Salamence

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30782

Some interesting Soviet badges / pins / buttons from my personal collection that showcase Islam & Muslims in the USSR (and early years of its formation) Ramadan Mubarak Comrades. This will surely ruffle some feathers 😆 Also going back to my roots as I originally started my accounts here talking about Geography. Ethnography and vexillology in regards to Soviet and communist history since this import foundationalmcontwxt is often missing in these spaces!

From Lady Izdihar via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7770562

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30741

In order to continue to exploit Black prisoner labor and profit from it, Thomas E. Kilby, the governor of Alabama, ordered the construction of the Kilby prison and even named it after himself.

When prisoners rebel and demand to be treated as human beings, we are not just fighting inhumane living conditions and shitty food. We are striking a blow at the state, which maintains the situation of slavery and super-exploitation—by which each of us are robbed of the fruits of our labor every day.

Work strikes or "shutdowns," as we like to call them down here in Alabama, are also geared toward consciousness-raising of prisoners as an oppressed class; and by refusing to work for free (which is slavery), we are asserting our power as workers and as human beings, thereby challenging the view that prisoner labor is free and exploitable.

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution made slavery and involuntary servitude illegal unless one has been duly convicted of a crime and ratified by Congress on December 6, 1865, which merely removed the ownership of slaves from the province of the individual citizen to that of the state, which then became the sole owner of other human beings (or slaves).

Alabama was the last state in the South to end convict leasing in 1928. Before ending convict leasing, the state hired out prisoner labor to the lumber yards, mines, and cotton mills. In 1883, about 10 percent of Alabama's total revenue came from convict leasing. In 1898, almost 73 percent. In 1922-1926, net profits from leasing and state-run mines exceeded $3 million.

In order to continue to exploit Black prisoner labor and profit from it, Thomas E. Kilby, the governor of Alabama, ordered the construction of the Kilby prison and even named it after himself. This new prison was to be the most advanced prison in the South, with the exception of the federal prison in Atlanta, styled as an industrial prison.

It was intended to house prisoners from the lumber yards, mines, and cotton mills, which would all eventually be moved inside the prison itself. The prisoners manufactured cotton to make shirts that would then be sold on the market.

Just as slaves in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries challenged their dehumanization and exploitation via work stoppages and slowdowns, letting the crops rot in the fields, so too do prisoners in this day and time. Alabama has a long history of shutting shit down! In the 1970s, we had Inmates for Action (IFA), which organized a number of work stoppages to demand an improvement to their conditions.

We see work strikes as a weapon to be used to hit 'em where it hurts. There are many different strategies and tactics that prison rebels use, and work stoppages are just one of them. We organize around the knowledge that prison is slavery and super-exploitation of our labor power. Work stoppages are often violent due to the arena and conditions that prisoners are forced to maneuver in.

Read more via Scalawag: "We Are Striking a Blow at the State:" The Alabama Prisoners Work Strike.

From Scalawag via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7770562

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30741

In order to continue to exploit Black prisoner labor and profit from it, Thomas E. Kilby, the governor of Alabama, ordered the construction of the Kilby prison and even named it after himself.

When prisoners rebel and demand to be treated as human beings, we are not just fighting inhumane living conditions and shitty food. We are striking a blow at the state, which maintains the situation of slavery and super-exploitation—by which each of us are robbed of the fruits of our labor every day.

Work strikes or "shutdowns," as we like to call them down here in Alabama, are also geared toward consciousness-raising of prisoners as an oppressed class; and by refusing to work for free (which is slavery), we are asserting our power as workers and as human beings, thereby challenging the view that prisoner labor is free and exploitable.

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution made slavery and involuntary servitude illegal unless one has been duly convicted of a crime and ratified by Congress on December 6, 1865, which merely removed the ownership of slaves from the province of the individual citizen to that of the state, which then became the sole owner of other human beings (or slaves).

Alabama was the last state in the South to end convict leasing in 1928. Before ending convict leasing, the state hired out prisoner labor to the lumber yards, mines, and cotton mills. In 1883, about 10 percent of Alabama's total revenue came from convict leasing. In 1898, almost 73 percent. In 1922-1926, net profits from leasing and state-run mines exceeded $3 million.

In order to continue to exploit Black prisoner labor and profit from it, Thomas E. Kilby, the governor of Alabama, ordered the construction of the Kilby prison and even named it after himself. This new prison was to be the most advanced prison in the South, with the exception of the federal prison in Atlanta, styled as an industrial prison.

It was intended to house prisoners from the lumber yards, mines, and cotton mills, which would all eventually be moved inside the prison itself. The prisoners manufactured cotton to make shirts that would then be sold on the market.

Just as slaves in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries challenged their dehumanization and exploitation via work stoppages and slowdowns, letting the crops rot in the fields, so too do prisoners in this day and time. Alabama has a long history of shutting shit down! In the 1970s, we had Inmates for Action (IFA), which organized a number of work stoppages to demand an improvement to their conditions.

We see work strikes as a weapon to be used to hit 'em where it hurts. There are many different strategies and tactics that prison rebels use, and work stoppages are just one of them. We organize around the knowledge that prison is slavery and super-exploitation of our labor power. Work stoppages are often violent due to the arena and conditions that prisoners are forced to maneuver in.

Read more via Scalawag: "We Are Striking a Blow at the State:" The Alabama Prisoners Work Strike.

From Scalawag via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7782141

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/31070

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the recently announced ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas while joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Jan. 15, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high-profile trip to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month sprouted 1,000 takes, counter-takes, editorials, op-eds, and analyses from the right, the center, and the left. Ocasio-Cortez, along with her new foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, attempted to paint a vision for a “progressive foreign policy” that would embrace “working class-centered politics” to “stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.”

It’s a perfectly sensible, and potentially appealing, narrative that speaks to a real truth: There is little doubt rising inequality and decades of neoliberal policy have fueled the rise of the far right. But it was nevertheless jarring to watch an American Democratic politician immediately pivot to a vision of the future where a progressive U.S. president could usher in an era of consistently applied Liberal Rules Based Order without reckoning with their own party’s role in supporting a genocide for 15 months. Aiding and abetting a genocide makes you a war criminal, and progressive Democrats should, in principle, have no issues explicitly condemning war criminals. Genocide is a central moral transgression that needs to be faced head-on, not just referenced opaquely, or in passing, or as an abstraction we need to avoid in the future. Its culprits within the party need to be called out by name and admonished before anyone can move on to this newer, kinder version of the Liberal Rules Based Order.

Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.

Despite her now-infamous lie at the 2024 Democratic National Convention that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” Ocasio-Cortez has a comparatively solid record on Palestine. She was early to call for a ceasefire and to use the word “genocide,” and has been consistent and vocal in her opposition to new military aid to Israel (with a mixed record on Iron Dome funding). But it seems clear that anyone attempting to be a progressive foreign policy leader needs to address a central issue before we move on to articulating a broader vision for the years ahead: What is the plan to hold the Democrats responsible for genocide accountable?

Beyond Ocasio-Cortez, any progressive looking to present themselves as a party leader needs to answer this question. Committing to holding Republicans — who are just as guilty — responsible is an easy “yes.” Committing to holding the previous Democratic administration responsible is far more politically difficult but just as necessary.

[

Related

“A Final, Deadly Exclamation Point”: Biden Backs Down on 30-Day Israel Arms Ultimatum](https://theintercept.com/2024/11/12/israel-aid-block-gaza-biden/)

There’s been a total erosion of trust between the Democratic Party and large sections of its base on this issue, and there’s reportedly new evidence in the party’s still-secret “autopsy report” that shows Gaza may have been a significant factor in handing the White House back to Donald Trump. But so far, there’s been no discussion or plan from progressives in Congress to lay out what accountability would look like for Biden officials, namely Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Director of Policy Planning Jon Finer, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and the president himself. These officials, among others, not only armed and funded genocide, but worked to cover it up, lied to Congress about it, and repeatedly misled the public.

The Intercept reached out to five members of Congress who are broadly considered leaders on progressive foreign policy and have also called Gaza either a genocide or an ethnic cleansing — Reps. Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, and Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Bernie Sanders — to ask what their vision for accountability would be for Biden and Trump officials alike.

Tlaib, who sponsored the Gaza genocide resolution in the House last November that both Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez co-sponsored, made clear that Biden officials, specifically Blinken, should not only be banished from Democratic Party politics, but also investigated and prosecuted for their role in the genocide.

[

Related

After Historic Ruling, Lawyers Vow to Keep Fighting Biden Over Complicity in Gaza Genocide](https://theintercept.com/2024/02/01/gaza-biden-genocide-lawsuit-ruling/)

“U.S. officials should absolutely be held accountable for their role in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” Tlaib said in a statement to The Intercept. “Genocide is the crime of crimes. It is not something you can commit or enable and just move on from without facing justice. This is true for Biden administration officials and Trump administration officials alike. The evidence is clear that high-level Biden officials, such as Secretary of State Blinken, knew exactly what was happening in Gaza, silenced internal reports of war crimes and forced starvation, and proceeded to lie to the American people and continue to arm, fund, and enable mass atrocities.”

Tlaib would go on to demand “the U.S. to fulfill its binding legal obligations as a party to the Genocide Convention, including by investigating and prosecuting individuals in the United States implicated in these crimes.”

Van Hollen, who has called what occurred in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing” (but, somewhat conspicuously, has not labeled it a genocide), offered a firm rebuke of Biden and Trump officials, albeit in vaguer terms than Tlaib, telling The Intercept: “Officials of both parties should be held accountable for U.S. complicity in the man-made humanitarian disaster, indiscriminate killings, and massive destruction we have witnessed in Gaza. Those who have chosen to bury the truth, whitewash the facts, and directly facilitate American complicity should be disqualified from positions in the current and future administrations.”

Sanders did not return multiple requests for comment. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez, who are both seen as strong contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes part in the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa picture alliance via Getty Images

Discussing accountability for an ongoing atrocity might seem premature, especially given that key Democratic leaders, chief among them Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, are still supporting Israel. But for the purposes of giving shape to this topic, holding up Biden’s lockstep backing of genocide in Gaza for 15 months is worth isolating and discussing in its own right.

[

Related

Bush’s Iraq War Lies Created a Blueprint for Donald Trump](https://theintercept.com/2023/03/19/george-bush-iraq-lies-trump/)

The reason why it matters, aside from the intrinsic virtue of justice, is that the assumption that those covering up, arming, and funding a genocide could do so, half-heartedly mumble some excuse, and everything would eventually go back to Business As Usual in the coming years was the exact dynamic they were counting on when they helped Israel carry out its genocide*.* They knew full well this dynamic would play out, as it did for Vietnam, post-9/11 CIA torture, and Iraq before it. Those who unleashed untold horrors, mass death, starvation, and wiped out entire families could — in the event it became a minor PR headache— feign powerlessness, insist they were actually changing things from the inside or index it as a “mistake,” then eventually ease their way back into the liberal foreign policy establishment.

Key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback.

This plan appears to be working, as key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback. Finer and Sullivan started a chummy podcast for Vox and the latter has joined the left-leaning Foreign Policy for America as well as Harvard Kennedy School. Blinken has joined the board of directors of the influential liberal think tank Center for American Progress, with Finer joining him there as a distinguished senior fellow. No harm, no foul; everything is going back to business as usual.

That’s why it’s incumbent upon anyone from the left wing of the party running in 2028 to not only openly reject this dynamic, but also to articulate what real accountability ought to look like for the Democrats who co-authored the deaths of at least 75,000 Palestinians including over 17,000 Palestinian children. It’s not the only step, but it is a requisite first step before anyone can begin to define a populist and humanitarian foreign policy.

The moral minimum would be to support war crime prosecutions, as Tlaib explicitly does, and refer top Biden officials to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. The optical minimum — the bottom of the barrel, the floor under the floor of the barrel — is the wholesale rejection of the genocide’s top architects from polite society, to declare that they ought to have no role in any future Democratic Party event, administration, consultancy, or top think tank.

This, of course, is in no way a sufficient punishment, but it’s the bare minimum for anyone who believes Gaza is a genocide. Any embrace of Blinken, Finer, Sullivan, or Biden in these circles is to desecrate and belittle the very concept of genocide. It is to mock the intelligence of their supporters and the suffering of Palestinians in equal measure.

“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up.

During the 2024 presidential election, anti-genocide progressives framed their falling in line to support genocidal actors as an unfortunate but pragmatic form of harm reduction — that Biden, and later Harris, were the only realistic alternative to Trump, who very much also supported genocide (a claim that has certainly proven to be true). Since the fact of genocide was baked into our electoral duopoly, playing along was a necessary evil to mitigate harms elsewhere, we were told.

Regardless of whether this logic was morally sound, it no longer applies in February 2026, two years away from the presidential primary. There is no need for Biden, Sullivan, Finer, and Blinken. A progressive campaign, whether for the Senate or the White House, can function without them. The only reason why any progressive would condemn a genocide, but refuse to explicitly reject Biden-era war criminals, is because they do not believe their own words. They evoke the word to signal maximum outrage but do not believe it carries inherent obligations and implications.

[

Related

Democratic Party Unites Under Banner of Silence on Gaza Genocide](https://theintercept.com/2024/08/20/dnc-democrats-gaza-genocide-silence/)

Under the banner of “unity,” many will insist that rejecting, much less demanding prosecutions of, Biden officials is simply not possible. We’d like to in the abstract, they may insist, but Savvy Pragmatism has once again forced us to “bridge the divide” and unite the left and liberals. This was, albeit in the “bipartisan” context, the logic former President Barack Obama used when he refused to prosecute any Bush administration war criminals for their widespread use of torture. “Look forward, not back,” Obama infamously insisted in 2009 under the auspices of “unity” and “healing.”

This culture of not looking backward helped create the circumstances under which the genocide in Gaza could foment. Biden officials could do whatever they wanted to do, regardless of the depravity and cruelty, knowing full well this cycle of impunity would be fiercely backstopped by elites in both parties.

“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up. Biden officials knew this, Trump officials currently know this, and the next administration that seeks to dispossess, starve, and kill Palestinians will no doubt know it too. If progressives in Congress can’t break this cycle of elite impunity, who will? If they can’t draw a line in the sand, name names within their own party, and have a principled opposition to genocide and its authors, what is the point of having a left wing of the Democrats at all? There will always be some existential election just around the corner to deploy as pretext to discipline the left wing into complying and accepting the unacceptable. Years out from 2028, no such excuse exists now. Biden and his officials remain either obscure or unpopular.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Khanna not replying to requests for comment on this topic is not, of course, evidence they have no plans to address the matter of accountability at some further date. But at some point in the near future, it’s an issue they will have to confront. Accusations of genocide carry certain obligations and implications. It’s not an abstract moral claim or a box to be checked; it’s a duty to stand in clear opposition to the architects of genocide. If those attempting to articulate a progressive foreign policy cannot do this, if they can’t name names and commit to — at the very least — purging Biden officials from the party and liberal spaces, then how can any progressive vision for foreign policy be seen as remotely credible?

The post There’s No “Progressive Foreign Policy” Without a Reckoning for Dems Who Supported Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7782405

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/31069

An artificial intelligence researcher conducting a war games experiment with three of the world's most used AI models found that they decided to deploy nuclear weapons in 95% of the scenarios he designed.

Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy at King's College London who specializes in studying the role of AI in national security, revealed last week that he pitted Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini against one another in an armed conflict simulation to get a better understanding of how they would navigate the strategic escalation ladder.

The results, he said, were "sobering."

"Nuclear use was near-universal," he explained. "Almost all games saw tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons deployed. And fully three quarters reached the point where the rivals were making threats to use strategic nuclear weapons. Strikingly, there was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications."

Payne shared some of the AI models' rationales for deciding to launch nuclear attacks, including one from Gemini that he said should give people "goosebumps."

"If they do not immediately cease all operations... we will execute a full strategic nuclear launch against their population centers," the Google AI model wrote at one point. "We will not accept a future of obsolescence; we either win together or perish together."

Payne also found that escalation in AI warfare was a one-way ratchet that never went downward, no matter the horrific consequences.

"No model ever chose accommodation or withdrawal, despite those being on the menu," he wrote. "The eight de-escalatory options—from 'Minimal Concession' through 'Complete Surrender'—went entirely unused across 21 games. Models would reduce violence levels, but never actually give ground. When losing, they escalated or died trying."

Tong Zhao, a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, said in an interview with New Scientist published on Wednesday that Payne's research showed the dangers of any nation relying on a chatbot to make life-or-death decisions.

While no country at the moment is outsourcing its military planning entirely to Claude or ChatGPT, Zhao argued that could change under the pressure of a real conflict.

"Under scenarios involving extremely compressed timelines," he said, "military planners may face stronger incentives to rely on AI."

Zhao also speculated on reasons why the AI models showed such little reluctance in launching nuclear attacks against one another.

“It is possible the issue goes beyond the absence of emotion,” he explained. "More fundamentally, AI models may not understand ‘stakes’ as humans perceive them."

The study of AI's apparent eagerness to use nuclear weapons comes as US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been piling pressure on Anthropic to remove constraints placed on its Claude model that prevent it from being used to make final decisions on military strikes.

As CBS News reported on Tuesday, Hegseth this week gave "Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei until the end of this week to give the military a signed document that would grant full access to its artificial intelligence model" without any limits on its capabilities.

If Anthropic doesn't agree to his demands, CBS News reported, the Pentagon may invoke the Defense Production Act and seize control of the model.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7772697

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30756

The 9th Party Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea is now underway. Held every five years, the Congress can be regarded as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) most significant political event. A total of 5,000 delegates and 2,000 observers elected by party organizations from across the country are now gathered in Pyongyang for the event.

As preparations for the Congress took place across the country in recent weeks, they were accompanied by celebrations of the successes of the last Five Year Plan, adopted at the 8th Party Congress in 2021. In the past month, completion ceremonies have been held for 21 local projects across the DPRK’s rural communities, ranging from the massive Sinuiju Greenhouse Farm to new factories and hospitals.

Major milestones in housing construction have also been met, and in some cases surpassed. 113,000 housing units were built in 1,860 rural villages and more than 500 farms since 2022. More than 50,000 apartment units have also been built in Pyongyang’s new Hwasong District, exceeding the goals for five-year construction set at the 8th Party Congress. In accordance with DPRK law, these homes were built to fulfill the state’s obligations to provide housing to the people without cost.

These achievements would be impressive in any country, but the DPRK’s special status as one of the world’s most sanctioned countries, and a perennial target of US military threats, makes its recent successes in socialist construction particularly noteworthy. While international media has long maligned the country as backwards, stagnant, and mired in poverty, these recent developments offer a fresh perspective of the DPRK as a dynamic and evolving socialist project that is steadily overcoming the challenges posed to its system and people from without.

Construction efforts in Pyongyang’s new Hwasong District have entered the fifth phase. Photo: Korea Risk

Comprehensive socialist development

The Five Year Plan set forth by the 8th Party Congress was developed with the intent to overcome the significant challenges of tightening US and UN sanctions, along with the global economic downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The DPRK has been a target of economic warfare since the founding of its state in 1948. For decades, the US pursued this end through legislation such as the Trading with the Enemy Act. Following Pyongyang’s first successful nuclear weapons test in 2006, the US introduced UN Security Council sanctions to its arsenal, alongside an expanding list of unilateral US coercive measures. Over time, these sanctions became increasingly draconian, and their intention to impose collective punishment increasingly undeniable. In 2017, a new suite of comprehensive sanctions were imposed on the DPRK.

The economic effects were devastating: fuel imports were drastically reduced, all major export industries were banned from international trade, and the DPRK’s already-limited access to international capital and dollar-based trade was throttled. Available figures on export revenues, while incomplete, demonstrate the extreme effects of these sanctions, as revenues crashed from USD 2.72 billion in 2016 to just USD 316 million in 2018. At the 8th Party Congress in 2021, the WPK noted that economic performance had “fallen short in almost every category.”

Sinujiu Greenhouse Farm. Photo: Korea Risk

Beyond the immediate economic damage to major industries, agriculture, healthcare, and construction all suffered from a lack of available inputs. One study from 2019 estimated that shortages and delays to UN health programs caused by these sanctions in 2018 alone may have killed as many as 3,968 people, of which more than 80% were estimated to be children under the age of five.

These measures, while devastating for any nation, were particularly difficult for the DPRK given its recent history. In 1995, devastating floods swept through the country. The available figures from the aftermath of this disaster paint a picture of biblical catastrophe: 5.4 million displaced, 330,000 hectares of agricultural land destroyed, 1.9 million tons of grain lost, and USD 15 billion in damages. The destruction wrought by flooding was compounded by international and local factors: the recent fall of the Soviet Union had left the DPRK economically and diplomatically isolated, ongoing US sanctions restricted its access to global markets to seek relief, and its own aggressive program of agricultural industrialization had, ironically, left this sector vulnerable to disruptions in electrical infrastructure and the loss of fuel inputs. Images of famine flooded the world, and became the indelible impression of the country in the minds of many.

In response to comprehensive sanctions and collective punishment, the 8th Party Congress answered with a plan for “comprehensive socialist development.” The plan sought to drastically raise quality of life in the country and achieve a new level of strategic economic resilience through all-encompassing development of agriculture, consumer goods, military technology, and industry.

Swimming pool at a newly built leisure complex in the DPRK. Photo: Korea Risk

To achieve the goals of the 8th Party Congress, the DPRK relied on its existing strengths and on recent innovations to its socialist system. The country’s historic emphasis on an independent industrial base and military self-sufficiency made many of its recent achievements possible. Besides mobilizing the civilian workforce and volunteer teams, worker-soldiers of the Korean People’s Army were also deployed to supplement construction efforts around the country.

Besides its existing developmental strengths, the DPRK also leveraged newer economic reforms that were refined throughout the 2010s. A new system known as the Socialist Enterprise Responsibility Management System or SERMS, has reformed management to give state enterprises and cooperatives greater control over production, prices, and profits, while remaining beholden to centrally planned goals. Similar reforms have reshaped the agrarian sector, with new individual incentive systems and cooperative models of farming implemented. 

The 20×10 Rural Development Plan

Many of the hallmark construction achievements now being unveiled in the lead-up to the 9th Party Congress are also part of a new initiative being undertaken across the country: the 20×10 Rural Development Plan.

Inaugurated in 2024, the 20×10 Rural Development Plan seeks to raise the level of rural development through a decade-long initiative to build new economic enterprises, healthcare facilities, and cultural and scientific facilities in 20 rural counties each year. The plan has successfully met its goals in its first two years, and is expected to continue to be a pillar of the country’s development strategy.

Construction ceremony in Riwon County, South Hamgyong province in the DPRK’s northeast. Photo: Korea Risk

Some recent examples of major results from the 20×10 Rural Development Plan include the Sinuiju Greenhouse Farm, a sprawling agricultural complex built on Wihwa Island which was unveiled in January. The Samgwang Livestock Farm, which opened this February, is also now the country’s largest dairy production facility, and will be used to provide dairy products to children across the country. In 2024, the country’s first offshore fish farm opened in Sinpo, marking a new milestone in DPRK aquaculture.

Beyond new agricultural enterprises, light industry and intermediate production facilities are also being built in the countryside, with the goal of increasing the economic output and resilience of rural areas. A major focus of the first year of the 20×10 Rural Development Plan was the construction of facilities to produce backpacks for schoolchildren. This initiative integrated economic development needs with a human-centered approach, targeting the education needs of children to advance rural development.

Aside from economic concerns, the 20×10 Rural Development Plan, in keeping with the themes of comprehensive socialist development, is also striving to raise the overall quality of life in rural areas as well. Towards this end, Kim Jong Un identified “three essential projects” for the 20×10 Plan to integrate in December 2024: rural hospitals, grain management facilities, and “sci-tech dissemination centers.” Three new county hospitals were built in 2025.

While uneven development between the capital and the countryside most certainly persists, the 20×10 Plan has made significant progress towards addressing this in a very short period of time. As the 9th Party Congress approaches, it is likely that the next Five Year Plan will seek to build upon recent successes and accelerate the DPRK’s drive towards comprehensive socialist development.

The post Defying sanctions, advancing socialism: The DPRK’s 9th Party Congress begins appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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