[Marxism] North Korea

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n24/cumi01_.html
LRB | Vol. 27 No. 24 dated 15 December 2005
We look at it and see ourselves
Bruce Cumings

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim 
Dynasty by Bradley Martin  · Dunne, 868 pp, US $29.95

Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea by Jasper 
Becker · Oxford, 300 pp, £16.99

The exiled Trotsky began his biography of Stalin with the observation that 
the old revolutionist Leonid Krassin ?was the first, if I am not mistaken, 
to call Stalin an ?Asiatic??. He proceeded to write about ?Asiatic? leaders 
as cunning and brutal, presiding over static societies with a huge peasant 
base. Another Bolshevik who ran foul of Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, called 
him ?a Genghis Khan?, while Isaac Deutscher described Stalin as ?primitive, 
Oriental, but unfailingly shrewd?.

?Cunning? and ?shrewd? are standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians; 
?brutal? is another, at least since Genghis Khan, with Pol Pot and Mao 
reinforcing the image in our time. The broad distinction between the static 
or indolent East and the dynamic, progressive West goes all the way back to 
Herodotus and Aristotle. Trotsky, however, made specific reference to 
Marx?s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, which appraised Asia by 
reference to what it lacked when set against the European model of 
development: feudalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, capitalism. A brutal 
satrap presided over a semi-arid environment, running armies of bureaucrats 
and soldiers, regulating the paths of great rivers, and employing vast 
amounts of slave labour in gigantic public works projects (the Great Wall). 
The despot above and the cringing mass below prevented the emergence of 
anything resembling a modern middle class.

Karl Wittfogel, the leading ideologue of the German Communist Party in the 
early 1930s, was the leading proponent of this theory. He went to the 
United States, and taught at Columbia and the University of Washington. 
Oriental Despotism was published in 1957. Marx never really investigated 
East Asia, but learned enough to know that even if China might fit his 
theory, Japan with its feudalism (and ?petite culture?) clearly did not. 
Wittfogel, however, applied his notions of Oriental despotism to every 
dynasty with a river running through it ? China, tsarist Russia, Persia, 
Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Incas, even the Hopi Indians of Arizona. He soon 
performed a complete tenko (Japanese for a political flip-flop), and 
re-emerged as an organic reactionary. He wrote for many right-wing 
publications and played a critical role in the purges of China scholars and 
Foreign Service officers during the McCarthy period.

This episode tore apart the field of East Asian studies in America; people 
wouldn?t speak to each other for years. But China was now ?Red China?, and 
the government needed experts. In the late 1950s the Ford Foundation 
provided funds for a committee to promote scholarship on the country. A few 
years later, the CIA provided a subvention for the publication of the China 
Quarterly, still the pre-eminent journal in the field. Its inaugural issue 
featured a debate about Wittfogel?s Oriental Despotism. Wittfogel was back 
in the fold; out in the cold were the many scholars who had had their 
careers ruined and/or their characters assassinated.

In 1975, Perry Anderson published Lineages of the Absolutist State, at the 
end of which is an 87-page ?Note? on the theory of the Asiatic mode. 
Anderson shows that Marx?s views on Asia differed little from those of 
Hegel, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and a host of others; they were all peering 
through the wrong end of a telescope, or in a mirror, weighing a smattering 
of knowledge of Asia against their understanding of how the West developed. 
And Marx never took the ?Asiatic mode? very seriously; he was only ever 
really interested in one thing ? capitalism. Anderson recommended giving 
this theory an unceremonious burial, concluding that ?in the night of our 
ignorance . . . all alien shapes take on the same hue.? I eagerly 
recommended his book to my colleagues. A friend said: ?He doesn?t know any 
Chinese.? Another responded: ?Isn?t he a Marxist?? (Anderson had called 
Wittfogel a ?vulgar charivari?.)

The theory never was buried: it just reappears in less conspicuous forms. 
It isn?t politically correct to say ?Oriental? or ?Asiatic? anymore, but 
journalists use the term ?Stalinist? time and again to describe North 
Korea, without any hint of qualifying or questioning their position. The 
idea that the DPRK is a pure form of ?Stalinism in the East? goes back to 
the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War 
scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed 
Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its 
administration and much of its system on Stalin?s Russia ? but so did every 
other Communist regime in the 1950s. Chinese Communism had greater 
influence, but the DPRK isn?t often called Maoist. In the 1960s, Kim Il 
Sung instituted big changes, redirecting the state ideology towards 
nationalism and self-reliance and provoking sharp clashes with Moscow ? 
enough to make Alexei Kosygin and Yuri Andropov come running to Pyongyang, 
where Kim essentially told them to go to hell. Whatever North Korea has 
been since then, it hasn?t been Stalinist. Stalin?s speeches went on about 
the newest gains in pig-iron and machine tools; in their focus on ideas, 
the two Kims? ideology is closer to their Neo-Confucian forebears. The 
defector Hwang Jang-yop told Bradley Martin that the two Kims ?turned 
Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism on their heads by reverting to Confucian 
notions?.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a picture emerged of Kim Il Sung 
in a Soviet uniform with a medal on his lapel. Like Ho Chi Minh, he had a 
?dark period?. Between 1941 and 1945 his whereabouts were unknown; finally, 
some evidence turned up of a clear connection to Moscow. This information 
is never balanced with facts we learned long before: that Stalin ordered 
every Korean agent in the Comintern shot in the late 1930s and began his 
many mass relocations of subject populations by moving 200,000 Koreans from 
the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (tens of thousands died on 
this forced exodus), in both cases on the racist grounds that they might be 
Japanese spies, subject to Japanese ideas, or generally unreliable. In 
recent years scholars have excavated Kim?s history as an anti-Japanese 
guerrilla from 1931 to 1945 and his relationship with the Soviets, which 
turns out to have been quite modest and uneasy. None of this scholarship is 
mentioned by Martin or by Jasper Becker.

The Soviets of course controlled Korea north of the 38th parallel, and Kim 
could not have come to power over their objections. But even if Stalin had 
handpicked Kim and installed him in Pyongyang as his faithful servant, it 
wouldn?t have been too surprising, since he did that throughout Eastern 
Europe. And it would still show bias not to point out that the United 
States engaged the services as the first president of South Korea of 
Syngman Rhee, an exiled politician who had spent the previous 35 years in 
America, and that the Office of Strategic Services deposited Rhee in Seoul 
after flying him there in General MacArthur?s personal plane, in an 
intelligence operation designed not only to get him there before anyone 
else, but to side-step State Department objections. Rhee had angered 
everyone at Foggy Bottom by pretending to represent a ?Korean Provisional 
Government? that had never governed any Koreans, and had in any case gone 
belly up in 1925. The writers who love to feature Kim in his Soviet uniform 
never mention such things.

Balance and proportion are vexed questions because of the North Korean 
regime?s own habit of lying, and its grotesque exaggeration of its 
achievements and the merits of its leaders. Anyone wanting to find out 
about the country begins with a farrago of outlandish claims and heroic 
myths, goes on to what the ?Dear Leader? says, what DPRK scribes are told 
to write, what the outside experts claim, what the reporters report, what 
some other government offers up. Then there are the occasional visitors: 
what did they see and experience? For decades Pyongyang funded foreigners 
to set up groups for the study of Kim?s ?Great Juche Idea?, otherwise known 
as self-reliance; I remember once seeing in a Pyongyang magazine a Bedouin 
sitting on a camel, one sneaker on and one off, perusing the pages of Kim 
Il Sung?s latest work. With all that, just over the horizon is South Korea, 
for nearly four decades run by military officers and bureaucrats who had 
served the same Japanese masters that Kim and his friends spent a decade 
fighting in the 1930s. In 1949-50, as civil war loomed between North and 
South, most of the high command of the Southern army were officers who had 
served imperial Japan. General Park Chung Hee, who came to power in a coup 
in 1961, had served in the Japanese military in Manchuria, chasing after 
Korean guerrillas. He was shot in the head in 1979 by his chief of 
intelligence, Kim Chae-gyu, who had also been an officer in Manchuria; both 
Park and Kim had graduated from the American military school in 1946.

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