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The DSP leadership makes a political gesture towards the "deformed workers state" of North Korea
By Bob Gould

The Christmas break issue of Green Left Weekly has an excited review by Chris Atkinson of Jim McIlroy's pamphlet, Origins of the ALP, which condemns Laborism and Laborites in the most sweeping way. I'll comment more fully on that in a few days.

Right next to that review is an article about North Korea, ostensibly a  review of a book by a US historian, Bruce Cumings.

The review is by Iggy (Ignatius) Kim, who is one of the younger leaders of the DSP. He's of Korean background and comes of a zealous Korean Catholic family, who sent him to good Catholic schools. He became a Marxist a few years ago.

I have to confess to a certain respect, and even personal liking, for Iggy Kim. He's a tall bloke with an infectious laugh and a winning smile. He's an energetic activist of the DSP. He obviously lives on not much money and is very dedicated. He's often to be seen pedaling his pushbike around the inner city.

His personal commitment deserves respect, and he's also a serious Marxist intellectual, although he's commissioned from time to time by the DSP leadership to perform intellectual tasks that are extremely problematic.

For example, the DSP leadership got him to write a pamphlet, The Origins of Racism, at the time of the Pauline Hanson outbreak a few years ago. The pamphlet blamed the Labor Party for the origins of racism in Australia and attacked official multiculturalism at the same time as the Hansonites were doing the same thing from the right.

Now, Iggy Kim has obviously been given the job of prettifying North Korea because of his Korean background, and to my mind, chronically suspicious in matters relating to the DSP leadership, this suggests that this may have something to do with the DSP's planned Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference.

Maybe there will be delegates at the conference from pro-North Korean groups in South Korea, or even from the North Korean regime itself.

I vividly remember the Asia-Pacific conference before last, to which the DSP managed to get a delegation from the ultra-Stalinist Japanese Communist Party, who were the stiffest Stalinists, in black three-piece suits (flanked by younger interpreters, also suited up to the nines), that I've seen for many a long year.

I want to preface what I'm going to say now with a general political statement. I believe that it's necessary for socialists to oppose the US and Japanese imperialist machinations (supported by Australia) in the northern Pacific region, directed against North Korea, quite independently of the bizarre character of the North Korean regime. The struggle against imperialism isn't conditional on the character of regimes under the imperialist hammer.

Having said that, when I see Iggy Kim shyly introducing the notion of the "deformed workers state of North Korea" into his fulsome review of an enthusiastic book about North Korea, I'm deeply angered, politically speaking.

I'm an old revolutionary socialist of the sort that generally characteristed the Soviet Union as a deformed workers state, rather than a state capitalist state, as the International Socialist Tendency generally viewed it. I haven't changed my mind about the deformed workers state analysis of the Soviet Union, and I still consider that in its time that analysis was more scientific and useful to the working class than the state capitalist analysis.

Nevertheless, the debate between workers statists and state capitalists was a serious and far-reaching argument on both sides, and there is considerable literature about that debate, and this material is worthy of serious study by young Marxists.

In the modern revolutionary socialist movement there are substantial groups still active on the far left that owe their ideological origins to one or the other of those two general political currents.

It's as an old deformed-workers-statist that I find trying to prettify the bizarre regime in North Korea as a deformed workers state eccentric, politically dangerous and thoroughly opportunist.

The DSP, mainly prodded by Eva Cheng's initiative, characterises China as a capitalist state, and has done so for a number of years. I agree with that analysis of China, put forward by Eva Cheng and the DSP.

On the other hand, I think it's reasonable to call Vietnam a deformed workers state, and even possibly Laos, and I certainly believe that Cuba is a deformed workers state, the vigorous defence of which against imperialism is entirely desirable. It's equally clear that Cambodia is now a semi-colonial capitalist state.

To call North Korea a deformed workers state is a mad caricature of the whole concept of deformed workers states elaborated by Trotsky.

This categorisation does a great disservice to the whole idea of workers states. The idea that the North Korean regime is in any way, any kind of model for socialist development, does terrible harm to the idea of socialism.

North Korea is not a deformed workers state, but a feudal hereditary monarchy, in which the royal family runs the state from top to bottom by the most brutal police methods. There is a wealth of evidence to show that's the actual situation in North Korea today.

In the case of China, a reversion to capitalism has taken place in economic and class terms. In the case of North Korea, an even stranger permutation has taken place. Reversion to capitalism is not the only possibility in a workers state. In North Korea, there has been a leaping of stages back to something closely resembling feudalism.

Under feudalism the monarch had complete control of the land and the country, and was the major active political force in the country. The monarch's subjects held property at the monarch's wish, etc.

North Korea closely resembles a medieval feudal state. In the 1930s, the ex-communist theorist Kurt Wittfogel developed the idea that the Soviet Union had reverted to what Marx described as oriental despotism. Wittfogel's theory was overstated in relation to the Soviet Union, but it applies forcefully to the social relations in North Korea.

In South America just before the Spanish conquest, the realm of the Incas was a kind of statist empire in which the land and productive resources were run in a kind of communal way with, however, a highly authoritarian structure focused on the emperor.

I recommend to Iggy Kim that he carefully study The Inca Empire by Thomas C. Patterson, published by Berg, Oxford and New York, in 1997. The resemblance of the current North Korean regime to the Inca empire is striking.

The North Korean regime is also very fragile because of its reactionary, feudal quality, and it's reasonable to predict that one day, possibly quite soon, after some division within the regime, the masses will tear down that regime from below in the elemental way that the masses tore down the regimes in Rumania and Albania, which had some features in common with North Korea, although neither was as feudal as the set-up in North Korea.

When the North Korean regime implodes, as it inevitably will, its downfall is very likely to be bloody and chaotic.

On China, Eva Cheng and the DSP leadership point out that the potent combination of explosive, almost 19th century, capitalist economic development with a rigid Stalinist political system, is a combination that is in the sharpest conflict with the interests of the working class and peasantry in China, as demonstrated by recent industrial disputes there.

I would add to that analysis the proposition that in China, basic democratic demands, such as the right to trade unions, free speech, and even the formation of a constituent assembly, are appropriate.

In a situation such as China, socialists should be completely on the side of the democratic demands of the workers and peasants. If it's possible, the situation in North Korea is even worse than that in China.

Iggy Kim relies on evidence from one North Korean expert, a pro-North-Korea one, that he manages to dig up. There are quite a number of other experts on North Korea, some of them on the left, for instance Gavin MacCormack, from Australia, whose book on the Korean War is extremely useful.

They paint a picture quite different, and in my view more accurate, than the one painted by Iggy Kim and Bruce Cumings.

The DSP itself, even had a direct report of the situation in North Korean from two then DSP members who went to a world youth festival in Pyongyang in the late 1980s and described the actual situation. Even their interpreters and guides were afraid to talk to them frankly, or even to walk in a garden where they might be out of sight of their overseers and in a position to talk privately.

There are several books about the history of the North Korean Communist Party and Kim Il Sung's royal dynasty. Kim the elder, rather like Stalin, exterminated most of the other leaders of the North and South Korean communist movement and the Korean guerrilla movement between 1947 and 1955.

Bruce Cumings quite rightly points to the massacres perpetrated by the US and the South Koreans, but he almost ignores the brutal massacres carried out by the North Korean regime.

Iggy Kim, who presumably speaks and reads Korean, is probably aware of the ongoing crisis of the past 10-15 years in the leftist political movements of Koreans in Japan.

The form of the crisis is as follows. There's a large community of Koreans in Japan, rather like the Irish in Britain. Many of these Koreans originally came from South Korea.

From just after the Second World War until the early 1980s these exiles were overwhelmingly sympathetic to North Korea on generally nationalist grounds. Lenin distinguished between the reactionary nationalism of imperialist countries and the progressive nationalism of oppressed colonial countries. Korean nationalism clearly falls into the second category, particularly when expressed against its former Japanese colonial oppressor. In this respect, Korean nationalism is very similar to Irish nationalism.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, more than 100,000 Koreans from Japan moved to North Korea, and with their families and descendants they probably make up 200,000-300,000 people now. Unfortunately for them, after they were enticed to North Korea, the regime there treats them with enormous suspicion, and many thousands of them were imprisoned or executed. A few hundred managed to escape back to Japan, mainly through China.

The sympathy for the North Korean regime among Koreans in Japan has steadily fallen because of the disappearance of relatives and the evidence from escapees as to what happened to them.

This has produced a sustained and very public continuing crisis in the political organisation of Koreans in Japan. I suspect Iggy Kim knows a fair bit about this, and he should discuss it publicly, rather than repeating what is essentially propaganda by Cumings in favour of the North Korean regime.

An infuriating feature of Bruce Cumings' book and Iggy Kim's review is their avoidance of the issue of the conventional military invasion of South Korea by the North in 1950.

The book never comes out very clearly and accepts that the North invaded the South. It goes to great lengths to describe, quite accurately, how bad the regime in the South was but it avoids the question of the North Korean invasion.

Stalinists in the 1950s and 1960s routinely denied that North Korea had invaded, and tried to make a case that the South had invaded. The extremely courageous, but on this question quite misguided, US left-wing liberal I.F. Stone wrote a book, The Hidden History of the Korean War trying to make a case that the South invaded the North.

The partial opening of the Soviet archives since 1989 blows that conspiracy theory sky high. There's a considerable amount of material in the Soviet archives that makes it clear the North invaded the South.

I'm not arguing a moral case here. Given the reactionary character of the South Korean regime, there's some force in the argument that the Korean War was a civil war, but nevertheless launching a conventional war between one state and another is a strategic and military matter. There's no doubt in my mind that the invasion of South Korea by the North was a dangerous adventure, politically and militarily, and was inevitably going to get the response that it got from US imperialism, and Western imperialism in general.

The invasion of the South by the North was a military strategic error of the highest order, and the carnage of the Korean War stemmed from that political error.

You only have to contrast the situations in Korea and Vietnam to underline the adventurist nature of the North Korean invasion. The Vietnamese, although they had considerable moral weight for their case for reunification of Vietnam, relied mainly on a guerrilla struggle to achieve their objective, and they were successful. The invasion of South Korea was a military and political disaster.

To try to evade all this as Cumings does, echoed by Iggy Kim, is to abdicate Marxism, or even any pre-Marxist military strategic analysis.

I generally avoid arcane and pretentious discussions from afar about strategy and tactics in countries about which the people commenting are really not expert, that often passes for discussion on the Marxmail and Green Left Weekly and Leftist Trainspotters email lists.

I'm constantly amazed that people in many of these discussions could be so sweeping in their judgements on so little evidence. But that's not the case with North Korea.

There's a very large body of evidence about the character of the North Korean regime, and a lot of it emanates from North Korea itself. In 1960, as secretary of the Sydney Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament I sent our little newsletter to the more or less official mouthpiece of North Korea published in Japan, The People's Korea offering an exchange. Thereafter, that 12-page newspaper, printed on ricepaper, came every week for the next 30 years. I wrote several times trying to stop it, and eventually gave up.

It arrived faithfully at my Catholic mother's residence at Bondi (where I was living in 1960), much to her fascination and eventual irritation. Every issue for 30 years had about five photographs of Kim Il Sung in it, and from time to time we would also get large, free, indigestible sets of books of the Great Leaders' trite works, all leather-bound.

They are such eccentric items of high Stalinism that they're now collectors' items.

Over the years as a bookseller I've acquired three or four books of North Korean art. They are all totally dominated by pictures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

I present this humorously, but the public art of any society is a serious matter. The adulation of Stalin, expressed in the public art of the USSR, was a political and cultural crime. The same applies to the cult of Mao. The cult of the two Kims is even more ubiquitous and far worse.

A society that devotes so much of its resources to such a cult when the masses are starving and dying is, from the point of view of the working class and peasants, a criminal regime.

Eventually the North Korean masses will overthrow that regime by some means, and I will support that overthrow.

The idea of defending the North Korean "deformed workers state" against its own population is an absurdity and an obscenity.

Socialists should defend North Korea like any other colonial or ex-colonial state against US and Japanese imperialism, but they should never defend the North Korean state against its own workers and peasants.

I write about these questions with considerable personal feeling. At the age of 67 a large part of my conscious political life has involved defending genuine revolutionary socialism against Stalinism. I have read and studied everything that I can lay my hands on about the history of Stalinism, its bloodthirsty assault on the old Bolsheviks and the working class in many countries.

Part of the political sections in my bookshop reflects this lifelong preoccupation. It seems to me, on the basis of my life experience in the socialist movement, completely unprincipled, dangerous and against the interests of reviving the socialist project to prettify in any way the reactionary feudal monarchy in North Korea.

This is not a personal attack on Iggy Kim. In my view he has just performed a political task to which he has been assigned by the DSP leadership. But someone who can speak Korean and knows something about Korea, in my view ought to know better.

The purpose of this contribution to discussion is to open up a political discussion on the class character of the North Korean regime.

PS. The question of North Korea and the Korean War figured rather dramatically in the modern division between the revolutionary socialist workers statists and the state capitalists of Tony Cliff.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the supporters of Cliff who adhered to the state capitalist theory were a minority in Gerry Healy's British revolutionary socialist organisation, which adhered to the deformed workers state theory.

The Healy leadership of the organisation launched a campaign for the workers state of North Korea and the state capitalists adopted a position summarised in their then slogan, which was on the banner of their magazine for many years: "Neither Washington nor Moscow. Fight for international socialism."

The Cliff supporters in union bodies and Labour parties broke the Healy organisation's discipline and put forward different resolutions on the Korean War in public. They were then expelled from Healy's group and formed their own organisation.

The historical origins of the modern splits between state capitalists and workers statists were thereby precipitated by a theoretical dispute with practical implications, about the class character of North Korea.

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Comments welcome. Ozleft Bob Gould

Since December 23, 2004