"The Shapelessness of Macro-Political Organisation" What the hell does that mean?!

I was reading an article on the collapse of North Korean Stalinism by Andrei Lankov (http://www.nbr.org/publications/element.aspx?id=198). The man is my biggest hero; if I had to whittle his work down to a few salient points he uses technical vocabulary only when absolutely necessary, he is very insightful, witty and he uses the word 'Stalinist' with some provisos to describe Kim Il Sung era North Korea.

But although the man is an excellent writer, he did cite another rather less transparent man when he was defining Stalinism as a concept. I doubt many people have heard of Seweryn Bialer, but he in his scholarly definition of Stalinism he uses the phrase in the title of this blog. Whilst the phrase is rather difficult of get a handle on I think I have finally understood what it means in practice.

The idea of 'Totalitarianism' as a scholarly term, has fallen out of fashion. In the Cold War it became a term of abuse for any regime that those on the democratic left and right chose to vilify; classic examples of totalitarianism that are often given are Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany etc. But in practice whilst these regimes erected impressive propaganda façades of monolithic unity, total control and submission of their peoples, the reality was obviously more complex. The first people I could find who used the term were Italian Fascists, whose own dictatorship whilst very brutal, was economically and politically laughable. The term was part of the aforementioned ideological fiction. Yet this fiction was believed ex post facto by many political theorists and historians; Hannah Arendt, one of the great post-war European public intellectuals used the term in her understanding of Communism and Fascism. Karl Popper who hailed from similar ideological roots, and from the same time also used the term in the same context. Outside the realm of political philosophy, the more events focused Zbigniew Brzezinski used the term in his analysis of the Soviet Union.

Yet these regimes were administratively and politically anarchic. Whilst certainly they were one-man dictatorships in principle, in reality, whilst power was concentrated in the hands of a few people, there was a great deal of confusion. This confusion was caused by the 'Shapelessness of Macro-political organisation'. This term translates into reality as conflict and overlap between the political party, the state/government and the military. To give a Soviet example, there was both a government cabinet and the more famous party duplicate the 'Politburo' or Political Committee. In Hitler's Reich there were two agencies that undertook espionage activities, the SS and the Abwehr (military intelligence). The SS obviously has infamous cult status, but the Abwehr is not widely known outside historical circles as a hot bed of anti-Nazi resistance. This is a classic example of administrative anarchy which empowers individuals within the state to act on their own for their own advantage or even 'worse', actively against the state.

In the North Korean context the situation is far more opaque, but nonetheless we know rather more than the 'nothing' that the western media sometimes says. The North Korean political structure has three major, and overlapping structures; the party, state and military. There overall power and the difference between them is not widely known in English language publications. What appears clear is that there is a small oligarchy that surrounds Kim Jong Il who have their power through their loyalty, family backgrounds and I am sure to a small degree their competence. Much has been made of North Korea's military first 'Songun' Politics (선군정치), what this means in practice is that the top organ of state is the National Defence Commission (국방위원회). Yet this doesn't mean that the country is just run by a bunch of geriatric generals. So far as we know Kim Jong Il is the man who runs the country, this is what defectors like Hwang Jang Yop say. Yet control of the economy and the army itself at an every day level cannot merely be managed by one man. This is the same for all one-man dictatorships, there has to be a degree of delegation to trusted confidantes. Yet in the North Korean context, some party agencies for instance the 'Organisation and Guidance Department' are reputed to have a great deal of power. Whilst the apex of the military hierarchy is said to manage and control most of the State Corporations. Concomitantly there barons of the state as well, economic policy itself is not merely set by Kim, or the generals, but there are economic technocrats in the state who are also heavily involved. The currency re-denomination of last year for instance is widely thought to have been the work of a number of high level state technocrats. This is one dimension of the so-called 'Shapelessness of Macro-political organisation'. There is no clear division of labour between party, state and military. All three seem to be intermeshed in their control of the key functions of what I would collectively call the 'regime'.

The second dimension of this 'Shapelessness' is the overlap that I already mentioned in the Nazi context. There are actual institutional overlaps and competition between institutions that share the same basic functions and roles in the regime. A good example of this is the security agencies; there is The Central Committee Secretary in Charge of South Korean Affairs (CCSCSKA), which is an agency of the Korean Workers Pary (KWP). Then there is the State Security Department (SSD) which is controlled by the National Defence Commission. And last and most important now is the Ministry of People’s Security (MPS). There has been some interesting things written about this in English. I can imagine from what I'm told that the Korean language stuff is compulsive reading...

Nonetheless North Korean watchers use rather sophisticated and at the same time crude guess work to try and work out who is influential in the leadership. Checking the order of lists, photographs etc. in the official media. Its quite amusing, and often yields similar results to interviews with defectors. The shapelessness makes any straight faced look at the North Korean political structure rather useless however.