A Non-Comedic Tour of Ideology

When thinking about "ideology boxes", to stay consistent with the idea of a box it's a good idea to talk about the parameters of ideology as a category of thought.  There are two ways to approach this.   The first is that ideology is a shifting, mutable concept that reflects the times in which it is active, even as it encompasses more time-durable concepts from morality or religion.  The second is that ideology is specific to political beliefs, and that recognizing when something in the world; a phenomenon, a fact, a belief, is not in itself ideological is useful to figuring out what an ideology is.  This is a point I made in the last post that I want to drive a little further by using a couple of real life examples to show what I mean by it, as well as to showcase a peeve I have about how the media talks about things.

North Korea has been in the news for the past week, which is something I don't need to tell anybody, having been implicated by the FBI in the cyber attack against Sony pictures.  The attack preceded the impending release of "The Interview", what looks to be a mediocre film with perhaps some mildly amusing bits occurring in some places during it.  As we all know, the plot centers around the assassination of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, a comedic device the North Korean's apparently did not find humorous (the DPRK is, you could say, accidentally funny).  The effect has been a geo-political dust-up and some discussion in the U.S. about a basic tenet of a free society.  All well and good, but it's not what I'm going to talk about.

What it did was spur me to revisit the subject of North Korea to form some perspective on the country itself and how we in the U.S. are talking about it.  North Korea is often referred to as a communist nation, or socialist, which is, maybe, kind of accurate.  They call themselves that, after all.  During my You Tube investigation, I found a BBC program featuring a journalist who disguised himself and his cameraman as tourists.  The two of them took the official state tour of North Korea for non-dignitaries and made a 30 minute program about it.  The tour itself as presented by the official North Korean tourism ministry is, as you can imagine, a bizarre look at the happy mask over the Orwellian nightmare that is the DPRK.  But there were a few scenes in which they managed to show a glimpse of the true conditions almost all people who live there endure, which led the journalist to ask:  What ideology does this represent?  What is positive program here?  Of course, it's a rhetorical question.  There is none beyond the personal power of Kim Jong-un.

It made me think that describing the DPRK as a "communist" country really isn't very accurate or useful in understanding what the government is or to explain how it acts.  If you consider all the totalitarian regimes that sprang from the communist revolutions, they turned into something resembling the form of government that prevailed before the revolution.  North Korea carried over some major old world, pre-modern elements that now serve to legitimize the current regime.  These basic elements of the DPRK are a slightly morphed and extremely brutal monarchy supported by an official state ancestor worship.  Kim il-Sung, in their official account of things, is still the leader of that country even though he's been dead for twenty years.  This does not represent any tenet of communism that I know of.  Ancestor worship is a form of societal organization that can be traced literally to the stone age.  So the ruling ideology shifted from a left wing communist to a right wing nationalist one heavily reliant on prevailing myths about the war with the U.S..

Of course, ancestor worship isn't peculiar to North Korea.  Japan has the same belief, at least until recently, about their emperor.  Mao, whose governance most closely resembles that of North Korea, eventually morphed himself into a Godhead like the emperors before him.  So these ancient forms of divinely sanctioned rule go way back.  Remember what Marx said about religion?  There is nothing in North Korea outside the completely unbelievable claims they make about themselves that has anything to do with Karl Marx or of communism.  If anything it's used as a gauge to measure the likelihood a person may live or die after each and every conversation they have with someone in authority.  Though, probably even a slip up on doctrine might be forgivable and the real live/die outcome is based on whether you've heaped enough praise on the Dear Leader.  And it's useful to remember that it's not possible to praise him too much.

A healthy, sane person finds North Korea a repellent subject, so the next part will feel light hearted and fun in comparison.  But to sum up on the Kim dynasty and North Korea's comi-tragedy,  one point I want to make is that ideology is a lens through which to make things sensible, and to know what does or doesn't fit the description makes a big difference in how you think about something.  Marx's ideal economic form was not to be controlled by a divine leader with supernatural talents whose only use for the national industry is to build extravagant monuments to himself.  This affects both how we view North Korea and how we view Marx.

Exhibit B is something I just found mildly revealing about how media people, especially more general interest figures, think about the economy.  It is an interview with Jeremy Grantham by Charlie Rose.  Jeremy Grantham is a very interesting person.  He is an institutional investor for Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo, which manages some $112 billion in assets.  Call him a capitalist par excellence.  He is also able to speak to the subjects found in this blog better than I can.  In the clip posted below, which is about three and a half minutes long, Grantham describes to Rose what is happening to the economy based on the resource argument and the rising cost of oil.

What I find interesting is how Rose tries to understand what Grantham is talking about through the lens of politics.  Rose bleats out Paul Krugman's and Ronald Reagan's names midway through to get a response from Grantham and Grantham shrugs him off.  Grantham, of course, is saying nothing, or doesn't want to, about politics and Rose has a hard time with it.

It's worth reading through the relevant parts of Grantham's newsletter to his investors which is here.  In this link are several others to the full newsletter. 

All of this typing I have done is to demonstrate a need to think clearly at least about ideology.  The world is changing along lines that will be expressed through ideology.  Two things pop into the cranial box.  The first is that a resurgence of nationalism is already happening.  Vladimir Putin is a right wing nationalist, as can be seen by his adoption of the Russian Orthodoxy.  Ahmadinejad appealed to a conservative nationalism.  But I also see Marxism to make a comeback, and Latin America is the place to look for that.  Can't say it will be a big hit in the U.S. but then again, Marx has a big advantage in his ready made class analysis and the  Law on the Declining Rate of Profit, all of which fit rather well in today's political wackiness.