Korea: the last 100 years
My attempt at an introductory anarchist historiography of the Korean Peninsula
My understanding so far of Korean history- (from CIRA-Nippon’s article https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cira-nippon-the-post-war-korean-anarchist-movement and Dongyoun Hwang's Anarchism in Korea, & some other sources, synthesizing with the experiences my North Korean friend told me about her family and country)
Possibly important background reading, in case you are not familiar with the history of Russian, Chinese, and American imperialism in the 20th and 21st centuries-
https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/chinese-imperialism-in-the-20th-and/
https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/russian-imperialism-in-the-20th-and/
https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/american-imperialism-in-the-20th/
Note: For all Korean words here except family names, I use the Revised Romanization System. For family names (e.g. Kim, Park/Baek/Paek/Pak, Yi/Rhee/Lee, etc.) I use whatever romanization for that person appears most commonly in English media, rather than making everyone Gim, Bak, and I. My reason for writing e.g. Kim Il-Seong and Lee Seungman (Syngman Rhee) instead of Gim Il-Seong and I Seungman is to aid the reader in looking up the names elsewhere.
The year is 1920, Korea is a Japanese colony, exploited for its resources and labor. Many Koreans were enslaved. Korean workers and civilians were massacred by Japanese soldiers a lot, there were atleast four horrible massacres I know about, all of which the Japanese government still denies (Japanese govt is quite right-wing and fascistic these days thanks to Abe helping the country backslide towards one-party right-wing rule)
Yi Jeonggyu became an anarchist in the 1920s very decisively after talking to blind Ukrainian anarchist Vasyl’ Yeroshenko, who educated the Korean revolutionaries on the realities of the U.S.S.R.1, and the purges of anarchists, and why only anarchism, not Leninism was the way to liberate Korea. This fact, that only anarchism or some kind of autonomous, direct-democratic communist movement can liberate Korea, remains as urgently true today as it was 100 years ago.
1927- the deadly CCP-KMT alliance forced by Stalin on the CCP (in Comintern) got most of the urban left in China murdered by KMT under Chiang Kai-Shek, they murdered communists and anarchists, also Korean anarchists. Chiang Kai-Shek was a proto-fascist drug lord who took over during 1926-28, KMT invited to revolutionary Shànghǎi in 1927 and massacred communists there.
Quánzhōu is from 1926-1934 maybe the safest Chinese city for anarchists because despite being surrounded by KMT control, Quánzhōu atleast is held by Chinese anarchist Qin Wangshan, and Xu Zhuoran who had sympathy for anarchist ideals. So Quánzhōu becomes a place for many anarchist refugees.
1929- Korean People’s Association of Manchuria (KPAM) founded by refugees of Japanese imperialism. The KPAM was a group of anarcho-communist Koreans organizing in Manchuria, at their height in 1930, they had 2,000,000 people engaging in a gift economy with free stores, depositor-owned banks, worker co-operatives, communal farms and direct-democracy.
1930s- Korean communists start murdering anarchists (Hwang).
This whole time I use anarchist to mean anarcho-communist, but the anarchists and communists remain enemies for a long time, since the beginning of this 1930s betrayal.
1/20/1930- Korean communists murder Kim Jwajin, key figure of USAKP (united umbrella org of LKAM and New People's Government (Sinminbu) in northern Manchuria), while he was working on a rice mill. This assassination really hurt the USAKP movement.
In 1931, Stalin issues secret orders to Korean communists to begin assassinating key figures in the KPAM, to counter the anarchist influence in Korea (MacSimoin 2002:6)
1931- Japan invades Manchuria and KPAM dissolved
July 1931- Korean communists murder Kim Jongjin (age 31), an anarchist who was active in KPAM
Japanese imperialists also arresting anarchists
1936-1937- It is important here to mention Stalin’s genocide-deportation of the Koreans living in Primorsky Krai, U.S.S.R., in Russia’s far east very near to Korea.
1939- Japanese imperialism in Korea gets way more fascistic and begins sending Koreans to work in horrible conditions to support imperialist Japan's fascistic wars of expansion. Many Koreans are massacred. Korean girls are kidnapped to be sex slaves for the Japanese army. Fascist Japan still denies both of these things
1945- Korea liberated from Japanese Imperialism, northern zone of Russian occupation and southern zone of American occupation.
Post-liberation, Korean Preparatory Committees to rebuild society after the war. Communists make them into People's Committees which gradually absorb all unions. Reactionaries attempted to form a united front with communists to seize power, but it was anarchists associated with Oim Ji Gang and Cha Ik Hyun, who proposed first revenge on the Japanese collaborators!! Meanwhile communists are still murdering anarchists, they murder Jul Ri Bang and Lee Yu San. A communist named Kim Il-Seong comes back from the U.S.S.R. with his wife and kids, one of whom is named Yuri Irsenovich Kim. Yuri is ethnically Korean, but was given the name Yuri because he was born in Vyatskoye, Khabarovsk Krai, Russia (in 1941).
1945- Many anarchists from exile, and anarchists throughout the Korean Peninsula all come to Seoul for an anarchist congress
12/25/1945- Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers meeting of U.S., China, Russia, U.K. FDR demands 40-year four-power rule, but other countries' leadership takes it down to five years of Trust Rule. All throughout the peninsula, Koreans are against U.S.-backed Trust Rule. U.S. suppresses anti-Trust Rule rebellions in the south, and the communists in the north support Trust Rule (it means U.S.S.R. rule in the area, this was decided by communist party to prevent a U.S. right-wing takeover of the north, but tossed the south to the U.S. and fucked over the prospects of national Korean unity. Now an important question here- what option did the communist party have? It could have decided in solidarity with the south to not throw them to U.S.-backed fascism, and instead pledged for the whole united Korean Peninsula's rejection of Trust Rule). The U.S. began making deals with the Korean right, committing to try and get them in power as U.S. puppets, and supporting their opportunistic use of anti-Trust Rule, because the U.S. could bypass Trust Rule with a puppet, and make the north look bad for being pro-Trust Rule.
It is now important to talk about the different terrible trajectories taken in U.S.-occupied Korea and Soviet-occupied Korea.
Flag map of Korean peninsula in 1946, from Wikimedia. the U.S. flag represents U.S.-occupied Korea, and the Soviet flag Soviet-occupied Korea. The horizontal border, which corresponds exactly to geographic latitude 38°0′N, was the agreed-upon border by American and Soviet troops in the liberation of Korea from Japanese imperialism in World War II.
U.S.-OCCUPIED KOREA, 1945-1950
From 1945-1950, the south had U.S.-backed still-intact Japanese bureaucracy using fascist Japanese imperial administrators (who were kept in their posts), landlords, ultra-rightists, former collaborators and military officers, unleashing sometimes genocidal levels of violence like in Jeju. This was part of a general pattern in Southeast Asia- Allied powers frequently maintained and enabled Japanese fascism, as they did in south Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines. This right-wing violence obviously killed lots of anarchists and communists both.
4/23/1946- Anwi Congress of anarchists in Anwi, old heartland of Korean anarchism (and birthplace/childhood home of many famous Korean anarchists)
"By 1947 there were more political prisoners in occupation jails than at the end of Japanese rule. Local organizations were crushed by American troops helped by Japanese collaborators recalled (to even their own astonishment!) from hiding in the hills. Labor unions, even reformist ones, were smashed. Rightist-gangster mobs sent to break strikes and beat up workers (castration was their specialty) later formed the basis for the official union after 1948. Concentration camps were built to house strikers. Many starved to death. While events in the north are still shrouded in secrecy so that we must surmise much of what took place as Kim II Seong consolidated his power, the facts of the American and rightist repression in the south are stark, and document one of the little-known but bloody episodes in the suppression of popular aspirations in Asia." (CIRA-Nippon)
Quoting from my post on U.S. imperialism, “In the south, on 1948 Truman installed [(in a rigged election)] and backed military dictator Lee Seungman (Syngman Rhee) who banned unions, massacred 10% of Jeju’s population during a revolt (1948-1949), and suppressed the left-wing Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion”. Both revolts were organized by the Workers’ Party of South Korea (communists) but included a wide variety of left-wing protestors. Communists, anarchists, and many random people suspected of being connected to anarchist or communist movements were executed by Lee Seungman’s Truman-funded forces, in these massacres as well as various counter-insurgency campaigns.
All of the brutality of the U.S. rule massively increased support for the communist movement all across the peninsula.
SOVIET-OCCUPIED KOREA, 1945-1950
It is maybe at this point helpful to take a look at what’s been going on in the north, in more detail. I will first discuss the history and political economy of North Korea (whose state structures grew out of Soviet-occupied Korea) from 1945 until the present day, before then getting into the history and political economy of South Korea (whose state structures grew out of U.S.-occupied Korea). In my view, the close ties these countries’ governments and ruling classes maintained to the U.S.S.R. and U.S. respectively throughout most of the second half of the 20th century makes North and South Korea somewhat accurately described as Soviet-occupied Korea and U.S.-occupied Korea, respectively. The Soviet and U.S. occupations manifested themselves less in Soviet and American troops in the country after 1953 (although there was some of this)
In the north, the U.S.S.R. manipulated through the structure of the People's Committees. The workers’ councils effectively had no real autonomy, subservient to direction from party leadership. (https://isj.org.uk/the-formation-of-north-korean-state-capitalism/2) Anti-Trust Rule people, like some communists, or moderates like Cho Man Sik, leader of the moderate Korean Democratic Party's Pyongyang branch and representative of the "Five Provinces" Provisional People's Committee, were disappeared. Cho Man Sik's post was then given to Kim Il-Seong.
In the first years of Red Army presence in North Korea, many citizens were extremely dissatisfied with the high levels of looting, violence, theft, and rape committed by Red Army troops against Koreans. These dissatisfactions, against both Soviet soldiers and the Korean communists who supported the Soviets, grew into student movements, like the Democratic Youth Association of Hamheung (all of whose members were arrested), and eventually large protests, like the Sineuiju Incident of November 1945 and the Hamheung Students’ Demonstration of 1946 (which also protested against Soviet seizure of grain in Hamheung, which was leading to starvation). Both of these were violently suppressed by Kim Il-Seong and his police forces in collaboration with Soviet secret police, who open fired into the demonstrating crowds. 15-24 people were killed in the suppression of Sineuiju. (Kim Ha-yong, https://isj.org.uk/the-formation-of-north-korean-state-capitalism/)
By 1946, internal North Korean state documents reveal that, amidst all the purges and suppression of protests carried out by Kim Il-Seong and his police, the jails had filled up, and local prison wardens were requesting that new jails be built. (Kim Ha-yong) Soviet military occupation authorities collaborated with Kim Il-Seong’s police, deporting some prisoners to Siberian gulags (Owen Miller, https://isj.org.uk/north-koreas-hidden-history/).
In September 1948 Kim Il-Seong became premier of the newly inaugurated Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north, following his “Juche idea”3, which was his synthesis of (what he thought was) Marxism-Leninism with random other shit, producing a form of state capitalism.4 This state-capitalist project would primitively accumulate the entire country as a labor force to rapidly industrialize (in now state-owned Japanese-built factories across the north) and build up a large standing army. By 1949, 90.7% of all industrial expenditure was towards state-run industries (Miller).
The latitude 38°0′N, which had been established by the American and Soviet militaries as the border between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. occupation zones, in 1948 became the border between the now officially declared Republic of Korea (ROK) headed by Lee Seungman and the DPRK headed by Kim Il-seong.
ANARCHISTS?
A brief note on the anarchists. The was a complicated time, in which Korean anarchists were getting murdered by Japanese imperialists, Korean Stalinists like Kim Il-Seong, as well as various nationalist groups. Various Korean anarchists would make alliances with different nationalist groups, at first as part of the national united front to liberate Korea from Japanese colonialism. Later, for the purpose of survival under the two new dictatorships, some had to make increasingly uncritical alliances with one of either the ROK or the DPRK governments, abandoning revolutionary anarchism in pursuit of advocating policies to not make either dictatorship that terrible.
South Korean anarchists, for example, pursued a policy “towards cooperative experiences, rural development and the idea of a harmonious relationship between countryside and urban centres as the key to national development”, taking from Kropotkin’s ideas about urban-rural mutual aid— ideas which were basically ignored by Lenin, Stalin, Máo, and Kim Il-Seong in their stated attempts to build communism. Under Lee Seungman and all the U.S.-backed capitalist dictatorships of ROK, South Korean anarchists could not advocate anything too critical of capitalism without being labelled a subversive communist, or pro-North sympthasizer, and then imprisoned, tortured or executed.
The result was the different “post-1945 trajectories of some of the leading anarchists fighters and activists of this period: some anarchists, such as Yu Ja-Myeong, ended up having prominent roles in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, others occupied important posts in the South Korean military, such as Bak Giseong, and yet others ended up as activists in South Korea suffering from perennial persecution and hardship, such as Jeong Hwaam (p.148).” (https://blackrosefed.org/review-korean-anarchism/) Yi Jeonggyu became a professor in South Korea. But many were killed during the various purges in both South and North Korea.
KOREAN WAR, 1950-1953
By 1950, both Lee Seungman and Kim Il-Seong had been massacring their way to power, both declaring themselves as the ruler of the entire Korean peninsula. Communist movements in the south were supported by Kim Il-Seong. Border clashes between Kim Il-Seong’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) in the north and Lee Seungman’s Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) in the south had been going on for some time. On June 7, 1950, Kim Il-Seong called for a Korea-wide election, which Lee Seungman rejected. Lee Seungman desired to conquer the entire peninsula, rather than Kim Il-Seong, who expected considerable electoral support in South Korea, whose population had experienced the massacres under the genocidal rule of Lee Seungman. Eventually on June 25, 1950 the KPA invaded South Korea. In response, four days later, Truman began the ordering of a bombing campaign on North Korea from June until October, a genocide by aerial bombardment in which 20% of the North Korean population was killed (Source- Office of US Air History, The Korean War: A History). Rice fields were destroyed by American soldiers bombing many dams, which is itself a Nuremberg-indictable war crime (Avraam Noam Khoms’kyj5).
By this point, the KPA troops were well-trained, well-equipped, and following Stalin’s orders and strategy, and the ROKA by contrast was frightened and confused. By September 1950 the KPA took over all of the south except for Busan and surrounding area. The U.S. would not accept what Truman likely perceived as an insult of having its anticommunist fascist dictatorship be crushed this easily, and in July mobilized conscripted American troops to fight for Lee Seungman and U.S. domination. The U.S. launched a counteroffensive, re-conquering the entirety of the Korean peninsula south of latitude 38°0′N by mid-October 1950. But they didn’t stop there. U.S. troops pressed on towards the Amrok River6, the border between North Korea and China, worrying Máo of an incoming U.S. invasion into Chinese territory. Chinese troops and the Korean People’s Army both decisively defeated U.S. and ROKA forces in North Korea, including in the famous Battle of Lake Jangjin of November 27, 1950 (called Battle of Chosin Reservoir in a lot American historiography) in which retreating Americans were surprise-attacked by Chinese soldiers. In December 1950, Lee Seungman ordered massacres of suspected communists in Seoul in which thousands were killed. The Korean War continued until a ceasefire in July 1953, with territory around latitude 38°0′N often changing hands:
Animation of the territory changing hands through the course of the Korean War, red is DPRK-controlled, green is ROK-controlled. Animation from Wikipedia.
The war didn’t exactly end in July 1953, that was merely the cessation of large-scale hostilities with foreign backing (China and the U.S.S.R. backing the DPRK vs. U.S. backing the ROK). Along 2km of either side of the border was created the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which, despite the name, is the most militarized zone in the world. Border skirmishes and hostility would continue between the DPRK and ROK since 1953, and the pattern has not stopped.
DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA 🇰🇵, 1953-PRESENT
From 1953 until around the 1970s, South Korea (ROK) and North Korea (DPRK) were roughly equally wealthy.
Kim Il-Seong led the DPRK through the genocidal bombardment by the U.S. over 1950-1953, and then later began murdering his political rivals to get even more power. His son Yuri Irsenovich Kim (aka Kim Jeong-Il) would later write about this in On The Juche Idea (1982) as when the leader emerged victorious in his "struggle against bigoted nationalists and bogus Marxists, flunkeyists and dogmatists". As part of this "struggle", in 1955 Kim Il-Seong murdered "bogus Marxists" like Pak Hun Yong, leader of the south Korean Workers' Party, who called for unification rather than "socialism in one country"7. Kim Il-Seong, "the leader", would go on to murder many more " bogus Marxists" (three entire major factions, including "Yenan faction") as part of his power struggle in the 1950s. As I said before, it is difficult to know full details of Kim Il-Seong's purges and how they contributed to the political economy of the DPRK.
The DPRK would remain as basically a Soviet military outpost masquerading as a country, developing a massive armed forces (how much?? how militarized was it under kim il-seong??). The regime concentrated on army mobilization at the expense of food production. All the would-be farmers who ran past the barns and sheds on their way to military drill camp, resulted in the decline of agriculture in North Korea, and the regime substituted this loss of domestic food production by importing increasingly large chunks of the food for the population from the U.S.S.R. Additionally, U.S. sanctions against North Korea from the 1950s have isolated North Korea from a lot of resources (food, medicines) that other third-world countries could buy to an extent, furthering North Korea’s dependency on the U.S.S.R.
Every member of the North Korean population was mobilized to state-assigned work posts (though women could register as housewives8) and given rations of this Soviet food. (https://libertyinnorthkorea.org/learn-a-changing-north-korea) Housing appears to be effectively state-owned, with DPRK officials stating that no North Koreans are required to pay property taxes (Álvaro Longoria 2015, The Propaganda Game). The state apparatus justifies its totalitarian control through fear and paranoia regarding an imminent U.S. re-invasion, manipulating the North Korean population still traumatized from the U.S. bombing during the Korean War.
when did this trend begin? and how did its growth exactly look like over the decades? these questions remain difficult to answer as of now.
The DPRK really stuck to Trust Rule (where Russia gets to rule over the north), in some ways. No doubt the fact that Russia and North Korea share a border. Indeed, it is in Russian universities that some DPRK bureaucrats were educated (some also went to Switzerland and China), and where many senior members of the Korean Workers' Party were hanging out in the 1940s. Even Yuri Irsenovich Kim, Kim Il-Seong's son, was born in Vyatskoye, Khabarovsk Krai, Russia. Yuri Irsenovich Kim would later become known as Kim Jeong-Il, and children's textbooks in the DPRK now teach that Yuri was actually born in a log cabin on Baekdu Mountain, the highest mountain in the Korean Peninsula (Wikipedia, even Russia Beyond confirms this).
The U.S.S.R. was also actively involved in construction projects up until the 1980s, and Soviet and Chinese students regularly went to North Korea to study the Korean language, where they lived in Pyeongyang isolated by travel and marriage restrictions from the rest of North Korean society. (Lan’kov, https://www.nknews.org/2014/05/enjoying-a-very-unusual-life-indeed-north-korea-in-1984/).
1958- Kim Won-bong, another anarchist in the DPRK, was purged by Kim Il-Seong. There are many different theories about his death.
In 1961, China and the DPRK signed a treaty pledging to defend the DPRK in the case of any outside attack.
At some point (by atleast 19679) the DPRK begins a system of gwanliso (concentration camps) with forced labor and executions as punishment. And also the state-implemented seongbun system (officially denied, but gleaned through refugee testimonies) where people are divided into three hereditary social castes based on ancestry. Families of high party bureaucrat and military cadre are at the top, average North Koreans in the middle, while any descendants of former landlords or Christian missionaries, as well as ethnic Koreans who repatriated from China are at the bottom (Lan’kov, https://www.nknews.org/2019/10/how-north-koreas-devastating-famine-subverted-the-rigid-songbun-system/). Gwanliso concentration camps are mostly filled with those at the bottom, as well as anyone who is caught breaking a law by an army officer. Quality of housing and employment is entirely determined by seongbun.
As far as foreign policy, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the DPRK, being a Soviet military outpost, was a place where Vietnamese guerrillas trained, while the ROK provided immense logistical support for the U.S. war of aggression in Việt Nam. Kim Il-Seong and the DPRK government, throughout the duration of the Cold War, also remained close to Soviet bloc countries, and provided support to some left-wing movements in American bloc countries.
1982- The Juche Tower is finished being built in Pyongyang, a monument to Kim Il-Seong’s shitty “Juche idea”.
1987- Uprising of prisoners in the Onseong gwanliso camp, DPRK military is ordered to execute everyone. The sounds are so loud the nearby villagers can hear the execution. (https://web.archive.org/web/20071017123327/http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200212/200212110038.html)
In 1991 the U.S.S.R., DPRK's main source of food, collapsed. And along with that collapse meant the loss of Soviet raw materials for North Korean factories10. So the DPRK turned to China for food aid. China provided food aid until 1993, at which point the Chinese economy collapsed (meaning Chinese rich people were not willing to forgo profits to feed North Koreans) and the result was a devastating famine from 1994-1998, that (it is thought) killed around 600,000 people, but estimates vary wildly, from 240,000 at the low end to 3.5 million at the high end. The population was about 22 million at the time, meaning the famine killed around 3% of the entire population (taking 600,000 as the estimate). Those with low seongbun were hit systematically the hardest by the famine due to the DPRK’s centralized distribution system prioritizing feeding party cadres and military (from what I remember reading about seongbun). Many North Koreans as of the 2010s still have cataract problems, due to the malnutrition from the famine (Álvaro Longoria 2015, The Propaganda Game).
1994- Kim Il-Seong dies, is declared by the Workers' Party of Korea to be the eternal president. Kim Il-Seong’s son Yuri Irsenovich Kim, now known as Kim Jeong-Il, becomes new leader of the DPRK.
1995- Kim Jeong-Il begins a policy of seongun, which involves primarily directing funding towards the Korean People's Army. (This during a famine.)
It is complicated, certainly, but the Kim Il-Seong family and U.S. are both to blame for the horrific situation in North Korea. The U.S. set North Korea up for failure by sanctioning it and cutting it off from the agriculturally rich southern half of the peninsula, isolating the DPRK to more barren, mountainous land. Simultaneously, Kim Jeong-Il made his priority clear with seongun: state capitalist military-industrial-prison complex to benefit those with high seongbun instead of developing agriculture to feed people.
1997- Kim Jeong-Il invents an explanation for the famine: Seo Gwan-hui, the DPRK’s Minister of Agriculture, was accused of being a U.S. imperialist agent, accused of intentionally sabotaging North Korean agriculture. Seo Gwan-hui was executed by firing squad.
During this famine (1994-1998), North Koreans began to organize to survive, building large networks of solidarity. Mainly women begin to travel all across the country, setting up barter and trust networks, foraging for wild food, setting up jangmadang (black markets) in towns, and even taking the extremely risky journey back and forth into China to earn money to support family back home (https://libertyinnorthkorea.org/learn-a-changing-north-korea). The jangmadang become a way many with low seongbun survive and begin to find semi-autonomous economic interaction outside DPRK state-capitalism.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s jangmadang continue to grow. (https://libertyinnorthkorea.org/learn-a-changing-north-korea) Right-wingers and supporters of South Korea's style of capitalism praise this as "capitalism from below", tankies rage at this for the loss of state control over food and commodity markets, and real communists & anarchists recognize this transfer of control from the state to a more autonomous, transnational body of people as a step forward for ensuring the survival of more people living under isolated state-capitalist North Korea, whose food security is now no longer the guarantee of the U.S.S.R. but subject to the same vicissitudes of global capitalism that the Chinese ruling class is.
More North Koreans become orphaned, poor, and deal with food insecurity after 1994, which meant that effectively the state of the DPRK itself began to begging for food aid internationally, all while not letting up on totalitarian control of almost all enterprises and a large army and police state. Kim Il-Seong is remembered more fondly than Kim Jeong-Il by some North Koreans, due to the relative stability and perception that he was less authoritarian (James Jones, Secret State of North Korea11), , and also because the famine came under Kim Jeong-Il’s management.
In 2004, the Gaeseong Industrial Region was opened in southwestern North Korea (near the DMZ) as a special economic zone for South Korean businesses to employ North Korean labor. Some North Koreans worked there until in 2016, when the Gaeseong Industrial Region was closed for South Korean businesses.
Throughout the 2010s, as more border trading would happen, some North Koreans living near the border would start to secretly buy Chinese cell phones. This along with some Chinese and South Korean DVDs... (https://libertyinnorthkorea.org/learn-a-changing-north-korea, also read this in https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-garine-an-anarchist-in-north-korea) Some North Koreans buy illegal DVD players and illegal radios with access to some foreign radio (for instance Open Radio for North Korea). Anyone caught with these items can be sent to gwanliso camps, and a general air of paranoia runs high, with one North Korean (illegally recorded) stating that “one in three people will secretly report you”. (James Jones, Secret State of North Korea)
Where the DPRK was once a Soviet military outpost, it is now somewhat of a Chinese military outpost, with the China-DPRK treaty remaining in full effect, but the DPRK maintaining its refusal to follow the CCP’s course from state-capitalism to one-party neoliberal “free-market” capitalism. Chinese officials frequently visit the DPRK, and the DPRK government imports Chinese products (DPRK official Alejandro Cao de Benós, in Propaganda Game). while most North Koreans can only travel illegally (at risk of gwanliso imprisonment for being caught) to China. Chinese tourists can under special circumstances take the train from Dāndōng across the Amrok River into North Korea on guided visits with DPRK officials monitoring closeby.
12/17/2011- Kim Jeong-Il dies, and a massive state funeral is conducted. Kim Jeong-Eun12 becomes new leader of DPRK.
As of 2013, United Nations Human Rights Council (useless organization for social change, but reliable statistics) estimates 80,000 to 120,000 people are imprisoned in the gwanliso camps.
By 2014, Amnesty International had analyzed satellite images, concluding that the system of gwanliso camps has expanded greatly, and testimony from defectors (James Jones, Secret State of North Korea) confirms that even distant families, as far as ninth cousins, of those deemed criminal by the DPRK, have now been sent to gwanliso forced labor camps. Torture, starvation (requiring often that people have to forage outside for food) and executions are common at many of the gwanliso camps. At a few gwanliso camps there are reports of rape as well. Some former gwanliso guards who defect report that their instructions are to treat prisoners like slaves.
As of 2023, 5% of the population is active duty in the Korean Peoples' Army, 7% including reserve. The Korean Peoples' Army is the fourth largest army in the world.
As of 2024, Kim Jeong-Eun is still leader of DPRK. Presumably once he dies, if things continue like this, someone else within his dynasty will come to rule the (basically monarchist) DPRK. Some sources speculate that it will be his daughter Kim Ju-ae.
I know nothing of the potential today for an anarchist revolution in North Korea. When I hear defectors' stories of organizing as children to steal food from the state's storehouses, I do of course start to get ideas, like, "what if this morphed into a giant social movement all across the country, backed by Korean People’s Army soldiers who break rank, to bring down Kim Jeong-Eunist capitalism?" The trust networks developed during the 1990s between neighbors and even distant towns have the potential to morph into some kind of anti-Kim-dynasty movement at some point in the future.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA 🇰🇷, 1953-PRESENT
I’ve gone through the story of how Kim Il-Seong climbed his way to power by murdering opposition within the party and massacring protestors and established his totalitarian state-capitalist project, the horrors of which are well known outside of North Korea through the testimony of many refugees. I’ve begun to also discuss the far lesser-known horrors (e.g. the 1948 Jeju genocide) of Lee Seungman (Sygman Rhee)’s U.S.-backed version of capitalism, which I will continue with here. Discussion of these horrors, and the system in modern South Korea that they helped shape, appears to have become more common in recent decades.
Here, I want to define neoliberal-capitalism. I use terms like “liberal” and “capitalism” to mean different things; here neoliberal-capitalism is a kind of capitalism that encourages neoliberal economics (privatization, austerity, free flow of transnational capital). “Neoliberal economics” has multiple competing definitions, and the ways in which different neoliberal capitalist economies are is extremely worth exploring. However, for the purpose of this discussion, I use “neoliberal capitalist” to describe South Korea, primarily in opposition to what I call North Korean “state capitalism”.
Most defectors from the north decide to stay in the south. These days it’s obviously better to live in the south in many ways, where now there are representative-democratic elections, and freedom of speech and assembly13. But some very few who defect to South Korea do decide to return to North Korea, where getting caught as a defector could mean a life sentence in gwanliso camps. Why? Neoliberal-capitalist military dictatorship with brutal authoritarianism, and terrible labor organizing conditions, from Lee Seungman in the 1940s until 1987.
In the years after the liberation of Korea from Japanese imperalism, Korea became subject to American and Russian imperialism due to the zones each army occupied in 1945. In the wake of fascistic massacres and sexual slavery under Japanese imperialism, Russian and American imperialism would barely promise an improvement. As I previously mentioned, in the DPRK, the U.S.S.R. backed Kim Il-Seong as he murdered his way to power, and Russian soldiers commonly got drunk and raped North Korean women. Identically, in the ROK, the U.S. backed Lee Seungman as he conducted massacres to hold onto his dictatorial power, and American soldiers would also rape South Korean women, and even had connections with human trafficking groups and pimps who would bring in often poor South Korean women who had to become prostitutes to support themselves economically, due to the widespread poverty and inequality of wealth under neoliberal-capitalist South Korea. This connection between the U.S. military and prostitution would persist into the 2000s.
Recall that after U.S. president Harry Truman installed Lee Seungman as dictator via rigged election, Lee Seungman banned unions and did genocide in Jeju in 1948 in response to workers’ attempts to organize there. Under Lee Seungman’s rule, South Korea’s labor force would become subject to harsh anti-union laws working under corporations that were (and still are) well-integrated into the supply chains of U.S. corporations. Workers were prohibited from organizing their own union independent of the Seungman-affiliated trade union. Lee Seungman continued to arrest opposition and rig elections to maintain his dictatorship, suspending constitutional term limits on the presidency after he “won” the election for the third time in 1956. (He rigged and “won” in 1948, 1952, and 1956.)
April 1960- Student movement in South Korea ousts Lee Seungman
1961- Park Jeong-hui seizes power in a coup, continuing South Korea’s military dictatorship
1963- Park Jeong-hui rigs election and “wins” presidency
1965- Park Jeong-hui agrees to help the U.S. wage war on Việt Nam by sending South Korean troops to South Vietnam (to fight to defend the U.S.-backed terror state set up in 1954 by Eisenhower in the wake of liberation from French colonialism)
1967- Park Jeong-hui rigs election and “wins” presidency
1967- Korean-born composer Isang Yun was kidnapped in West Germany by South Korean agents and imprisoned in South Korea on the charge of spying for the North. He was released after an international outcry (Fraker, Sara E. (2009). The Oboe Works of Isang Yun)
1968- Unsuccessful assassination attempt on Park Jeong-hui by left-wing groups working with DPRK
1971- Park Jeong-hui rigs election and “wins” presidency. Elections “by popular vote” (which just keep getting rigged anyway) are cancelled for the remainder of
October 26, 1979- Successful assassination attempt on Park Jeong-hui by Park Jeong-hui’s own security chief Kim Jae-gyu. 18 years of Park Jeong-hui military dictatorship is over, and Choe Gyu-ha becomes acting president, promising democratic elections
December 12, 1979- ROKA major general Jeon Du-hwan does a coup against Choe Gyu-ha, allowing Jeon Du-hwan and his supporters to fill many government roles
May 17, 1980- Jeon Du-hwan does full coup, and institutes martial law.
May 18, 1980- Gwangju Massacre: There was a demonstration by students of Jeonnam National University in Gwangju against the coup. In response, the Republic of Korea Army with the help of U.S. president Jimmy Carter, beat, raped, and killed protesting students. 1,000-2,000 students were massacred by ROKA open firing on them.
From 1980 to 1987, South Korea had an authoritarian one-party military junta government under Jeon Du-hwan. Jeon Du-hwan opened the Samcheong concentration camp, very much like a gwanliso camp, with forced labor or physical violence. At least 60,000 people were sent to Samcheong concentration camp, 40,000 of whom had not been charged with any crime.
1983- Unsuccessful assassination attempt on Jeon Du-hwan in Rangoon, Burma. North Korean agents attempt to bomb Jeon Du-hwan, killing instead 17 members of his entourage, including cabinet ministers.
After mass protests across the country in June 1987, South Korea is finally allowed its first democratic elections, bringing an end to decades of authoritarian dictatorship, electing No Tae-u (Roh Tae-woo), a close friend of Jeon Du-hwan. Since 1987, no elected leader has gotten rid of the capitalist system which is the root of the problem, as the violence unleashed against workers was for the bourgeoisie, and failing to abolish the classes will only continue to result in variations of this violence.
As of today still there are still major problems with corruption (most exemplified by former president Park Geun-Hye’s connections to the Church of Eternal Life cult, which resulted in massive protests in 2016), and neoliberal-capitalism has resulted in a fast-paced, dog-eat-dog style of living for much of the urban proletariat. Suicides among students and workers are alarmingly high. The erosion of community to neoliberal capitalism has meant that a North Korean refugee mother and son who found it difficult to adjust to capitalism and find employment, and starved to death in their apartment in Seoul, were not found by anyone until neighbors called the police reporting a foul smell weeks later. The farmers continue to suffer higher rates of poverty under neoliberal policies. According to an OECD report from 2017, half of South Korea’s elderly population lives below the poverty line.14
As for more recent politics, after Park Geun-Hye’s impeachment and a period of an acting interim president, in 2017 center-left/liberal Democratic Party candidate Moon Jae-in won the elections (on a policy of attempting to make peace & end the war with North Korea), and was in power until 2022, when the far-right Yoon Seok-Yeol (called by some critics the South Korean equivalent of Donald Trump) won the elections on a platform promising South Korean corporations a much easier time exploiting workers and an abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. In 2023, Yoon Seok-Yeol tried to force longer workplace hours by increasing the maximum working hours, which, in a grueling workplace culture whose bosses routinely demonstrate their desire to push workers to the legal limit with the work they give and the working conditions. Widespread protests resulted in Yoon Seok-Yeol realizing he had to cancel this move, lest protests erupt and get extremely costly for his administration to police (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/15/south-korea-u-turns-on-69-hour-working-week-after-youth-backlash).
I get the sense that since 1980, a large section of the South Korean left is very tankie and supports the DPRK, due to a combination of the brutality of South Korean neoliberal-capitalism under the guise of “democracy” and the complete isolation and enigmatic nature of North Korea. As the case of Isang Yun illustrates, throughout the ROK military dictatorship, and even many decades after democratic elections, South Koreans can be arrested for making any statements in praise of North Korea.15 Attempts were made by some legislators from a center-left party to remove this law, but were prevented by the far-right party in 2004. There are many notable cases of arrests of people with allegedly pro-North sentiments: for instance in 2012 of a student, and in 2013 of left-leaning politician Lee Seok-ki. It is, in such an environment, very understandable for the historically heavily criminalized left to associate itself with heavily criminalized North Korean nationalism (especially when Kim Jeong-Il claims that the Juche idea is an adaptation of Marxism-Leninism). When many South Koreans don’t know a lot about what life is in North Korea and vice versa, it can be easy to support the other capitalist republic as an imagined possibility of a different, better life. Of course, like I said elsewhere in this post, these days no doubt living in South Korea is better than living in North Korea.
In North Korea meanwhile, it is difficult to know what the ideological tendencies are among various resistance movements, due to the very incomplete nature of information on the entirety of the country, but I presume a large section of it can be labelled as “pro-South Korea”, meaning, pro- whatever people are doing in South Korea with their government/economic system right now (not “pro-Lee Seungman”). Frequently one form of nationalism is suggested as the only “reasonable” path towards eliminating the evils of the system whose supporters subscribe to the other kind of nationalism. However, a lot of the ROK leadership does not want to integrate North Korea into ROK control (which would put an end to the totalitarian DPRK state capitalist nightmare) because North Korean labor is not as profitable to exploit (compared to the South Korean labor which has been better trained for work in the South Korean economy) and the North Korean population is on average more expensive to feed, due to the mountainous terrain and underdeveloped agricultural sector— as Andrey Lan’kov puts it, the ROK “doesn’t want reunification, because they will have to pay for it. And it’s going to be absolutely, unbelievably expensive”. The ROK ruling class and leadership can expect that U.S. policy from the Bretton Woods institutions will force the cost to be shouldered primarily by South Korea (b/c no cancellation of foreign debt), whose ruling classes will find various ways (or be given ways, like IMF “structural adjustments” and austerity) to pass on that cost to the most vulnerable segments of post-reunified Korean society (primarily North Koreans and poor South Koreans). For more information on how U.S. financial imperialism works, see https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/american-imperialism-in-the-20th. Most likely, ROK rule over the entire Korean peninsula, at this stage of history, with a mobilized “pro-democracy” mass of South Koreans, would ensure that, while wealth inequality would be quite bad in post-reunification ROK Korea, North Koreans would be allowed access to internet, cell phones, significantly greater freedom of movement, expression and assembly, the gwanliso system would be closed or decreased significantly, the seongbun system would be legally abolished, and North Koreans would be able to vote in bourgeois parliamentary elections. The ROK ruling class simply wouldn’t be able to get away with denying the North these things, unless I am gravely overestimating the extent of solidarity between the South Korean public generally and North Korean defectors. If I am indeed greatly overestimating this solidarity, another much more bleak possibility is that an ROK takeover would see North Korea administered by an ROK-backed military administration that more or less maintains all or many aspects of the same repressive DPRK state capitalist structure under the guise of “security against counter-unification forces”, but actually due to cutting development cost. If the U.S. actually fronted some of the cost, or atleast cancelled South Korea’s $500 billion in foreign debt, it would make much more secure the end of the DPRK repressive structures in North Korea, and without that large a cost for the post-reunification Korean poor to bear.
The only way to build a real democracy in Korea is for more North Korean workers and South Korean workers to begin to understand that they have more in common with each other than their bourgeoisie capitalist rulers in Pyeongyang and Seoul (and Busan and so on). I say the same thing to Indians and Pakistanis. We, like the Palestinians and Israelis, like the Koreans, suffered a Partition by Great Powers that killed many of us and brought to many of us incredible suffering. And all these three Partitions happened around roughly the same time (1945-1953, corresponding so well with Truman's reign in the U.S.), and were part of the Great Powers' invididual (and sometimes negotiated) shaping of the post-World War II order. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin largely decided the fate of millions. Instead of those millions themselves. And that, my friends, is imperialism, of various hues. American imperialism, British imperialism, Soviet imperialism.
Korean People’s Association in Manchuria (1929-1931) was the last time Korean people had true freedom.
DPRK or ROK- neither represents the Korean people.
SOME WORKS CITED
Hwang, Dongyoun. Anarchism in Korea
Lan’kov, Andrey- Soviet linguist who studied Korean language in Pyeongyang in 1984-1985, and has continued to provide his takes based on the information he gets out of North Korea. Frequent contributor to NKNews, wrote these- https://www.nknews.org/2014/05/enjoying-a-very-unusual-life-indeed-north-korea-in-1984/, https://www.nknews.org/2019/10/how-north-koreas-devastating-famine-subverted-the-rigid-songbun-system/
MacSimoin, Alan (2002) [1991]. The Korean Anarchist Movement. Braamfontein: Zabalaza. OCLC 999512376.
Miller, Owen. https://isj.org.uk/north-koreas-hidden-history/
CIRA-Nippon’s article https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cira-nippon-the-post-war-korean-anarchist-movement
https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/russian-imperialism-in-the-20th-and
This source appears to be Leninist (so the author likes Lenin and hates Stalin), keep that in mind. I hate both Lenin and Stalin, see here for why- https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/russian-imperialism-in-the-20th-and
“Juche” is an old Korean translation from the 19th century of the idea of Subjekt in German philosophy.
Due to the secrecy, there is a difficulty in establishing the early history of the North Korean political economy, but from all analysis into how the state seems to have been set up, it appears to have been a form of state capitalism from the beginning (in the 1950s), based on Kim Il-Seong’s ideological influences from Leninism (as stated ad nauseam in the opening chapter of Kim Jeong-Il’s shitty treatise On The Juche Idea). The state-assigned work and free rations contains aspects #3 and #4 of capitalism- private ownership of the means of production, and primitive accumulation of people into labor (see here- https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/what-is-capitalism). Aspect #2 (center of gravity of money is bullion) seems to be there. As for aspects #5 (M-C-M’) and aspect #6 (speculation), I am not sure when these emerged (but I suspect that they were there also). Aspect #1 would seem to have to undergird the entire system. Given the similarities in state-run economy to the systems of the U.S.S.R. and CCP China, state capitalism would seem to be the only sensible possibility for North Korea’s economy. As for who exactly was first directly hurt by this state capitalist policy in the early years (1950s, 1960s), it is (at present, with what I know) difficult to determine. This also requires an investigation into the origins of seongbun. But it’s not exactly like North Korean sociologists and anthropologists can easily conduct investigations and post their papers online.
Tankies may be delighted to know, I have actually read one whole chapter of On The Juche Idea. I think the text is terribly written, vague, pseudo-revolutionary, deceitful historiography. Kim Jeong-Il writes like a politician, repeating a few phrases over and over again. He lays out that the “starting points” of the Juche idea are organizing in mass, and examining the conditions on the ground. Those are in fact the starting points of literally any kind of organizing, including organizing a local Super Smash Bros. tournament. He also continues to say that the Juche idea is the product of “the leader” Kim Il-Seong perfectly adapting Marxism-Leninism to the situation of Korea in the 1940s, over and over again. Maybe Kim Jeong-Il is right about that one thing; he adopted Lenin’s (and Mao’s) program of “exploit the peasants for the benefit of (a segment) of the industrial workers”, but eventually, with seongbun, it became “exploit the low-seongbun for the benefit of the high-seongbun”. None of these programs (of Lenin, Máo, or Kim Il-Seong), as I have argued in my “Anti-Tankie Anarchist Political Education” series, is remotely communist (except in name).
The main difference between the Lenin-Máo program and the Kim Il-Seong program is how this kind of class structure (peasants vs. workers vs. bureaucrats in the former case, the economic realization of the seongbun system in the latter case) is put into effect. For Lenin and Máo’s program, the basic idea is to fix grain prices to be low, and sell urban-factory produced industrial equipment at high prices. This exploits the peasantry, who quickly find they cannot afford the equipment they need to be able to continue to sell grain at the quotas demanded by the Party. This led to famine in rural China in 1959-1961, and in southern Ukraine and Tatarstan in 1921-1922. The point wasn’t to arbitrarily punish the peasantry because the Party didn’t like them or something (Máo had organized much of his support base among the peasantry, which largely stayed supportive around 1953 even as conditions started getting more exploitative). The point was to industrialize at any cost, even the cost of human lives in the countryside. State capitalism.
Kim Il-Seong’s state-capitalist program, on the other hand, was much more direct in its control. Setting up a centralized food distribution system and prioritizing party and military officials over others, especially low-seongbun. The point in this case does seem to be to punish the low-seongbun, and exploit some of them (increasing numbers of them as of 2014 under Kim Jeong-Eun) through the gwanliso system. But the point is also to militarize (mass mobilization into the Korean People’s Army) and industrialize— industrialization is in some of the state-owned work sites that adult North Koreans were assigned to by the state.
I’ve got my problems with Khoms’kyj, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. But his word is a reliable summary of U.S. air force testimony and Nuremberg laws.
Amrok-gang in Korean; also known as Yālù Jiāng in Mandarin
a phrase coined by Stalin. It was Stalin's way of pledging to abandon solidarity with socialist movements in Western Europe because he said that he did not believe that only a Western European revolution would save give Russia a revolution.
According to somewhere, I forget...which showed some women registering as housewives
This is the year Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda was arrested in North Korea, and his release and return from North Korea brought the first known testimony of the North Korean prison system. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa24/002/1979/en/
this fact comes from American economic historian Barbara Demick, in Propaganda Game. Demick’s perspectives, given her focus on the atrocities and genocides committed by geopolitically anti-U.S. regimes, might be liberal (and thus too in favor of ROK-style capitalism), but Demick cites and synthesizes lots of refugee testimony, to the point that it provides useful additional details for assessing the political economy of the DPRK.
My stance on using media like this documentary is that often PBS-backed media shows its clear ideological bent in service of U.S. imperialism often by omitting key details. For example, this one omits the brutality of U.S. imperialism, but shines a spotlight on the repressive aspects of Kim Jeong-Eun’s regime, and what North Korean refugees and North Koreans inside the DPRK say about the system there. It is quite difficult in my view to fake footage from inside North Korea, and all of what I cite is consistent with both anarchist historiographies of Korea, and what I have heard from North Korean refugees. To quote anarchist Jihad Al-Haqq, “sometimes the best propaganda is the truth”.
Often romanized in English sources as “Kim Jeong-Un”, but his name is Kim Jeong-Eun in Revized Romanization
only to some degree, yes, but when compared with North Korea, these freedoms are huge
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/aug/02/south-koreas-inequality-paradox-long-life-good-health-and-poverty
[This footnote repeats some things I say in the main body of the text and builds upon them]
It is, in such an environment, very understandable for the historically heavily criminalized left to associate itself with heavily criminalized North Korean nationalism (and Kim Jeong-Il claims that the Juche idea is an adaptation of Marxism-Leninism).
To liberals, who no doubt support such repressive criminalizations, I say- taking someone to prison to be beaten for supporting the DPRK sounds like tactics…straight out of the DPRK. This is literally exactly what the DPRK does to ROK supporters. And when many North Koreans don’t know a lot about what life is in South Korea and vice versa, it can be easy to support the other capitalist republic as an imagined possibility of a different, better life. Of course, like I said elsewhere in this post, these days no doubt living in South Korea is better than living in North Korea.
To tankies, I know it’s cool to be pro-DPRK and their flag looks nice. And as I mention, DPRK agents have before helped to try and assassinate ROK military dictators. But. Do think critically, and come to understand that the DPRK is capitalist and oppressive as fuck. As I always say to tankies of any flavor: the refugees can’t all be making it up. There are too many of them, with stories consistent with each other (once you sort out the exaggerations by financially vulnerable people looking for stories that sell) and an emerging perspective on the DPRK’s political-economic history. Also, one of them was a close friend to me years ago. Building a truly communist Korea free of capitalist exploitation requires solidarity with North Koreans, and organizing without a hierarchical Leninist-vanguard structure that allows for easy manipulation by bureaucrats to pursue their own agenda that serves only their interests as a ruling class (of bureaucrats). It is possible to be a Korean patriot (that is, one who loves the land and the people of both North and South Korea) without being a North Korean nationalist (that is, who supports the DPRK).