Solidarity with the Korean People Against Imperialism! For a Socialist Korea!
Recent news shows that tensions between the United States of America (USA) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have risen. Korea is attacked for its nuclear testing while the US provokes those tests with geopolitical maneuvers in South Korea. Across the world, imperialists condemn the DPRK and invent all sorts of lies against it, and they mock it for its economic hardships even though they are mainly due to the hundreds of sanctions levied against the country. What is the history of imperialism’s subjugation of Korea? What is our position on the DPRK? We will get into these matters here.
Semi-Feudalism and Semi-Colonialism in Korea
We will not go back to thousands or even many hundreds of years into Korean history. We will simply talk about what Korea was like starting from the late 19th century. First, Korea was a feudal society; even after it legally abolished serfdom, its ruling class was the feudal aristocracy that extracted rent from tenant peasants and subjugated independent peasants. Korea was very similar to neighboring China and other countries in what is now the third world. Second, Korea was semi-colonial because it was first under the Qing Dynasty before it attempted independence and subsequently fell under Japanese imperialist control. Thus, Korea was similar to China at this time, except it was under direct imperialist control while China had a revolution in 1911 that at least got rid of direct colonialism until 1937. Kim Il Sung wrote this about Korea’s standing in 1930:
In order to crush the Korean people’s anti-Japanese spirit and stamp out their desire for independence once and for all, the Japanese imperialists are covering the whole of Korea with police and soldiers as well as intelligence networks, and are enacting various evil laws to arrest, imprison and slaughter Koreans at will. Our fellow countrymen thrown into prison by the Japanese imperialists number tens of thousands.
The Japanese imperialist marauders are intensifying more than ever before economic plunder as well as political repression in Korea.
By seizing Korea’s key industries, the Japanese imperialists are putting a brake on the development of the national industry and without restraint are robbing us of our rich resources, including gold, silver, coal and iron ore. In particular, the aggressors are making desperate efforts to ruthlessly exploit Korea’s cheap labour. As a consequence, the Korean workers are leading a wretched life as wage slaves, as colonial slaves.
The Japanese imperialists are exploiting the countryside even more ruthlessly, while maintaining feudal landownership in Korea. They have not only seized vast tracts of land by force, but last year alone, while pursuing a coercive, predatory policy to obtain grain in the name of the “increased rice production plan,” shipped off as much as seven million sok of rice. Owing to the cruel expropriation of the Japanese imperialists and feudal landlords, our peasants are barely subsisting on grass roots and tree bark.
The Korean nation is facing a question of life or death today–it either perishes forever under the colonial yoke of the Japanese imperialists or rises up in a fight to survive. If it merely laments over its ruined land and tolerates the unheard-of Japanese tyranny, our nation will fall never to rise again; but if the whole nation rises up and fights, defying death, it will greet the dawn of liberation.
Across the country the Korean people, who have been pushed to the wall by the harsh colonial rule of the Japanese imperialists, are now waging a vigorous mass struggle against them.
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In Japanese-occupied Korea, only the landlords and comprador capitalists that sold off their nation to the imperialists had good lives. The masses of workers, peasants of all strata, and petty and national capitalists that competed with the compradors suffered immensely thanks to Japanese imperialism. Production was geared solely to benefit the imperialists and their puppets. Like any colonized or semi-colonized country, Korea produced more than enough food to feed itself, yet its peasants had to survive on “grass roots and tree bark” while the imperialists fattened themselves on Korean food crops. In addition, Korean labor was used only for the industrial production that benefited Japan’s war machine; this produced some industrial technology for Korea, but it was not built in their interests.
Manufacturing and mining, like agriculture, were subordinated to Japan’s needs. Almost all major industry north of the 38th parallel belonged to the Japanese, and was engaged in producing semi-finished products which were shipped to Japan. Not a single plant produced finished goods for the Korean market. Korean needs were simply not a consideration. On top of this, Korean workers were discriminated against in pay. According to Bruce Cumings, “Japanese workers in Korea got over 2 yen per day in 1937, a Formosan [Taiwanese] worker 1 yen, and a Korean worker .66 yen.” The pay was intolerably low, and working conditions were insufferably harsh. In the mines, Koreans were forced to work punishingly long hours, the women bare-breasted.
As Japan took steps to expand its empire through military conquest, Koreans were impressed into service as conscripted laborers, sent to every corner of the empire to satisfy the requirements of Japan’s military and economic expansion. In 1941, about one of every 17 Koreans was in Japan, half working in Japanese industry. By 1944, one in eight had been relocated outside Korea, to other parts of the empire, where they were needed as laborers. Twenty percent were uprooted, either shipped beyond Korea’s borders or living in Korea outside of areas in which they were born. At the close of World War II, one third of the industrial labor force in Japan was made up of Koreans. At least ten thousand Koreans were employed as conscripted laborers in Japanese war plants in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They perished in the US atom bombing of the two cities.
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Japan’s treatment of the Koreans was worse in many other ways. Among the forced laborers mentioned in the quote above, about 800 thousand died due to the brutal conditions of their work. In addition, Korean women and girls were taken as “comfort women”, and they were repeatedly raped and abused to satisfy the imperialist soldiers’ demands. Children, and even infants, were murdered in “entertaining” ways by the barbarians; civilians were selected for horrific experiments by Unit 731. To this day, Japan denies the criminal nature of its war for expansion in this period, but the Korean masses, their Chinese comrades, and Japanese revolutionaries will never forget them. All of this is why the Koreans picked up arms and waged a people’s war to liberate their peninsula.
Liberation Struggle
The Korean people engaged in mass struggles to weaken Japanese imperialist domination. Workers used strikes in attempts to win concessions, but they would more often than not face violent suppression from the Japanese authorities. Peasants tried joining “adventurist uprising(s)”, led by ultra-“left” elements, to no avail. The old “Korean Communist Party” failed to actually be a communist party, and its bourgeois deviations made it not represent the people. Kim Il Sung founded a revolutionary army, namely an Anti-Japanese People’s Guerrilla Army (AJPGA), or a Korean People’s Revolutionary Army (KPRA); he also sought to unite the Korean masses, namely the proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie (especially the peasantry), and national bourgeoisie.
The AJPGA started its war against Japan in China, specifically in Manchuria, for many Korean communists fled there to escape Japanese repression. They allied with the Chinese communists and sought to form a united front between China and Korea against Japanese imperialism. Japan attempted to antagonize the two nations with various schemes, but they failed to disunite them in their anti-imperialist fights. The Korean communists then waged guerrilla warfare in Manchuria as it got occupied by Japan, and over many years of fighting they greatly weakened it. They had to reduce the scale of their activities against Japan when the USSR had the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany and tried to pose itself as a neutral force in the early years of World War Two, but they continued the long-term strategy of struggling for Korea’s liberation.
If the fascist powers make a pincer attack on the Soviet Union, not only its security and socialist construction but also the development of world revolution as a whole and world peace will be seriously threatened.
In view of this urgent situation in which the menace of the invasion of the Soviet Union by fascist Germany and imperialist Japan is mounting, the Soviet Union is now pursuing a policy of easing the situation in the East, in order to have time to forestall the fascist aggression and, in particular, check the menace of a pincer attack by the two fascist powers and strengthen the country’s defense capabilities.
In this connection, the Comintern has recently sent a liaison officer 200 to us and advised that the anti-Japanese guerrilla units operating in the area of Manchuria stop large-unit operations for the time being in order to ease the tense situation along the Soviet-Manchurian border and not to give the Japanese imperialist aggressors the excuse of igniting an aggressive war against the Soviet Union.
We have to take into account the advice of the Comintern, because the Japanese imperialists regard the struggle of the anti-Japanese guerrilla units as a “hostile act” against them by the Soviet Union and try to use it as a pretext for provoking an aggressive war against the Soviet Union. It is the lofty internationalist duty of the communists to check and foil the attempt of the fascist powers to invade the Soviet Union and to defend this socialist state. If we suspend for the present large-unit operations according to the Comintern’s advice, it will give the Japanese imperialists no excuse for invading the Soviet Union and will be very helpful to the Soviet Union in carrying out its policy of easing the situation in the East, with a view to making fuller preparations to counter the aggressive schemes of the fascist powers.
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Once fascist Germany invaded the USSR, the Korean revolutionaries’ stance shifted, meaning that the Korean war against fascism became more serious and larger in scale:
We must put all our energies and talents into the struggle to hasten the great event of national liberation as soon as possible.
In order to meet this great event with full preparation, we must further strengthen the military and political activities of the KPRA to reinforce our own revolutionary forces and thus get the whole nation ready for the general mobilization for the final battle with the Japanese imperialists. …
The building of revolutionary bases in the homeland can fully be realized when the prevailing situation and the balance of forces between friend and foe are taken into consideration. As the days go by, the Japanese imperialists will be further isolated and their forces dispersed, finding themselves highly vulnerable in our homeland. Then we shall be able to set up revolutionary bases deep in the mountains in all parts of the country and, relying on them, expand and reinforce the armed ranks and lay the mass foundation.
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Thanks to the combined efforts of the Korean revolutionaries, their Chinese comrades, and the mighty Red Army of the USSR, Japanese imperialism was pushed out of Korea. Since the communists fought alongside America during this war, America sought to establish a presence in Korea; once Japan officially surrendered to end the war (which it really did due to the Red Army’s liberation of Manchuria, not due to America’s atomic bombs), American troops entered the southern half of the peninsula. Koreans, with Soviet support, founded a People’s Democracy, namely the People’s Republic of Korea, built on a network of people’s committees and led by multiple parties for the different classes of the people. While the Korean masses initially welcomed America as an ally against Japanese imperialism, they soon saw the anti-democratic, pro-feudal, and pro-capitalist reality of US imperialism:
When American troops landed in South Korea, September 7, 1945, thousands of Koreans danced and cheered and shouted: “Mansai,” or “Live a Thousand Years.” Within six months surly Koreans were demanding how soon the Americans would go home. Within a year great uprisings took place in eighty cities and in hundreds of farming villages against the “police state* that the American armed forces kept in power.
When the Americans landed in Korea, the Koreans had already a de facto government. A “People’s Republic” had been declared a day earlier by a congress of Koreans themselves. General John R. Hodge, commander of the U. S. armed forces, dissolved this “People’s Republic,” and drove most of its members underground. Two days after landing, Hodge announced to the Koreans—who had waited a quarter of a century for liberation—that Japanese officials would temporarily continue to run Korea. Korean delegations waiting to greet Americans were fired on—by Japanese police!
The Russians pursued an opposite policy. They recognized the “People’s Committees” that the Americans were suppressing. They encouraged Korean initiative when it took the form of ousting the Japanese-appointed puppets, dividing the landlords’ lands, and nationalizing the Japanese-owned industry as the “property of the Korean people.” They especially looked with favor on what they called “mass organizations,”—farmers’ unions, labor unions, women s associations and unions of youth. The Russian zone in the north fairly blossomed with such organizations energetically building their country after their own desire.
From time to time the Americans and Russians held conferences to determine Korea’s future. Nothing came of these talks but increasing bitterness for two years. The Americans insisted on including pro-Japanese quislings and returned exiles in the provisional government. The Russians refused. The Russians insisted on including representatives of the trade unions, the farmers’ union and other similar organizations. The USA would not hear of this.
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Americans sabotaged the development of People’s Democracy in Korea with their partition scheme. In 1948, they wanted an election of anti-communist puppets into a new Korean government, which could only be enforced with American military occupation, comprador thugs harassing Koreans into submission, the rejection of the UN Commission’s call for civil rights, prohibiting the election outside of America’s zone (while making the election’s results cover all of Korea), and even ignoring criticisms from Korean right-wingers that did not want their nation partitioned. The “Republic of Korea” that the US installed in the south did not represent the Korean masses’ interests for these reasons, but the people’s committees continuing to operate in the north as an alternative to the comprador-bourgeois dictatorship of the south. The People’s Republic became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as Soviet troops left the Koreans to their own devices.
With the political partition of Korea now a (US-engineered) fait accompli, there was little choice for Koreans in the north but to declare a separate republic, a democratic republic, to operate on behalf of the social strata to which 98 percent of Koreans (i.e., the demos) belonged. The dream of Korean self-determination, seemingly promised by Wilson, urged by Lenin, for which thousands of Korean patriots had been martyred, had been blocked on a pan-Korean scale and restricted to the north. The declaration of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on September 9, 1948, was therefore only a partial victory. “Two months after the end of the Second World War,” wrote Kim Il sung, “the 30 million Korean people were still intoxicated with the joy of liberation. None of these people, however, imagined that the liberation of the country would end in a territorial division and national split, resulting in a great national disaster.” A great national task remained, announced Kim: to “drive the U.S. imperialist aggressors out of south Korea, accomplish the national liberation revolution and realize the reunification of the country.”
A day after its birth, the newly formed DPRK, acting as a representative of all Koreans and considering itself on strong grounds to be the sole legitimate government in Korea, asked the Soviet Union and the United States to withdraw their military forces from Korean territory. The Soviets complied, exiting the peninsula by December 25. Washington ignored the request, even though the Soviet withdrawal meant there was no longer a justification for US forces to remain on Korean soil under the terms of the occupation agreement worked out between the two wartime allies.
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In this way, the DPRK maintained its legitimacy as the sole government of the Korean people, while the so-called “ROK” based its existence on being an American semi-colony; the DPRK was led by the Workers’ Party of Korea (a party made after the merger of workers’ parties in both parts of Korea, which were in turn made from merging communist parties and non-communist progressive parties) and allied parties for the petty and national capitalists, while the “ROK” had banned such parties. Anna Louise Strong talked about how the WPK was formed in her book, In North Korea:
Believe it or not, there is no Communist Party in North Korea! It was rather a shock to me to discover this, for the American press cannot refer to this area without labeling it all as “Communist.” Two years ago there was a Communist Party, a thriving one. It combined with the equally thriving “Farmers’ Party” (People’s Party) into the “North Korean Labor Party,” which, as far as I could judge, seems more like America’s last century ‘Populists’ than like today’s Russian Communists. [The South Korean Labor Party merged with the northern party later in 1949.]
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It is possible that the introduction of rural petty-bourgeois into the “workers’ party” was a cause of the party’s eventual path to right-opportunism, or revisionism, but we will talk more about this path in the section after the next.
The DPRK continued popular measures of land reform, nationalizing imperialist property while allowing national bourgeois property to continue, expanding workers’ rights, improving womens’ conditions to smash patriarchy, etc.; the ROK protected landlords and their big capitalist allies, maintained patriarchal customs, suppressed labor unions and made workers’ conditions intolerable. All of this made the People’s Democratic state’s calls to liberate the south justified, too, and it makes America’s crimes during the Korean war all the more outrageous and illegitimate.
American Imperialist Aggression
American imperialists were happy to have southern Korea as an obedient semi-colony to be exploited, but they were also insatiable in their desire for more markets, more resources, and especially more labor-power. The republic they backed continued to suppress Korean patriots and democratic forces, against the will of the masses. Many Koreans participated in an insurgency in the south starting in 1948, so the US supported a campaign to eliminate this communist opposition; nearly 200 thousand Koreans were murdered in this suppression. Furthermore, the illegitimate ROK started border clashes with the DPRK well before “the Korean War officially started”, before June 25, 1950; “Rhee frequently promised to undertake a ‘northern expedition’ to ‘recover lost territory,’ and in the summer of 1949 his army started to provoke fighting along the 38th parallel with the forces of the DPRK” [Source].
Even the actual happenings of that date itself are up for debate since both Korean regimes claim their opponent crossed the 38th parallel before them. Either way, the Korean People’s Army (KPA) was able to liberate nearly all of the peninsula in two months. In liberated areas, the same land reforms and expropriation of imperialist property took place as they had in the north, and the army’s system of land reform was later used by the fascist ROK to appease Korean peasants and get them to reject the DPRK. People’s committees, the organs of People’s Democracy and the legitimate representatives of Korean working people, were revived in Seoul and other southern cities. Meanwhile, “at least 300,000 people were detained and executed or simply disappeared by the South Korean government in the first few months after conventional war began,” and the US, already supporting the reactionaries’ fight against the KPA, mobilized the United Nations’ Security Council to get multiple countries’ troops in the peninsula [Source]. (The USSR boycotted the Security Council to protest how China was represented by the Kuomintang government in Taiwan, as opposed to the legitimate socialist state in mainland China.)
Even as the UN only mandated American-led intervention to push the KPA back to the 38th parallel, the US decided to allow itself to push it well past that. By October, the imperialists got alarmingly close to China’s border with Korea. This prompted Mao to send the People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) to more directly support the KPA; prior to this, China, the USSR, and other People’s Democracies had only supported Korea with supplies, and that too they all did so pretty hesitantly since they wanted to avoid confronting American imperialism. Once the 300,000-strong force joined the KPA, they retook northern Korea in two months, and from there the territorial changes between the two sides became less extreme.
This did not mean the fighting was less intense. On the contrary, the American militarists made the fighting bloodier than ever before. The American imperialists dropped more bombs in Korea than the entire Pacific Theater had in World War Two, and they nearly dropped nuclear bombs on the peninsula as well as China.
Stunned by the collapse of MacArthur’s forces at the hands of a lightly armed army of peasants, Truman declared a national emergency, and MacArthur called for a nuclear strike, importuning the president to authorize the use of 50 nuclear bombs to reverse the setback. Truman declined. But for the next two years the United States set about producing, by conventional means, the equivalent destruction of many nuclear attacks. MacArthur called on US bombers to create a wasteland, ordering the use of incendiaries to burn to the ground every city, every village, and every factory between the 38th parallel and the Chinese border.45 US “planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea—that is, essentially on North Korea—including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II. The number of Korean dead, injured, or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population,” wrote historian Charles Armstrong.
The extent of the physical destruction visited upon Korea north of the 38th parallel by US carpet bombing is horrifying. It’s not clear that every building over one story was destroyed, as some have claimed, but it is clear that the USAF created a desert. Joan Robinson claimed, though with a touch of hyperbole, that by the end of the war “there was not one stone standing upon another” in Pyongyang, although the level of destruction was close to Robinson’s account. By the end of the war, only two modern buildings remained standing in Pyongyang. US carpet bombing “destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes,” according to the DPRK. Dean Rusk, when he was the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, said that everything “that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another,” we bombed. …
The number of fatalities produced by the war can only be estimated. Estimates range from 3 to 4.5 million, with Koreans accounting for 2.3 to 3 million deaths. Chinese fatalities in the war ranged from an estimated 600,000 to one million. US fatalities were a comparatively insignificant 36,574, one to two percent of the total. Given that the population of Korea in 1950 was approximately 20 million, the war destroyed 10 to 15 percent of the population. Charles Armstrong estimates that the fraction of Koreans killed is in the range of “the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.” About 2.3 million Japanese perished in the Pacific War, or roughly three percent of the population, much lower than the Korean fatality rate in the 1950-1953 holocaust. Curtis LeMay, who directed the terror bombing, estimated that “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population.” It’s not clear whether LeMay’s figure was based on a methodical estimate. It was offered more than 30 years after the war ended, and may have been only a very rough guess. In any event, whether 10 percent or 20 percent, it’s clear that the United States exterminated a significant proportion of the Korean population.
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In the face of all this destruction and death, the Korean people fought as hard as possible until they could force the Americans to sign an armistice. On July 27, 1953, the DPRK, China, and the UN signed the Korean Armistice Agreement; the ROK refused to sign it, so Korea still has a civil war going on in its peninsula. America used (and still uses) the ROK to act for American interests, so America could continue pressuring the DPRK into submission.
While Americans may rightfully criticize Japan for not acknowledging its history of war crimes in Korea and China, those same Americans seldom admit America’s crimes, which were as murderous as Japan’s. (In fact, America rehabilitated and quietly hid many Japanese scientists involved in crimes against Koreans, including members of Unit 731; the ROK today goes so far as to display a memorial statue of a “comfort woman” in front of its embassy with Japan, yet it refuses to acknowledge America’s role in hiding that and other crimes.) It is stupid to assume that America is a “good side” in its conflict against Korea.
Reconstruction and New Subjugation
Once the war de facto ended, Democratic Korea sought to focus on reconstruction. As a people’s democracy, it needed to fix the economy damaged by both Japanese and American imperialism, and this involved restructuring the economy as well as repairing and replacing damaged productive forces. Social production (total value of means of production and final products) by 1960 was over sevenfold what it was in 1946, national income (part of social production after deducting depreciation) was nearly as great, and industry grew to be twice the portion of Korea’s economy that it was earlier [Source]. Industrial output value increased twentyfold, and state expenditure rose while taxes fell, eventually being eliminated in 1974. All these measures were signs of Korea’s economy growing really fast in the north, while the south’s US puppet failed to catch up until the late-1970’s. While the socialist nature of the DPRK will be called into question, it remains rather impressive for a country forced into isolation from the Western capitalist world.
American imperialism’s hampering of socialist and People’s Democratic economies via sanctions, embargoes, etc. never ceased, and contrary to anti-communists’ and imperialists’ claims, they were used specifically to make ordinary life for people as hard as possible:
US sanctions against the DPRK have included the following:
limits on the export of goods and services
prohibition of most foreign aid and agricultural sales
a ban on Export-Import Bank funding
denial of favorable trade terms
prohibition of imports from North Korea
blocking of any loan or funding through international financial institutions
limits on export licensing of food and medicine for export to North Korea
a ban on government financing of food and medicine exports to North Korea
prohibition on import and export transactions related to transportation
a ban on dual-use exports (i.e., civilian goods that could be adapted to military purposes)
prohibition on certain commercial banking transactions
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Imperialist aggression also included imperialists’ local puppets being used against the People’s Democracy, so class struggle was not ignored, at least nominally speaking; Kim acknowledged that, “The landlord class, comprador capitalists, pro-Japanese elements, traitors to the nation and other reactionary elements, who were liquidated in the northern half of Korea as a result of the democratic reforms, have not yet given up their wild dream of restoring their old positions, nor have they abandoned their true colors as exploiters” [Source]. In 1955, Kim came up with the idea of “Juche”, which was essentially the idea of Korean self-reliance in socialist construction and in “defending the fatherland”; while this was fine on the surface, just as China had Mao Zedong Thought as its application of Marxism-Leninism with additional theories synthesized from Chinese communists’ revolutionary experiences, this Juche idea proved to develop into bourgeois ideology over time.
The USSR and various People’s Democracies experienced revisionist takeovers that led capitalist restoration. Starting in the USSR after Stalin’s death, the “socialist camp” was largely losing its socialist essence; this change was far from instantaneous, but by the 1960’s most “socialist countries” were really capitalist states, dictatorships led by new bourgeois classes of those countries. Genuine socialist countries, i.e. China and Albania, and their parties hoped for the best in correcting these parties’ errors, and then encouraging those parties to remove revisionists, but once the revisionists proved to have total control over the “communist” parties, China and Albania concluded that their countries were no longer socialist; the workers of their countries lacked any real control over state power and the mode of production, and their exploitation returned as a real phenomenon. Furthermore, the USSR was transforming into an imperialist state, and it mainly controlled the revisionist countries in Europe while it sought control elsewhere. Korea and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam emerged as “centrists” in this Sino-Soviet split.
What Vietnam did is out of the scope of this article, but Korea’s path during and after the Sino-Soviet split was rather peculiar. In 1956, while Kim Il-Sung was on a trip in East Europe, factions within the WPK sought to overthrow him. Information around these people is relatively scarce, but what is important is that they tried to overthrow Kim and put themselves in power to direct Korea in their desired trajectories. They failed, and Kim was able to purge them from the party and execute their leaders. Some people taking part in the struggle were proletarian, but it seemed many were just as petty-bourgeois or bourgeois as Kim would turn out to be:
In the early post-liberation days, many exiled political figures began to return to Korea. Among the various factions that returned, the Guerrilla Faction led by Kim Il-sung and the Yanan [pro-Chinese] Faction led by Kim Tubong and Mu Chŏng soon began to assume important roles within North Korea.
After returning home, the Yanan Faction found itself being divided into two groups, which played active roles in the building of the new government. The first group gained important positions within government organizations in North Korea and the military and security sector. For example, Mu Chŏng was appointed as the principal of the second Security Cadres School while Pak Ilwu was appointed as the director of the Bureau of the Interior. The second group played a pivotal role in the organization of the Democratic Party established as part of a return to a united front strategy. ….
The change in the political situation in the aftermath of the Korean War, changes characterized by the purges of the domestic faction, the elimination of Pak Ilwu of the Yanan Faction, the suicide of Hŏ Kai of the Soviet Faction, and Ch΄oe Yonggŏn’s official ascension to the Workers’ Party of Korea, was clearly reflected in the Third Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea in April 1956. The Guerrilla Faction led by Kim Il-sung concretized their leading status by assuming an absolute majority within the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea. However, it was also during this congress that the complaints of the Yanan Faction started to be expressed.
While Kim Il-sung was visiting the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in June and July 1956, the Yanan Faction led by Ch΄oe Ch΄angik and some members of the Soviet Faction, led by Pak Ch΄angok, decided to form an anti-Kim Il-sung coalition. However, this group was in essence an interest based anti-Kim Il-sung coalition rather than one based on a common ideology and identity. Thus, the coalition could not base its struggle on the most powerful tools available, namely ‘ideology’ and ‘identity.’ Furthermore, the anti-Kim Il-sung coalition failed to properly assess the political situation. For instance, Pak Ch΄angok thought that he could get Ch΄oe Yonggŏn to join their ranks. As Im Ŭn has stated, this was a childish and simplistic effort to correct Kim Il-sung’s mistakes through criticism at the congress. …
In the evening of September 18, 1956, Mao Zedong engaged in discussions with the Soviet delegation led by Mikoyan. Mao Zedong and Mikoyan agreed to implore the comrades of the Workers’ Party of Korea to ensure party unity and to have both sides dispatch a joint delegation to the North. Mao Zedong advised that the Soviet-Chinese delegation emphasize the fact that they had come to help Kim Il-sung rather than overthrow him. Mao also advised the delegation to persuade Kim Il-sung to adopt a conciliatory attitude toward those who were purged from the party and admit his own errors. At the same time, Mao stressed the fact that Kim Il-sung might view the dispatch of this joint delegation as interference in the North’s internal affairs and might require the withdrawal of Chinese support troops, a move that China was willing to entertain. Mao also stated that Koreans did not listen to the Chinese, and as such ‘the success of this endeavor is in the hands of Mikoyan.’ …
In the aftermath of the Hungarian [Counter-]Revolution of October 1956, Kim Ilsung began to show signs of riding out the crisis. Kim Tubong was fiercely criticized once again during the general meeting of the Central Committee held in January 1957. Kim Il-sung and the North Korean leadership started a Workers Party wide purge in P΄yŏngyang in January 1957, with the emphasis being on the departments where the opposition had wielded influence. In December 1956, Kim began to implement a fivemonth series of purges and changes in Party membership certification that resulted in the expelling of about 300 opposition members. In addition, the objective of “Strengthening the struggle against anti-revolutionary elements” was adopted during the meeting of the Central Committee of the Party held on May 30, 1957, and the “anti-factional struggle” was waged in a more intensive manner. On the military front, the meeting of the Korean People’s Army held in March 1958 provided the impetus for the purging of the director of the politburo, Ch΄oe Chonghak and hundreds of members of the Yanan and Soviet Factions on the grounds that they were ‘anti-revolutionary and factional elements.’
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We cannot surely say whether Kim Tu Bong was a proletarian representative, however. He may have seemed as one since he promoted democratic rights, but he also wanted to weaken the party’s power; in implementing democratic centralism, excess centralism is incorrect, but so is excess democracy, especially excess democracy without party guidance. Kim Il-Sung pointed this out when discussing the power struggle attempt two years later:
The central figures leading the recently exposed anti-Party factionalists are former members of the New Democratic Party. Kim Tu Bong, Choe Chang Ik, among others, are all members of the New Democratic Party. The intention of the anti-Party factionalists was to eliminate hard-core members who originated in the Communist Party and to establish within our Party the influence of those who originated from the New Democratic Party, that is, men of petty-bourgeois origin. It does not mean, of course, that all former members of the New Democratic Party have this tendency. …
Despite the fact that Han Bin is a man hated by our Party for his subversive activities against it, Kim Tu Bong considered him his closest friend. If Kim Tu Bong had ever been a communist, if he had ever been devoted to the Party, why had he been on the most intimate terms with a man hated by the Party? This is how things were. Kim Tu Bong always valued Han Bin’s words more than the resolutions of our Party. …
In our country revisionism found expression in the rejection of the Party’s leadership and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kim Tu Bong said that the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly stood above the Party. What does that mean? It means that the Presidium rejects the Party’s leadership. So Hwi said: “The Party is not entitled to lead the trade unions. The membership of the trade unions is greater than that of the Party; they are a larger organization than the Party. Those who are working in Party organizations should obey the leadership of the trade unions because they are all trade union members. The trade unions should get rid of the tutelage of the Party.” Kim Ul Gyu said that the People’s Army was not the army of the Party, but rather “the army of the united front”. All these are ideological viewpoints which reject the Party’s leadership. …
Kim Tu Bong, Choe Chang Ik, Han Pin, Ri Yu Min, Kim Min San and other people who had organized the petty-bourgeois New Democratic Party intervened and tried to take over important posts in the Workers’ Party, disrupting everything that had been attained by the Communist Party. Their recent plot for a rebellion is connected with this. We cannot, under any circumstances, compromise with such elements who try to find faults in the Party deliberately in order to try to overthrow Party organizations and destroy the Party.
[Source]
Reading Kim Tu Bong’s speech made in 1956, it does seem like Kim Il-Sung’s criticisms are fairly accurate. The former reeks of Trotskyism, as it is very similar in style to Trotsky’s attacks on Stalin. It even cites the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fondly; though it is true that every Marxist-Leninist then saw it at least more positively in 1956 than later on and seriously criticized it only after Khrushchev’s revisionism became clear, it is equally true that comrades like those of China and Albania defended Stalin’s legacy against Khrushchev’s rather baseless accusations. Kim Tu Bong, however, did no such thing:
[Kim Il-Sung] grossly tramples on intra-Party democracy and suppresses criticism; these actions completely contradict the Party charter and the Leninist norms of Party life; this means undermining revolutionary Marxist-Leninist principles. …
First, Leninist principles are not being observed in the life of our Party. The ideology of the cult of personality has become widespread inside the Party. This causes enormous harm to the life of the entire Party. There is no genuine unity in the Party ranks, and bureaucratism, the cult of the hero, and factionalism have become widespread; intra-Party democracy, criticism, and self-criticism are being suppressed; a toleration of flattery, sycophancy, and blind submission is occurring; and arbitrary actions of some comrades are possible in the Party. …
As everyone knows, the 20th CPSU congress has the greatest historical importance for the international Communist movement. A deep Marxist analysis of the contemporary international revolutionary movement was given in the decisions of this congress; they should become the action program of Marxist Parties and worker’s parties of the entire world, including our Party, too.
In spite of this, under the pretext of a so-called “national spirit” and soc-called “national features” part of the officials of the leading nucleus of our Party did not intend to put the decisions of the 20th CPSU congress into effect, and what is more, they consider [them] incorrect, as a result of which a number of serious mistakes continue to be made at the present time with which our Party, being loyal to Marxism-Leninism, cannot tolerate. …
It is that in the decisions of the 20th congress a deep Marxist-Leninist analysis of the work in the past was given, an irreconcilable struggle against the cult of personality of Stalin was unleashed, and measures were outlined to decisively overcome its harmful consequences.
[Source]
The fact that Kim Tu Bong rather blindly praised the Soviet bourgeoisie’s decisions shows that he was probably not a proletarian leader; if he was, he was a deeply flawed one, one falling into the tricks of the bourgeois enemy. It is surprising that he was part of the Yanan faction and not the Soviet one, to be honest! As we shall see, though, Kim Il-Sung was not as interested in defending proletarian power as he claimed to be. In fact, the same sort of attack on excessive democracy and anarchy he used against Kim Tu Bong would be used in other, clearly incorrect instances. For now, though, we may only speculate as to what position Kim Tu Bong really had, and what his interests were.
In 1960, while the “socialist camp” was still basically united and the revisionist countries were not, well, called out as totally revisionist (i.e. when they were still considered “socialist”, even if their mistaken policies were criticized), Enver Hoxha criticized the attitudes of many of the communist and workers’ parties toward socialist China during a conference in Bucharest, Romania. In it, he claimed certain parties were made unaware of the plans of that conference to attack China, and Korea’s party was one of them:
No warning was given to the Party of Labour of Albania by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which organized the Bucharest Meeting, that, on the occasion of the Congress of the Rumanian Workers’ Party, accusations would be brought against the Communist Party of China for alleged grave mistakes of line. This came as a complete surprise to the Party of Labour of Albania. While now we hear that, with the exception of the Party of Labour of Albania, the Communist Party of China, the Korean Workers’ Party, the Vietnam Workers’ Party, other parties of the camp were cognizant of the fact that a conference would be organized in Bucharest to accuse China. If this is so, then it is very clear that the question becomes very much more serious and assumes the form of a faction of an international character.
[Source]
This makes sense since China was a very important ally in Korea’s war against the US’s imperialist forces, and it remained so at this time; it was not about to attack China like the Soviet revisionists wanted to. In 1963, Hoxha referred to Korea’s party as a “fraternal party” alongside the Vietnamese Workers’ Party and the Communist Party of Indonesia, but he said none of them were “maintaining a public stand in defense of China” [Source]. All this shows that the WPK, in contrast to the Albanian Party of Labor, was not anti-revisionist; then again, even China’s Communist Party was not as extreme as Albania’s in 1963, so this is not enough to accuse Korea of revisionism. (As a matter of fact, Albania’s party was harshly critical of China’s for not communicating enough with it before 1964 or so. The criticisms were constructive and in the interests of improving a proletarian ally, but they were rather aggressive.)
Hoxha made his views of the WPK clear enough in 1966. He said that their (and other parties') stance on Soviet revisionism was incorrect because they "defend[ed] principles in words" while they "distort[ed] them under the guise of 'independence', or 'specific conditions'" to "conceal their gradual departure from Marxism-Leninism, their deviation from the internationalist unity of Marxist-Leninists in the world" [Source]. He said this in "The Fascist Coup in Indonesia and Lessons Communists Draw From It". Later that year, during his conversation with Zhou Enlai, Hoxha said, “We think that Kim Il Sung and his comrades are mistaken in certain stands of theirs towards Soviet modern revisionism and, unfortunately for the Workers ‘ Party of Korea and the Korean people, if they do not change the course they have taken, they will become modern revisionists like the rest” [Source].
Hoxha’s predictions were more correct than incorrect. While Korea maintained friendship with both Soviet revisionism and Chinese socialism, it really adopted revisionism and did not build socialism in essence. Economically, it collectivized land and socialized industry; however, it relied on Soviet imperialist “aid”, which made Korea more dependent on the USSR. Kim opposed Khrushchev’s brazen deviation from Marxism-Leninism, but once the new Soviet bourgeoisie got better at masking its revisionism, the WPK’s leaders got much closer to the USSR, hence Hoxha’s remarks above and the description of Kang Sheng’s thoughts below.
Kang Sheng began the meeting by outlining the position in regard to North Korea. While earlier the Korean Party led by Kim Il-Sung had leaned somewhat towards the Chinese position, after the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 the CPSU began an intensive drive to win the Korean Party to its side. Kang informed me that Brezhnev, the then CPSU leader, had flown to Pyongyang with a package of bribes. These included undertaking to give Korea substantial financial assistance, and offering a wide-ranging trade agreement on very favorable terms along with essential food and military supplies. Kim accepted, signed appropriate agreements and withdrew any support for China.
[Source]
This deal with the USSR proved to be catastrophic for the DPRK once the former dissolved. Dependence on the USSR meant that its dissolution meant a loss of an important market for Korean goods, which were generally materials for production. Kim was “bribed” into taking on the position of heading the ruling bourgeoisie, which developed in Korea’s “WPK” and state as a whole; this was the real reason Juche was deviating from Marxism-Leninism. Korea was not quite a semi-colony of the USSR, however; it maintained considerable independence, and so it maintained relations with socialist China and Albania, and so its bourgeoisie was not quite a comprador for imperialism.
Kim Il Sung attacked the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution when it began. While socialist Albania sought to emulate it, Kim had only paid lip service to waging cultural revolutions. This meant that Kim opposed the proletariat’s struggle to defend their state and fight off capitalist roaders, and he voiced the views of the state-capitalists in Europe rather than those of the masses. Just as various revisionists ideologically justified the workers not taking mass initiatives with “paternity” and “paternalism”, the Korean state under him points to its “care for the people” and does not encourage the masses to get very involved politically.
As events develop in China the KWP leadership has exhibited ever-growing concern and caution. In a conversation with the Soviet Ambassador in November 1966 Kim Il Sung said, “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has seriously alarmed us.” Explaining the reasons for such alarm, Kim Il Sung pointed to the fact that KWP members “still are not so experienced [zakaleny] as to correctly understand everything” (See ref. Nº 313 of 2 December 1966)
The need has arisen to conduct such explanatory work among KWP members as a result of which they would, on the one hand, as before be convinced of the correctness of the policy of the Korean leadership and, on the other, unquestionably approve of the negative attitude of the Korean leadership toward the so-called ‘Cultural Revolution.’ …
“The Korean comrades speak of the ‘thousands of victims during the so-called ‘revolution’, the ‘suicides’, the ‘political chaos’, and the ‘chaos in the economy,’ about Mao Zedong as ‘an old fool who has gone out of his mind.’ In lectures they cite instances of political and economic pressure on the DPRK from the Chinese government.”
[Source]
This development was part of why China regarded Korea as “semi-revisionist”. It curiously continued to call Korea “socialist” publicly—as did Albania—while it also cautioned Korea for its trajectory toward revisionism, i.e. capitalism with a “socialist” face. Revisionist states ridiculed socialist China and Albania for their precise categorization of self-proclaimed “socialist” states, but we proletarians can learn from said categories:
North Korea has become a main focus of Chinese foreign policy. Relations between both countries proceed accordingly. The common fear of Japan benefits respective efforts undertaken by the Chinese leadership. China is afraid of Japan as a rival for hegemony in Asia. In some articles in “People’s Daily”, as well as in Zhou Enlai’s speech at the Albanian reception, Japan was massively attacked—among else in order to impress the leadership of the DPRK. …
Cuba, North Vietnam, and the DPRK are viewed by the Chinese leadership as “anti-imperialist and semi-revisionist” states. The recently established Japanese-American rapprochement serves as the foundation for Chinese-Korean rapprochement.
[Source]
[Zhou Enlai:] And what is the situation in the semi-revisionist countries? …
As far as our two neighbors go, Korea and Vietnam, the situation there develops as it does in other countries, even more so because they have not been able to achieve the unification of the country. In the southern part of these countries the exploiting classes are in power, and people from North Korea and North Vietnam still have family ties to the southern Koreans or Vietnamese, and as a result there is a direct influence being exerted on them by the exploiting classes.
So we are only left with Albania. It is possible that only elements of the exploiting classes continue to exist here, in other words isolated individuals, but I think that you will agree with what I said regarding the influence of the strength of the habits passed down by the old society in your country.
[Source]
In 1968, the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia under the pretext of “defending socialism”. China and Albania correctly called this nonsense out, for the USSR itself was not socialist, and neither were any of the Warsaw Pact states that partook in the invasion; true Czechoslovakia was not socialist, but the USSR only invaded it to secure its presence within the Soviet imperialist sphere of influence:
The Soviet revisionist renegade clique claims that it sent troops into Czechoslovakia in order to “defend” the “socialist gains.” What amazing gall! Who, after all, has capitulated to U.S. imperialism and ruined the socialist gains of the Soviet Union? Who has peddled Soviet modern revisionism in Eastern Europe and ruined the socialist gains of a number of European countries? You are the guilty ones, you, the worst renegades in history! It is completely useless for you to put up such a phony signboard in a vain attempt to deceive the people of Czechoslovakia, the people of the Soviet Union and of the rest of the world.
[Source]
In contrast, the DPRK supported the USSR’s policy, exposing its rulers’ bourgeois views:
After carrying the lengthy dispatch on the event by the Soviet news agency Tass, Nodong Sinmun declared in an editorial entitled “The Historic Lessons of the Czechoslovak Situation”:
“In Czechoslovakia today the machinations of counter-revolutionary forces pose a very serious threat to the great socialist tasks of the people. Particularly intolerable is the fact that such machinations are being aided and abetted by the U.S. imperialists, the West German militarists, and other imperialists.”
[Source]
Even as China and the DPRK maintained friendly relations after the 1960’s, Korea stayed with the USSR for the most part. While Kim claimed Juche was an ideology for Korea and Korean self-reliance, the country really relied heavily on the USSR. As the Soviet state-capitalist economy stagnated in the 1970’s and 80’s, so did Korea’s. Starting in this time period, Juche entirely replaced Marxism-Leninism, marking the WPK’s explicit break from proletarian ideology; this meant the party exposed itself as not being a workers’ party, but a capitalist party. While the ruling Korean capitalists were allies of the USSR, they had their own interests as well, hence their slight distancing with the Soviets.
Korea supported fascist Peru in its suppression of its people’s war, for Peru’s “police[men were] trained variously in the United States and North Korea, as well as arm[ed]… by North Korea,” and “North Korea’s role in the government death squads can be assumed to be tied to Soviet social-imperialism’s efforts. It is noteworthy that the U.S. is not making a fuss about the Soviet military involvement in Peru, as it is with Cuba and Nicaragua, the only other recipients of significant amounts of Soviet weapons in what the U.S. considers its ‘back yard’” [Source]. This was the sort of thing capitalist states would do; socialist countries may live in peaceful coexistence with capitalist ones, but they never oppose revolutionary anti-colonial struggles or force them to pacify as revisionist countries do, and they certainly don’t arm reactionary powers against revolutionaries. If Korea was really a workers’ state, it would have at least criticized the Peruvian state for its crimes against the people it ruled over, yet it opposed those masses’ attempts at taking power and building real socialism.
The biggest evidence of Korea’s subjection to Soviet imperialism is likely the great weakening of its economy after the USSR’s illegal dissolution. Just as it was for compradors of Soviet imperialism, the fall of the USSR was harmful for the Korean economy. While Korea was not a total Soviet semi-colony like Eastern European states were, it was still similar to them in its dependence on Soviet capital.
In 1990, Russia announced that it would no longer supply North Korea with subsidized oil, and the North responded by suspending repayments. Eberstadt (1995) estimates that in 1991 North Korea suffered a trade shock equivalent to 40 percent of total imports due to disengagement with the Newly Independent States, and by 1993 imports from Russia had fallen to less than a tenth of their earlier levels.
These external shocks were compounded by a series of natural disasters. Although as with everything else North Korean, controversy surrounds the precise timing and magnitude, the consensus is that agricultural production peaked around 1989 and has fallen significantly since.
[Source]
The DPRK then became a comprador of China, which turned capitalist in the late-1970’s, and Russia. The DPRK created a “Special Economic Zone” like the ones China made during its transition to capitalism, and now Russian and Chinese capitalists use them to exploit Korean labor more directly. Even as China has obeyed sanctions on Korea, it is still Korea’s largest trading partner; unlike in the socialist era, unsurprisingly, Chinese trade with Korea is more exploitative today. That combined with the exploitation of the state bourgeoisie in Korea and the pressure of American-led imperialist sanctions on the country means the Korean people suffer immensely from the global system they once tried to free themselves from. While the state once paid lip service to being a proletarian state, it took off its mask in the 1990’s, and it is a bourgeois state that does not serve the people.
While it has a variety of problems of its own (including, as one may see, citing capitalist-imperialist sources that slander the DPRK inaccurately or unjustly), “Jose Maria Sison: From Marxist-Leninist to Revisionist” does a decent job explaining the nature of Korea today:
In 1981, the Korean News Agency ran an article that stated “This love by the Great Leader for our people is love of kinship…Our respected and beloved Leader is the tender-hearted father of all the people … Love of paternity … is the noblest ideological sentiment possessed only by our people, which cannot be explained by any theory or principle or fathomed by anything.” …
While the North Korean regime trumpets its practice of “juche,” or self-reliance, Cummings points out that in the late 1950s and 1960s, the KWP’s program of putting heavy industry first was fed by “unprecedentedly large amounts of aid from the Soviet bloc.” With large scale Soviet aid, North Korea’s industrial production grew by 25% in the decade after the end of the Korean War, and by 14% from 1965-1978, outstripping industrial growth in the U.S. neo-colony of South Korea.
In the 1970s, the DPRK turned to the Western imperialists and Japan to purchase turnkey plants, including complete French petrochemical and cement plants. According to Cummings, these purchases ran up North Korea’s external debt to between $2–3 billion, which it has had difficulty servicing.Even though the KWP never officially joined COMECON, “juche” has been more of a self-serving political myth for the leaders of the KWP than a reality since the DPRK’s founding in 1948. The extent of North Korea’s dependence on the Soviet Union and the revisionist-ruled countries of Eastern Europe was underlined by several years of declining GNP and famine conditions in much of the countryside in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Cummings writes that drought and floods between 1995 and 1997, along with “a near collapse of the energy system (which caused many factories to close),” led to a widespread famine that claimed the lives of more than half a million people. The Chinese state capitalist regime, as well as U.S. and Western aid agencies, had their own political agendas for providing extensive aid that prevented the death toll from rising to substantially higher levels. …
In recent years, North Korea has set up several very un-“juche” like export zones with Chinese and South Korean capital, for which it supplies cheap North Korean labor. One large export zone at Najin-Sonbong was established in the early 1990s on the northeast border with China. Another export zone at Kaesong that is close to the border with South Korea was established by Hyundai Motors and currently employs 53,000 North Korean workers.
[Source]
Even as we criticize the DPRK and see it as a comprador-bourgeois, we do not forget that it remains a victim of American imperialist aggression and saber rattling. American imperialists and their allies use a combination of military threats and dishonest media reporting about the country to justify this hostility. While the workers of Korea want a state run by them, they know what American imperialist domination would do, and they know it is far from the solution to their problems. That is why we dedicate a section of our article to refuting myths about the DPRK, and we show it for what it is: a state-capitalist country in the third world, with features not too different from other third world capitalist states.
Lies Debunked
Most fanatical claims about the DPRK come from South Korean yellow journalism, defectors inventing myths for great sums of money, and American imperialist mouthpieces. Despite the obviously low quality of this “evidence”, it is trusted in Western media, and the pervasiveness of these myths is so great that even so-called “progressives” believe them! Trusting these falsehoods and spreading them among the masses does nothing to help revolution, and it only justifies intensifying sanctions on Korea. That is why we must go against these lies.
First, when people attack the DPRK’s bourgeois dictatorship for “oppressing its people” (while they conveniently ignore the real oppression compradors of US imperialism use against their people), they trust defectors from North Korea that flee southward. These defectors are paid according to how extraordinary their tales are, and not how accurately they depict this “hermit kingdom”. This is not a claim the DPRK’s state propaganda needs to make, as defectors in South Korea admit it themselves, such as in the documentary, “Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul”:
Hilarious examples of western lies against the DPRK include all the clickbait tales of certain people being “executed”, only for them to reappear months later. This has happened numerous times, so we urge people to be skeptical of such claims. Likewise, the claims of defectors such as Yeonmi Park are highly suspect, for they involve fantastical stories that, oftentimes, other, less-known and less-paid defectors, disprove. Shin Dong-Hyuk’s father clarified that some of his son’s claims were false, as did Yeonmi Park’s mother with her daughter’s claims. This is even shown in some US imperialist media, though of course it is never featured as much as those articles that slander the DPRK:
But go back through the archives of the South Korean television show, Now On My Way To Meet You, in which Park stars, and in the same episode referred to previously, the host of the show says to Park’s mother, “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju (Park’s pseudonym) says, ‘Oh that never happened…’ Why is that? Did Yeju never go through these experiences?
Park’s mother replies, “We were not to that extent. We were just never in a position where we were starving.”
[Source]
Defectors’ claims are not entirely trustworthy or entirely false, and that is why it would be more legitimate to use them with disclaimers and proper contexts than using them with full trust. Since people like Yeonmi Park are known for being terribly dishonest, and only being more dishonest the more that time passes on, it is better to treat their claims with great caution.
This is not to say that life in the DPRK is very good. As stated many times before, the sheer level of sanctioning the DPRK endures results in a pretty poor quality of life for Korean people. In addition, the DPRK has to deal with military threats from the US, meaning that it diverts many resources to the military, leaving less for civil society. Liberals and conservatives alike claim that that just means “North Korea is bad and should change to be good,” except far worse regimes across the world get nowhere near the levels of sanctions the DPRK gets. Furthermore, the sanctions are designed to cause misery for the Korean people, and they only make the case for Korea’s leadership to tighten security, increase surveillance among the people, cut costs, etc.
There are two broad methods Washington has used to weaken and undermine the DPRK, with a view to eventually destroying it: isolation and unremitting military pressure. Both are measures of economic warfare. Both are intended to bring about the economic collapse of North Korea. Isolation is achieved through a network of sanctions whose purpose is to deny the DPRK vital economic inputs, forcing it to rely on more expensive surrogates, or to suffer crippling shortages. Unremitting military pressure—that is, the unceasing threat of attack—keeps the DPRK on a permanent war footing, diverting critical resources from its civilian economy to military preparedness. The goal is to place the DPRK on the horns of a dilemma: allocate expenditures to the military sufficient to deter an attack and bankrupt the economy, or allocate sufficient expenditures to the civilian economy to allow it to thrive (as much as is possible with restricted access to inputs) at the expense of self-defense. Neither choice is palatable, and both lead eventually to disaster. As we’ll see, the DPRK decision to build a nuclear weapons capability is a solution to the dilemma with which the United States has presented Pyongyang. Unremitting US hostility is the distal cause of the DPRK’s decision to develop nuclear weapons.
The history of US sanctions on the DPRK is as old as the DPRK itself. From the moment the DPRK was founded in 1948, Washington has tried to block Pyongyang’s access to vital economic inputs in order to make the state fail. As a rival to Washington’s puppet state in Korea, and hostile to the US project of turning the peninsula into a stationary US aircraft carrier, the DPRK had to be destroyed. …
Sanctions have effects equivalent to a nuclear attack. In 1999, the political scientists John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote an important paper in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which they argued that economic sanctions “may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.” The scholars tallied deaths due to the use of weapons of mass destruction as follows: “The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed more than 100,000 people, and at a high estimate suggests that some 80,000 died from chemical weapons in World War I. If one adds the deaths from later uses of chemical weapons in war or warlike situations … as well as deaths caused by the intentional or accidental use of biological weapons and ballistic missiles, the resulting total comes to well under 400,000.” By contrast, the Allied economic blockade of Germany during the Great War is estimated to have caused almost twice as many deaths through hunger and malnutrition while “as many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died” from food scarcity-related diseases caused “by economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council, according to two scientists who surveyed the country for the Food and Agriculture Organization,” whose findings were reported in the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association.
“So long as they can coordinate their efforts,” the two political scientists wrote, “the big countries have at their disposal a credible, inexpensive and potent weapon for use against small and medium-sized foes. The dominant powers have shown that they can inflict enormous pain at remarkably little cost to themselves or the global economy. Indeed, in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated.” And part of the devastation can be a death toll which exceeds that producible by a nuclear attack.
[Source]
The quote above fits nicely into the refutation of the next myth we shall discuss, which is that the DPRK is some sort of nuclear rogue state that will cause the end of the world at any moment. Since Western media sounds alarm bells every time the DPRK tests nuclear weapons, people are brainwashed into assuming that the DPRK has no reason to hold nuclear weaponry other than to aggress against “free and democratic” capitalist-imperialist states. On the contrary, the historical experiences of the 20th century show the masses that the DPRK deserves to have nuclear weapons, and we need not fear its possession of them any more than we fear imperialist countries that hold them, particularly the US (which actually used nuclear weapons against Japan, and nearly used them against China and Korea). If anything, while the US has accused countries like Iraq of having “dangerous weapons”—and it has used such accusations to justify invasions—it refuses to use the DPRK’s actual nuclear weaponry as a justification for any war, proving that the nuclear weapons serve as a deterrent for imperialists. Considering the devastation the first Korean War had, it’s no surprise the DPRK wants to avoid direct conflict with Yankee imperialists.
Furthermore, the DPRK is the only one of nine nuclear powers that has expressed desires to get rid of nuclear weapons. Of course, it is stupid to expect it to denuclearize without its rival, the US, and other states denuclearizing as well, but the DPRK still did show that willingness that other powers refused to have.
Delegitimizing nuclear weapons is central to the longer term goal of abolishing this uniquely inhumane and devastating weapon of mass destruction. The decision to start negotiations is recognition that a ban treaty can be one useful building block for creating the structures necessary to support a world free of nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons were universally prohibited back in 1993 and the relevant convention entered into force in 1997. It is widely hailed as an outstanding success, even though the actual elimination of all chemical weapons has yet to be completed.
Similarly, a legal nuclear ban treaty by itself cannot deliver nuclear disarmament. But it can be a vital element to revive flagging momentum and re-energize efforts to move from a ban to total elimination of nuclear warheads and dismantlement of the nuclear weapons infrastructure. Accordingly, a ban treaty will be complementary to the disarmament goal of the NPT and provide impetus to efforts toward an eventual Nuclear Weapons Convention that is universal, nondiscriminatory and fully verifiable.
A ban treaty would strongly affirm the moral case against the development, acquisition, possession and use of nuclear weapons and for their abolition. Its implementation will require action by those who possess nuclear weapons. Their failure to follow through will be evidence of defying the global norm.
A detailed breakdown of the U.N. vote is quite revealing. Four of the five NPT-licit nuclear weapons states voted against the resolution (France, Russia, Britain and the United States) and were joined by Israel as a non-NPT nuclear power. China abstained and so did India and Pakistan. North Korea, remarkably, voted “yes.” Of the three countries that have hosted conferences on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, Austria and Mexico voted for it, but Norway buckled to U.S. pressure and voted against.
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The fact that Korea wanted to denuclearize but couldn’t due to the aggression it faces from the US, the second-strongest nuclear power in the world, shows that it isn’t “evil” for using nukes but is forced to due to geopolitical circumstances.
The nuclear weapons question ties well into the next matter, which is that of access to food and other basic needs. Now, the DPRK is not first world state, as is obvious to everyone. Consequently, it lacks the comforts capitalists and even many proletarians (at least the labor aristocrats among them) take for granted in the first world. This is, again, due to the sanctions and the lack of trading partners for the DPRK, as Russia and China are the only two countries of significant economic power willing to support it while the US deliberately uses such sanctions to deprive Korea of vital resources. That is why it often has problems with medical care.
An egregious example of blaming the target of sanctions for the sanctions’ effects was provided in 2010 by Amnesty International. The Western human rights organization released a report that condemned the DPRK government for failing to meet “its obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to health of its citizens,” citing “significant deprivation in [North Koreans’] enjoyment of the right to adequate care, in large part due to failed or counterproductive government policies.” The report documented rundown healthcare facilities which operated “with frequent power cuts and no heat” and medical personnel who “often do not receive salaries, and many hospitals [that] function without medicines and essentials.” Horrific stories were recounted of major operations carried out without anesthesia. Whether the report was accurate or not is difficult to determine, but if we assume, for the sake of argument, that it was, the assessment suffered from a glaring flaw: it made not a single reference, direct or indirect, to the US-led campaign of economic strangulation that has lasted the better part of a century and has been designed to make the DPRK—along with its healthcare system—fail.
[Source]
Nevertheless, for the conditions it deals with, the DPRK does not fare terribly in terms of health outcomes, when compared to capitalist economies of similar economic size. For instance, it has a lower “burden of mortality due to communicable diseases and malnutrition” than other low-income countries [Source]. It also has more vaccination among its people than most “developing countries” exploited by imperialism. Its life expectancy is about the global average (73 years), too. Therefore, the reality of life in the DPRK is more nuanced than imperialist media would claim.
Regarding the DPRK’s “brainwashing”, its cult of personality, etc., these are, again, either exaggerated and inflated attacks on the country or straight up inventions made by South Korean or Western tabloid papers. There have been some really absurd creations, including the idea that Kim Jong-Un mandated his haircut on all men, and the opposite idea that he banned that haircut on all men! Furthermore, people seriously believe North Korean media told its people that its astronaut reached the Sun, only for that to come from a satirical news source from Ireland. The idea that mass mourning over leaders’ deaths in North Korea is “forced” by the state and is not part of the Confucianist tradition of Korea as a whole (including the south), too, is false. The belief that Juche is racist and promotes Koreans as a “master race” or whatever is unfounded; Korea was an ally of the Black Panthers, even as Kim Il-Sung promoted Juche. All these outlandish claims have roots in orientalism, or the Western belief that “the Orient” (i.e. Africa and Asia) are “strange”, “exotic”, and thus worth being colonized.
As for its authoritarianism, it is a product of the Korean War and the continued aggression of US imperialism against it. Contrary to Koreans being “egotistical” enough to isolate themselves from the world, it is the US which bombed, shot, bayoneted, raped, infected, and starved enough Koreans to force them into isolation from the “Western world”. Its suppression of liberal ideas going against its bourgeoisie’s Juche idea is due to fears of Korea falling under the camp of US imperialism, which would mean the sale of Korean people into sexual slavery, wage-slavery, and even literal slavery via human trafficking. Its consolidation of power into the Kim family—which is certainly exaggerated in American-backed media—is done since that family has had prestige for freeing Korea from Japanese imperialism and at least posing as continual defenders of Korean sovereignty. None of this is nice, and ideally Korea would be more democratic as its name claims (and even more ideally, it would return to being the people’s democracy it briefly was after its founding), but it is wrong to ignore the historical and geopolitical context in which the state of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea evolved. (Also, keep in mind that Korea maintains multi-party rule, and so people can choose among approved parties to represent them.)
There are certainly other myths and legends circulating regarding the DPRK. We cannot get into all of them; we will share good videos at the end of this article for readers to learn more about how most narratives about the country are false, but beyond that, all we can suggest is reading the sources we cited throughout the previous sections. Now, we shall sum up our Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (and thus proletarian) perspective on Korea.
Our Position on the DPRK
As we said when talking about the DPRK’s founding and development during and after the Korean War, the state started as a genuine people’s democracy interested in protecting the power of the Korean people from American imperialist aggression. When the USSR was still socialist and all the people’s democracies were genuinely democracies for their peoples (their workers, peasants, petty-bourgeois classes, and, if applicable, national bourgeois classes), Korea remained a true people’s democracy. However, rather than maintaining a proletarian leadership of this state, the government became more bourgeois, and thus it gradually ceased to be a people’s democracy. Korea’s stance to revisionist states showed that it, unlike proletarian states led by proletarian parties, was not anti-revisionist, and was in fact happy to cooperate with those capitalist states with de facto capitalist economies. By the late-1970’s, the national-bourgeois character of the Korean leadership was clearly shown as Marxism-Leninism was replaced entirely by Juche, and while Korea may not have been semi-colonized by the USSR, it did become a semi-colony of Russia and China in the 1990’s and 2000’s.
We do not “endorse” or uphold the state that rules northern Korea. We recognize it as the legitimate government of Korea, as opposed to the implanted southern state that was never organically established, but beyond that we cannot say we support it. That being said, we oppose imperialism’s oppression of Korea, including both Russian and Chinese exploitation of Korean labor and American sanctions and blockades on the country. This is why our solidarity extends to the Korean masses. The solution for their oppression cannot be unification with the openly-bourgeois southern republic, but it is the liberation of their peninsula and the establishment of a truly proletarian-led state with a genuine Communist Party of Korea. The South Korean masses have shown interest in expelling the US imperialist boots from their homeland, and so they seek to unite their homeland with their interests in mind, not the interests of American finance capital or the imperialist bourgeoisie of any country. We hope for a people’s war to free Korea from the shackles of imperialism and bureaucratic-comprador capitalism, and we hope for socialism to develop and spread.
Until such liberation occurs, it is the duty of communists all over the world to fight and sabotage imperialist aggression as much as possible. We must mobilize the masses of our countries to oppose the sanctions on Korea, those sanctions that hurt the people and make life harder for them but not the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. We must end the American blockades on all rival states, and we must cut the exploitative relations between imperialist nations and oppressed ones. With revolutionary actions at home, we weaken imperialism abroad, and thus people’s wars can grow and expand, further bolstering our own revolutions. The unity of the working class and its allies all over the world will free us all, and we must do this as soon as possible, for the sake of humankind’s survival!
Let a socialist Korea with a Communist Party leadership form! Death to the imperialist oppressors of Korea! Down with the capitalist-imperialist system and its puppets!
Helpful Videos
Some good videos can be found in this playlist I made here: DPRK Videos