100th Anniversary of the birth of Comrade Kim Il Sung
On unity
On his 70th birthday in 1982, Cde Kim Il Sung made
a speech at a banquet given by the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of
Korea and the government of the DPRK to which the title has been given: ‘The
life of a revolutionary should begin with struggle and end with
struggle’. In this speech, he stressed the importance of unity: “Ensuring
the firm unity and cohesion of ideology and will of the revolutionary ranks is
the key to the victory of our future struggle … This unity and cohesion should
be based on the Juche idea [i.e., on Marxism-Leninism[1]]
and should centre on the Central Committee of the Party; they should be
confirmed by a noble sense of revolutionary obligation and faith. Only unity
and cohesion which centre on one pivot with one ideology and are based on a
sense of revolutionary obligation and faith will last forever and surmount al
tribulations and ordeals. … When the revolutionary hard cores of our Party,
all the cadres and Party members and the entire people fight on courageously,
rallied, with a single heart and will, closely around the Central Committee of
the Party, victory and glory will always lie ahead of us …”
It cannot be stressed strongly enough that Cde Kim
Il Sung is clearly not talking of unprincipled unity, of going along with wrong
ideology for the sake of unity. The unity must be a unity around the principles
of scientific socialism, as embodied, for example, in the Juche idea, and it is
a fighting unity, a unity in struggle, not unity in inactivity, dithering,
cynicism or uncertainty. However, when the essential ideological unity,
and fighting unity, are present, there can be no justification for failure to
unite as one. There are very many people who think that ideological unity
implies perfect agreement at all times on each and every application of the
principles of scientific socialism to each and every problem of the
revolutionary proletarian movement. Of course since such a level of unity
is absolutely impossible in practice, those who insist they cannot unite in any
organisation which has even the slightest aspect to its programme with which
they disagree are in practice opponents of all and any unity. Curiously one
rather sees them uniting with each other, and with people whom they consider to
be unprincipled, in their anxiety to see the downfall of any revolutionary
organisation, which they long for with all their hearts as a justification for
their sectarianism.
Unity must be maintained in the struggle against
wrong ideology that would drive the working-class movement off its
revolutionary path. Wrong ideas are bound to crop up all the time in any
revolutionary organisation as the people who make up that organisation are
simply members of society who are exposed to all the prejudiced ideas prevalent
in the rotten societies that they are pledged to overthrow, and there will
always be people even among the best revolutionaries who succumb from time to
time to backward thinking. It may even flourish temporarily and be the cause of
acute class struggle within the party. It is not an excuse, however, for
staying away from the party and from its inner struggles, that the party has
weaknesses, so long as the party remains on the revolutionary path. True
enough, if the weaknesses are not corrected then sooner or later the party is
in danger of losing its way, but unless and until it finds itself on the side
of reaction, the duty of all advanced workers is to join the party and to
uphold its policies with single-hearted unity, while working hard to help it to
overcome any weaknesses that it might have. And of course, comrades also
have a duty to consider that maybe it is not the party which has weaknesses but
they themselves who are in error, just in case it is they who need to correct
themselves in order the better to serve the masses.
On revisionism
Comrade Kim Il Sung could not but turn his mind to
the question of the revisionism that had split the international communist
movement in the 1960s.
“If the revisionists do not want to make a
revolution, they are welcome to go their own way alone. But the danger
lies in the fact that they are even opposed to other people making a revolution
and go to the length of imposing revisionism upon others.
“In doing so, they call the revolutionary
Marxist-Leninists who refuse to follow their revisionist line ‘dogmatists’,
‘nationalists’, or ‘Stalinists’, rejecting them and trying to isolate them from
the socialist camp. This is the modern revisionists’ most absurd act and
presents a serious danger to us” (see ‘On improving and strengthening
organisational and ideological work of the party’, 8 March 1962).
It was in these conditions that he brought to the
fore the Juche idea as a means of stressing Korea’s right to take its own
revolutionary path rather than to follow instructions issued by powerful
foreign parties. He gave thought to the rationale given for the
introduction of the so-called market socialism, namely, that without the
discipline of the market, people were not inclined to work hard, with the
result that the building of socialism was retarded. Comrade Kim Il Sung
had witnessed this phenomenon in Korea also, especially among people who were
given positions of responsibility and trust. However, he never followed
the road to ‘market socialism’. Comrade Stalin had warned shortly before
he died that such measures far from improving productivity would end up
impeding progress, as, among other things, it would expose socialist society to
the same phenomenon of alienation of the masses that is characteristic of capitalist
societies. In fact, it could be said that unwillingness to work hard in a
socialist society is a leftover from capitalist society of the workers’
alienation as they resentfully toiled to make others rich and longed for
idleness. Even in socialist society it may take decades before the whole
working class becomes really at one with the idea that all their labour
directly produces a better life for themselves, their children and
grandchildren. The cure for alienation, however, cannot be to make work more
alienating by the reintroduction of bourgeois norms of profitability as the
regulator of production, at the expense of the democratically evolved state
plan. The cure for alienation must be sought in the tireless efforts of
the cultural workers, who must find ways of popularising the new ways of
thinking appropriate to the proletariat in power.
On the importance of
theory
It is in this context that in a talk to a
delegation from the CPUSA on 24 June 1989, entitled ‘On our people’s struggle
for socialist construction and national reunification’, Comrade Kim Il Sung
said:
“To achieve the complete victory of socialism,
it is extremely important to intensify educational work to remould people into
revolutionary and working-class patterns. Only when ideological education
is increased among people will it be possible to establish in the whole of
society the communist tone of working and living – one for all and all for
one. If a working-class party neglects ideological education after it has
carried out socialist revolution and established a socialist system, obsolete
ideas lingering in the minds of people will grow. In the end, people will
become degenerate ideologically and inclined to lead an easy life, disliking
work. If this happens, opium addicts and drunken brawlers may appear, and, in
consequence, it will be impossible to build a socialist and communist society
successfully. The revolutionary education of people must be further
intensified as the revolution advances and life becomes prosperous. When
people are in need, their enthusiasm to make revolution is high and they work
in good faith. However, when they have no worries about food, clothing or
housing they will become contented, their revolutionary zeal may gradually cool
and they may show no enthusiasm for work.”
Comrade Kim Il Sung said that to counter this, “the
most important thing … is to induce the members of society to strengthen
their life in a revolutionary organisation”. Furthermore, “In our
country the entire Party, the whole nation and all the army study. Everyone
raises his or her political and ideological level by belonging to a study and
lecture network, according to his or her intellectual level and the
characteristics of his or her profession … even the members of the Children’s
Union, to say nothing of the cadres, Party members and other working people,
arm themselves with ideas and policies of our Party and receive communist
education regularly”.
On cultural work
While it is very important to persuade people to
make an effort to keep their thinking revolutionary, cultural workers have a
crucial role to play in presenting the new ways of thinking in an attractive
and entertaining way, so that people are able to improve themselves as part and
parcel of indulging in well-earned relaxation. Addressing a meeting of
propagandists of the provincial People’s Committees, political parties and
social organisations, cultural workers and artists in north Korea on 24 May 1946, Comrade Kim Il Sung said:
“You are combatants on the front of
culture. You have the responsibility to attack, verbally or with the pen,
the reactionary forces that try to retard the development of Korean society;
you have the obligation to develop our national culture and educate our masses
in the spirit of patriotism and democracy. Whether we can crush the
reactionary forces and build a new, democratic Korea depends largely on how you
fight on the cultural front”.
In another speech made on 7 November 1964, ‘On
creating revolutionary literature and art’, Comrade Kim Il Sung said: “All
kinds of art are necessary for the education of our working people and young
folks, but stress should be laid on novels and films. …
“Now I would like to say a few words about
producing revolutionary songs.
“At the time of the guerrilla struggle, when we
composed a revolutionary song, even the puppet Manchukuo soldiers sang it, to
say nothing of the peasants … If you comrades compose a good song, men of the
‘ROK army’ in south Korea will sing it, and so will south Korean students.”
Here in the UK we do not have the luxury of
full-time revolutionary cultural workers, but we should heed Comrade Kim Il
Sung’s advice to produce chants for demonstrations, for instance, and songs
that will be taken up carrying a revolutionary message even among those who
have been recruited by various opportunist organisations.
However, Comrade Kim Il Sung did have various
criticisms of cultural workers: “To begin with, our propagandists,
cultural workers and artists never go among the masses. Thus divorced
from the people, our men and women of culture do not properly understand what
the people think, and what they want … Only those who work for the masses,
who fully understand their mentality, speak their language, write what they
want to read and learn from them as well as teach them deserve to be called
genuine cultural workers”. (24 May, 1946, op.cit.).
At our stage of the movement, we are seeking to
appeal mainly to advanced workers (i.e., those who have already taken at least
some steps to resist the iniquities of capitalism), and we therefore focus on
addressing the issues of the day and exposing the decay of the capitalist
system, while pointing to socialism as the only solution. On certain
occasions, however, such as when we participate in elections, we have the
opportunity of addressing a wider audience. If we are to be effective in
this, we need to follow Comrade Kim Il Sung’s advice and find out what exactly
the masses are thinking so that our propaganda can be responsive to their needs.
This does not mean that it should avoid making any point that the masses might
disagree with. For instance, if on talking to the masses we were to
discover that significant numbers of people were blaming immigrants for the
ills of capitalism, then our propaganda would seek to counter that debilitating
delusion, pointing out its absurdity and exposing the motives of those who put
out such nonsense. This would be propaganda responsive to the needs of
the working class. However, if investigation showed that almost everybody
welcomes immigrants into their community, then there would be no point in
distributing material that pontificated against anti-immigrant propaganda.
Quite apart from that, people who have never been
among the masses are particularly susceptible to bourgeois propaganda to the
effect that working-class people are mentally deficient, unable to understand
words of more than one syllable, and not many of those either. Again,
actual acquaintance with proletarian masses would cure this problem, at least
in the case of those who are prepared to listen to what is said to them.
On the role of
intellectuals
Strangely enough, the question of cultural work is
closely tied in with another issue on which Kim Il Sung had a great deal to
say, namely, the role of intellectuals in the revolutionary movement. In
Kim Il Sung’s days fighting the Japanese, as in Britain today, intellectuals,
even when they were technically merely hired hands – wage slaves – always
tended to be paid rather more than manual labourers and were rather inclined to
think of themselves as superior beings. Their ability to command high
wages is related to their perceived individual intellectual qualities, as a
result of which individualism is hardwired into their very conditions of existence.
In spite of that, Comrade Kim Il Sung considered that intellectuals had an
important part to play in effecting the ongoing proletarian revolution:
“Although the main motive force of the
revolution is the working class and the peasantry, we cannot succeed in the
revolution and construction with the working class and peasants alone. In
the revolutionary struggle and construction work the intellectuals play no less
important a role than the workers and peasants. Therefore, when we were
founding our Party, we defined the intellectuals as an important component
along with the workers and peasants. The emblem of our Party has a
hammer, a sickle and a writing brush, symbolising the workers, peasants and
working intellectuals that comprise the Party …We regarded the small number
of intellectuals as priceless assets. We did not take issue with the
intellectuals, although they had been born into rich families and received
education at Japanese universities and colleges. We regarded them as ‘brood
hens’ for training our own cadres …”
In fact Comrade Kim Il Sung went so far as to say:
“An important policy put forward by our Party in
carrying out the cultural revolution is to raise the cultural and intellectual
level of all the people to that of a college graduate In other words, it
is to assimilate the whole society into the intelligentsia” (24 June 1988, op.cit.).
Since socialism itself is a science, requiring
scientific study, it is essential for all party cadres to become revolutionary
intellectuals. However, there is no escaping the fact that in class
society it is very difficult for intellectuals, even those who have come up
from the ranks of the broad masses, to resist the temptations of individualism
that inexorably turn them into slaves of their own ambition rather than
servants of the masses. The party plays an essential role in keeping its
intellectuals focused on service to the revolution and teaching them to
eradicate their natural tendency towards the pursuit of personal ambition at
the expense of service to the revolution.
In cultural work there is a constant battle waged
against those who regard the subordination of their creative abilities to the
interests of the revolution as a totally unwarranted imposition and curb on
their talents. We have difficulty in persuading intellectuals, even
though we have the advantage that the overwhelming majority of our
intellectuals are proletarianised intellectuals who are as dependent on their
next salary cheque as other wage workers, to put their artistic talents to the
service of the revolution. In this country artists and artistes seem to
imbibe with their art the bourgeois idea that the exclusive purpose of art is
the expression of individuality, forgetting that hitherto for the most part all
great art served the interests of the rich and powerful. They must learn
to understand that in the future the only really great art will be that which,
reflecting the spirit of the age, serves the interests of proletarian
revolution. Really there can be no greater honour and glory for an artist
than to serve the interests of the vast mass of the exploited and oppressed as
they struggle to overthrow capitalist society and establish their own
supremacy.
Our party fulfils its duty in developing all its
cadres as intellectuals, regardless of whether they come from a fully working
class or intellectualist background, and of course it is no more immune from
these problems than was the Workers’ Party of Korea, whose cultural work
Comrade Kim Il Sung had occasion to criticise quite sternly, as has been seen
above. Comrade Kim Il Sung’s advice, arising as it does from real
conditions of struggle, is particularly valuable. We must constantly
remind ourselves that “the life of a revolutionary should begin with
struggle and end with struggle… Uninterrupted struggle and continuous
progress is the requirement of revolution and the tenor of a revolutionary
life”.
NOTE
[1] This speech was made after the split in
the international communist movement when for diplomatic purposes the DPRK
started to refer to the genuine Marxism-Leninism, to which it continued to
adhere, as the Juche idea. Until then, a typical speech of Kim Il Sung’s
was ‘On the tasks of the League of Socialist Working Youth’ (15 May 1964), in
which he said: “Marxism-Leninism is the theory of scientific communism and
the guiding ideology of our Party. Only with a knowledge of Marxism-Leninism
can a correct judgment of the ever-changing national and international
situation be formed and the correct path be found to the victory of the
revolution, and the struggle be unwaveringly sustained with firm confidence in
the socialist and communist future, however complex and difficult the
circumstances…”