Roland Boer : “Korean Style” of Socialist Governance in the DPRK
Author: Roland Boer
Born in Australia in 1961. PhD in Philosophy from McGill University, Canada. Currently a research professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Australia, and a distinguished professor of “Overseas Talents” at Renmin University of China. One of the contemporary Marxist researchers, his main research areas are religion and politics, Marxist biblical criticism, and religious critical theory.
His representative works include “Critique of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology”, “Critique of Religion: On Marxism and Theology” (three volumes), “Marxist Biblical Criticism”, and “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Bible and Popular Culture”. Due to its novel perspective, this series of books has been translated into Danish, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Chinese. In addition, Professor Boll has published more than 300 articles, chapters or encyclopedia entries, and has been invited to give lectures at many universities in China. Teaches at the School of Literature at Renmin University of China: Western Marxism and Literature (graduate students), Religion and Popular Culture (undergraduate students).
Opening Remarks
The history of socialist governance now moves eastward, in terms of the Eurasian landmass. The move is not so great, across the border from the Soviet Union to Korea. After all, the Soviet Union was, like Russia today, a Eurasian country with its own distinct civilisational development. However, when we come to east Asia—the focus of the remainder of the book—we find the most enduring types of socialist gover nance. It would be another task to assess the cultural, social, and historical reasons why Marxism took such deep root in eastern Asia in a way not found elsewhere in the world. The fact that Marxism did resonate so deeply in east Asia explains—in part at least—why socialism continues to grow in strength, albeit not without periodic challenges and problems, in countries such as the DPRK, Laos, Vietnam, and China.
The concern of this chapter is the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK), infor mally known as North Korea. In what follows, I will devote most attention to the prac tices of socialist governance in the DPRK. This requires a treatment of electoral and consultative democracy, as well as the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Korea— familiar categories by now. The continuities with other socialist countries is notable, but there are also distinct emphases in light of the DPRK’s concrete conditions. In terms of electoral democracy: while there is only one decision-making body, the Supreme People’s Assembly (along with regional people’s assemblies), there is also the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland. This is not a governing body per se, but it plays a crucial role in the electoral process. Made up of all polit ical parties, mass organisations, and religious groups, it proposes multiple candidates, debates their suitability, and approves one candidate for elections. In terms of consul tative democracy (apart from the Democratic Front), we find a comparable role for what the Soviet Union called Primary Political Organisations. These are found in the Chongsanri method in agriculture and the Taean work system in industry, where party cells and local committees engage substantively and robustly with collective farmers and factory workers in the process of making decisions and plans. As for the leadership of the Communist Party, which became the Workers’ Party of Korea in 1946, this is a given, but the statutory processes by which it exercises leadership can be seen most clearly in the unique role of the State Affairs Commission. It is this body that the country’s leader now chairs, although he is chair of neither the SPA nor president of its Standing Committee.
I will also devote some attention to the DPRK’s political philosophy, which reflects the anti-hegemonic emphasis on self-sufficiency and the need for development in light of the DPRK’s specific characteristics. While Juche (people as masters of their destiny) and Songun (military-first) are reasonably well-known, I give greater attention to the people-first approach of Kimilsungism Kimjongilism. Identified and promoted by Kim Jong Un, primacy is given to—as far as possible in light of circumstances—to the comprehensive improvement of the economic, social, and environmental conditions of the common people.
A crucial question concerns the sources. In some earlier work, I waded through all of the available Western material on the DPRK. With rare exceptions, this material can hardly be called “scholarship.” Caricatures, fabrications, falsities, Orientalism, racism, the “Potemkin” assumption, and more, mean that any rigorous scholarly work on the DPRK must put such material to one side. That said, there are a small number of exceptions among Western scholars, based on research visits and archival mate rials, and I will use them where needed in this chapter. However, my prime source is Korean scholarship itself. Fortunately, it is now possible to access a reasonable amount of Korean scholarship in multiple languages on the Naenara website, or—if one prefers—to purchase them from Korea Books. Since I do not read the Korean Hangul script, I am reliant on well-produced English translations. Still, those whose minds are saturated with Western liberal assumptions will need to make an extra effort to overcome an ingrained assumption and even prejudice: Korean scholar ship does not simply parrot the Party line. In other words, it is a distinct scholarly discourse that seeks to explain in detail a country that remains much misunderstood and misrepresented.
Finally, we should be very clear that the Korean revolution was one that established deep roots among the people; it was not imposed from outside or from above.[1] A major factor is that among all east Asian countries, Korea has—perhaps along with Vietnam—arguably suffered most from imperialism and colonialism. Japan’s process of capitalist modernisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used the standard capitalist approach: colonise another country (Korea), brutally suppress any resistance, and exploit its resources and labour power for one’s own benefit. At the moment Japan was defeated by the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance—to which Japan devoted 75% of its war effort[2] —the United States turned up as a second wave of colonialism. Here we find one of Stalin’s two mistakes towards the close of the Second World War: he ordered the Soviet Red Army to pause at the 38th Parallel, when it could have taken over the whole of the peninsula with little resistance (the other mistake was to concede significant parts of the Germany to US and UK forces). Meanwhile, the anti-communist Japanese smoothly made the transition to assisting US occupation of the southern half of the peninsula (Brun and Hersch 1976, 75–76). The Koreans north of the 38th Parallel not unjustifiably refer to the south as a “US puppet regime,” as a colonised country with tens of thousands of foreign soldiers on its soil. That the US was subsequently guilty of extensive war crimes—napalm, biological weapons, genocidal efforts to obliterate the country and its people—in the war of 1950–1953[3] only adds to the strong emphasis on anti-imperialist and anti hegemonic sovereignty in Korea. Like Vietnam, Korea’s keen attention to Marxism’s concern with anti-colonial struggles for national liberation determines so much of the approach in the north (Kim Il Sung 1970). In short, “independence, Songun, and socialism” are not simply the necessities of the Korean revolution, but also the realities that accord with its concrete conditions (Kim Jong Un 2015c, 35)
2.Historical Background
The components of the system of governance did not, of course, emerge overnight; they are the product of a long process of development and maturation. As with China, there had been a long and bitter revolutionary struggle before the DPRK was established.[4] This experience led to the formation of a revolutionary people’s government that was based for a time in the area around the Tuman River and sought to coordinate the mobile and ever-changing realities of the struggle.[5] It was this experience that led to the proposal to establish a Korea-wide democratic people’s republic. Thwarted these plans were in light of post-liberation realities, so power was initially held by a provisional people’s committee. Not one committee, but many: by November of 1945 people’s committees—11,500 of them—had been formed in all areas, “from provinces to cities, counties, sub-counties and ri” (Choe and Pak 2018, 7; Brun and Hersch 1976, 129–130).[6] These many people’s committees required coordination through ten administrative bureaus that sought to ensure the inter-connection between economic, political, and social policies.
All of this was preliminary, leading up to a consultative conference in February of 1946. Crucially, the conference included representatives from all political parties that had striven for Korean independence, along with mass and social organisations, and the many people’s committees. This multi-party consultative approach would abide in Korea (see below), as it did in China. The conference set in place the basic realities of Korean governance, appointing a Provisional People’s Committee, of which Kim Il Sung was elected chair. The task was twofold, embodied in the term democratic dictatorship: complete elimination of the remnant landlord class, comprador capital ists, pro-Japanese elements, and anti-communists (not a few escaped to the southern dictatorship under Syngman Rhee); develop socialist democracy among the ordinary people, namely, urban and rural workers. Obviously, the first part was a thorough exercise of what Marx and Engels designated as the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was certainly not bloodless, but one wonders whether any other type of transmission was possible in light of the former Japanese colonial system.
The Provisional People’s Committee was—as the term indicates—clearly provi sional. Soon enough, the next step was underway, with countrywide elections held on 3 November, 1946—the first in Korea’s history (Kim Il Sung 1946). The results of the elections led to an initial congress of delegates from all of the people’s commit tees, and it was this congress that formally established the People’s Assembly as the supreme organ of governance. The People’s Assembly met for the first time on 21 February, 1947, and instituted the following measures: the establishment of a People’s Committee to carry on the tasks of the Assembly when not in session; election of Kim Il Sung as chair of the People’s Committee; and the organisation of elections at the lower levels, in districts, neighbourhoods, and villages, with the result that people’s assemblies were established at these levels as well. The final transition of power took place at the first session of the new Supreme People’s Assembly in September, 1948, when the People’s Committee absolved itself (Kim Il Sung 1948).
Although there would be subsequent development of the governance structures, the basic system was now in place.[7] Notably, the early process was not so much an abolition of previous united-front structures and their replacement with new and more socialist structures—as happened in the Soviet Union. As Choe Su Nam and Pak Kum Il observe, “it was unnecessary to do away with the already established government to replace it with a socialist government.” Instead, a “socialist govern ment was established while preserving intact the form of the people’s government” based on the worker-peasant alliance. At a more philosophical level, we can see this process in dialectical terms, in which former structures are preserved and trans formed within the new framework. As a result, the DPRK embodies both multi-party and multi-organisational involvement through the Democratic Front and the socialist governmental forms of the People’s Assemblies and the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
In light of this historical background, we may turn to the components of the DPRK’s approach to socialist governance.
3. Electoral Democracy
The DPRK’s electoral democracy relates primarily to the people’s assemblies, along with local state organs, assemblies, and committees. Every eligible citizen may stand for election, so much so that independent candidates are regularly elected to the people’s assemblies and may even be elected to be the speaker or chair. The history of the DPRK has many such examples. I think here of Ryu Mi Yong (1921–2016), who moved from south to north in 1986 so as to take up her role as chair of the Chondoist Chongu Party (The Party of the Young Friends of the Heavenly Way, formed in 1946). She was elected to the Supreme People’s Assembly and became a member of the Standing Committee (then called the Presidium). Other examples include Gang Ryang Uk, a Presbyterian minister who was a leader of the Korean Christian Federation (a Protestant organisation) and served as vice president of the DPRK from 1972 until his death in 1982, as well as Kim Chang Jun, who was an ordained Methodist minister and became vice-chair of the Supreme People’s Assembly (Ryu 2006, 673). Both Gang and Kim were buried at the Patriots’ Cemetery.
[1] The study by Suzy Kim (2013c) shows this reality very well, based—somewhat perversely—on archival documents from 1945–1950 that were stolen during the brief US occupation of the north in 1950.
[2] The United States’ efforts in the Pacific was a sideshow, accounting for less than 25% of Japan’s war effort.
[3] That the initially civil war was begun by the anti-communist hit-man and dictator, Syngman Rhee, is by now historical fact—despite US and southern Korean propaganda (Brun and Hersch 1976, 90–98; Liem 1993;Ryo 1995). Rhee’s southern regime was riven with revolt and was on the verge of economic and political collapse. The USA saw an opportunity to strike not merely at the emerging socialist society in the northern part of the peninsula, but also at the newly established People’s Republic of China. The US’s resounding defeat, and indeed rout, at the hands of Chinese and Korean forces that had vastly inferior weapons technology, has led to this episode being known as the “forgotten” or “unknown war,” in the USA at least (Cumings 2011).
[4] The following draws on Choe and Pak (2018, 6–11).
[5] For a useful overview of the era of revolutionary struggle led by Kim Il Sung, see Cumings’s otherwise patchy book (2004, 103–127).
[6] 6 A ri is an administrative district based on the village.
[7] For overviews of subsequent developments, including the constitution of 1948, the establishment of the National Defence Commission in light of Songun politics, and the transition to the State Affairs Commission in 2016, see Choe and Pak (2018, 70–73, 100–103, 134).
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