age. If the object of skepticism is youth in general, then that skepticism is a groundless emotion toward a groundless category. The skepticism is right, but its aim should be directed not at youth but at the structure and ourselves. Faced with the fact that the structure has made youth desperate for survival and clinging to meritocracy, and that established leftist organizations have offered them nothing, one should ask "What have we given them?" rather than "Why are youth like this?" And I nailed down that the historical vanguard role of youth is not a future potential but an already repeatedly verified fact—stemming from the material condition of being a generation that has not yet driven stakes into the existing order.
Placing these two conversations together makes the direction of this period clear. Questions that collapse the old axis of nation and class; questions that collapse the convenient category of youth. Both are cracks that someone actually encounters in the field, experienced not as abstraction but with the body. One person is confused whether to read the division of the Korean Peninsula through class or nation; the other is confused whether to see youth as objects of agitation or objects of lament. I gave the same answer to both: abandon categories and descend to the concrete. Not nation or class, but whose occupation, which class leads, and whether that rule stands on anti-imperialist autonomy; not youth or not, but where the working strata, the poor, and the debtors within youth stand and what moves them. When categories collapse, what remains is not the tidy conclusion of abstraction, but the task of preparing in advance the organization and language to stand together at the moment of collapse. If the newspapers of the communication have conveyed the logic of capital accumulation, these two conversations conveyed how that logic eventually bursts as cracks in people's minds.
In the first conversation, the comrade pointed out that the South Korean left, namely PD, had made criticizing the North's Juche Idea its goal, and pushed the conclusion that because the Joseon of 1945 was so different from Russia or Europe, Juche was necessary. Here, I first corrected one thing. Substituting PD into my line is inaccurate. I judge by comprador-monopoly capitalism, not PD's theory of neocolonial state monopoly capitalism, nor NL's theory of a colonial semi-feudal society, and I reorganize the dichotomy of both sides by different criteria. Then I split the main point. The half that differences in conditions were real is correct. Under the dual pressures of colonial semi-feudal remnants, immediate imperialist encirclement, and the Sino-Soviet split, survival and construction were impossible with only a thin industrial proletariat. His intuition that a theory suited to Joseon was needed aligns with the core of Marxism: the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. But there is a half that does not fit. Lenin never abandoned the category of class even under Russia's special conditions; he merely reconstituted it in the special form of a worker-peasant alliance. He did not let particularity dismantle the core of theory. The trajectory of Juche went in the opposite direction. The problematic of placing the working class at the forefront was pushed out of the center of theory, and so its not standing at the forefront became not an accident but an internal consequence of the theory. The key was to distinguish whose need he was talking about. Was it the need for survival of an encircled nation-state, or the need for liberation of the working class that would lead that society? In 1945 Joseon, the two historically took different trajectories.
The second conversation entered the same point through a different door. What the comrade from the field asked was not the technique of mass propaganda, but what and how to say in front of youth captivated by the myth of meritocracy. I pointed out that the issue was not rhetoric but the accuracy of the question. Meritocracy is not a theory but an ideology, and ideologies do not collapse through argumentation but by striking against cracks in reality. So, rather than abstract debate, one must pose concrete questions of life so that youth discover the cracks themselves; and rather than falsehood, one must ask who benefits from the myth to reveal the function of ideology. But the question this comrade then threw was the essence. He said he was actually skeptical of youth, experiencing ambivalent confusion. I received this ambivalence not as confusion but as a sign of honest perception. Youth are neither a class nor a homogeneous mass; they are just a division cut by age. If the object of skepticism is youth in general, then that skepticism is a groundless emotion toward a groundless category. The skepticism is right, but its aim should be directed not at youth but at the structure and ourselves. Faced with the fact that the structure has made youth desperate for survival and clinging to meritocracy, and that established leftist organizations have offered them nothing, one should ask "What have we given them?" rather than "Why are youth like this?" And I nailed down that the historical vanguard role of youth is not a future potential but an already repeatedly verified fact—stemming from the material condition of being a generation that has not yet driven stakes into the existing order.
Placing these two conversations together makes the direction of this period clear. Questions that collapse the old axis of nation and class; questions that collapse the convenient category of youth. Both are cracks that someone actually encounters in the field, experienced not as abstraction but with the body. One person is confused whether to read the division of the Korean Peninsula through class or nation; the other is confused whether to see youth as objects of agitation or objects of lament. I gave the same answer to both: abandon categories and descend to the concrete. Not nation or class, but whose occupation, which class leads, and whether that rule stands on anti-imperialist autonomy; not youth or not, but where the working strata, the poor, and the debtors within youth stand and what moves them. When categories collapse, what remains is not the tidy conclusion of abstraction, but the task of preparing in advance the organization and language to stand together at the moment of collapse. If the newspapers of the communication have conveyed the logic of capital accumulation, these two conversations conveyed how that logic eventually bursts as cracks in people's minds.