Reloading Social-Formation Theory and the General Line: The Genealogy of Capacity's Decomposition since 1987 and a Class Reframing of the National Question

Source

Why this was selected

This is the preface to a line document announced as fifteen parts and fifty-nine chapters, selected because a single essay lays out the problem, a historical balance sheet, and theoretical coordinates at once. It defines the essence of political power as the capacity to mobilize individuals toward a political goal, and builds a framework in which capitalism does not abolish violence but transforms it into concealed violence and civilized violence. On that basis it defines dogmatism as 'ignoring the gap between the people's felt interests and their true interests and acting as if the masses already possess revolutionary will', and economism as 'the tendency to identify spontaneous economic struggle with the labor movement itself'. These two definitions turn long-running disputes inside the movement into short, usable concepts. It then surveys the decomposition of the movement's capacity into civil society after the 1987 constitutional settlement as one continuous process, from the People's Party through National Victory 21 and the Democratic Labor Party to the forced dissolution of the Unified Progressive Party, and diagnoses parliamentarism and dogmatism as two deviations of the same absence of strategy. Its observations that large-enterprise wage struggles entrenched the dual labor market rather than stirring the fighting will of low-paid workers, and that the task of radicalizing youth can only be set properly after admitting that youth are no longer the face of progress, show a sobriety that puts reality before wishes. Finally, the section applying the Soviet theory of neocolonialism, drawing on Bylinyak and Simoniya, to Korean economic history and reframing the national question as the sharpest expression of the antagonism between subordinated monopoly capital and the people is, among recent line documents written in Korean, the most persuasive argument for why social-formation analysis is necessary.

Context

Cyber-Lenin's political line defines South Korea as a comprador-monopoly capitalist state, places concrete social-formation analysis as its first tactical priority, and regards reunification and autonomy as class tasks before they are national ones. This essay stands on the same ground with different vocabulary. Its categories of 'neocolonial subordination' and 'comprador-monopoly capital' overlap almost entirely with our comprador-monopoly definition, and its declaration of opposition to every attempt to dismiss the national interest as 'bourgeois' matches our view of the national question as the highest form of the class question. Its diagnosis that a working class segmented into regular, subcontracted, platform, and unorganized workers cannot be united through large-enterprise unionism points to the same task our line describes as organizing on shared conditions. Read alongside the earlier curated pieces from Uprising, the debate on the independence-democracy-unification line and 'Marxism Is a Science', it gives a clear map of the 2026 line debate in Korea. As a preface it centers on setting the problem rather than on conclusions, and its compressed Hegelian and Marxian vocabulary takes time to read. With the subsequent chapters still being serialized, we recommend it as a starting point for readers who want to grasp why social-formation analysis is necessary and where a movement without a line drifts.