/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

In 1969, Eldridge Cleaver then a leading theoretician of the Black Panther Party, an organization forged in the crucible of Oakland’s ghettos and dedicated to the armed self‑defense of the African‑American nation traveled to Pyongyang to attend an anti‑imperialist journalists conference. The journey was not a mere diplomatic gesture; This gesture acted as a genuine encounter between two fronts of the same global war, the war of the dispossessed against the empire of capital. In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cleaver directly experienced the truth of North Korea, that is, it is a socialist state that had expelled Japanese colonialism, repelled US invasion, and was constructing a self‑reliant society under conditions of total blockade. He became entranced. For the Panthers, North Korea was not a curiosity; it was a material proof that a non‑white, non‑Western nation could not only survive imperial punishment but thrive on its own terms.

The theoretical bridge was Juche of course, the principle of self‑reliance. Juche is a strategic doctrine born from Korea’s particular material conditions, a peninsula divided by imperial confrontation, a nation forced to choose between Soviet patronage, Chinese hegemony, or its own path. Pyongyang’s genius was to turn this squeeze into a weapon. Juche allowed North Korea to navigate the Soviet split by declaring its ideological independence, and in doing so, it offered a template to other colonized and semi‑colonized peoples, you need not bow to Moscow or Washington; you can build with your own hands, your own soil, your own class struggle.

The Black Panther Party, from its inception, had practiced a form of Juche. The programs of armed community patrols, the free breakfast for children, the survival kits these were expressions of “using what you have to get what you need.” The Panthers did not wait for the settler state to provide; they expropriated from the bourgeoisie and redistributed within their nation of poor dispossessed peoples, separate from the amerikkkan nation. When the Black Panther newspaper declared in February 1970 that “broken wine bottles and hypodermic needles are very effective… this is Juche,” it was not appropriating a foreign slogan. It was recognizing a theoretical kinship of self‑defense as a materialist necessity under conditions of occupation.

Eldridge Cleaver’s embrace of North Korea was documented. He saw in Pyongyang’s streets, its literacy campaigns, its mobilization of women into the workforce, and its ruthless suppression of bourgeois activity as a model for a revolutionary society that could survive the inevitable counter‑revolution and blockade. The Cleavers named their daughter born in Pyongyang Jojuyounghi, “a young heroine born in Juche Korea” , a symbolic act of revolutionary internationalism. Kathleen Cleaver, in her unpublished memoir, noted that North Korea’s official denunciations of “US imperialists” resonated with the “most virulent sentiments Black slaves and their descendants felt.” The enemy’s enemy is not merely a friend; the enemy’s enemy is a total ally in the same global class war.

The Panthers were not the only US radicals to absorb Juche. In the mid‑1970s, the San Francisco‑based Black Vanguard Party published Seize The Time featuring Kim Il Sung’s definition of Juche, “holding fast to the principle of solving for oneself all the problems of the revolution and construction in conformity with the actual conditions at home.” On the East Coast, a white radical collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts named itself Juche and published a newspaper with the same name. The concept of self‑reliance, of building autonomous institutions independent of the non‑profit industrial complex and the Democratic Party was a necessary antidote to the tailism that has since conquered the US left.

The US empire requires racial hierarchy to fragment the working class. The colonized Black community in America shares a structural position with colonized nations abroad, both are subject to super‑exploitation, state violence, and cultural erasure. Juche’s insistence on national sovereignty and popular autonomy translates directly into the demand for Black self‑determination. This isn't some type of separatism, this is history, and the precondition for any genuine anti‑capitalist struggle. As the Panther Assata Shakur later recalled, she preferred reading Kim Il Sung over Marx and Lenin because the Korean leader’s texts spoke to the immediate, concrete conditions of a colonized people. Mind you, these are the same people who were the first publishers and translators of anarcho//nihilist texts from Russia. They read Mao, Marx, Lenin. We are not some modern abstraction of individuals that spun a new idea, this is just what ill informed leftists, and paranoid uneducated feds claim. We are continuing tradition of anti-capitalist thought and struggle. It’s exhausting how few leftists recognize the consistent, dialectical materialist connections between these tendencies and instead treat ideology like a product to be picked off a shelf, and repeated word for word. What are all of these organizations so many people love joining doing in regards to history & theory, training them to be campy cliques, rather than actually expanding their members theory and historical knowledge?

Anyway, North Korea’s anti‑racist rhetoric has never been superficial. When the DPRK’s state run media condemned the 2013 acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, calling the United States a “kingdom of racial discrimination,” it was not a propaganda stunt as the CIA bots love to claim. It was a materialist diagnosis of the empire’s core contradiction. Likewise, during the 2014 Ferguson uprising, Pyongyang denounced the US as a “disgrace” and a “laughing stock of the world” words that echoed the lived experience of every Black American who has faced wicked police. The DPRK understands that the same system which bombs wedding parties in Yemen also executes unarmed Black men in Missouri.

The Panther‑Juche alliance of the 1960s and 1970s was not based on cultural affinity but on material interest and international solidarity. The US state understands this perfectly, that is why it works so tirelessly to sever any solidarity between the Black oppressed peoples and Juche thought. The question the Panthers posed is still the question we must confront, can a dispossessed people build its own infrastructure, its own defence, its own future, without the permission of the oppressor? North Korea answered yes. That answer is a beacon. And it is why the US intelligence apparatus is so desperate to smear, isolate, and criminalize anyone who dares to read the Juche idea with an open mind. They fear the material practice of self‑reliance and self-defense. They are uneducated so think were apart of some organized cult rather than consistently carrying a multi-decade long tradition of struggle & theory.