Fighting capitalist restoration, building the revolutionary party to defend the gains, for democratic workers control of the whole country
by Folha do Trabalhador # 5, December 2011 - The Liga Communista of Brazil produces Folha
Artigo original em Português (Br) http://lcligacomunista.blogspot.com/2011/12/morreu-lider-da-coreia-do-norte.html
North Korea announced the death of its leader Kim Jong Il on December 21. Immediately the capitalist world media treated it with a mixture of pleasure and pressure. Pleasure for the death of an enemy leader, pressure to take advantage of that weakness to demand the restoration of capitalism. This is what is at stake in this country alone and against the powerful weapons which are pointed in the U.S., Japan and South Korea.
North Korea is a very different nation to all others. At the end of World War II (1945) Koreans expelled the Japanese troops who occupied the country since the early twentieth century. This victory encouraged them to do away with capitalism in the whole peninsula promoting agrarian reform and creating "popular committees" against the bourgeoisie.
But the U.S. had aspirations to replace the Japanese imperialism in Asia. The war was practically won already after the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to intimidate the Soviet Union and decimate the Japanese working class and so make revolution impossible. As they did with Germany which they divided between East and West, the USA and USSR divided North and South Korea between them but artificial division that has not prevented the continuation of class struggle. The popular committees were overwhelmed by the troops of UN sponsored Imperial in the South but the ones in the northern peninsula pressed their bureaucratic leadership linked the USSR to break with and expropriate the bourgeoisie. Despite having consciously betrayed the Korean revolution by refusing to wield their veto against the UN sponsoring the invasion of the country, they also needed to enforce a cordon against imperialism in its Eastern borders.
But the U.S. had aspirations to replace the Japanese imperialism in Asia. The war was practically won already after the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to intimidate the Soviet Union and decimate the Japanese working class and so make revolution impossible. As they did with Germany which they divided between East and West, the USA and USSR divided North and South Korea between them but artificial division that has not prevented the continuation of class struggle. The popular committees were overwhelmed by the troops of UN sponsored Imperial in the South but the ones in the northern peninsula pressed their bureaucratic leadership linked the USSR to break with and expropriate the bourgeoisie. Despite having consciously betrayed the Korean revolution by refusing to wield their veto against the UN sponsoring the invasion of the country, they also needed to enforce a cordon against imperialism in its Eastern borders.
The war was suspended in 1953 but the South Korean workers remain continuously intoxicated with lies by the media to believe that their main enemies was their brothers and sisters in the north and not the bosses who exploit them in factories such as Samsung, LG, Hyundai Kia. This ’security’ is ultimately controlled by the large U.S. military contingent in the country.
With the demise of capitalism and private property in the northern state, the whole working population had a job, health, education and free housing. North Korea became a deformed workers state as demonstrated by this achievement and we defend it unconditionally including making a military front with the son of Kim Jong Il, the bureaucrat successor, Kim Jong-un, against external or internal attempts to restore capitalism in North Korea. The world working class is one body and every victory for it is a defeat of our bosses. However, after losing the war, the U.S. Did not give up. Just as they do with Cuba, the country underwent a violent economic blockade which caused shortages of food and energy in an attempt to force Korea to give up and restore capitalism and its super-profits.
The FDT is opposed to sanctions established by imperialism to strangle the small Asian country and defends the right of Korea to develop nuclear power to meet their energy weaknesses and also to defend themselves with nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its allies if necessary.
However, as in bureaucratized unions, the government of North Korea does not allow democracy for the majority of workers. The Korean Workers Party, the PTC, is a party bureaucracy that functions under cover as a TU bureaucracy, as an intermediate in the struggle between capitalists and workers to obtain parasitic privileges.
This gradually weakens the North Korean workers' state as the TU bureaucrats weaken and demoralize our struggle in the unions. Kim Jong Il, leader of the PTC was a bureaucrat, but we did not celebrate his death, as does the bourgeoisie and certain groups and pseudoleftist parties who capitulate to the employers, because the death of a bureaucrat in itself does not result in the strengthening of the fight workers’ power.
As with a union where the workers need to take control of the mafia bureaucratic policy in order to use it as an instrument of struggle against the employers, in North Korea or Cuba workers must organize themselves into a party independent of bureaucrats and make a proletarian political revolution to win control of the state by popular councils in order to use it to defend the conquests of the country, stop the restoration of capitalism and reunite all Korean workers North and South, expropriate the bosses and expelling imperialism.