By Gim Joong-gen
First World bosses point to the social values of Asia's newly industrialising countries (NICs) as a universal recipe for prosperity: unswerving loyalty to family, company and nation.
The most genuine progress in these countries is often overlooked: the resurgence of powerful, militant and uncompromising working-class movements. In several NICs, the imposed facade — and western stereotype — of social conformity is now being shattered.
The southern Korean working class recently stunned workers — and worried investors — around the world with its first general strike in half a century. The last time Korean workers waged a general strike, it was as part of a workers' and peasants' revolution that began in 1945, following the defeat of the Japanese colonialists in the second world war.
Japanese colonialism
Because capitalism in Korea was the product of Japanese colonisation, and the daily struggles of workers were directed against Japanese bosses, the Korean labour movement readily took on anti-colonial demands. After the Russian Revolution, workers came to see liberation from wage slavery as liberation from Japan, and vice versa. The revolutionary workers became the vanguard of the independence struggle.
In the 1920s, due to a considerable inflow of Japanese capital, the working class expanded in size and class consciousness. Between 1926 and 1931, the number of industrial clashes more than doubled, while the numbers of workers involved went from 5984 to 21,180.
In 1929, the struggle erupted into a general strike in the northern city of Wonsan which soon won the widespread support of all Korean workers and patriots.
The Koryo (ancient name for Korea) Communist Party was formed in 1920 in Shanghai by exiled socialists, under the leadership of Yi Dong-hwi.
In 1927, communists and nationalists joined to form the Sin'ganhoe, a national liberation front that succeeded in gaining legal recognition from the Japanese.
The Sin'ganhoe's manifesto stated its purpose: 1. to promote political and economic awakening; 2. to strengthen national solidarity; and 3. to disavow any form of opportunism. Concretely, it fought for the dismantling of exploitative organs, the freedom to study Marxism-Leninism, the teaching of Korean in schools, an education system to serve Korean needs and the abolition of special laws and regulations that controlled Koreans.
In a short period, the Sin'ganhoe established more than 100 branches outside Seoul, its membership reaching about 30,000. A parallel women's organisation, the Kunuhoe, worked with the Sin'ganhoe.
1945 revolution
Following Japan's defeat in 1945, in less than a month, a sweeping movement of people's committees won control of industry, the land and political power. As the bulk of the economy had been owned by the Japanese, putting industry and land under working people's control carried a great moral weight in a climate of generalised anti-Japanese hatred.
A range of social forces were united behind the workers under the political leadership of the Korean Communist Party. At the head of this mass movement, the Central People's Committee proclaimed a Korean People's Republic on September 6, 1945.
It had the support of the Soviet Union, whose Red Army had helped liberate Korea in the last weeks of the war. However, the Kremlin agreed to US troops overseeing decolonisation south of the 38th parallel.
On September 8, US troops invaded southern Korea and established a military governing authority. On December 12, this authority outlawed the revolutionary government and ordered the people's committees in the south to disband.
The US began grooming a right-wing anticommunist regime of the old landowning class which had collaborated with the Japanese. At its head was a virulently anticommunist autocrat, Syngman Rhee, who had some legitimacy as an exiled patriot. The northern committees behind Soviet lines refused to submit and began consolidating their political centre in Pyongyang.
Reviving the extensive security apparatus of the Japanese colonial regime, and underwritten by the US military, Rhee carried out a terror campaign to destroy the southern left. He also relied on a network of extreme right-wing youth groups, of which the most infamous — the Sobuk (north-west) Youth — astounded even the US military with its barbarity.
This conflict culminated in an uprising through much of the south in October 1946. It was brutally suppressed with the aid of the US. The uprising occurred without some key communist leaders, who had been arrested or fled to the north after the defeat of a general strike a month earlier.
The September strike gave way to huge riots in the city of Taegu after police smashed picket lines. Three people were killed and many wounded by police gunfire, whereupon Taegu workers retaliated by killing 38 police. Martial law was declared, and US troops were deployed to suppress further action.
The director of the US Department of Transportation described the US military's role in Taegu: "We were out to break that thing up and we didn't have time to worry too much if a few innocent people got hurt. We set up concentration camps outside of town and held strikers there when the jails got too full. It was war."
This "war" smashed the communist-led National Council of Trade Unions (Chun-pyung), the organiser of the general strike.
A rival anticommunist federation, the Korean Labour Federation for the Promotion of Independence (No-chong) had been formed in March 1946 by conservative nationalists. With financial assistance from the bosses, thuggery by police and right-wing gangs, and the backing of the US and Rhee, No-chong helped to destroy Chun-pyung.
No-chong became today's government-sanctioned Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), having changed its name in April 1960.
By the end of 1947, Rhee's regime was strong enough for the US to push for UN-sponsored elections to formalise a separate capitalist republic in the south. In May of the following year, the paramilitary National Police organised the voting on a restricted franchise, despite a boycott by the majority of parties. On August 15, the Republic of Korea (ROK) was declared with Rhee in control.
Many people's committees and the Communist Party (which became the South Korean Workers Party after a fusion with two other parties in November 1946) had continued to operate underground, particularly in the south-western Cholla province, and were at the heart of the 1946 offensives. When mass demonstrations failed to stop the sham election, the workers and peasants began a guerilla war to win reunification under their rule.
Cheju and Yosu uprisings
The fiercest guerilla battles took place on the southern island of Cheju, where the people's committees were deeply rooted. Equally fierce was the ruling class's response.
After an anti-election protest on March 1, 1948, the police arrested 2500 young people. One of those arrested was later fished out of a river, tortured to death.
Thereupon, the guerilla struggle turned into sweeping uprisings. Utilising the complex of caves, bunkers and tunnels — as well as the arms — left behind by the Japanese, the Inmin-gun (People's Army), by early June, had liberated most villages in the interior of the island.
In response, the ROK military, paramilitary police and youth gangs — under US command — unleashed one of the most vicious episodes in the Korean counter-revolution. By April 1949, 20,000 homes in Cheju had been destroyed, while about 100,000 people (one-third of the population) had been forcibly removed to coastal areas under ROK control.
By the end, about 12% of the Cheju people had been massacred. The US embassy happily reported: "The all-out guerilla extermination campaign came to a virtual end in April with order restored and most rebels and sympathisers killed, captured, or converted".
Earlier, on October 19, ROK soldiers in the mainland port city of Yosu rose up in opposition to their mobilisation for the war in Cheju. About 2000 insurgent soldiers won control of the city and sent a detachment to take neighbouring Sunchon. By the end of October 20, a number of nearby towns had also been liberated.
In Yosu, the people paraded with red flags and shouted slogans. At a mass meeting on October 20, the people's committee was, once again, made the rightful governing body. People's courts were established to try police officers, landlords, regime officials and other active supporters of the Rhee dictatorship.
In the suppression that followed, the regime was hell-bent on weeding out all rebel elements in the army. For this bloodletting, the planning and directing was done by the US military and carried out by Korean subordinates. Official estimates put insurgent deaths at 821, loyalist deaths at 141.
The Korean War
The struggle to complete the 1945 revolution did not subside until after the counter-revolution had escalated into all-out war in 1950-53, which resulted in further physical destruction of the revolutionary movement and the complete exhaustion of the people.
In those horrific years, the US — still smarting from the "loss" of China — led 16 other countries to defeat the Korean revolution once and for all.
The enemy was the mass of Korean working people. Hence, the US committed and condoned enormous atrocities. The US occupation from the very start had been characterised by acts of mass cruelty legitimised by racism.
As a French journalist poignantly summed up, "[The Koreans] were not even communists, they were gooks".
President Truman even went as far as secretly moving non-assembled atomic bombs to an aircraft carrier off Korea in December 1950 and carrying out mock nuclear bombing runs over northern Korea.
The commanding officer of the invading forces at the time, Douglas MacArthur, stated in a later interview: "I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs, strung across the neck of Manchuria, spread behind us — from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea — a belt of radioactive cobalt".
The Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington had stated that atomic bombs could be useful for "a cordon sanitaire [that] might be established by the UN in a strip immediately north of the Manchurian border".
Fortunately, the US did not go that far, but it used napalm, germ warfare, carpet bombing, massacres of civilians of all ages and concentration camps even for children. When the US occupied the north for a period during the war, it unleashed a barbaric revenge. The extent of atrocities is revealed by the continued discovery of mass graves in the north, one as late as August 25, 1988, in Sinchon, containing 239 bodies, including 42 children.
So massive was the destruction that Korea would still be in ruins had it not been for the worker-led reconstruction in the north, and the consequent US funding to the south to rebuild an anticommunist bulwark. The northern half, despite all its cultist and bureaucratic distortions, remains a partial victory for Korean workers and a symbol of our unfinished revolution.
Ironically, one of the gains of the revolution helped southern Korea industrialise at a pace unique in the Third World. After northern forces in the early part of the war helped southern workers re-liberate the peninsula, people's committees were re-established to carry out sweeping land redistribution to poor peasants.
Therefore, when the US regained control of the south, its class relations had changed substantially, and the invaders saw the political danger of reversing measures which were, on the whole, harmless for imperialism.
With this achievement of the bourgeois stage of the revolution, the landlord class was broken, aiding the rapid growth and dominance of an industrial capitalist class in the south.
[To be continued next week.]