South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
The state in the North
Millions of ordinary people in the South yearn for their country to be reunited but genuinely fear the so-called communism of the North. Based on a philosophy which in itself is a total distortion of Marxism ("Juché" or "self-reliance"), it has taken the cult of the personality to extremes. The leader of the nation for 40 years, Kim Il-sung, was credited with the infallibility and special powers of a demi-god while the mass of the people saw their country fall into the depths of poverty and total isolation.
There are those activists in the South who, willing things to be otherwise, argue that descriptions of life in North Korea are merely propaganda churned out by the paranoically anti-Communist government and its imperialist backers. They adopt the attitude of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and envy what they see as a simple, moral and Chaebol-free land. But that is not sufficient.
It is true that the economy of the North grew faster than that of the South in the period after the war, demonstrating the advantage of state-ownership and planning. But the attempt to build a planned economy on the basis of autarchic rule and isolated in one small country proved to be a failure even before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now the country is literally a disaster area with eight to nine million of a 25 million population already on the danger list and dying through starvation. The ‘Far Eastern Economic Review’ talks of women cooking wild grass and tree bark for food. People are keeping the bodies of their dead for a few days before burial in order not to risk them being dug up and used as food by the desperately hungry people around them!
North Korea has an army one million strong and the defector Hwang Jang-yop says his mission in leaving the country (where he was general secretary of the ruling Workers’ Party) was to prevent a frightened and desperate North Korea from going to war with the South. But soldiers must not only be fed (and there are stories that rice aid from abroad is going only to them) they must have a will to fight. Who can help? Even China, going over to capitalism, now has fewer links with the North than it has with the Chaebol-dominated economy. South Korea is one of Beijing’s biggest trading partners and the fourth largest investor in China. Two-way trade has rocketed from nothing to nearly $20 billion. That between China and North Korea is dwindling - last year $566 million. The Chinese president meets South Korea’s president Kim Young-sam every year but has never met North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il.
As more and more harrowing stories about life in the North reach Seoul, used as always by the regime as "proof" of the evils of "communism", there is a widespread urge amongst ordinary people to give physical assistance. But, having fostered the idea itself in mid-April, the Kim Young-sam government tried to stop street collections. The organisers - the church and various ‘left’ groups - were overwhelmed with the response and were blamed for fomenting criticism of the government’s policy towards the North. Kim Young-sam cannot be too confident on this score as he has changed his unification minister five times.
Reunification
All South Korean regimes, from the dictators to the pseudo-democrats, have claimed to be in favour of reunification but unquestionably entirely on terms dictated by imperialism as a whole and South Korean capitalism itself. Many hold that the quibbling over aid to the North is in order to bully Kim Jong-il’s regime into submission. Kim Young-sam claims to be reluctant to give succour to an enemy which has so recently (last year) "sent marine commandos to invade". The North’s leaders must come to the negotiating table first and make a peace agreement. (Technically for them the Korean war has not yet ended).
If the North Korean regime, facing famine at home and cold shoulders all around it, virtually collapses into South Korea it will cost the economy of the Chaebol far more than the reunification of Germany cost capitalist West Germany. The United States would be forced to put in large sums of money to shore up a united capitalist Korea. The population of the North is half that of the South, compared with East Germany’s being one-quarter that of West Germany. It has a per capita income of at most one-tenth that of South Korea. Most of the population is now receiving less than 200 grammes of food a day, far less than the United Nations prescribes for refugees in Africa. 90% of the country’s livestock has gone - traded or slaughtered. While South Korea is the eleventh largest economy in the world, North Korea "would not make it into the top 500 centrally managed economic units in the world" (Economist - ‘The World in 1997’).
No socialist could be against Korean reunification if it is carried out in the interests of the people. Many hundreds of thousands of families are still cruelly separated by the line that cuts the body of their country in two. World imperialism with the collusion of the Soviet bureaucracy, imposed this artificial arrangement solely in the interest of maintaining their own sphere of influence in the region - literally dividing a nation and ruling as much of it as possible.
No socialist, however critical of the bureaucracy and the elite in the North, would welcome a delayed victory of imperialism in the form of a ‘surrender’ of state ownership and planning. While the people of the North are desperately in need of food and working people in the South are prepared to make sacrifices to help, aid programmes organised by the United Nations or other organisations of capitalism are bound to have strings attached. Socialists vigorously oppose the privatisation of industry and land.
They would argue for full democratic rights and give full backing for workers to establish control in their workplaces and manage the economy and society through genuinely elected representatives. While thus pressing for the overthrow of the ruling elite, they would have to argue for North Korea, at least initially, to maintain its own identity, probably in a federation of the two states with the freedom of all Koreans to travel. The right of self-determination must be upheld and a united movement of the Korean working class built with the aim of organising the voluntary re-unification of Korea on a socialist basis. The decision must be that of the people of North and South, arrived at in a totally democratic manner.
The "Bogey"
Some ‘nationalist’ activists in the South paint foreign imperialism as the main enemy, implying that Koreans of all classes can struggle together to eliminate it. Later can come the struggle for socialism. Indeed, the Korean nation has endured enormous suffering under decades of direct and indirect colonial rule. The movement will never forgive or forgot. It has to demand that US troops be completely withdrawn, that all the assets of American and Japanese imperialism be taken into public ownership and that the country be re-unified. But the now fully-fledged Korean capitalist class is integrally bound up with foreign capital. It will use the very same methods of economic exploitation and state repression, with or without that ‘special relationship’ with Washington and Tokyo. The struggle against imperialism means a struggle against Korean capitalism.
The present Southern regime wants unification on its own terms, that is with the imposition of capitalist market relations. Socialists must oppose this. They must fight for democratic rights in the North and the South and for unification without the rule of the Chaebol. The fight for re-unification must be linked precisely to the fight for socialism - the elimination of rule by a handful of capitalist families in the South and by a small bureaucratic ‘dynasty’ in the North.
It sometimes seems as if the bourgeois South prefers to keep things as they are. A separate capitalist North Korea is unlikely to develop, but if it did, in itself it would not represent a powerful rival to the South. It is most likely to be ‘absorbed’. But not only would this cause big problems for the South Korean economy. If the planned economy was dismantled, the rather useful "bogey" over the border would be gone. What conspiracy theories could be used then against the workers’ and students’ movements to try and deter them from from the ideas of socialism and communism?
Although this excuse for intimidation has allowed regimes in the South literally to get away with murder, in some cases, the fact that the South Korean regime so ruthlessly punishes "pro-North activities", tends to attract some of the most rebellious youth towards those very activities. There is also a well grounded and deep-seated hostility to imperialism amongst wide layers of the population. But some activists feel that the lives of many valiant young fighters have been wrecked unnecessarily as a result of incorrect tactics that have laid the movement open to state provocation.
National Liberation (NL), the organisation behind last summer’s confrontation at Yonsei University, has been against linking up the struggle of the students and the fight for the expulsion of imperialism from the peninsula with the workers’ movement for an end to the Chaebol economy in the South. The NL leadership, in its blind drive for unification on Pyongyang’s terms and following its false Juché doctrine, abandons the class struggle and, in effect, also excuses the monstrous rule of the ruling clique in the North. It argues for a struggle of all Koreans, in the North and South and abroad - i.e. Koreans of all classes - against foreign domination.
This is the Stalinist theory of two stages - first the national liberation struggle against imperialism, then the class struggle against the bosses and for socialism. It was this treacherous policy that delivered the leaders of the Chinese working class into the murderous hands of the Chiang Kai Shek nationalists in 1927 and was responsible for the slaughter of up to two million members of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965.
The other tendency in student politics was PD or ‘People’s Democracy’ which, while arguing for "broad coalitions" of forces, recognises the main enemy as the Chaebol and the main force for change as the proletariat. These, the two best known trends in student politics, have long fed the debates in every corner of the movement - particularly in the underground and semi-legal organisations that abound in the conditions of political persecution.
Cross-class alliances
When the question of a new party is under discussion, there are those, including in the KCTU, who also argue for a cross-class coalition involving members of Kim Dae-jung’s NCNP (National Congress for New Politics) party. While Kim Dae-jung may have slightly more "radical" credentials than Kim Young-sam, he has failed to live up to the most modest expectations of his party’s supporters even in the course of this great strike. He said at the parliamentary symposium on 17th January that democracy must be fully developed in order to crush communism. As soon as "Hanbogate" broke he was forced to admit receiving $292,000 to use his influence in favour of this now fallen pillar of Chaebol capitalism.
When, as happens quite frequently, he is accused in the yellow press of association with the regime in the North he does not use the opportunity to condemn his accusers. He says nothing of the right to free speech, free association, let alone the right to advocate an alternative system. He is well known for singing the praises not of North Korea but of capitalist Germany.
The Korean people can no longer put their trust in any of the "Kims". Kim Jong-pil, leader of the smaller ULD, is no "friend of the people" either. Few will forget his role in the police butchery under the Chun Doo-whan regime as founder of the Korean CIA.