No.

There was a post here maybe a year ago that I saved, but it’s not in my saved posts now and I can’t find it by search so it must be deleted. But someone linked a quora post from someone - I believe they were Chinese - who put the work in to study Juche and what it means in practical terms. I’ll try as best I can to summarize from memory.

Juche is not “self-reliance”. That is how westerners (not you OP) who don’t understand or want to understand socialism as applied to the Korean experience or just Korean history over the last ~125 years or so understand it.

“Juche” is to Korean communism as “freedom” is to western capitalism. How much do westerners actually understand about capitalism? Not much at all. But capitalism has reinforced this idea of “freedom” as the highest ideal. Free markets lead to free people, so they say. So while your typical American doesn’t have the first clue about actual capitalism, they have a vague notion that capitalism and “freedom” are tied at the hip. While we all know how capitalism limits real freedom, there’s certainly kernels of truth to this idea when you see the world as the capitalists do.

All ideologies need “slogans” that communicate a broader truth in simple terms. “Juche” serves this purpose for the DPRK. It’s obviously hard to define this as “freedom” is in capitalism, but the best way to sum it up would be that it means the Korean people are in control of their own history. Communism allows the people of the DPRK to write their own history and chart their own path. They control their own destiny. They don’t have to answer to or please anyone else, what the Korean people desire for themselves is up to them to make into reality. Self-reliance can be a part of this but limiting Juche to that really limits it.

Now if you are an American or a Brit or whatever, you might read this definition and not get what the big deal is. But put yourself in the shoes of someone in the DPRK. Your country was under a brutal occupation by the Japanese Empire for decades. Then after liberating yourselves, your country gets split in two by a couple drunk American officers. Then the Americans unleash hell on earth, kill 20% your people, and level nearly every building. And then for decades after that, the West does its best to isolate your country to bring to heel.

If your people have gone through all that, I can see how the idea of taking your destiny into your own hands - not subject to the power of others - could mean quite a bit.

Many here don’t seem to understand the historical context. The rise of Juche correlated with the 1973 US-Soviet wheat deal.

Here’s the context: agriculture is difficult - very difficult - in Northeast Asia due to its harsh climate. For years, and certainly as a beneficiary of the Sino-Soviet split, the DPRK had relied on the Soviet Union for economic assistance.

However, the crop failure in the Soviet Union in the 1970s caused a break in its ability to supply to the DPRK. The leadership understood that continual reliance on foreigners will only place the nation in a vulnerable position. Juche - which means something like “self autonomy” - was an ideology that served to rectify its geographical and geopolitical shortcomings. It is rooted in the idea that “man shall conquer nature”, and that “nature” refers to the extremely difficult climate of Northeast Asia.

And the DPRK did succeed to some extent, with a surge in food production, high mechanized farming and one of the earliest countries to reach an urbanization rate of 70% by 1970s. The living standards in the DPRK was much higher than China in the 1970s.

However, this also comes at the cost of spending nearly 20% of its annual GDP on agriculture, and continue to remain so to this day. For comparison, South Korea spent merely 2% of its GDP on agriculture, as it chose to import from Western countries.

This was all reversed after the fall of the Soviet Union, and after the unprecedented famine - caused both by rare weather events in 1994-1996 and the loss of petroleum supply from the Soviet Union necessary for a highly mechanized agricultural sector - the DPRK economy simply never recovered.

Juche was absolutely not some invention of the fall of the Soviet Union, it was an ideological pillar of Kim Il-Sung that he first published on in the '50s and, with KJI’s influence especially, it became state ideology in the '70s.

Moreover, it has long been the strenuous assertion of the DPRK that Juche is an ideological development particular to Korea (this was particularly started by KJI). It certainly was not just a word that westerners made up to describe something much more generic so that they can make it more mystifying and scary.

The particular ideological shift that transpired from the fall of the Soviet Union was the explicit abandonment of Marxism, as references to it were struck from the DPRK’s constitution in ~'92. I think that hello_hello’s claim of it being revisionist is difficult to evaluate not because it’s hard to tell if it’s good Marxism (it is not) but because it is hard to tell if it can even be superficially associated with Marxism or socialism at all. The DPRK definitely has for decades been proclaiming it to not be Marxist (or just not talked about Marxism almost at all, eventually) and have contradicted virtually every important point that defines what Marxism is.

To slightly minimize the sorts of arguments that this usually produces, I will still add the usual caveat that the DPRK is geopolitically a historically progressive force and that it is preferable for them to triumph over the occupation that has dominated half of their nation, but the gestures made in the last decade or so to the effect of saying positive things about Marx and co. are completely meaningless and, if anything, might just be a reaction to Xi’s own questionably-substantive reassertion of the importance of Marxism in China, since the DPRK definitely wants to get along with the PRC even if they obviously don’t want to have fealty to anyone.

Juche is a revisionist ideology born from the conditions of the Korean anti-colonial struggle in the late 20th and early 21st century. It was composed in the 80s before Soviet collapse under KIS but was more reinforced through KJI and continued by KJU and has been back-inserted in the historical re-tellings of the Korean revolution. Juche has also been used to mark the years since the Korean revolution.

The term “Man” is basically a substitute for the national masses of people (not specifically the working class, but centered around them). There really isn’t an orientalist lens attached to the term other than Juche is paired with the policy of Songun (military first) so it’s portrayed as North Koreans being militaristic which can be argued as a orientalist trope (but it’s more an anti-communist one imo)

Suggestions for further reading:

• https://kfausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/President-Kim-Il-Sung-and-Juche-Idea-In-the-Historic-Days-of-External-Activities.pdf
• https://kfausa.org/the-origin-of-the-juche-idea-by-kim-il-sung-march-31-1982/