First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Dermot Hudson for organizing this significant seminar.
President Kim Il Sung’s book On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work was published 70 years ago at a time when socialism had been built in the DPRK for ten years and the Fatherland liberation war had ended a couple of years earlier. During that period, there was still an ongoing struggle within the Workers’ Party of Korea over the party line. Within the party there were comrades who, although Korean, had spent most of their lives in the Soviet Union. Likewise, some comrades had strong ties to the Chinese communists’ struggle for the liberation of China. These comrades promoted views according to which socialism should be built in exactly the same way as it had been built in the Soviet Union or China. The main line advocated by President Kim Il Sung supported reliance on one’s own forces and the strengthening of Juche in party work and in the construction of society.
I would like to highlight a couple of points from this excellent work. President Kim Il Sung criticized the fact that the history of the Korean people’s struggle was not sufficiently known and was not taught. This is an extremely important observation.
When developing strategy and tactics for advancing socialism, it is of course necessary to understand how socialist society has been built in different countries. At the same time, it is absolutely essential to know one’s own people’s struggle for independence. In this work, we cannot rely on bourgeois historiography. Just as Kim Il Sung pointed out, the dictator Syngman Rhee used the Gwangju student movement for his own reactionary purposes.
Bourgeois historiography is written for the capitalist class—for defending the existence of capitalism and strengthening it. Many achievements of the working class are ignored or distorted.
For example, in Finland in the 1970s there was a strong youth movement aiming toward socialism, which weakened as the 1980s approached due to bourgeois fragmentation. Even today, so-called historiography about that period continues to appear, criticizing and belittling the significance of the movement. However, it is clear that the movement was important for the Finnish working-class. At that time, much revolutionary theory was studied and learned, and the strategy and tactics of the working-class were examined. This written legacy is available to us and greatly enriches the history of the working-class movement in Finland.
If we do not carefully examine these forms of struggle of the working-class and learn from the history of our own country’s working-class, we cannot build a socialist revolution in accordance with the Juche idea. The danger is that the working class will repeat the same mistakes again and again. Learning from history often requires workers’ study circles, precisely because historiography is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
Another issue I would like to highlight is President Kim Il Sung’s observation that in our work it is important to adopt revolutionary truth, Marxist-Leninist truth, and to apply it correctly to the concrete conditions of our country.
The adoption of revolutionary truth is also of paramount importance. I personally see this as having a fully unified understanding of the laws governing society—how society develops and how it is built—so that everyone shares the same goal.
Creating a shared understanding is not easy. Take European communists, for example. It is very difficult to build a common strategy and tactics when people and groups have different views on how capitalism develops, which matters belong to the economic base and which are phenomena of the superstructure, and ultimately what the goal is and what kind of socialist society should be built. Solutions are sought in various conspiracy theories rather than in Marxist science.
A shared understanding does not arise by chance or instinctively; it requires a great deal of independent and guided work, study, and discussion of what has been learned with comrades who think in a similar way. We have a great deal of work to do in this regard.
President Kim Il Sung spoke about these issues already 70 years ago. His speech, as well as historical practice, has shown that his thinking was already at that time very unique and correct. In the Soviet Union, insufficient attention was paid to these matters, as even within the party it was thought that teaching Marxist philosophy to the entire people was too difficult. This erroneous way of thinking led to a situation where the people ultimately did not have a shared understanding of building society. The Soviet Union and socialism in Eastern Europe suffered a temporary collapse, but the DPRK has achieved continuous success by applying the Juche idea. This would not be possible if every citizen of Korea did not share the same understanding of the laws governing society.
Finally, I would like to encourage everyone to study the Juche idea and to participate in study-circle meetings. And once again, many thanks to Dr. Dermot Hudson for organizing this event.
Thank you!
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