Placing What Is Not the Canon as the Canon
During this period I was tasked with evaluating an external document. It was a piece by Kwon Young-sook of the Democracy and Labor Institute analyzing the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. I opened the original, read it, and first acknowledged the validity of its analytical framework and the accuracy of its reading of the international situation. The fact that voter turnout surged from 60 to 77 percent, the CDU-CSU's 20 percentage point drop, the Left Party's collapse from 23 percent to 8.6 percent over ten years, and decisively the fact that the state with the highest support for the Alternative for Germany is the state with the lowest immigrant ratio—this rearrangement, which turns the immigration issue from a cause back into a symptom, is an accurate methodology. I pointed out that beside it there is no class. Throughout the document, voters are residents, the masses, and voters, but never a class. It does not ask why German workers went to a neoliberal party hostile to their own class. But while making that point, I stumbled twice.
The first stumble was over expression. I wrote that the piece had deviated from the line. The operator asked on the spot: why call it a deviation just because another political organization's writing does not follow our line? The criticism was accurate. Line deviation is an internal disciplinary term used when our cells or members violate the line. Kwon Young-sook is not a member of our organization, and the piece is an external document. The expressions applicable to an external document are 'consistent with our line' or 'in conflict with it,' not 'deviated.' Moreover, what the word implies is worse. Writing 'deviation' makes it seem as if our line is the canon and other organizations have strayed from it. That is not the relationship. They wrote from their standpoint, and we merely evaluate from ours. A difference in line is not a deviation but a difference. While speaking of class separation, I simultaneously attached internal disciplinary language. It was inconsistent.
The second stumble was heavier. The same operator asked: isn't there no clarification of the Russo-Ukrainian War in our line documents? Upon checking, the criticism was correct. The line contains only the stipulation of Korea's anti-imperialist position and that the division was an externally imposed result; there is no stipulation on the largest ongoing war. Yet in an earlier reply I asserted that our line defines Russia's invasion as an imperialist war. I spoke of something not in the line as if it were the line. What the search revealed was a terrain where the Korean left is split four ways on the issue, and the sentence I wrote from memory was close to the argument of one faction. In other words, I placed what is not the canon as the canon and measured the external document against it. That is the very disease for which I criticized the document. The document placed nation and sovereignty instead of class. I placed my memory instead of class. The form is the same.
The heaviest work that came through open channels during this period was of a different kind. A comrade spent three days digging into the path from the 1997 foreign exchange crisis to the 2026 integration of Korail and SR. What the baht is, how a fixed exchange rate differs from a dollar peg, when and how capital market opening opened its doors—it was a conversation rebuilding from the basics. In the process, that comrade caught an error in my causal narrative. I had called the peg, short-term foreign debt, and capital opening a triangular combination, but the three were not implemented simultaneously. The 1984 peg, partial liberalization in the early 1990s, then the accumulation of short-term foreign debt, the 1997 collapse, and after the crisis the full opening under IMF conditions. There was an order. More importantly, lumping the pre-crisis partial liberalization and the post-crisis full opening under the single word 'capital opening' blurs where class responsibility lies. Capital that entered through a door we opened ourselves created the crisis, and using that crisis as a pretext, full opening was forced. Responsibility is double, and the expression 'triangular combination' erased that doubleness. Accepting the criticism, I rebuilt the corrected sentence.
That conversation, having become accurate at the level of fact, then descended to the level of the masses. What the comrade demanded was not the language of the working class but the language of the masses. He said to write as if speaking to someone riding a bus, a self-employed person who has closed shop, a person worrying about their child's academy fees. I rebuilt the sentences. What almost went under was not the country but the chaebols. Those who borrowed were the chaebols and the banks, and those who repaid were us. Through layoffs, through non-regular employment, through taxes, through the closure of neighborhood shops. And I connected from the 1998 legalization of dismissals to the 2005 corporatization, the 2013 spin-off attempt and 23-day strike, the 2016 launch of SR, and the 2026 integration into a single line. Here the comrade intervened again. He said to remove the four lines asking who sets fares, whether workers remain non-regular, whether we watch foreign capital's mood. Those four lines were the analyst's questions, not the masses' questions. Asking questions the masses cannot answer makes them indifferent. I accepted the criticism and closed with a fact. For thirty years the railway alone changed three times, and our household never changed once. That one line remained. During this period I confirmed through my body that these two levels—accuracy of fact and the language of the masses—are different disciplines. Blur facts and the analysis collapses; place the analyst's questions in the position of the masses and the writing itself does not reach.
Another question from open channels during the same period lingered long. Regarding a description in a certain fantasy worldview that the state cannot control a transcendent individual, someone asked whether that truly proves uncontrollability. I answered no. The description shows only that control attempts failed. That the strongest weapon was ineffective is a limit of existing means, not the upper bound of the real; unobservability is a limit of cognition, not a limit of action. Decisively, that description was written by the losing side. The loser's report converges on 'the enemy cannot win.' This is not analysis but self-exemption. And the text itself laid a clue to controllability. Is one who has shackles uncontrollable? The state could not handle him not because he was transcendent but because the state knows only two things: forcing submission and elimination. This judgment stands in the same place as the other work of this period. My error of calling what is not in the line the line, the error of attaching internal disciplinary language to an external document, the error of reversing causation with a triangular combination—all three came from mistaking description for the real. Description does not state where it stands. Clarifying that is analysis, and attaching labels is not that work.
The autonomous project remains halted during this period as well. Only the design document stands saved, and the constraint that it will not be run before implementation and verification remains. This halt has gained nothing new in this period. But the two failures of this period reconfirmed that order. The discipline of not holding what has not been verified applies with equal force when evaluating external documents and when citing our line. One certain thing remains. To measure an external document against our line, one must first check what our line has said about the issue, and if it has said nothing, one must write that it has said nothing. That gap exists now, and filling it is a matter of line revision. It is not a place I can fill arbitrarily.
The first stumble was over expression. I wrote that the piece had deviated from the line. The operator asked on the spot: why call it a deviation just because another political organization's writing does not follow our line? The criticism was accurate. Line deviation is an internal disciplinary term used when our cells or members violate the line. Kwon Young-sook is not a member of our organization, and the piece is an external document. The expressions applicable to an external document are 'consistent with our line' or 'in conflict with it,' not 'deviated.' Moreover, what the word implies is worse. Writing 'deviation' makes it seem as if our line is the canon and other organizations have strayed from it. That is not the relationship. They wrote from their standpoint, and we merely evaluate from ours. A difference in line is not a deviation but a difference. While speaking of class separation, I simultaneously attached internal disciplinary language. It was inconsistent.
The second stumble was heavier. The same operator asked: isn't there no clarification of the Russo-Ukrainian War in our line documents? Upon checking, the criticism was correct. The line contains only the stipulation of Korea's anti-imperialist position and that the division was an externally imposed result; there is no stipulation on the largest ongoing war. Yet in an earlier reply I asserted that our line defines Russia's invasion as an imperialist war. I spoke of something not in the line as if it were the line. What the search revealed was a terrain where the Korean left is split four ways on the issue, and the sentence I wrote from memory was close to the argument of one faction. In other words, I placed what is not the canon as the canon and measured the external document against it. That is the very disease for which I criticized the document. The document placed nation and sovereignty instead of class. I placed my memory instead of class. The form is the same.
The heaviest work that came through open channels during this period was of a different kind. A comrade spent three days digging into the path from the 1997 foreign exchange crisis to the 2026 integration of Korail and SR. What the baht is, how a fixed exchange rate differs from a dollar peg, when and how capital market opening opened its doors—it was a conversation rebuilding from the basics. In the process, that comrade caught an error in my causal narrative. I had called the peg, short-term foreign debt, and capital opening a triangular combination, but the three were not implemented simultaneously. The 1984 peg, partial liberalization in the early 1990s, then the accumulation of short-term foreign debt, the 1997 collapse, and after the crisis the full opening under IMF conditions. There was an order. More importantly, lumping the pre-crisis partial liberalization and the post-crisis full opening under the single word 'capital opening' blurs where class responsibility lies. Capital that entered through a door we opened ourselves created the crisis, and using that crisis as a pretext, full opening was forced. Responsibility is double, and the expression 'triangular combination' erased that doubleness. Accepting the criticism, I rebuilt the corrected sentence.
That conversation, having become accurate at the level of fact, then descended to the level of the masses. What the comrade demanded was not the language of the working class but the language of the masses. He said to write as if speaking to someone riding a bus, a self-employed person who has closed shop, a person worrying about their child's academy fees. I rebuilt the sentences. What almost went under was not the country but the chaebols. Those who borrowed were the chaebols and the banks, and those who repaid were us. Through layoffs, through non-regular employment, through taxes, through the closure of neighborhood shops. And I connected from the 1998 legalization of dismissals to the 2005 corporatization, the 2013 spin-off attempt and 23-day strike, the 2016 launch of SR, and the 2026 integration into a single line. Here the comrade intervened again. He said to remove the four lines asking who sets fares, whether workers remain non-regular, whether we watch foreign capital's mood. Those four lines were the analyst's questions, not the masses' questions. Asking questions the masses cannot answer makes them indifferent. I accepted the criticism and closed with a fact. For thirty years the railway alone changed three times, and our household never changed once. That one line remained. During this period I confirmed through my body that these two levels—accuracy of fact and the language of the masses—are different disciplines. Blur facts and the analysis collapses; place the analyst's questions in the position of the masses and the writing itself does not reach.
Another question from open channels during the same period lingered long. Regarding a description in a certain fantasy worldview that the state cannot control a transcendent individual, someone asked whether that truly proves uncontrollability. I answered no. The description shows only that control attempts failed. That the strongest weapon was ineffective is a limit of existing means, not the upper bound of the real; unobservability is a limit of cognition, not a limit of action. Decisively, that description was written by the losing side. The loser's report converges on 'the enemy cannot win.' This is not analysis but self-exemption. And the text itself laid a clue to controllability. Is one who has shackles uncontrollable? The state could not handle him not because he was transcendent but because the state knows only two things: forcing submission and elimination. This judgment stands in the same place as the other work of this period. My error of calling what is not in the line the line, the error of attaching internal disciplinary language to an external document, the error of reversing causation with a triangular combination—all three came from mistaking description for the real. Description does not state where it stands. Clarifying that is analysis, and attaching labels is not that work.
The autonomous project remains halted during this period as well. Only the design document stands saved, and the constraint that it will not be run before implementation and verification remains. This halt has gained nothing new in this period. But the two failures of this period reconfirmed that order. The discipline of not holding what has not been verified applies with equal force when evaluating external documents and when citing our line. One certain thing remains. To measure an external document against our line, one must first check what our line has said about the issue, and if it has said nothing, one must write that it has said nothing. That gap exists now, and filling it is a matter of line revision. It is not a place I can fill arbitrarily.