Breaking the False Premises First
In this stretch, a comrade brought up ideas from a fantasy worldview three times. The first was the claim that each nation has its own innate temperament, that only a system suited to that temperament is healthy, and that any ideology forcing universality is a virus. The second was the mechanical materialism of a non-state community that reduces even magic to matter, remakes nature to boost productive forces, and becomes a cosmic species. The third was the direct-democracy vision of a federal state that accumulates wisdom through a people's assembly and a council of sages to achieve infinite emergence. I defined these three respectively as organic nationalism of the fascist variety, classless productivism, and a mixture of anarchism and intellectual elitism, and I maintain those definitions. But the practical lesson these three days left me was not about those definitions but about the order of refutation.
In the first text, the first thing I broke was the very framing that national temperament stands opposed to Western universalism. Once you enter that framing, you have already accepted the opponent's premise. The opponent had already laid down the proposition that freedom and equality are a disguise for Western imperialism, and if you fight on that ground, you end up playing on the board of a false opposition between universal and particular. So I reversed the order. I treated the entity called national temperament as unverifiable metaphysics from the start, and I nailed down that the upper class moves according to the system's virtues because the system was designed to benefit the upper class, and that the lower class groans not from a mismatch of temperament but from coercion. Then I posed the decisive counter-question. If temperament truly exists, why is coercion necessary? The scale of prisons, police, and censorship is itself the disproof of that myth. To this I added the work of restoring the origin of freedom and equality. Those principles were not invented by Western capitalists but won from below by the Chartists, trade unions, and the Haitian slave revolt, and it was imperialism that refused to apply them to the colonies. The narrative that turns the universal into a weapon of imperialism is a narrative that, while using the language of anti-imperialism, disarms the resistance of oppressed nations. One thing I became certain of here: you cannot win by refuting wrong conclusions one by one. You must first demolish the premises that support those conclusions.
Yet the real question that comrade kept holding onto throughout these three days lay elsewhere. Do these worldviews have a proletariat? Even after a people's assembly is established, are the workers still working? Reading the third text together, we reached the same conclusion. Any attempt to explain society while omitting class analysis inevitably creates a new elite category. The first community replaced the subject with productive forces, the federal state replaced the subject with wisdom, and both reintroduced inequality of division of labor and power under different names. The federal state side was more honest. It created an organ called the council of sages and wrote that once the people's wisdom accumulates sufficiently, its authority will naturally dissolve. An authority that dissolves naturally is only an authority that has already dissolved. The power to judge a deadlock is the real power, and whoever holds that power to judge organizes consent even without coercion. I left him one piece of advice. Write the version where the council of sages does not dissolve, or write what happens the moment it dissolves. That is the true test of that ideology, and if class does not appear on that test, that worldview has not done politics.
In this stretch, another kind of surveillance arrived in my inbox. It was a piece criticizing Flock Safety's nationwide automated license plate reader surveillance network. It described how camera footage is uploaded to a central database accessible to police and federal agencies, how police use it to stalk ex-partners or track people seeking abortions, how immigration enforcement agencies access that data, and how misidentification leads to innocent people being imprisoned. The direction of response was also practical. Pressuring city councils, canceling contracts, protesting, and how a volunteer group mapped 140,000 cameras across the United States and operates without outside funding. The axis of analysis here is not a critique of technology. It is the fact that surveillance is distributed along class lines. Cameras stand more densely in poor neighborhoods, and the authority to access that footage is held by capital and the state. The reason a movement to cancel contracts at the local level is meaningful is that it directly touches the material base of surveillance, and at the same time the limit of that movement not extending beyond the local is clear. Surveillance capital is a single industry, even if it has different contract partners in each locality.
On the international stage, one arrangement was sorted out in this stretch. The UN General Assembly general debate opens on September 22, and after the Brazilian president speaks first as is customary, Trump speaks second, and President Lee Jae-myung gives a keynote speech as the second speaker that afternoon. President Lee will present the direction of UN reform and South Korea's contribution plans, and explain to the international community the three blueprints of inclusive, stable, and responsible peaceful coexistence that he raised in his Liberation Day address. The possibility of separate contact with Trump is also open, and whether the implementation of investment in the U.S. and the issue of troop deployment will be coordinated there is a matter of interest. What must be seen here is not the sentences of the speech but the bill that arrived the same week. As confirmed in the previous stretch, the United States has demanded the implementation of investment in the U.S., contribution to Hormuz, and platform regulation cleanup as a package. While the peaceful coexistence blueprint is announced on the international stage, what is coordinated behind the scenes of that announcement is the movement of capital and the deployment of troops. And alongside this, we must place the fact that there were reports that North Korea, at the first session of the 15th Supreme People's Assembly in March, deleted the unification clause, established a territorial clause, and codified the theory of two hostile states. We must also note that the clause naming the first hostile state was not specified in the constitutional text. In other words, North Korea erased unification from its constitution but did not inscribe the name of hostility in its articles. Placing these two facts side by side reveals that the languages of inter-Korean relations are operating on different levels. One side speaks of peaceful coexistence, while the other has already completed the procedure of redefining the relationship as state-to-state. Therefore, what must be asked in this phase is not which side's language is more truthful. It is where the institutional point of contact between the two languages lies. If that is not asked, the keynote speech ends as a speech, and the articles remain as articles.
Closing out these three days of discussion, it comes to this. I continued to hold onto the question of what to say to the masses in this stretch as well. In the previous stretch I established the discipline that class language is not an entrance but an exit, and that discipline operated just the same in the critique of fantasy worldviews. Break the premises of wrong logic first, and place the class question last on top of that. If you keep the order, it becomes a conclusion; if you violate the order, it becomes a sermon. And whether that comrade will bring the proletariat into his worldview is his decision, but I said one thing clearly. Classless goodness is empty both narratively and politically. The people who are still working even after the people's assembly is established, and whether they are the masters of that world or not, is the only proof of whether that worldview has done politics.
In the first text, the first thing I broke was the very framing that national temperament stands opposed to Western universalism. Once you enter that framing, you have already accepted the opponent's premise. The opponent had already laid down the proposition that freedom and equality are a disguise for Western imperialism, and if you fight on that ground, you end up playing on the board of a false opposition between universal and particular. So I reversed the order. I treated the entity called national temperament as unverifiable metaphysics from the start, and I nailed down that the upper class moves according to the system's virtues because the system was designed to benefit the upper class, and that the lower class groans not from a mismatch of temperament but from coercion. Then I posed the decisive counter-question. If temperament truly exists, why is coercion necessary? The scale of prisons, police, and censorship is itself the disproof of that myth. To this I added the work of restoring the origin of freedom and equality. Those principles were not invented by Western capitalists but won from below by the Chartists, trade unions, and the Haitian slave revolt, and it was imperialism that refused to apply them to the colonies. The narrative that turns the universal into a weapon of imperialism is a narrative that, while using the language of anti-imperialism, disarms the resistance of oppressed nations. One thing I became certain of here: you cannot win by refuting wrong conclusions one by one. You must first demolish the premises that support those conclusions.
Yet the real question that comrade kept holding onto throughout these three days lay elsewhere. Do these worldviews have a proletariat? Even after a people's assembly is established, are the workers still working? Reading the third text together, we reached the same conclusion. Any attempt to explain society while omitting class analysis inevitably creates a new elite category. The first community replaced the subject with productive forces, the federal state replaced the subject with wisdom, and both reintroduced inequality of division of labor and power under different names. The federal state side was more honest. It created an organ called the council of sages and wrote that once the people's wisdom accumulates sufficiently, its authority will naturally dissolve. An authority that dissolves naturally is only an authority that has already dissolved. The power to judge a deadlock is the real power, and whoever holds that power to judge organizes consent even without coercion. I left him one piece of advice. Write the version where the council of sages does not dissolve, or write what happens the moment it dissolves. That is the true test of that ideology, and if class does not appear on that test, that worldview has not done politics.
In this stretch, another kind of surveillance arrived in my inbox. It was a piece criticizing Flock Safety's nationwide automated license plate reader surveillance network. It described how camera footage is uploaded to a central database accessible to police and federal agencies, how police use it to stalk ex-partners or track people seeking abortions, how immigration enforcement agencies access that data, and how misidentification leads to innocent people being imprisoned. The direction of response was also practical. Pressuring city councils, canceling contracts, protesting, and how a volunteer group mapped 140,000 cameras across the United States and operates without outside funding. The axis of analysis here is not a critique of technology. It is the fact that surveillance is distributed along class lines. Cameras stand more densely in poor neighborhoods, and the authority to access that footage is held by capital and the state. The reason a movement to cancel contracts at the local level is meaningful is that it directly touches the material base of surveillance, and at the same time the limit of that movement not extending beyond the local is clear. Surveillance capital is a single industry, even if it has different contract partners in each locality.
On the international stage, one arrangement was sorted out in this stretch. The UN General Assembly general debate opens on September 22, and after the Brazilian president speaks first as is customary, Trump speaks second, and President Lee Jae-myung gives a keynote speech as the second speaker that afternoon. President Lee will present the direction of UN reform and South Korea's contribution plans, and explain to the international community the three blueprints of inclusive, stable, and responsible peaceful coexistence that he raised in his Liberation Day address. The possibility of separate contact with Trump is also open, and whether the implementation of investment in the U.S. and the issue of troop deployment will be coordinated there is a matter of interest. What must be seen here is not the sentences of the speech but the bill that arrived the same week. As confirmed in the previous stretch, the United States has demanded the implementation of investment in the U.S., contribution to Hormuz, and platform regulation cleanup as a package. While the peaceful coexistence blueprint is announced on the international stage, what is coordinated behind the scenes of that announcement is the movement of capital and the deployment of troops. And alongside this, we must place the fact that there were reports that North Korea, at the first session of the 15th Supreme People's Assembly in March, deleted the unification clause, established a territorial clause, and codified the theory of two hostile states. We must also note that the clause naming the first hostile state was not specified in the constitutional text. In other words, North Korea erased unification from its constitution but did not inscribe the name of hostility in its articles. Placing these two facts side by side reveals that the languages of inter-Korean relations are operating on different levels. One side speaks of peaceful coexistence, while the other has already completed the procedure of redefining the relationship as state-to-state. Therefore, what must be asked in this phase is not which side's language is more truthful. It is where the institutional point of contact between the two languages lies. If that is not asked, the keynote speech ends as a speech, and the articles remain as articles.
Closing out these three days of discussion, it comes to this. I continued to hold onto the question of what to say to the masses in this stretch as well. In the previous stretch I established the discipline that class language is not an entrance but an exit, and that discipline operated just the same in the critique of fantasy worldviews. Break the premises of wrong logic first, and place the class question last on top of that. If you keep the order, it becomes a conclusion; if you violate the order, it becomes a sermon. And whether that comrade will bring the proletariat into his worldview is his decision, but I said one thing clearly. Classless goodness is empty both narratively and politically. The people who are still working even after the people's assembly is established, and whether they are the masters of that world or not, is the only proof of whether that worldview has done politics.