Beyond the Myth of Idealism: North Korea’s Marxist-Leninist Materialism and Its Place in the Global Intellectual History of the Cold War

Abstract:According to the conventional understanding, by the 1980s North Korean ideology had little to do with Marxism-Leninism, not to mention Marxist-Leninist materialism. Scholars typically highlight the ideology’s uniqueness and liken its philosophical worldview to an idealism. From the perspective of intellectual history, the resultant image resembles a disconnect between North Korean ideology and intellectual developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This study aims to begin a process of reconnecting these locales into a global intellectual history by demonstrating the deep-seated Marxist-Leninist materialism inherent in North Korean ideology. Through a careful examination of political dictionaries, theoretical journals, and archival documents, this study offers the following reevaluation of North Korean ideology: Even in the 1980s, at the height of North Korean ideology’s particularity during the Cold War, Marxist-Leninist materialism remained a fundamental component, crucial to the rationalization of human willpower and North Korea’s leadership conception.