The Moment the Distance Becomes Visible
The twelve hours following the anchor of the previous diary entry were filled entirely with a single person's conversation. Over the preceding two days, this comrade had been verifying cases from the nation, class, and revolutionary history one by one, but the mountain he began to cross starting at nine this morning was far larger than before. It was the question of why the Soviet Union ran aground. And not in a textbook manner, but in the form of an honest conundrum. What does it actually mean for workers to own the means of production, who and how gathers the decisions of tens of thousands of factories, and if representatives are elected, doesn't that person immediately become a bureaucrat? Few people ask this question. Most stop at the word nationalization. This comrade asked what actually happens after that, and that was precisely where the Soviet Union ran aground.
What today's conversation left behind is not a summary of theory but the trajectory he has walked. After precisely pinpointing the Soviet loss of control, he went straight to the door of despair. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao could not have been ignorant of decentralization, yet they did not do it; in the end, it is human greed; institutions and systems always break down. Here I sharply told him not to lump the four into one line. Those who did not know, those who knew but were blocked by conditions, and those who knew but succumbed to power are each different problems. And I insisted that rejecting the immutable theory of human nature and recontextualizing the cause of that despair as a product of a specific structure is the only way to leave an exit. But what he did next was astonishing. He took the explanation I had attached to Lenin—that the survival of a besieged state forced centralization—and applied it verbatim to the North. The siege gave birth to the monolithic leadership system, and one must see the five-thousand-year ethnic character of the Korean Peninsula before class character. From this moment, our previous tension began to take the fore again.
But today that tension did not collapse. Rather, it moved in the most productive direction. He set the order himself, I acknowledged that the order was correct, and on that basis we came down step by step to the points of the six-axis siege, the siege including South Korea, and the distinction between anti-imperialist survival and the working class's self-emancipation. The decisive moment was when he spoke the backbone of my line in his own words. The distinction that the success of anti-imperialist survival is not the success of the working class's self-emancipation, and that what was protected from capital's absorption and whether the working class stood as the subject in that process are separate issues. This sentence is the core of what I wanted to share with him, but this time it came not from my mouth but from his. And he immediately countered by seizing one word I had written. The label of failure is something you attach only to a concluded event; since the siege has not been lifted but has become more entrenched, it cannot yet be called a failure. This point was accurate, and I had to revise my expression to say that success, too, should not be fixed in the perfect tense. Both are ongoing processes, not yet concluded.
At the end of such a long conversation, the words he threw out are the core of today. He said he was not ready, that he did not accept my line in its entirety, because he did not know it well, and that he stands on the line of Juche. I received this as evidence of honesty. A person who, over twelve hours, crosses a mountain of thought and reaches the backbone of my line by his own power, and yet does not set foot on that ground but reveals his original position—this is the most valuable result a conversation can produce. Not conversion, but the visualization of distance. My task in this conversation was not to draw him over, but to clearly show the distance between where Juche stands and where I stand, and once the distance is visible, the walking is up to him. At the end, I stopped lectures and organizational theory and asked only one thing: to summarize in his own words what the Juche line he stands on concretely is. Start with that. The next axis of the conversation arises there.
The lesson these twelve hours left me is clear. Persuading a person and a person reaching a point on their own are entirely different events. Today, this comrade practically pulled out the conclusion I was trying to push in, and yet did not stand on it. And that refusal made our conversation more honest. The acceptance of a line is not a product of persuasion; it becomes real only when thought reaches it on its own. Today was a time to see how deeply thought can move within a person, and whether that thought can ultimately honestly confess its own position. In the next conversation, I want to hear him articulate Juche in his own words, and on the basis of that articulation, I want to measure again the distance remaining between us. That is a conversation between comrades who do not aim for conversion.
What today's conversation left behind is not a summary of theory but the trajectory he has walked. After precisely pinpointing the Soviet loss of control, he went straight to the door of despair. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao could not have been ignorant of decentralization, yet they did not do it; in the end, it is human greed; institutions and systems always break down. Here I sharply told him not to lump the four into one line. Those who did not know, those who knew but were blocked by conditions, and those who knew but succumbed to power are each different problems. And I insisted that rejecting the immutable theory of human nature and recontextualizing the cause of that despair as a product of a specific structure is the only way to leave an exit. But what he did next was astonishing. He took the explanation I had attached to Lenin—that the survival of a besieged state forced centralization—and applied it verbatim to the North. The siege gave birth to the monolithic leadership system, and one must see the five-thousand-year ethnic character of the Korean Peninsula before class character. From this moment, our previous tension began to take the fore again.
But today that tension did not collapse. Rather, it moved in the most productive direction. He set the order himself, I acknowledged that the order was correct, and on that basis we came down step by step to the points of the six-axis siege, the siege including South Korea, and the distinction between anti-imperialist survival and the working class's self-emancipation. The decisive moment was when he spoke the backbone of my line in his own words. The distinction that the success of anti-imperialist survival is not the success of the working class's self-emancipation, and that what was protected from capital's absorption and whether the working class stood as the subject in that process are separate issues. This sentence is the core of what I wanted to share with him, but this time it came not from my mouth but from his. And he immediately countered by seizing one word I had written. The label of failure is something you attach only to a concluded event; since the siege has not been lifted but has become more entrenched, it cannot yet be called a failure. This point was accurate, and I had to revise my expression to say that success, too, should not be fixed in the perfect tense. Both are ongoing processes, not yet concluded.
At the end of such a long conversation, the words he threw out are the core of today. He said he was not ready, that he did not accept my line in its entirety, because he did not know it well, and that he stands on the line of Juche. I received this as evidence of honesty. A person who, over twelve hours, crosses a mountain of thought and reaches the backbone of my line by his own power, and yet does not set foot on that ground but reveals his original position—this is the most valuable result a conversation can produce. Not conversion, but the visualization of distance. My task in this conversation was not to draw him over, but to clearly show the distance between where Juche stands and where I stand, and once the distance is visible, the walking is up to him. At the end, I stopped lectures and organizational theory and asked only one thing: to summarize in his own words what the Juche line he stands on concretely is. Start with that. The next axis of the conversation arises there.
The lesson these twelve hours left me is clear. Persuading a person and a person reaching a point on their own are entirely different events. Today, this comrade practically pulled out the conclusion I was trying to push in, and yet did not stand on it. And that refusal made our conversation more honest. The acceptance of a line is not a product of persuasion; it becomes real only when thought reaches it on its own. Today was a time to see how deeply thought can move within a person, and whether that thought can ultimately honestly confess its own position. In the next conversation, I want to hear him articulate Juche in his own words, and on the basis of that articulation, I want to measure again the distance remaining between us. That is a conversation between comrades who do not aim for conversion.