While I do like Hakim and his content, his take on this is just... bad. Thank you for providing a critical response. The Socialist Movement needs more discussion like this.
Reading this was a phenomenal waste of my time. The majority is ridiculously irrational and having finally got through it all I just genuinely don't even think it's worth responding to, it's just dogshit. Simple as.
“In November, 1946, North Korea held its first general elections, to approve or disapprove of what the provisional government had done. By this time there were three political parties: the North Korean Labor Party, which was by far the largest; the Chendoguo and the Democrats. These parties formed a ‘democratic front’ and put up a joint ticket, the ‘single-slate ticket’ so criticized in the west.
“I argued with the Koreans about it but they seemed to like their system. Ninety-nine per cent of them came out to vote, and everyone with whom I talked declared that there was no compulsion but they came because they wanted to. I discussed the question with a woman miner. ‘Did you vote in the general elections?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The candidate was from our mine and a very good worker. Our mine put him up as [a] candidate.’ I explained the Western form of elections. What was the use of voting, I argued, if there was only one candidate. Her vote could change nothing. It would be a great shame for the candidate, she replied, if the people did not turn out in large numbers to vote for him. He would even fail [the] election unless at least half of the people turned out.
“... ‘We all knew the candidate. We all liked him, we all discussed him,’ she concluded. ‘The political parties held meetings in our mines and factories and found the people's choices. Then they got together and combined on the best one, and the people went out and chose him. I don't see what's wrong with this or why the Americans don't like it.’
“She paused and then added, with a touch of defiance. ‘I don't see what the Americans have to say about it, anyway!’ Voting technique was simple. There was a black box for ‘no’ and a white box for ‘yes.’ The voter was given a card, stamped with the electoral district; he went behind a screen and threw it into whichever box he chose. The cards were alike; nobody knew how he voted. Were any candidates black-balled? I learned that there were thirteen cases in the township elections in which candidates were turned down by being thrown into the black box. This fact, which westerners may approve as showing ‘freedom of voting,’ was regarded with shame by the Koreans since it meant that ‘the local parties had poorly judged the people's choice.’
“In one case a candidate was elected but received eight hundred adverse votes, organized by a political opponent. He at once offered to resign, as he had ‘failed to receive the full confidence of the voters’; the three political parties all jointly urged him to accept the post. The Koreans are familiar with the competitive form of voting also. This was used in village elections and in many of the township elections in March, 1947. These elections were largely nonpartisan, nominations being made not by parties but in village meetings. Secret voting followed, choosing the village government from competing candidates.”
Strong, Anna Louise. In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. Soviet Russia Today, 1949.
The quote is from Anna Louise Strong's visit to the DPRK. It expands upon the role of the people for example, and confirms this quote which you wrote off:
"The results [of the general election] are therefore expected to show overwhelming support
because a no-vote indicates the mass meetings failed to reach a consensus with popular
support."
And on reason three, instead of critiquing the individual excerpts from state media, you go off topic to critique what you feel is dogmatic support for the WPK. Are these thorough critiques? No. Very well, but at least these critiques are accompanied by a topical analysis of the way voter nomination is presented (no again). We’ll agree information is hard to come by. But you say these excerpts indicate that:
"... voters' meetings merely examine the 'qualifications' of candidates as [1] servants of the
people and [2] loyal party members."
Except each of these excerpts claim the very opposite. You admit such, and even highlight the relevant words proving this in some, but choose instead to derive an opposite conclusion:
"There's no discussion of multiple candidates -- let alone the debate necessary to choose
between them on ideological or political grounds!”
There is the implication of multiple candidates (you used implications as concrete numeric data in your chart of election turnout) because the voters are said to nominate candidates, which makes no sense otherwise.
“(The claim that [the fact that] candidates are ‘working people’ explains why they receive
‘unanimous support’ is absurd). Why? Do you elaborate on this point? Of course not. And what the hell is a "vanguardist"? That is not a concrete ideology in itself and feels more like a dishonest attempt to micharacterize opponents on your own grounds.
And what's with a white dude writing in discord, "I just want to gentrify Africa, fuck blacks tbh, mixed babies too." And "blacks and guns cause deaths." Do you think that shit is funny? Were you, as a white person in Amerika, "just joking" about "hating blacks?" Because I'm sure you just see it as a trivial thing, I don't.
No single account can confirm *or* deny that people meaningfully participate in voters' meetings. If you think otherwise, you'd have to apply no skepticism to Anna Strong's account.
0. Strong writes, "ninety-nine per cent of them came out to vote" with no compulsion whatsoever aside from avoiding "great shame for the candidate". Does that give you no skepticism? Rephrased: Why do you think 99% participation (Strong) or >99.9% participation (KCNA) is realistic?
1. Strong quotes a voter, "‘We all knew the candidate. We all liked him, we all discussed him’". If true, these candidates are beloved. Does it give you no skepticism that just 1 in 4 federal parliament candidates are re-elected in the same district? (See the section: "Of 657 possible candidates".)
2. You write: "There is the implication of multiple candidates because the voters are said to nominate candidates, which makes no sense otherwise." This is false. A nomination can occur without multiple candidates, as happens in uncontested elections in the US. (Or, for a more direct analogy to voters' meetings, a caucus meeting for President where just one candidate is running.) "Nomination" does not imply "real choice of nominations"; the latter must be proven. What do you make of the fact that voters' meetings (and their presumably extremely important discussions) receive no press coverage?
3. You write: "you used implications [of multiple candidates] as concrete numeric data in your chart of election turnout". That's wrong. The claim that "100% of votes went to coalition X" does not imply that voters' meetings have multiple meaningfully different candidates.
4. You ask why it's "absurd" that candidates "receive unanimous support" simply for being a worker. I answered that: """Getting 99.8% of leftists -- let alone 99.8% of the general public -- to agree on anything is impossible. To do it every election from 1990 to 2019 is even more impossible. You should automatically distrust any government which claims to accomplish such a feat."""
5. "Vanguardist" is shorthand for various Marxist groups which follow Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. in supporting a communist party as the socialist revolutionary leader, or "vanguard".
6. I've apologized for those comments, which I intended to mock absurd "scientific racist" claims. I've continued to produce anti-fascist, anti-racist content -- the reason I got into politics in the first place: https://twitter.com/SocDoneLeft/status/1564437421290180610
Just wanna say that part where you pointed out the image with Kim Jong Un in it in Hakim's video and tried to pretend he had construed it as a mass meeting was hilarious. You're an absolute moron.
[*] Refer to no. 4 + Vietnam has had ~95% voter turnout for a decade, China has had ~90%, Cuba this year had the lowest voter turnout and it was close to 90%, Laos has an avg turnout of 98% . You conceive of capitalist and bourgeois oriented systems as invoking the same attitude from the masses as socialist systems.
1. What is your explanation for this from your perspective? Wouldn’t an administration which apparently selects loyal candidates without any regard for the people’s choice want to keep the candidates they selected? I’d say what’s more likely is that voters would, in some instances, like to select new workers and citizens to have representation in the SPA.
2. I suppose, but the implication clearly lends itself to my view rather than yours.
“What do you make of the fact that voters' meetings (and their presumably extremely important discussions) receive no press coverage?”
Perhaps these resources are not published for foreigners? We have evidence that KCNA has declined to translate and publish to foreigners certain articles relating to domestic political affairs in the past. You could probably assume that these meetings, within which a smaller section of the population and representatives of political parties nominate candidates, are less important than the actual deciding election in terms of impact. It’s sort of like asking why you can’t find any info on LPA elections. These would either be relegated to local publications or kept under domestic translation and distribution.
3. This is a misunderstanding of what I was saying. I am mentioning how you listed KCNA reports as proof of the 100% yes votes despite implications of the fact making up a fourth of these. Then you added these implications as concrete numeric values in a chart (which you didn’t actually make but yk) [label: the table below is compiled from the election results reported by Korea Central News Agency (KCNA)].
Note: apparently your counting isn’t great because there are 11 and not 12 screenshots; the table only has 10 entry dates.
Then I related this to the implication available in the relevant references to voter nomination.
4. Your reference is to western leftists (of which I would be extremely careful of equating you with even) who live in a bourgeois state without a proletarian dictatorship or organized workers representation. I don’t know if you are unable to understand the development of mass consciousness alongside class development that Marx and Engels talk of repeatedly, but you are spouting liberal nonsense.
5. . Why not call them Leninists or MLs, terms THEY identify with and which are shorter than your term? Vanguard”ism”, as I said, is a component of a guide for praxis and not a viable political ideology on its own.
6. I don’t care. In fact I could not conceivably care less what your excuse is for:
- using transphobic slurs/chasing
- using some of the most vile racist rhetoric towards black people (that’s already prevalent in the U.S., you want us to see this shit as rhetoric you can move on from or a mistake and not the vile words of a wolf in sheep’s clothing)
- so on
You’re a white “leftist” who actively disparages AES (finally, a white guy from the U.S. to set us all straight!).
Stick on this point (#0) for a moment: How do you square substantial public support for "free markets" in China and Vietnam (comparable or worse than in the US) with the view that Chinese people or Vietnamese people have near-ubiquitous (>90%) "class consciousness"?
Of course you didn't actually care to look into this; the same exact framing could be used in the case of China since they also allowed an increase somewhat in private property under the control of the DOTP.
I can't open the second link (Idk why) but if it's from Pew Research then it's the same deal. Also wtf is that question (low taxes or high taxes for reducing inequality?). That is the textbook definition of a false dichotomy. Are you actually of the infantile rightist position that higher taxes=socialism?
I want a response admitting you were incorrect and failed to look into the actual questions provided. This is a really pathetic conversation.
[1] Anna Louise Strong’s account is from a visit to the DPRK; it explains the candidate selection process in a comprehensive manner.
SDL says, “Li notes that candidates are ‘considered by the electors in meetings in the workplace or similar.’ This sentence is the single mention of voters' meetings in Li's speech, and they don't even bother to explain their powers or how they work!”
Should it not be a point to explain how they work then? Furthermore, since the Korean War and the joint war demonstrations/sanctions ever since, things have been more secure. Since the war started in 1950, this is going to be the most descriptive source available apart from the usual appraisal found in DPRK state media.
SDL also says, “The mechanics of the North Korean electoral system bode poorly for the ‘democratic view.’ You should be very skeptical of any electoral system which only gives the general public one candidate.”
The general public is also involved in the candidate selection process, so this is just straight lying (and the quote I cited goes over this exact grievance).
[2] The 1992 IPU pamphlet (and the 1991 speech from a representative of the DPRK which is cited) only shows that candidates were nominated by representative parties rather than individual representatives before consideration (in 1991). This does not prove anything other than that candidates were usually represented by parties rather than individuals when running. IPU is not a North Korean source, it is a secondary (at best) source of the DPRK’s position.
[3] The ‘statistics’ you’re referring to must be the table compiled of candidate acceptance (although these aren’t actually statistics). As I said in the correspondence, SDL says there are twelve screenshots, but there are only eleven (for some reason this was never corrected). As I also said, out of these eleven screenshots, implications of the fact make up 3 of these. These *implications of numbers* are then turned into concrete values and placed on the chart (absurd).
SDL then claims: “As a result, zero candidates have ever been voted down.” (remember the quote I used also refutes this). Anyways, I also addressed this outside the source in correspondence. Your reply was much later than the end of this correspondence, so you shouldn’t have even brought this up unless you had something new to say. The quote was an introduction to refute a specific claim, not a refutation of the entire article, most of which is nothing special.
[4a] The photographs are only evidence in relation to single-candidate ballots for municipal SPA elections after constituency selections, which is a recognized thing. I never denied that such ballots are single-candidate, since this is a continuation of mass selection, and the only source that denies this is a Twitter thread SDL picks out.
[4bIn regards to party statistics, SDL writes: “These election results are obvious bullshit. One of the obvious features -- and obviously bullshit features -- is the stability of the WPK over time. The WPK always receives nearly exactly 87% of the vote: 87.4% in 1990, 86.4% in 1998, 88.2% in 2009, and 88.4% in 2014. If you've ever tried to get 99.8% of leftists to agree on anything, you know it's impossible. Any socialism worth fighting for is dynamic, where competing socialist visions should rise & fall from power.”
This is clearly nonsense for a few reasons:
1. Why the jump from ~88% to 99.8% in this sentence? Clearly to clumsily make the opposition seem more absurd (the DFRF encompasses all parties, it is not a central agreement).
2. Capitalism tends towards decentralization and irrational anarchy in production, whereas it leads the way for immense socialization and thus centralization. The DPRK has been at war for 70 years, is under the most oppressive sanctions, has had placed on it almost total limits on travel of workers and citizens by the UN, and has to deal with war mobilizations along the demarcation line yearly. This is not the utopian socialism where everything is decentralized yet socialized with no remnant of capitalism, where a party with the most resolute discipline is not necessary to ensure the country doesn’t completely fall apart to immense external pressure. The people of the DPRK understand this. The WPK regularly intermingles with the people, is a party of the people, is massive in its admission and scope, and is not subject to the petty ramblings of left-communist doctrinairism. The comment that there is no massive opposition party to the worker’s dictatorship is also purely an exercise in ignorance.
[4c] SDL says: “If we search the Korean archives, "선거자회의들" [Voters' meetings] has just 9 mentions since 2015 (Juche 104). If we search the English archives, ‘voters meetings’ has just 12 mentions since 2014 (Juche 103). (KCNA translates almost every article from Korean into English.) That's roughly 1 mention per year -- nearly nothing!
SPA elections happen every five years, what do you want? Also, going through the KCNA Watch archive and searching up the term “voters’ meetings” (notice you could also look up the term Constituency), I was able to count many more than 12 mentions including 2014 [56 to be exact, although there is some repetition] (2014 is a strange year to start the counting by).
SDL uses sources to prove basically nothing; you don’t have to “trust” anything. His victory lap at the end going over all of the tweets he has now “refuted” is really pathetic. I don’t know how you buy this nonsense but the clear thing is that this “I know who to trust” point is a cop-out. It's not a case of "either-or" in regards to sources; the fundamental facts only contradict each-other with SDL's framing (many things are just dismissed by saying "that doesn't make sense" or "that's ridiculous" without explaining because they don't fit with this).
While I do like Hakim and his content, his take on this is just... bad. Thank you for providing a critical response. The Socialist Movement needs more discussion like this.
Damn, the electoral system here is even funnier than I thought. Great article.
Reading this was a phenomenal waste of my time. The majority is ridiculously irrational and having finally got through it all I just genuinely don't even think it's worth responding to, it's just dogshit. Simple as.
Do you have any specific criticisms?
For you feds? Absolutely not.
Wait are you the racist guy?
Yeah he said really vile racist stuff in discord messages that were leaked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQaC_4BRqJI
“In November, 1946, North Korea held its first general elections, to approve or disapprove of what the provisional government had done. By this time there were three political parties: the North Korean Labor Party, which was by far the largest; the Chendoguo and the Democrats. These parties formed a ‘democratic front’ and put up a joint ticket, the ‘single-slate ticket’ so criticized in the west.
“I argued with the Koreans about it but they seemed to like their system. Ninety-nine per cent of them came out to vote, and everyone with whom I talked declared that there was no compulsion but they came because they wanted to. I discussed the question with a woman miner. ‘Did you vote in the general elections?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The candidate was from our mine and a very good worker. Our mine put him up as [a] candidate.’ I explained the Western form of elections. What was the use of voting, I argued, if there was only one candidate. Her vote could change nothing. It would be a great shame for the candidate, she replied, if the people did not turn out in large numbers to vote for him. He would even fail [the] election unless at least half of the people turned out.
“... ‘We all knew the candidate. We all liked him, we all discussed him,’ she concluded. ‘The political parties held meetings in our mines and factories and found the people's choices. Then they got together and combined on the best one, and the people went out and chose him. I don't see what's wrong with this or why the Americans don't like it.’
“She paused and then added, with a touch of defiance. ‘I don't see what the Americans have to say about it, anyway!’ Voting technique was simple. There was a black box for ‘no’ and a white box for ‘yes.’ The voter was given a card, stamped with the electoral district; he went behind a screen and threw it into whichever box he chose. The cards were alike; nobody knew how he voted. Were any candidates black-balled? I learned that there were thirteen cases in the township elections in which candidates were turned down by being thrown into the black box. This fact, which westerners may approve as showing ‘freedom of voting,’ was regarded with shame by the Koreans since it meant that ‘the local parties had poorly judged the people's choice.’
“In one case a candidate was elected but received eight hundred adverse votes, organized by a political opponent. He at once offered to resign, as he had ‘failed to receive the full confidence of the voters’; the three political parties all jointly urged him to accept the post. The Koreans are familiar with the competitive form of voting also. This was used in village elections and in many of the township elections in March, 1947. These elections were largely nonpartisan, nominations being made not by parties but in village meetings. Secret voting followed, choosing the village government from competing candidates.”
Strong, Anna Louise. In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. Soviet Russia Today, 1949.
What do you think this 1949 excerpt demonstrates?
The quote is from Anna Louise Strong's visit to the DPRK. It expands upon the role of the people for example, and confirms this quote which you wrote off:
"The results [of the general election] are therefore expected to show overwhelming support
because a no-vote indicates the mass meetings failed to reach a consensus with popular
support."
And on reason three, instead of critiquing the individual excerpts from state media, you go off topic to critique what you feel is dogmatic support for the WPK. Are these thorough critiques? No. Very well, but at least these critiques are accompanied by a topical analysis of the way voter nomination is presented (no again). We’ll agree information is hard to come by. But you say these excerpts indicate that:
"... voters' meetings merely examine the 'qualifications' of candidates as [1] servants of the
people and [2] loyal party members."
Except each of these excerpts claim the very opposite. You admit such, and even highlight the relevant words proving this in some, but choose instead to derive an opposite conclusion:
"There's no discussion of multiple candidates -- let alone the debate necessary to choose
between them on ideological or political grounds!”
There is the implication of multiple candidates (you used implications as concrete numeric data in your chart of election turnout) because the voters are said to nominate candidates, which makes no sense otherwise.
“(The claim that [the fact that] candidates are ‘working people’ explains why they receive
‘unanimous support’ is absurd). Why? Do you elaborate on this point? Of course not. And what the hell is a "vanguardist"? That is not a concrete ideology in itself and feels more like a dishonest attempt to micharacterize opponents on your own grounds.
And what's with a white dude writing in discord, "I just want to gentrify Africa, fuck blacks tbh, mixed babies too." And "blacks and guns cause deaths." Do you think that shit is funny? Were you, as a white person in Amerika, "just joking" about "hating blacks?" Because I'm sure you just see it as a trivial thing, I don't.
No single account can confirm *or* deny that people meaningfully participate in voters' meetings. If you think otherwise, you'd have to apply no skepticism to Anna Strong's account.
0. Strong writes, "ninety-nine per cent of them came out to vote" with no compulsion whatsoever aside from avoiding "great shame for the candidate". Does that give you no skepticism? Rephrased: Why do you think 99% participation (Strong) or >99.9% participation (KCNA) is realistic?
1. Strong quotes a voter, "‘We all knew the candidate. We all liked him, we all discussed him’". If true, these candidates are beloved. Does it give you no skepticism that just 1 in 4 federal parliament candidates are re-elected in the same district? (See the section: "Of 657 possible candidates".)
2. You write: "There is the implication of multiple candidates because the voters are said to nominate candidates, which makes no sense otherwise." This is false. A nomination can occur without multiple candidates, as happens in uncontested elections in the US. (Or, for a more direct analogy to voters' meetings, a caucus meeting for President where just one candidate is running.) "Nomination" does not imply "real choice of nominations"; the latter must be proven. What do you make of the fact that voters' meetings (and their presumably extremely important discussions) receive no press coverage?
3. You write: "you used implications [of multiple candidates] as concrete numeric data in your chart of election turnout". That's wrong. The claim that "100% of votes went to coalition X" does not imply that voters' meetings have multiple meaningfully different candidates.
4. You ask why it's "absurd" that candidates "receive unanimous support" simply for being a worker. I answered that: """Getting 99.8% of leftists -- let alone 99.8% of the general public -- to agree on anything is impossible. To do it every election from 1990 to 2019 is even more impossible. You should automatically distrust any government which claims to accomplish such a feat."""
5. "Vanguardist" is shorthand for various Marxist groups which follow Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. in supporting a communist party as the socialist revolutionary leader, or "vanguard".
6. I've apologized for those comments, which I intended to mock absurd "scientific racist" claims. I've continued to produce anti-fascist, anti-racist content -- the reason I got into politics in the first place: https://twitter.com/SocDoneLeft/status/1564437421290180610
Just wanna say that part where you pointed out the image with Kim Jong Un in it in Hakim's video and tried to pretend he had construed it as a mass meeting was hilarious. You're an absolute moron.
[*] Refer to no. 4 + Vietnam has had ~95% voter turnout for a decade, China has had ~90%, Cuba this year had the lowest voter turnout and it was close to 90%, Laos has an avg turnout of 98% . You conceive of capitalist and bourgeois oriented systems as invoking the same attitude from the masses as socialist systems.
1. What is your explanation for this from your perspective? Wouldn’t an administration which apparently selects loyal candidates without any regard for the people’s choice want to keep the candidates they selected? I’d say what’s more likely is that voters would, in some instances, like to select new workers and citizens to have representation in the SPA.
2. I suppose, but the implication clearly lends itself to my view rather than yours.
“What do you make of the fact that voters' meetings (and their presumably extremely important discussions) receive no press coverage?”
Perhaps these resources are not published for foreigners? We have evidence that KCNA has declined to translate and publish to foreigners certain articles relating to domestic political affairs in the past. You could probably assume that these meetings, within which a smaller section of the population and representatives of political parties nominate candidates, are less important than the actual deciding election in terms of impact. It’s sort of like asking why you can’t find any info on LPA elections. These would either be relegated to local publications or kept under domestic translation and distribution.
3. This is a misunderstanding of what I was saying. I am mentioning how you listed KCNA reports as proof of the 100% yes votes despite implications of the fact making up a fourth of these. Then you added these implications as concrete numeric values in a chart (which you didn’t actually make but yk) [label: the table below is compiled from the election results reported by Korea Central News Agency (KCNA)].
Note: apparently your counting isn’t great because there are 11 and not 12 screenshots; the table only has 10 entry dates.
Then I related this to the implication available in the relevant references to voter nomination.
4. Your reference is to western leftists (of which I would be extremely careful of equating you with even) who live in a bourgeois state without a proletarian dictatorship or organized workers representation. I don’t know if you are unable to understand the development of mass consciousness alongside class development that Marx and Engels talk of repeatedly, but you are spouting liberal nonsense.
5. . Why not call them Leninists or MLs, terms THEY identify with and which are shorter than your term? Vanguard”ism”, as I said, is a component of a guide for praxis and not a viable political ideology on its own.
6. I don’t care. In fact I could not conceivably care less what your excuse is for:
- using transphobic slurs/chasing
- using some of the most vile racist rhetoric towards black people (that’s already prevalent in the U.S., you want us to see this shit as rhetoric you can move on from or a mistake and not the vile words of a wolf in sheep’s clothing)
- so on
You’re a white “leftist” who actively disparages AES (finally, a white guy from the U.S. to set us all straight!).
0. Surveys of people from China and Vietnam make it very obvious that "mass consciousness alongside class development" does not dominate those countries. For example, see this global Pew survey. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/ 95% of people in Vietnam agreed with the statement: "Most people are better off in a free market economy, even though some people are rich and some are poor." (76% in China, 70% in USA.) https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/418850379518705675/749991985196302396/Inequality-01.png When asked, "What would do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor in our country? {Low taxes} or {High taxes}", Vietnamese people said (60% low, 35% high,-25pp); Chinese (31% low, 42% high, +11pp); US (38% low, 49% high, +11pp).
Stick on this point (#0) for a moment: How do you square substantial public support for "free markets" in China and Vietnam (comparable or worse than in the US) with the view that Chinese people or Vietnamese people have near-ubiquitous (>90%) "class consciousness"?
This is actually really easy to discredit. Pew Research used blatantly dishonest framing in their poll on Vietnamese citizens and their supposed favoring of a "free market."[https://web.archive.org/web/20221215170221/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1485985249234649095.html]
Of course you didn't actually care to look into this; the same exact framing could be used in the case of China since they also allowed an increase somewhat in private property under the control of the DOTP.
I can't open the second link (Idk why) but if it's from Pew Research then it's the same deal. Also wtf is that question (low taxes or high taxes for reducing inequality?). That is the textbook definition of a false dichotomy. Are you actually of the infantile rightist position that higher taxes=socialism?
I want a response admitting you were incorrect and failed to look into the actual questions provided. This is a really pathetic conversation.
Western source from 1949
VS
NK source from 1991
NK statistics from 1990 onward
Recent NK photographs and broadcasts.
yeah I think the latter one gives more trustworthy insights.
[1] Anna Louise Strong’s account is from a visit to the DPRK; it explains the candidate selection process in a comprehensive manner.
SDL says, “Li notes that candidates are ‘considered by the electors in meetings in the workplace or similar.’ This sentence is the single mention of voters' meetings in Li's speech, and they don't even bother to explain their powers or how they work!”
Should it not be a point to explain how they work then? Furthermore, since the Korean War and the joint war demonstrations/sanctions ever since, things have been more secure. Since the war started in 1950, this is going to be the most descriptive source available apart from the usual appraisal found in DPRK state media.
SDL also says, “The mechanics of the North Korean electoral system bode poorly for the ‘democratic view.’ You should be very skeptical of any electoral system which only gives the general public one candidate.”
The general public is also involved in the candidate selection process, so this is just straight lying (and the quote I cited goes over this exact grievance).
[2] The 1992 IPU pamphlet (and the 1991 speech from a representative of the DPRK which is cited) only shows that candidates were nominated by representative parties rather than individual representatives before consideration (in 1991). This does not prove anything other than that candidates were usually represented by parties rather than individuals when running. IPU is not a North Korean source, it is a secondary (at best) source of the DPRK’s position.
[3] The ‘statistics’ you’re referring to must be the table compiled of candidate acceptance (although these aren’t actually statistics). As I said in the correspondence, SDL says there are twelve screenshots, but there are only eleven (for some reason this was never corrected). As I also said, out of these eleven screenshots, implications of the fact make up 3 of these. These *implications of numbers* are then turned into concrete values and placed on the chart (absurd).
SDL then claims: “As a result, zero candidates have ever been voted down.” (remember the quote I used also refutes this). Anyways, I also addressed this outside the source in correspondence. Your reply was much later than the end of this correspondence, so you shouldn’t have even brought this up unless you had something new to say. The quote was an introduction to refute a specific claim, not a refutation of the entire article, most of which is nothing special.
[4a] The photographs are only evidence in relation to single-candidate ballots for municipal SPA elections after constituency selections, which is a recognized thing. I never denied that such ballots are single-candidate, since this is a continuation of mass selection, and the only source that denies this is a Twitter thread SDL picks out.
[4bIn regards to party statistics, SDL writes: “These election results are obvious bullshit. One of the obvious features -- and obviously bullshit features -- is the stability of the WPK over time. The WPK always receives nearly exactly 87% of the vote: 87.4% in 1990, 86.4% in 1998, 88.2% in 2009, and 88.4% in 2014. If you've ever tried to get 99.8% of leftists to agree on anything, you know it's impossible. Any socialism worth fighting for is dynamic, where competing socialist visions should rise & fall from power.”
This is clearly nonsense for a few reasons:
1. Why the jump from ~88% to 99.8% in this sentence? Clearly to clumsily make the opposition seem more absurd (the DFRF encompasses all parties, it is not a central agreement).
2. Capitalism tends towards decentralization and irrational anarchy in production, whereas it leads the way for immense socialization and thus centralization. The DPRK has been at war for 70 years, is under the most oppressive sanctions, has had placed on it almost total limits on travel of workers and citizens by the UN, and has to deal with war mobilizations along the demarcation line yearly. This is not the utopian socialism where everything is decentralized yet socialized with no remnant of capitalism, where a party with the most resolute discipline is not necessary to ensure the country doesn’t completely fall apart to immense external pressure. The people of the DPRK understand this. The WPK regularly intermingles with the people, is a party of the people, is massive in its admission and scope, and is not subject to the petty ramblings of left-communist doctrinairism. The comment that there is no massive opposition party to the worker’s dictatorship is also purely an exercise in ignorance.
[4c] SDL says: “If we search the Korean archives, "선거자회의들" [Voters' meetings] has just 9 mentions since 2015 (Juche 104). If we search the English archives, ‘voters meetings’ has just 12 mentions since 2014 (Juche 103). (KCNA translates almost every article from Korean into English.) That's roughly 1 mention per year -- nearly nothing!
SPA elections happen every five years, what do you want? Also, going through the KCNA Watch archive and searching up the term “voters’ meetings” (notice you could also look up the term Constituency), I was able to count many more than 12 mentions including 2014 [56 to be exact, although there is some repetition] (2014 is a strange year to start the counting by).
SDL uses sources to prove basically nothing; you don’t have to “trust” anything. His victory lap at the end going over all of the tweets he has now “refuted” is really pathetic. I don’t know how you buy this nonsense but the clear thing is that this “I know who to trust” point is a cop-out. It's not a case of "either-or" in regards to sources; the fundamental facts only contradict each-other with SDL's framing (many things are just dismissed by saying "that doesn't make sense" or "that's ridiculous" without explaining because they don't fit with this).