By Eva Cheng
The February 12 defection to South Korea of Hwang Jang-yop, a member of the central committee of the ruling North Korean Workers' Party, is being treated by the western media as evidence that the regime in Pyongyang is near collapse.
Washington is using the defection to strengthen its long-standing campaign to demonise Pyongyang, an exercise much helped by the North's persistent food shortages in recent years, and particularly since last year's floods.
The crucial cause of North Korea's economic difficulties — the prolonged embargo led by the US — is ignored by the media. The effects of the US aggression have been increased by the collapse of the USSR and dwindling assistance from China (the only source of strategic supplies since the '50s).
Washington is keen to destroy any memory of the remarkable achievements of the North's post-capitalist system, which even some of its key agencies have recognised.
The US Central Intelligence Agency stated in 1978, "... a reconstruction of official ... statistics indicates" that the North achieved 14% average annual industrial growth between 1965 and 1976, meaning a per capita output in '76 roughly double the South's.
Pyongyang turned its industry around in the short period after 1953, from a state of complete devastation after genocidal bombing by Washington in the 1950-53 Korean War and despite the US-led embargo.
Rebuilding the food supply from 1953 was seriously complicated by the North's harsh climate and difficult terrain, which leaves only 17% of the land cultivable. Yet even the CIA accepted in '76 that the North was "nearly self-sufficient in grain supplies", and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation was satisfied that in 1979-90 the North achieved the world's highest yield of rice per hectare.
Washington didn't acknowledge those amazing achievements as evidence of the superiority of the North's post-capitalist system, but draws the opposite conclusion when those achievements are eroded.
The North's current problems are triggered by the drying up of strategic supplies — despite Pyongyang's utopian ambition of "building socialism in the northern half" based on "self-reliance". Oil and coal are the two crucial raw materials that it lacks which, among other strategic items, the USSR and China used to provide at a "friendship price".
Since the early '90s, both Russia and China have "normalised" relations with South Korea, at the North's expense. As a result, strategic industries have been dealt a major blow with wide ramifications. Foreign debt mounts while economic growth plunged from the previous double-digit levels to 2% in '89 to minus 3.7% in '90 and minus 5.2% in '91.
The North's lack of certain natural resources has no implications for the superiority of the post-capitalist social order on which it operates. But the bureaucratisation of the regime is a serious obstacle to the development of such an order.
The lack of democracy in North Korea seriously stifles initiatives, produces wastage and limits development of the productive capacity. Appalling wastage was also produced by the grotesque leadership cult around Kim Il-sung and his family (including his heir and current chief Kim Jong-il).
An estimated 50,000 monuments to the "leaders", often in marble and granite, litter the North, added to numerous statues and enormous "museums"!
The military threat from the US from its bases in South Korea, and regular joint large-scale "exercises" with the South, seriously strain the North's resources, reducing significantly its capacity to meet basic social needs.
The progressive movement in the South aspires to unify with the North in spite of the bureaucratic distortions. The bureaucracy must go and a democratic system be put into practice for unification to have a real future.
The more immediate objectives of the movement in the South are to fight for the right to forge contacts with the North and to freely debate unification. The December 26 legislation that triggered the recent general strikes in South Korea includes provisions to limit further that right. A central demand that the movement has campaigned around since the '60s is to get rid of the US bases.