North Korea

Comradeland wrote:

This is what Marx wrote about Irish people fighting the British in the 1800s

The other letters from Marx and Engels in their later life on the subject of Ireland are also very interesting. Engels talks of the English proletariat becoming "bourgeois" itself (I read it as bourgeois consciousness, not bourgeois class position).

"For the rest, it seems to me that Jones’ new move, taken in conjunction with the former more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, is bound up with the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable. The only thing that would help here would be a few thoroughly bad years..." -Engels to Marx, 1858

Marx comes to a similar conclusion over 10 years later, if a bit more optimistic on the subject of the English proletariat.

"I have become more and more convinced—and it is only a question of driving this conviction home to the English working class — that it can never do anything decisive here in England until it separates its policy with regard to Ireland most definitely from the policy of the ruling classes, until it not only makes common cause with the Irish but even takes the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801 and replacing it by a free federal relationship. And this must be done, not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland but as a demand made in the interests of the English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain tied to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because it will have to join with them in a common front against Ireland. Every one of its movements in England itself is crippled by the strife with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England. The primary condition of emancipation here—the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy—remains impossible because its position here cannot be stormed so long as it maintains its strongly entrenched outposts in Ireland." - Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, November, 1869

I think this idea of a nation's proletariat having bourgeois consciousness and reactionary tendencies in relation to another nation's proletariat/oppressed people is very relevant given the state of the imperial core's working-class and it's reactionary tendencies when dealing with PoC and surplus value extracted from the Third World by imperialism..

CRITIQUE OF “FREEDOM OF THOUGHT”

In any society, the ruling class tries to bring about the unchallenged predominance of its own ideology. In capitalist society, where the society is split into classes and people’s interests conflict, one ideology cannot hold undivided sway and it is inevitable that different ideas exist. The imperialists and their mouthpieces claim the existence of these ideas is a source of pride for the “free world.” However, progressive ideas can never develop freely in capitalist society, where the means of propaganda and education such as the mass media are in the hands of monopoly capitalists and reactionary rulers. The reactionary bourgeois ruling class tolerates progressive ideas to some extent, to make capitalist society seem democratic; but when they are considered the slightest threat to its ruling system, it mercilessly suppresses them. Outwardly, different thoughts appear to be tolerated in capitalist society, but all kinds of thoughts throughout it are, without exception, none other than various forms and expressions of bourgeois ideology. The “freedom” of ideology talked about by imperialists is a deceptive slogan to dress up–under the signpost of “freedom”–their oppression of progressive ideas in capitalist society and their resorting to every method to propagate reactionary bourgeois ideas. It is a deceptive slogan to justify their ideological and cultural infiltration into other countries.

— Kim Jong Il, Selected Works, vol. 14, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang 2010, pp. 54-55.

Diamatiya wrote:

Honestly, controlled-opposition pro-imperialist "leftists" make me angrier than even right-wingers.

Could you give examples? In the United States it looks like their "left" wing in politics in split all over the spectrum now, and some are actually becoming properly left-wing in their reading of US history.

80-Year Anniversary of the Great Patriotic War

On this day in 1941, the forces of reaction launched their invasion of the first workers' state. What ensued was the largest military confrontation in history. Four years and 27 million martyrs later, the fascist cancer was not totally defeated, but rather merged with the Soviets' former allies like two water droplets. That's why the achievements of the Red Army have been diminished, and their country smeared with the most vile lies, that they were equivalent to those who were trying to exterminate them.

Ukraine suffered greatly during the war as a result of being especially coveted by the Nazis. Despite that, the country today is a cesspool of fascist historical revisionism since the Maidan. Belarus lost the most people relative to its population of any republic, at about 1 in 4. We cannot allow what happened in Ukraine to happen there, for those who fly the flag of the collaborators to sell their country's industries to the highest bidder.

Diamatiya wrote:

And as far as I'm concerned, anyone who promotes the myth of the enlightened, civilized, "democratic" West is a white supremacist.

Liberal democracies of the West do not have corruption, they have "lobbying", they are not a one party state but a "two-party majoritarian system", and not a dictatorship of the bourgeoise but "a system where one rises and falls on merits." It is "authoritarian" for Russia and China to hold military parades or for Venezuela to install curfews combatting Covid, but "freedom" and "democracy" when the US and its allies bomb Syria, ruin Iraq, support terrorists in Afghanistan, and send Yemen back into the stone age. This is the propaganda which all leftists must combat.