Are Juche and Mensheviks the same thing?

Measured across six independent axes they are 27.4 apart out of a possible 49.0, which is opposed programmes with little shared ground. They agree within three points on EC. They diverge by eight points or more on CU, AU, ID.

Atlas / Comparisons / Juche vs Mensheviks

Juche and Mensheviks

Measured distance across six axes

27.4 / 49.0 possible

Opposed programmes with little shared ground. They agree within three points on EC. They diverge by eight points or more on CU, AU, ID.

Axis by axis

Axis	Kimilsungism	RSDLP(m)	Gap		Reading
EC · Economic organisation	−10	−08	2	Agrees	Effectively the same position. Not what an argument between them is about.
CU · Social and cultural order	+09	−05	14	Diverges	Carries the disagreement. Any claim that these two are alike has to explain this.
AU · Organisation of power	+10	−04	14	Diverges	Carries the disagreement. Any claim that these two are alike has to explain this.
SC · Scale of decision	+10	+03	7	Differs	Real difference, but not the dividing line.
ID · Rule of membership	+10	−07	17	Diverges	Carries the disagreement. Any claim that these two are alike has to explain this.
CH · Method and tempo	−02	+02	4	Differs	Real difference, but not the dividing line.

Each axis runs from −10 to +10; the distance is the straight-line separation across all six at once, out of a maximum of 49.0. How the scoring works →

The evidence behind the widest gaps

A distance figure is worth nothing unless the scores behind it can be checked. These are the artefacts supporting the axes that separate these two most.

Kimilsungism · CU +09

At the traditional pole: a hereditary leader cult and a hierarchical social order with no autonomous association.

Programme textThe Ten Principles for the Establishment of the One-Ideology System govern private conduct including speech within families.

RSDLP(m) · CU −05

Shared the Bolshevik cultural programme; the split was never about social questions.

Programme textBoth factions campaigned on universal suffrage including for women, civil marriage and secular schooling.

Kimilsungism · AU +10

At the ceiling with hereditary succession, which no other communist state institutionalised.

Documented act or statuteThree hereditary successions since 1948.
Documented act or statuteThe songbun system assigns life chances by inherited political classification.

RSDLP(m) · AU −04

Committed to an open mass party and a constituent assembly, and destroyed by the faction that was not.

Programme textMartov's 1903 formulation would have admitted any member who assisted the party, against Lenin's requirement of participation in an organisation.
Documented act or statuteThe party was banned and its leaders exiled or imprisoned by 1921.

What this comparison does not establish

Proximity means similarity of stated position. It carries no claim about competence, circumstance, scale of operation, or what either organisation actually did to the people under it. Two organisations can sit close together and produce entirely different histories, because those things are not on any axis and could not be.

Juche

1955– · North Korea

National self-reliance under a hereditary leader treated as the source of all social life; military-first priority.

Mensheviks

1903–1921 · Russia

Russia must pass through a bourgeois-democratic stage; socialism cannot be decreed by a minority.

Distance is not the whole answer. Two organisations can sit the same distance apart for entirely different reasons, and the reason is the content of any claim about them. Open the comparison in the atlas to weight the axes yourself.

Open in the atlas