Fine article. I've not been able to follow development in north and south korea, so that part were especially interesting.

a paper from the occupied Korea point of view https://kiss.kstudy.com/Detail/Ar?key=4177303

Nice piece that resonates with my current thoughts. That China is sharing the fruits of industrial success with society as a whole gives hope to the cause—we lost that hope with the privatizations of the 1990s—but we should check how the money is truly distributed. I've read that China is also replacing an aging workforce with robots—wouldn't it be better to employ young foreigners instead? As Marx pointed out, machines don't buy; thus, once the aging population has died out, who will buy the robots' products? How will wealth be generated and redistributed then?

You're describing the effects of the 4th industrial revolution, a phase of capitalism we've been completely unprepared for, despite the many harbingers. I come from a party ( the Italian "Rifondazione Comunista" that, despite boasting to reshape communism for the 21st century, never moved beyond the Bolshevik tenet that only blue-collar workers are workers and all others ( especially intellectuals, the white collars) were the enemy. That experiment died miserably, I believe, because it failed to teach the masses that white is just a shade of blue (fascism has been much better at spreading this idea)—what alternatives do we have today? Where are the communist/socialist parties for the 21st century?

My hope is that China will start moving away from consumerism entirely. There's no need to build an economy on vapid consumption in the first place. As the machines produce more and more of the things people need autonomously, that frees people up to do whatever they want with their lives instead of slaving away to meet their needs. China could start reducing work hours, and build things like sports halls, craft shops, art studios, workshops, where people can just creative and social with one another. Instead of going to the mall to buy stuff, you go do some activity that you enjoy with friends.

For the big picture, we have to study what successful socialist projects like Cuba, China, Vietnam, and DPRK are doing. Cuba is obviously under incredible stress today and it might fall, but they've still managed to achieve incredible things over the decades. For more immediate action, I think that MAS in Bolivia is very much worth studying since they managed to organize an effective and militant worker movement there.

That's a big hope — even Russia was supposed to become the workers' paradise, but under Stalinism it became their tomb...

USSR was literally the first attempt at building a worker state, and it was demonstrably better than anything before it. On top of that, USSR was under the threat from the imperialist west throughout its whole existence. It was invaded by western powers in 1918, then plunged into WW2, and the Cold War right after that. Obviously, that forced the Soviet Union to develop in a way that made it possible to preserve itself. Blaming Stalinism here is frankly absurd.