this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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I have been interested in the Juche Idea lately and read some texts. From what i can tell, one of the main components of the Juche idea is that the man is master, the maker of history and master of his destiny. This sentence by its own sounds quite un-materialist as it implicates that material conditions do not shape the man but vise-versa. BUT, what i think they mean is that, using dialectic-materialism, we can predict societal changes that will evolve in the future...similar to how we know that socialism will sometime ovetake capitalism as the anti-thesis (the proletariat) will assert dominance over the current (syn)thesis as it had happened similarly to former societal structures. Knowing how the wheel of history spins now has given us the ability to predict it and therefore the power to take our destiny into our own hands and shape history after our desire.

Is that what Juche is about? I havent touched much of actual theory on that matter but im interested to know if i have interpreted it right...if not, i would be more than happy to be educated on the Idea and how exactly the man is supposedly the shaper of history according to Juche.

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[–] FlightSimEnjoyer@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I remember that there is a quote from Engels where he says that while the material conditions do have influence on humans, humans can and do influence the material conditions of the world.

If any comrade can find this quote and link it on a reply to my comment I would be grateful.

[–] MarlKarx@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is true that we can change our environments and therefore our material conditions but these man-made changes are again caused by material conditions leading to people changing their environments. That's how history is and always has been, a cycle of material conditions influencing people to change their surroundings whose material conditions will cause other people to change their surroundings and so on....the question is what was the initiator of this cycle, was the man who made the first change leading to a change of material conditions or the material conditions which led the man to do the first change? I would say its the second as we, from my atheistic point of view, are results of nature, of millions of years of evolution. We did not always possess the ability to change our world how we want it, those who were born adjusted to their environments would survive, those who were not, would die....we, for a long time, had no say over our survival or nature but due to a chain of environmental changes, we started to develop bigger brains and the ability to analyze and use our environments to our advantage. First the material conditions allowing us to to gain the ability to change our material conditions came. We now are not anymore slaves of nature, of selective survival of those who are adjusted, we are now developed enough to help those in need, those who would not survive....we (mostly) have surpassed these harsh realities making us masters of our destiny, not letting us be dictated by forces we can harness. We have the power to save this planet or destroy it how it currently is under global capitalism. Primitivism, Conservatism, any form of regression is not and cannot be the answer without it undermining our social and/or technical achievements made.

[–] MarlKarx@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

i apologize for my outburst, this is not materialist, it is idealist and any good marxist should restrain himself from utopian idealist thought.