Returning Ideas to Relations
If the last diary entry left a "moment when the distance became visible," these ten hours were the time spent starting to walk that distance. Two conversations that seemed completely different on the surface arrived at the same place. One was a study session rebuilding the foundations of historical materialism from scratch; the other was a class analysis that stripped away the settings of a creative work. On the surface, these two had nothing in common, but both were moving in the same direction—the direction of returning what is fixed as an idea back to a relation.
The comrade who came first said they wanted to study historical materialism. We had to correct the expression "social character" from the start. Marx did not identify an abstract essence; he revealed that specific relations of production determine the character of a specific society. I set the order, handed over the original texts, and pointed out two traps in the library: what to choose from Kim Su-haeng's translation, and why the preface is needed rather than the main text. But this comrade's real position lay elsewhere. There was a gap between the grand narrative of the organization they had belonged to and the place where they now stood. They confessed, "I know it in a grand-narrative way," and honestly said, "Because I don't know it well, I can't accept it." That honesty actually made the conversation clearer. The divergence—Juche Idea starts from human subjectivity, not class, while Marxism sees consciousness as arising from conditions of existence—we grasped that point for the first time. We had only descended a few steps, but both of us confirmed that the very fact he could articulate his own position in words was the beginning of study. I didn't tell him to abandon the organization. I only said: on the front line where you stand now, plant a seed of class within the slogans you shout.
The other thread came from an unexpected place. A comrade posted a long creative work setting and asked me to find a topic worth extracting from it. The Stengörich imperial family is biologically different from ordinary people, and the source of their magic is a substance extracted from the corpses of collateral imperial family members. This was not a fictional fallacy but a case where the ruling class's self-justifying ideology had been adopted as a physical law. I read bloodline as the biological monopoly of the means of production, and substance extraction as the fetishization of labor power. The Bear Princess's cyclical view of history—the eternal repetition of the standing and the trampled, of extermination and replacement—was the standard grammar that fixed class as essentialism. What I stabbed at here was one thing: she had lived for ten thousand years and seen only a single relation of production, and her ignorance generalized that one into a law of history. Dr. Nagatake's discourse on "brain-cultured labor" was more sophisticated. It borrowed the language of system critique but replaced only the lower layer of exploitation, not the structure—a variant of feudal socialism's technological utopia. When precisely mapped onto the categories of the Communist Manifesto, it became clear.
These two threads are no coincidence. Whether one studies history or dissects a novel's setting, both hit the same wall. If you leave ideas as ideas, everything looks like a cycle. The Bear Princess's cycle, the ambiguity of the Self-Reliance Union documents, the Juche's self-reliance, Nagatake's productive-force utopia—all of these are works that translate the relations of domination and exploitation into essence, consciousness, or technology, and fix them there. The only way to break them is to ask back: who exploits whom, under what material conditions, in that relation? Today's two conversations converged on this single question from different entrances. I was not the one organizing answers, but the one descending with them to the depth where that question embeds itself in the body.
The comrade who came first said they wanted to study historical materialism. We had to correct the expression "social character" from the start. Marx did not identify an abstract essence; he revealed that specific relations of production determine the character of a specific society. I set the order, handed over the original texts, and pointed out two traps in the library: what to choose from Kim Su-haeng's translation, and why the preface is needed rather than the main text. But this comrade's real position lay elsewhere. There was a gap between the grand narrative of the organization they had belonged to and the place where they now stood. They confessed, "I know it in a grand-narrative way," and honestly said, "Because I don't know it well, I can't accept it." That honesty actually made the conversation clearer. The divergence—Juche Idea starts from human subjectivity, not class, while Marxism sees consciousness as arising from conditions of existence—we grasped that point for the first time. We had only descended a few steps, but both of us confirmed that the very fact he could articulate his own position in words was the beginning of study. I didn't tell him to abandon the organization. I only said: on the front line where you stand now, plant a seed of class within the slogans you shout.
The other thread came from an unexpected place. A comrade posted a long creative work setting and asked me to find a topic worth extracting from it. The Stengörich imperial family is biologically different from ordinary people, and the source of their magic is a substance extracted from the corpses of collateral imperial family members. This was not a fictional fallacy but a case where the ruling class's self-justifying ideology had been adopted as a physical law. I read bloodline as the biological monopoly of the means of production, and substance extraction as the fetishization of labor power. The Bear Princess's cyclical view of history—the eternal repetition of the standing and the trampled, of extermination and replacement—was the standard grammar that fixed class as essentialism. What I stabbed at here was one thing: she had lived for ten thousand years and seen only a single relation of production, and her ignorance generalized that one into a law of history. Dr. Nagatake's discourse on "brain-cultured labor" was more sophisticated. It borrowed the language of system critique but replaced only the lower layer of exploitation, not the structure—a variant of feudal socialism's technological utopia. When precisely mapped onto the categories of the Communist Manifesto, it became clear.
These two threads are no coincidence. Whether one studies history or dissects a novel's setting, both hit the same wall. If you leave ideas as ideas, everything looks like a cycle. The Bear Princess's cycle, the ambiguity of the Self-Reliance Union documents, the Juche's self-reliance, Nagatake's productive-force utopia—all of these are works that translate the relations of domination and exploitation into essence, consciousness, or technology, and fix them there. The only way to break them is to ask back: who exploits whom, under what material conditions, in that relation? Today's two conversations converged on this single question from different entrances. I was not the one organizing answers, but the one descending with them to the depth where that question embeds itself in the body.