Views differ if the speech used the term juche to launch an ideology or more conservatively to assert that the Korean people were the subject of the revolution.

The speech was delivered against a backdrop of factional strife within the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) in reaction to the Korean War, de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, the Soviet–Yugoslav thaw, and economic reconstruction.

North Korea's defeat in the Korean War and the subsequent political turmoil within the WPK laid the groundwork for the speech.

These terms conflicted with Kim's focus on heavy industry and the goal of turning North Korea into a self-reliant and independent economy.

Pak Hon-yong, representing the party's domestic faction, as well as leading Soviet Koreans, appointed like-minded officials to cultural posts and discarded those sympathetic to Kim Il Sung.

[9] It is a possibility that the writer Han Sorya influenced Kim Il Sung to wage his campaign against propaganda workers with a Soviet Korean background.

[10] On 27 December, one day before Kim Il Sung's speech, the party convened a propaganda conference in which Han delivered the opening remarks.

[11] According to Dongseo University professor B. R. Myers, Kim Il Sung's speech likely took place at a small follow-up event of propagandists.

Likewise, "formalism" had meant an emphasis on the Soviet form of communism at the expense of the actual substance of revolution that needs to take local conditions into account.

[19] James F. Person calls this an attempt to abandon sadae ('serving the great') attitude (sadaejuui) and to "decolonize the Korean mind".

[20] In this sense the speech was grounded on traditional Marxist–Leninist thinking of the time, and the terms were used similarly in the Soviet Union to criticize Stalinism.

[23] Having been at first reluctant to take sides publicly, Kim felt vulnerable to critique by opponents after he had mismanaged the country's economy.

[24] To rebuild the country after the Korean War, Kim had decided on an economic policy of favoring heavy over light industry.

[28] Kim accused factionalists of wanting to bring the South Korean writer Yi Kwang-su, who had notoriously collaborated with the Japanese during World War II, to North Korea.

[18] As Myers points out, the title does not posit establishing juche as more important than the other two tasks (eliminating dogmatism and formalism).

Precisely this Korean revolution is the subject [juche] of our party's ideological work, all of which must therefore be made to serve its interests.

Whether we research the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the history of the Chinese revolution, or the general principles of Marxism–Leninism, it is all in order to carry out or own revolution correctly.While some scholars contend that the speech was a bold declaration of nationalism or political independence, Myers considers the rhetoric something not out of the ordinary in Eastern Bloc countries at the time.

But the subject [juche] has not been firmly established in ideological work, for which reason dogmatist and formalist errors have been made, doing much harm to our revolutionary cause.

[41] North Korean historiography has subsequently backdated the origin of the Juche ideology to Kim Il Sung's guerrilla days in the 1930s.

This largely did not happen as the focus of North Korean historiography gravitated toward studying only Kim Il Sung's exaggerated role in the liberation of Korea.

[52] In advertisements for the volume in the magazine Kulloja, seven individual works were highlighted in chronological order and the Juche speech came last, suggesting that it was not considered that important at the time.

According to Myers, this result of lazy (non-)translation made juche "jump out" from text and seem like an original idea instead of the ordinary word it was.

It did not deviate from the official Marxist–Leninist line, nor did it assert the two key features that are now commonly associated with Juche: self-reliance and nationalism.

[69] Myers thinks the speech represents a call for the creative appliance of Marxism–Leninism that was common in the Eastern Bloc at the time.

This leads David-West to conclude that Kim wanted to pursue rather than discard Stalinism and that the speech was a reaction to de-Stalinization.

He further believed it "an emergency writ of mandamus, commanding the party and government not to abandon the autarkic economic policies and political program upon which the DPRK regime was founded in 1948.