South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
"Communist threat"
The real reason for maintaining this ‘presence’, was blurted out by President Truman’s special advisor, Edwin Pauley, when he warned, "Communism in Korea could get off to a better start than practically anywhere else in the world". A US commander admitted in 1945: "When we came in, we found the communists actually ruling and controlling South Korea". Russian troops had been advancing from the North for some time but a genuinely popular rising was under way. In the brief period between the collapse of the Japanese war effort and the arrival of US troops, workers had begun to take control over their workplaces, to form unions and to take responsibility for management. Peasant unions were organising land take-overs and rice collection, storage and distribution.
Korean communists had built their own party and fought throughout the 1920s and 1930s to organise trade unions in the teeth of atrocious state terror from the Japanese occupiers. Now their movement was coming into its own. But it was not only US imperialism who feared the victory of a workers’ and peasants’ revolution in the Korean peninsular. The establishment of genuine socialist democracy in any country and an appeal for workers elsewhere to do the same would have sounded the death knell for the parasitic elite ruling the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Stalinism
Contrary to the much-peddled scare stories about ‘reds under the bed’ plotting revolutions everywhere, the bureaucracy that had usurped power in Moscow on the basis of the revolution being isolated to a backward country, worked through its domination of the "Communist Parties" internationally to prevent workers taking control in society. Notably in China in the 1920s, Spain and France in the 1930s, when there were heroic revolutionary movements, it insisted on treacherous tactics that tied the workers’ organisations to the political representatives of its own exploiters - the owners of industry, finance, land.
State-owned, planned economies were established, in post-war Eastern Europe, China and so on, following popular revolts and the virtual ‘flight’ of capitalism. But, with a heavy involvement of the ‘Red Army’ of the Soviet Union, or in the case of China, its own peasant-based army, from the beginning they were under the tight control of a developing authoritarian bureaucratic elite. Fig-leaf ‘coalition’ governments were artificially cobbled together. Behind them, a ruthless policy was pursued of physically excluding from power not only what remained of the bourgeoisie but the workers too. Regimes were set up in the image of Moscow’s centrally controlled society. In the Soviet Union, Stalin maintained the state terror that he had used to crush all opposition and all the elements of workers’ democracy established by the Bolshevik revolution.
Carve-up
Now, in Northern Korea, Stalin was as anxious as the US imperialists to find moderate figures through whom to operate to stem the movement from below. Attempts to set up provisional compromise governments were not faring well. With indecent haste, he agreed with the US generals’ proposals to carve-up the Korean Peninsula along the 38th parallel, even though ‘communist’ and insurgent forces were in control far to the South of it.
A congress in Seoul in September 1945 was attended by approximately one thousand delegates from North and South. A ‘Korean People’s Republic’ was proclaimed. Its programme included the nationalisation of all basic heavy industries, natural resources, means of communication and transportation; the establishment of compulsory primary education and a guarantee of basic human rights, freedom of the press, assembly and religion.
The task of the US War Department, having drawn its line across the body of the country, was to move rapidly to put an end to this uprising and to impose the Syngman Rhee government on South Korea. Moscow was forced to settle for Kim Il-sung in the North. Remaining decidedly in the anti-imperialist camp - retaining state ownership of industry and carrying through rapid collectivisation - he developed a highly personal form of ‘Bonapartist’ rule. The three main groupings in the ‘communist’ movement were systematically physically eliminated - first the Korean, then the Yenan (Chinese) returnees, and lastly even the wing most closely allied to Moscow!
Korean War
The Kim Il-sung clique was then in a position to make a push for the South with the idea of extending their own influence and not at all of encouraging genuine independent class action. Imperialism’s motives were to defend landlordism and capitalism in the South and to restore it in the North. War became inevitable on the Korean peninsular and broke out in 1950. By 1953 when it ended more than three million Korean civilians had been killed and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. (One million Chinese soldiers also died).
There were many heroic struggles up to and during the Korean War. In each one of them, the leaders would demand the restoration of the people’s committees, land redistribution and unification of the country. US forces were still fighting guerrillas throughout South Korea until well into 1952. Their actions were combined with wave upon wave of mass political executions carried out under the orders of their puppet, Syngman Rhee. Over 100,000 were rounded up and slaughtered in the immediate period after the US presence had restored him to power for a second ‘term’ in 1950. (This campaign alone eliminated more people than the US claimed to have been murdered by ‘communists’ North and South during the whole war).
No organised left political forces remained in the South at the end of the Korean War. Yet, before long, as if rising from the ashes, there were once again powerful movements of workers and students for ‘unification of the country and socialism’. They could only be contained by the heaviest of state repression and the American presence.
In his authoritative book, ‘Rush to Development’, Martin Hart-Landsberg explains: "Rule by military dictatorship was a logical consequence of the illegitimacy of the entire US project to create a separate South Korea; it could be saved in no other way". But he goes on to show how the building of Korea’s modern industries did not figure in the plans of American imperialism but was the deliberate decision of a military caste determined to grow rich on the proceeds. Quite cynically and methodically it would use its ‘special (favoured ) status’ to build the basis for becoming independent of its ‘sponsors’. Opting for the capitalist road, it would literally have to create a capitalist class to fill the vacuum that existed after the collapse of Japanese imperialism and the end of 40 years’ foreign domination in every sphere of life.
Theories on trial
Spectacular results were achieved, effectively on the basis of the defeat of the Korean revolution. Do they disprove the theory that isolated, underdeveloped countries cannot "catch up" with advanced industrial economies in terms of technique and productive capacity except on the basis of a state-owned, planned economy?
Special factors obviously prompted the largest imperialist power to set aside considerable resources to build its defences in that region and, in the process, develop the country to some extent. The special trading concessions, the big expansion into Korea of Japanese capitalism and even the land reforms pushed through under US tutelage to stave off peasant uprisings went a long way towards making South Korea an exception that proves the rule. But it is now widely accepted, and confirmed again in a March 1997 ‘Policy Review’ published in London by the ‘Overseas Development Institute’, that the single most important factor behind South Korea’s ‘miraculous’ development (and, to some extent that of the other ‘Asian Tigers’) was, after all, the state.
Although located firmly in the camp of capitalist nations, with a developed and very concentrated class of owners, the ‘Chaebol economy’ was by no means an example of unregulated laissez faire capitalism. On the contrary, there was here an exceptional involvement of the state in every aspect of economic as well as social life. The bourgeois state was even prepared to sacrifice some of "its own" when necessary and limit the freedom of the Chaebol themselves in order to keep the whole show on the road.
Interestingly enough, when the military took over in 1961, a group of colonels is said to have looked at the parlous state of the economy - especially compared to that of the North, which was going ahead - and developed a draft plan based on state ownership and principles of self-reliance. It was shredded for fear of US disapproval! Nevertheless, the Five Year Plans adopted by the military regimes and the targeting of investment in heavy industries achieved results through using methods strongly resembling those of the bureaucratically-run, state-owned economies of the Stalinist camp. In the early 1970s, 12 of the country’s 16 largest firms were actually state-owned and, ignoring Western advice and risking US ire, the Park regime used the state-owned banks to direct loans into six totally new industries - petrochemicals, electronics, iron and steel, machinery, ships, and other transport equipment.