You may oppose it, but you also likely do not live in a socialist country. Understanding why socialist countries have the policies they do requires understanding their situations. For example, in Cuba, sending doctors to the rural areas helped provide medical access to people who never had it before. These programs are not at all comparable to slavery, but are pro-social policies decided within a class, not imposed by one class onto the rest.

In an ideal world, no country would even have a reason to have universal conscription. We do not live in an ideal world, though, we live in the era of dying imperialism, where the US Empire could lash out at any moment. In these circumstances, the decision to implement universal conscription is entitely rational. Further, I am not purely speaking of children, but also full adults getting their medical degrees and having to give back to the system by going to the areas most in need for a time.

As for democracy, the book I linked is the best source I’ve found.

Slavery is largely forced labor to achieve economic ends, universal conscription is similar to how people are forced to go to school in most societies, or how doctors and other educated fields are sent to rural and underdeveloped areas in socialist systems upon graduating. There isn’t a class of exploiters and exploited, it’s the proletariat organizing itself in self-defense during the passive phase of an active war. Calling it slavery equates it to slavery in the Statesian south, where slave owners brutally exploited a class of slaves. The reason I bring up other countries is to show that this isn’t simply a policy preference, but something decided upon because of its practical necessity in real, existing conditions.

As for stats on those who lose elections, I don’t have any. I wouldn’t imagine it would be a high number given that it’s essentially an approval round for candidates, rather than their first exposure.

Again, universal conscription cannot be removed from its necessary context: the DPRK is under constant threat. It isn’t literally slavery, it’s a policy that has important context, and isn’t done for profit but to satisfy the justified need for security and deterrence.

As for direct democracy, the DPRK has approval based voting. Candidates that are selected run unopposed, on a “yes/no” basis. Elections are not treated like political theater, there’s a comprehensive candidate selection system in the Democratic Front, with direct elections from bottom to top at the approval level. I recommend reading more from the linked book, the snippet I showed is just a tiny portion.

Gotcha. I’ll address these in order.

Lack of Democracy in the DPRK?

The DPRK has a form of socialist democracy largely similar to the USSR and PRC, but adapted to the unique conditions of the DPRK’s existence and history. From Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance:

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.

Universal Conscription

The DPRK is still at war, as is the ROK and US Empire. The ROK also has universal conscription. This is a strategic necessity for deterrence at the present moment, and as such cannot be compared to a country at peacetime.

Nationalism

The DPRK’s nationalism is from a socialist perspective, national unity against imperialism and colonialism. The DPRK is in fact extremely internationalist as well. The DPRK has played a similar role internationally as Cuba, supporting anti-imperialist movements around the world. From aiding the African National Congress by training millitants, to supporting Palestinian liberation, the DPRK has never been Korean supremacist. The Black Panther Party maintained good relations with the DPRK, visiting it and teaching Juche to Statesians.

Poverty

The DPRK is poor. It’s under brutal sanctions, and like Cuba, does more with what it has thanks to its socialist system than capitalist countries would be able to. 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.

To top it off, famine is now far more under control than it was during the 90s, when weather disaster combined with the dissolution of the USSR and the DPRK’s hostile environment to agriculture resulted in tragedy. Now, however, this is far more under control:

Conclusion

The DPRK is incredibly misunderstood. It isn’t a secret paradise, but it isn’t Hell either. It’s real, existing socialism, and delivers results we can expect socialism to deliver in such harsh, hostile conditions. Their rise from being subject to genocide to a stable, functional society despite brutal sanctions is to be respected and studied, not opposed.

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 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 undisputed 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.

Overall, people support the DPRK in its struggle for similar reasons people support Cuba: they are socialist countries that have achieved remarkable results despite intense sanctions thanks to their systems. It has nothing to do with “stanning,” and everything to do with supporting their struggle for independence from the US Empire.

For absolute beginners to learning about Korea, I like Nodutdol’s US out of Korea toolkit. It gives you background on Korea, from the Joseon dynasty to Japanese colonialism to the split to today. For specifics on the DPRK I can offer some helpful resources, but without knowing what in particular you’re talking about I’d just have to dump books on you, and that’s not particularly effective. It’s better to either follow a course like Nodutdol’s, or to study specific areas of interest.

It is, to be fair, the target just shifted to the PRC once it became obvious that they were not in fact turning capitalist.

Are you under the impression that the Lemmy.world admins are Lemmy programmers? Because this post is about removal on Lemmy.world, not Lemmy.ml.

People support the DPRK in its struggle for similar reasons people support Cuba: they are socialist countries that have achieved remarkable results despite intense sanctions thanks to their systems. It isn’t “totalitarian,” such a term is meaningless to begin with, it’s a socialist state.

The reason Marxists don’t support Scandinavian social democracy is because it’s both capitalist and imperialist. Private ownership is the principal aspect of the Scandinavian countries, not socialism, and as such Scandinavian countries are neither democratic nor socialist. Instead, they plunder the global south to fund their safety nets while providing enormous profits to their ruling class.

Unsurprisingly, I’m a communist. Collectivized production and distribution along a common, scientific plan is the way to go.

🫡

Jabril is being honest, not sarcastic.

It’s a good thing for the working classes to use the boot against capitalists, landlords, and fascists, actually, and this is precisely what the Zapatistas have done with their state, something they have in common with the USSR. “Stalinism” isn’t a thing beyond specific policies of Stalin, the ideology of the USSR is Marxism-Leninism, which was a key inflence guiding Zapatismo.

Marxists have been discussing the class nature of authority since Marx and Engels themselves, see Marx’s Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy and Engels’ On Authority. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice. The term “gulag” came from the GULAG administration, and doesn’t mean “torture/execution camp” or anything of the sort.

Defending the USSR from undue slander is the only correct path for a socialist to take. We defend the USSR because we defend the achievements of real, existing socialism, and we want to criticize the USSR’s shortcomings from an accurate point of view. Any comparisons equating communists to Nazis contributes to Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization. I’ll leave you with a quote:

To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.

• Thomas Mann

If you consider yourself a socialist, you owe it to our predecessors to wipe away the sludge cast onto their graves, and carry the mission for socialism forward.

I’m defending the world’s first federation of socialist states from undue slander, because I’m a Marxist-Leninist, and support socialist states like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. that carry over its legacy. The Zapatistas are cool, but small, and their own movement that isn’t really Marxist nor anarchist but is their own. They aren’t relevant to the current conversation.

Secondly, I already addressed this elsewhere, but the categorization of the USSR as “authoritarian” is meaningless without class analysis. Rather than being the tyranny of capitalists and landlords over the working classes, the USSR used state power against those former ruling classes, as well as fascists that sought to overthrow the socialist system. Any effective, lasting socialist state needs to have the mechanisms to defend itself both internally and externally, something the Zapatistas have in common with the USSR.

The reason socialists need to defend the USSR from Red Scare narratives is because the Red Scare is used as a cudgel against anyone trying to improve the world. The horrifying version that exists purely in imagination is something relentlessly thrown at us. Rather than distancing ourselves from former socialism, we should dispel the slander, because of 2 main reasons:

1. It is entirely unconvincing to paint a purer and purer pucture of a hypothetical socialism free from all of the imagined USSR’s sins for those who have not studied it. Why should this time be so far removed from the USSR? Obviously conditions are different, but many struggles faced by the USSR and its real problems are common for any socialist state.

2. Even if we play along with the Red Scare, it will still be used as a cudgel.

That’s why it’s best to take an honest approach and cede no ground to liberalism and bourgeois historiography. As socialists, we need to tell history from a proletarian perspective, advancing the cause of socialism.

It’s difficult to find compiled data going over each member state of the USSR. The earliest I can find for Ukraine only goes back to 1950, but reflects the same trends in life expectancy as Russia: a doubling of life expectancy following the completion of collectivizing agriculture in the 1930s and coming out of World War II.

The USSR was not imperialist, the RSFSR was also not imperialist towards other SSRs and SFSRs. This highlights a terrible misunderstanding of socialist economics. Across the board, Russia was in general more developed due to having started off earlier, but this was not at the expense of other socialist states in the soviet bloc.

Finally, the 1930s famine was neither intentional nor did it only impact Ukraine. Surrounding areas were met with the same weather disasters and problems with kulaks, bourgeois farmers, resisting collectivization by killing livestock, burning crops, and taking up arms. The combination of struggles over collectivization with weather disasters caused agricultural output to plummet, even though collectivization increased agricultural output once it was completed, ending famine in areas where it was historically common.

The USSR abolished the imperial system of Tsarist Russia. The soviets then established protections for ethnic minorities, even giving more land to Ukraine in order to solidify their identity. The national question was taken incredibly seriously. It isn’t at all the same as the USA, which is a genocidal settler-colony that wiped out indigenous peoples and brought countless slaves over, and to make that comparison and equate them is to minimize the actual, real crimes of the US Empire.

The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.

Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.

The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.

The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.

Death rates spiked:

And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:

Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.

When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.

The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.

Lysenkoism in particular was a mistake of dogmatic interpretations of dialectical materialism, and was discarded as hard proof advanced and disproved its interpretations of things like genetics.