by Andy Brooks - General Secretary NCP
IT HAS LONG BEEN a Marxist tradition to elevate the lives of comrades
whose daily work was an example to others, developed and advanced
Marxist-Leninist theory or led the struggle for liberation. Kim Il Sung
was all of these. A fighter, a thinker and a leader, Kim Il Sung was an
outstanding communist of the 20th century whose name will forever be
remembered as the founder of the modern Korean communist movement that
began amongst the patriotic youth of Korea when he was a student in the
1920s.
Kim Il Sung was born into a world dominated by the great colonial powers
of Europe, the United States and Japan. In Korea the old feudal rulers
had been ousted by the Japanese imperialists and the peninsula turned
into a colony of Japan.
Wherever there is oppression there is always resistance and Korean
patriots tried to fight-back in whichever way they could. Some
nationalists, those representing the landowners and bourgeois elements
looked to Nationalist China and America for help. Others were inspired
by the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.
In the 1920s the Korean communist movement was riddled with divisions
that had left them isolated from the masses. Kim Il Sung condemned those
who simply hoped to rely on outside forces or those who strove for the
recognition of others, as a disgrace to the Korean nation.
Kim Il Sung saw the uselessness of the sectarians, flunkeyists,
dogmatists and factionalists who called themselves communists in the
1920s. So he decided to form a communist movement from the youth and the
grassroots of the villages and factories.
Kim Il Sung stressed that a revolutionary movement was not something to
carry on with the approval of others but a work to be done out of one’s
own conviction. Problems should be solved by oneself, he said, and only
when the struggle was waged well would others recognise it.
In words as relevant today as when they were written Kim Il Sung said:
“Factionalism is a product of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideologies,
particularly of self-heroising, fame-seeking and careerism. It has
nothing in common with the revolutionary ideas of the working
class”.From student leader to guerrilla commander Kim Il Sung grasped
the fundamental principles of Marxism and applied the lessons of the
Great October Russian Revolution to the concrete conditions of the
Korean people, who were slaves of the Japanese Empire. The “Young
General”, as he soon was called, gathered a group of young communist men
and women prepared to take on the might of the Japanese army.
Over the years that small band of heroes grew into a people’s army that
humbled the Imperial Japanese Army in 1945 – a victory that led to the
establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And it was
that People’s Army that fought US imperialism and its lackeys to a
standstill during the Korean war and forced the American imperialists on
their knees begging for an armistice in 1953.
Kim Il Sung was a great commander in war and a great leader in peace. In
the north of Korea, so brutally partitioned by imperialism, he built a
modern communist movement dedicated to serving the working people of
Korea and he led the people in the mass struggle to build a new life
after they had won their freedom in 1945.
The Workers Party of Korea with Kim Il Sung at the helm led the battle
for land reform, education and socialist construction in the 1950s and
60s and then pushed forward on the engineering, technical and scientific
fronts to build a modern socialist republic where every individual
worker is master of his or her own life.
In western Europe communists understood the economic case for scientific
socialism but ignored the philosophical aspects of the teachings of
Marx and Engels. Though the role of mass action was clearly understood,
the role of the individual was often ignored. Though the achievements of
the Soviet Union led by Lenin and Stalin were studied, they were often
not properly understood.
Kim Il Sung not only grasped Marxism-Leninism but he applied it to the
concrete conditions of the Korean people. He knew that once the masses
realised their own strength they would become unstoppable. He knew that
serving the people was the be-all and end-all for the Korean communists
and for the Workers’ Party of Korea that he launched in 1945. He
developed Korean style socialism into the Juché idea – which elevates
the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism as well as its economic
theories – and focuses on the development of each individual worker,
who can only be truly free as part of the collective will of the masses.
In the western world Juché is simply described as “self-reliance” but
it is much more than that. Kim Il Sung said that working people could
only become genuinely emancipated if they stood on their own feet. But
the Juché idea doesn’t negate proletarian internationalism. The Soviet
Union, People’s China and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe all
closed ranks behind Democratic Korea during the Korean war. The Korean
people responded with their trade and assistance whenever they could,
while Korean experts and advisers helped the Vietnamese, the Arabs and
the Africans struggling to break the chains of colonialism and continue
to do so today.
In the world communist movement Kim Il Sung steered a careful path
during the Sino-Soviet ideological conflict remaining on good terms with
the Soviet and Chinese parties.
Unlike British communist leaders in the past, and indeed many others in
Europe and beyond, Kim Il Sung stressed that Marxism-Leninism goes far
beyond simple economic formulas and the Soviet “model”.
Kim Il Sung knew that material prosperity and ideological strength were
of equal importance to the people. He called this the twin towers.
Though both couldn’t advance simultaneously, when progress in one was
made the other had to be advanced to catch up.
This was pointed out by Stalin in the 1930s when he told Soviet shock
workers, the Stakhanovites, that working people had benefited concretely
from the revolution. All previous revolutions had failed but: “Our
proletarian revolution is the only revolution in the world which had the
opportunity of showing the people not only the political results but
also material results” Stalin declared.
“It is a good thing, of course, to drive out the capitalists, to drive
out the landlords, to drive out the Czarist henchmen, to seize power and
achieve freedom. That is very good. But unfortunately, freedom alone is
not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of
butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are
bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult,
comrades, to live on freedom alone. In order to live well and joyously,
the benefits of political freedom must be supplemented by material
benefits”. Stalin said.
But Stalin’s revisionist successors abandoned the ideological tower and
failed to even maintain the material benefits for the Soviet masses.
And after the counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and the eastern
European socialist countries, an enormous setback for communism
globally, when parties were becoming demoralised and failing around the
world, Kim Il Sung stopped the rot by summoning a global conference of
communist and workers’ parties in Pyongyang in 1992.
When Kim Il Sung passed away his successor, Kim Jong Il, told the Korean
people and the world that they could “expect no change from him” and
with Kim Jong Il at the helm, the Workers’ Party of Korea has won great
victories in recent years. Natural disasters have been overcome.
Diplomatic isolation has been broken, the intrigues of US imperialism have been exposed and Korean rockets reach for the stars.
Kim Il Sung, the great leader of the Korean revolution, died in 1994 but
his work lives on in the Workers’ Party of Korea and in the colossal
achievements of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea today.
this article was first published in the New Worker in April 2009
