Juche - Relation To Marxism, Stalinism, and Maoism

Relation To Marxism, Stalinism, and Maoism

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Further information: Marxism, Stalinism, and Maoism

In 1972, Juche replaced Marxism-Leninism in the revised North Korean constitution as the official state ideology, this being a response to the Sino-Soviet split. Juche was nonetheless defined as a "creative application of Marxism-Leninism." Kim Il-sung also explained that Juche was not original to North Korea and that in formulating it he only laid stress on a programmatic orientation that is inherent to all Stalinist states.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea’s greatest economic benefactor, all reference to Marxism-Leninism was dropped in the revised 1998 constitution. Some Marxist-Leninist phraseology remained in occasional use, but in 2009, the word 공산주의 ("communism") itself was dropped from the constitution altogether. The establishment of the Songun doctrine in the mid-1990s, however, has formally designated the military, not the proletariat or working class, as the main revolutionary force in North Korea.

Many commentators, journalists, and scholars outside North Korea equate Juche with Stalinism and call North Korea a Stalinist country. Some specialists have argued otherwise and have attempted to characterize the North Korean state as corporatist (Bruce Cumings), race-based nationalist (Brian Myers), guerrillaist (Wada Haruki), monarchist (Dae Sook-suh), and theocratic (Han S. Park, Christopher Hitchens). Those who have made conditional arguments that North Korea is a Stalinist regime include Charles Armstrong, Adrian Buzo, Chong-Sik Lee, and Robert Scalapino.

Kim Il-sung's policy statements and speeches from the 1940s and 1950s confirm that the North Korean government accepted Joseph Stalin's 1924 theory of Socialism in One Country and its model of centralized autarkic economic development. Following Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, the North Korean leader wrote an emotional obituary in his honor titled "Stalin Is the Inspiration for the Peoples Struggling for Their Freedom and Independence" in a special issue of the WPK newspaper Rodong Sinmun (March 10, 1953), the opening of which reads:

Stalin has died. The ardent heart of the great leader of progressive mankind has ceased to beat. This sad news has spread over Korean territory like lightning, inflicting a bitter blow to the hearts of millions of people. Korean People's Army soldiers, workers, farmers, and students, as well as all residents of both South and North Korea, have heard the sad news with profound grief. The very being of Korea has seemed to bow down, and mothers who had apparently exhausted their tears in weeping for the children they had lost in the bombing of the air bandits sobbed again.

Despite this, statements by Kim Il-sung concerning learning from Stalin and the Soviet experience were later removed from public record.

After Stalin's death, Stalin's cult of personality was denounced at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, North Korean state authorities ended overt adulation of the Soviet leader. But the regime refused to follow the example of Soviet political reform, which it decried as modern revisionism, or join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the major international trade organization of Marxist-Leninist states subordinated to the economic development of the Soviet Union. At present, the North Korean government admits no connection between Juche and the ideas of Stalin, though occasional mention is made of his political merits.

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Political thinking from Maoist China has greatly influenced North Korea, such as the North's Chollima mass mobilization movements, which were based on China's Great Leap Forward. However, the ruling party in Pyongyang strongly denounces any Maoist influences on Juche in an attempt to appear independent. So even though the influence of Mao Zedong is also not formally acknowledged in North Korea, WPK ideologists and speech writers began to openly use Maoist ideas, such as the concept of self-regeneration, in the 1950s and 1960s. Maoist theories of art also began to influence North Korean musical theater during this time. These developments occurred as a result of the influence of the Chinese Army's involvement during the Korean War, as well as during the Sino-Soviet split when Kim Il-sung sided with Mao against Soviet de-Stalinization. Kim attended middle school in China, he was conversant in Chinese, and he had been a guerrilla partisan in the Communist Party of China from about 1931-1941. The postwar Kim Il-sung regime had also emulated Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his theory of the Mass line (qunzhong luxian), and the guerrilla tradition. Juche, however, does not exactly share the Maoist faith in the peasantry over the working class and the village over the city, as it exalts the military.