electoralism

While I don't like the Khruschevite stuff, it really isn't the point of my bringing up the article and neither is the SEZ stuff, which I'm obviously aware Hexbear is supportive of. My personal concern is with their thorough denouncement of Marxism point by point and even in name itself, as well as, it must be stressed, their explicit support for an indefinitely perpetuated capitalist class. It's not like these things were needed for them to stay on China's good side or could remotely help them get off the west's bad side, and these things have remained for decades.

If you want "grounding in the DPRK's context," I can point to stuff that Bland interestingly chooses not to discuss like the Supreme People's Assembly being a 687-person rubber stamp for virtually its entire history. There must be a line somewhere where one must admit that a "socialist" state has gone from "making compromises" to "being compromised".

I apologize that I don't have spreadsheets on the DPRK's economic functioning and probably wouldn't be qualified to interpret them even if I did, but I think even just the exercise of trying to have a standard of evaluation rather than producing post-facto excuses could be helpful.

I've never encountered people being able to respond to these things with something higher than handwaving, and the mods can probably tell you at this point that I complain about it constantly.