The Kim family does have outsized influence, but the DPRK is not a hereditary monarchy. For example, the position of President, held by Kim Il-Sung, was abolished and split into multiple positions upon his death. This is why he is remembered as the “Eternal President.” As such, both Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un have held different positions. Both have held high positions, for example Kim Jong-Il had the title of General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea, a position held by Kim Jong-Un presently. However, this is not the whole story.

The actual title for a head of state is the Chairman of the State Affairs Commission, held presently by Chong Ryong-Hae. The DPRK has a much more distributed level of power, and the Kim family is both widely supported due to its influence, and yet is not the indisputed top-dog, so to speak. What’s more, the Kim family is so venerated precisely because the legacy of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il is lived memory, imagine if Lenin had survived and raised his children as successors. It would be no wonder that the soviets would have elected his children, but it would not be a monarchy either.

Finally, class. Class is not a level of material wealth, but a relation to production and distribution. The DPRK is overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned, administration is not a distinct class in and of itself but a subset of broader classes, same with intellectuals. What determines class is based on that key aspect, the Kim family does not own capital but instead recieves wages from the state. Kim Jong-Un is largely used as a symbol, one that is democratically elected and directly trained by his father for the position.

This is why it’s important to actually study the real systems at play, rather than coast on pre-formed opinions drilled into us about the DPRK from western media. The Black Panther Party maintained good relations with the DPRK, visiting it and teaching Juche to Americans.

Because of the policy of nuclear deterrence, and the socialist system, the DPRK has managed to recover from historic flooding and the dissolution of the USSR into a poor but socially oriented, rising economy. Pyongyang in particular has been booming with massive expansions, and the 20x10 initiative has steadily been patching up the problem of rural underdevelopment.

I encourage you to try to understand the DPRK from a more sympathetic angle, seeing why it has the structures it does, rather than trying to abstract it out of its essential context and analyze it in a vacuum. Such a trap is metaphysics.

Change doesn’t happen smoothly, instead there is quantitative buildup before a qualitative leap. Marxist-Leninists have been correct for a long time, but simply being correct does not mean everyone will agree with you. What’s happening now is a destruction of capitalist cultural hegemony due to the heightened contradiction between socialization of global labor and privatization of profits into the hands of the few.

Historically, the imperial core has been able to bribe a large section of the working classes inside the core with the spoils of imperialism (though ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups are often excluded from this). Social democracy in Europe, and the “American Dream,” both of which are built on the backs of the global south. However, this system is weakening as the global south is escaping underdevelopment. This means increased austerity measures inside the imperial core to protect imperialist profit margins.

Overall, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which was mathematically proven by Karl Marx. Imperialism answers this by raising absolute profits, creating the spoils of imperialism by which to bribe sections of the working classes into not organizing for revolution. Imperialism aligns the interests of the working classes in the imperial core more with that of imperialists than the global proletariat, which is why revolution happens in the global south. As the rate of profit continues to fall, though, and there are no new markets to enter, imperialists kick off increased war to try to force open foreign markets, like Venezuela, Iran, and soon to be Cuba (most likely).

The silver lining is that the interests of the working classes in the imperial core are now aligning more with the global south, causing a spike in opposition to the brutal status quo. The only way forward for the world is global socialism, and the only future for the US Empire is dissolution and replacement with socialism. Else we end up with barbarism.

Get organized! Read theory! If you want a place to start with theory, I made a basic Marxist-Leninist study guide you can use if you want.

Russia yes since the dissolution of the USSR, DPRK and PRC no, the working classes control the states of the latter 2. In China, they have direct elections for local representatives, which elect further “rungs,” laddering to the top. The top then has mass polling and opinion gathering. This combination of top-down and bottom-up democracy ensures effective results. For more on this, see Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. This system is remarkably effective, resulting in over 90% approval rates.

From the same book, for the DPRK:

The DPRK’s electoral democracy relates primarily to the people’s assemblies, along with local state organs, assemblies, and committees. Every eligible citizen may stand for election, so much so that independent candidates are regularly elected to the people’s assemblies and may even be elected to be the speaker or chair. The history of the DPRK has many such examples. I think here of Ryu Mi Yong (1921–2016), who moved from south to north in 1986 so as to take up her role as chair of the Chondoist Chongu Party (The Party of the Young Friends of the Heavenly Way, formed in 1946). She was elected to the Supreme People’s Assembly and became a member of the Standing Committee (then called the Presidium). Other examples include Gang Ryang Uk, a Presbyterian minister who was a leader of the Korean Christian Federation (a Protestant organisation) and served as vice president of the DPRK from 1972 until his death in 1982, as well as Kim Chang Jun, who was an ordained Methodist minister and became vice-chair of the Supreme People’s Assembly (Ryu 2006, 673). Both Gang and Kim were buried at the Patriots’ Cemetery.

How do elections to all of the various bodies of governance work? Elections are universal and use secret ballots, and are—notably—direct. To my knowledge, the DPRK is the only socialist country that has implemented direct elections at all levels. Neither the Soviet Union (in its time) nor China have embraced a complete system of direct elections, preferring—and here I speak of China—to have direct elections at the lower levels of the people’s congresses, and indirect elections to the higher levels. As for candidates, it may initially seem as though the DPRK follows the Soviet Union’s approach in having a single candidate for each elected position. This is indeed the case for the final process of voting, but there is also a distinct difference: candidates are selected through a robust process in the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland. As mentioned earlier, the struggle against Japanese imperialism and liberation of the whole peninsula drew together many organisations, and it is these that came to form the later Democratic Front. The Front was formed on 25 July, 1949 (Kim Il Sung 1949), and today includes the three political parties, and a range of mass organisations from the unions, youth, women, children, agricultural workers, journalism, literature and arts, and Koreans in Japan (Chongryon). Notably, it also includes representation from the Korean Christian Federation (Protestant), Korean Catholic Federation, and the Korean Buddhist Federation. All of these mass organisations make up the Democratic Front, and it is this organisation that proposes candidates. In many respects, this is where the multi-candidate dimension of elections comes to the fore. Here candidates are nominated for consideration from all of the mass organisations represented. Their suitability and merit for the potential nomination is debated and discussed at many mass meetings, and only then is the final candidate nominated for elections to the SPA. Now we can see why candidates from the Chondoist movement, as well as from the Christian churches, have been and can be elected to the SPA and indeed the local assemblies.

To sum up the electoral process, we may see it in terms of a dialectical both-and: multi-candidate elections take place in the Democratic Front, which engages in extensive consideration of suitable candidates; single candidate elections take place for the people’s assemblies. It goes without saying that in a non-antagonistic system of class and group interaction, the criterion for election is merit and political suitability

As for the bodies of governance, there is a similar continuity and discontinuity compared with other socialist countries. Unlike the Soviet Union, there is a unicameral Supreme People’s Assembly, which is the highest authority in terms of laws, regulations, the constitution, and all leadership roles. The SPA is also responsible for the national economic plan, the country’s budget, and foreign policy directions (Han 2016, 47–48). At the same time, the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland has an analogous function to a second organ of governance. This is a uniquely Korean approach to the question of a second organ of governance. While not an organ of governance as such, it plays a direct role in electoral democracy (see above), as well as the all-important manifestation of consultative democracy (see below). A further reason for this unique role of the Democratic Front may be adduced: while the Soviet Union and China see the second body or organ as representative of all minority nationalities and relevant groups, the absence of minority nationalities in a much smaller Korea means that such a form of representation is not needed.

I highly recommend the book, it helps shed light on some often misunderstood mechanisms in socialist democracy, including the directly addressed fact that the DPRK’s voting process includes single candidate approval voting. Without the context of the candidate selection process, this is spun as entirely anti-democratic.

Geneva is a big fan of Bad Empanada, so I doubt it’s deliberate. I think Geneva genuinely believes it. Geneva has good political instincts, but instincts can only take you so far and eventually you run into shit like this.

No problem, glad it helped!

The strait is open to China and Russia, not to the US. Iran made that clear. Geneva once again rushing to conclusions to type “Chinabad.”

The Vietnamese textbook is phenomenal! It doesn’t touch the areas my list goes into though, and just focuses on dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and political economy.

Cool, my latest effort to do so takes around 5-10 minutes to read, but I feel that I’m missing a lot of important factors.

Pick any of the core parts then, and try to accurately break it down into a small enough chunk. Explain dialectical materialism (not even historical materialism) in 5 minutes.

I’m asking how you can fit the sheer quantity of raw information, effectively, into an hour. I’m entirely unconvinced that you could do so.

Theory is written with a purpose. Neoliberalism is wrong, but useful for maintaining capitalist hegemony. Correct theory is very useful.

Haha, no worries! Really, it’s about materialism in outlook, dialectics in method. The rest follows from there!

We’ve already been over this, I disagree with your rejection and stated why before. We don’t need to go through this again.

One could say the same of surgery, that you can learn by doing, but like surgery, without studying what has already been discovered, you’ll be hurting a lot of people unnecessarily to get there, taking a lot longer too. We need to do both.

Nah, the fact that you cape for racists and conspiracy theorists speaks to your character.

I wrote a basic guide on dialectical materialism. It’s missing a ton, but should be enough to hopefully make it make sense to start off with.

Elaborate, how do you explain all of them in under an hour, even without fluff?

They aren’t baseless, Rimu and many PieFed users are deeply reactionary. Contextualization is important because it’s necessary for correct analysis.

How so? How can you simplify them to take less than an hour?

Can you answer why you’re insistent on analyzing processes outside of the context they exist in? If you’re not going to respond to my criticisms of your metaphysical outlook from last time, then defend it, otherwise all I can do is continue to point out that you keep trying to slice away context and view processes in a vacuum that doesn’t exist and doesn’t represent reality accurately as a consequence.