Contradiction and Juche, Philosophical Deviations from Traditional Dialectical Materialism by Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong Necessitated by Socio-Political Conditions

Global Tides Volume 17 Article 5 April 2023 Contradiction and Juche, Philosophical Deviations from Traditional Dialectical Materialism by Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong Necessitated by Socio-Political Conditions Thomas Bidewell Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides Part of the Comparative Politics Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, and the Political Theory Commons Recommended Citation Bidewell, Thomas (2023) "Contradiction and Juche, Philosophical Deviations from Traditional Dialectical Materialism by Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong Necessitated by Socio-Political Conditions," Global Tides: Vol. 17, Article 5. Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides/vol17/iss1/5 This Social Sciences is brought to you for free and open access by the Seaver College at Pepperdine Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Global Tides by an authorized editor of Pepperdine Digital Commons. For more information, please contact . Bidewell: Contradiction and Juche Contradiction and Juche, Philosophical Deviations from Traditional Dialectical Materialism by Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong Necessitated by Socio-Political Conditions Thomas Bidewell Pepperdine University Published by Pepperdine Digital Commons, 2023 1 Global Tides, Vol. 17 [2023], Art. 5 “Workers of the World, Unite!”1 but how? For the centuries since the passing of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, practitioners of dialectical materialism and its resultant philosophies have been faced with the dilemma of interpretation and application of philosophical principles to legitimate revolution, or substantial reform. For some revolutionaries, the words of Marx and Engels are held to be the supreme word, and all action is justified within the pages of Capital. For others, Marx and his cadre were merely the authors of some guidelines written before the time of modern finance Capital, nullifying most of the theories’ implications on praxis. Within the ideological battleground of East Asia during the rise of Communism in the early to mid-20th Century, two cases stand out from the rest, both in their sophistication and diverging opinions on the role of dialectical materialism in governance, Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China, and Kim Il Sung’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. These two statesmen faced unique conditions in their given efforts to legitimize their rule: with the Chinese Communist Party contesting with other ruling governments on the mainland and fighting off imperial invaders, and with the Workers’ Party of Korea battling an imperialist empire both on the Korean Peninsula and within its own government. To allow for the utilization of Marxist philosophy in the nontraditional environments of both conditions, the two practitioners created what will be defined as “governing frameworks”, or systems for interpreting/reappropriating theory to explain conditions and solutions for building Communism in their nations. This work will attempt to attribute the deviations from the traditional Marxist dialectic in the given cases to their governing philosophies, and thus their geopolitical conditions. I: Hegel, Lenin, and Marx as the Forebearers of the Materialist Dialectic Vladimir Lenin once definitively stated, “it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.”2 While the term ‘Dialectical Materialism’ was not institutionalized until Stalin’s efforts to formalize it as the state philosophy of the Soviet Union, the framework itself can be traced to the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel, who himself reappropriated relevant Aristotelian dialectic philosophy.3 While himself an unabashed idealist who shamelessly thought of his theories as merely explanations of theological fact, Hegel is undoubtably the greatest influence on Karl Marx when he crafted what would later be termed the Materialist Dialectic, an answer to the idealist “opium” of Hegelianism while retaining the revised elements of the dialectic method reapplied to materialist conditions. The mere existence of a link between the two philosophers does not negate their substantial differences, and contradictions, in the two resultant philosophical frameworks; the suggestiveness of both philosophers, their legacies, and their successors make the likening of the two a controversial statement, regardless of factuality. To quote Dr. Sidney Hook, a scholar of Dialectical Materialism, “No two names are at once so suggestive of both agreement and opposition as are the names Hegel and Marx. To conjoin them is not so much to express a relationship as to raise a problem—one of the most challenging problems in the history of thought. How did there develop from what was ostensibly the most conservative system of philosophy in western European tradition, the revolutionary ideology of the greatest mass 1 Engels, Friedrich and Marx, Karl. 2017 [1948] The Communist Manifesto. Delaware: Millennium Publications. Glaberman, Martin. 1968. “Mao as a Dialectician” International Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1):94-112. PhilPapers (September 20, 2021). 3 Engels, Friedrich. 1892. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 2 https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides/vol17/iss1/5 2 Bidewell: Contradiction and Juche movement since Christianity?”4 While this closing question is directly relevant to Marxist dialectics, its many implications, not its direct answers, are the subject of this work; the melding of the two frameworks left ample space for contradictory interpretations and chronologies, and these contradictions serve as the principal deviations from materialist dialectics within Mao and Kim’s governing philosophies due to their circumstantial needs as statesmen. Before the Vietnam War, the two haunting spectres of Communism in East Asia were the People’s Republic of China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, both geographically (and politically) situated under the wing of the vast Eurasian hegemon, the USSR. At their helms were some of the most prominent figures of Marxist politics to date, particularly founding leaders Mao Zedong of the PRC and Kim Il Sung of the DPRK. These two, whose deviance from materialist orthodoxy will be catalogued in this work, both began and continued their political legacies under the red banner of Communism, with material and philosophical aid from the USSR, from the time of Vladimir Lenin through the dissolution under Mikhail Gorbachev. “Armed with Marxist-Leninist theory and ideology, the Communist Party of China has brought a new style of work to the Chinese people”;5 a philosophical contemporary of the Soviet dialectic, Mao made no mistakes in asserting the founding fathers of his ideology, while being sure to note its implementation in China. “We m (...truncated)