The Juche-oriented outlook on social history correctly clarifies the components of society and their interrelations on the basis of the scientific explanation on the essence of society.
Chairman Kim Jong Il said.
“Society, in a nutshell, is a collective of people. The community in which people live, linked together by social wealth and social rela¬tions–this precisely is a society.”
His instruction gives scientific explanation to the components of society as well as to the essence of society.
Society is the community in which people live, linked together by social wealth and social relations. People, social wealth and social relations are the components of society.
Society is the community whose main component is people.
Society cannot be born, exist and develop without people. Therefore, people are the first component of society.
Social wealth is also a component of society.
Social wealth is the means which are created by people and used for their needs.
Social wealth is divided by material wealth and spiritual and cultural wealth.
Wealth used to realize people’s need for material life is material wealth and the one used to realize the people’s need for ideological and spiritual life is spiritual and cultural wealth.
If society is to be maintained and developed continuously, it is first necessary for people to exist and train themselves into more powerful beings. To its end, they should have living materials for clothing, food and shelter and much material and technical, spiritual and cultural means.
Creating much social wealth is a condition favourable for the existence and development of people and the transformation of social relations. That is why social wealth is a component of society.
Social relations, the relations made by people in social life are also a component of society.
Social relations are purposeful and conscious ones regulating rights and duty of people to make collective life possible. It is classified by political relation, economic relation and ideological and cultural relation according to the fields of social life in which the relations are made.
If social relations are systematized and consolidated on a social scale, they become social system.
That social relations are an important component of society is because they are inevitable condition for existence and development of society.
In view of interrelations of the components of society, people are, by all means, the masters of them.
It is because social wealth and social relations are all made by people.
People, the masters of society are social beings who have independence, creativity and consciousness and shape their destiny independently, creatively and consciously.
Then, what is originality of the Juche-oriented view of society.
Before the Marxist philosophy, philosophical debates on society was made in the point of idealistic view for a long time.
The Marxist philosophy established the materialistic and dialectical view that society belongs to the material world together with nature, that society is the historical product of the material world, that society is divided by social being and social thinking, basis and superstructure and that social being, that is, material production and economic relations are the decisive factor that characterize a certain society.
Limitations of the Marxist view of society are that it explained society with material and economic factor as the main.
The Marxist philosophy considered people as component of productive force, the totality of social relations. So in the Marxist philosophy people are included in the components of society.
However, it did not consider people as an independent component of society. It neither defined what society is nor raised the issue of who is the master of society.
The Juche philosophy first clarified and explained scientifically what the essence of society is and who the master of society is.
Thanks to the Juche philosophy, original explanation on society was made with people as the centre and the components of society, their interrelations and all other theoretical and practical problems arising in the outlook on social history were correctly clarified.
