Pen/Insular_Notes

Time to plug an article of mine that came out last week in International Socialism 109 on the early history of North Korea and what it means for our understanding of the country today. It’s basically an introduction to/review of the work of Kim Ha-yông, and in particular her book The Korean Peninsula from an Internationalist Perspective (국제주의 시각에서 본 한반도). At some stage it would be nice to translate the whole of this book, but that will have to wait until I have time.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will have noticed that I have referenced or quoted from Kim Ha-yông’s work before. If you read the article you might also notice that I have made quite a bit of use of two excellent books on the early history of North Korea: Charles Armstrong’s The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (2003) and Andrei Lankov’s From Stalin to Kim Il-sung (2001). Both are highly recommended as works of history, although I think their analysis is lacking in comparison to Kim Ha-yông’s.

They haven’t put the article up at the ISJ site yet for some reason, but I’ll link it when they do. In the meantime here are a few sample paragraphs (from the middle):

After liberation, factories and other industrial facilities formerly owned by the Japanese remained under the effective control of the Soviet administration until late July 1946, when the Korean-run government (now called the North Korea Provisional People’s Committee) took them over and soon after announced their nationalisation. Further nationalisation happened rapidly, and by 1949 state-run industry accounted for 90.7 percent of total industrial production. The nationalization of industry and the commencement of a series of one-year plans in the late 1940s are one of the main developments that have led historians and commentators, whether hostile or friendly to the regime, to call North Korea socialist from this time on. In opposition to this view, Kim Ha-yong puts North Korea’s state ownership of industry into the context of the worldwide trend towards state capitalism, particularly in the period after the Second World War:

It was very common, particularly in developing countries, for the state to take a direct role in planning and overseeing resources and means of production in order to achieve rapid industrial growth. Representative examples include China, Cuba and African countries such as Mozambique, but South Korea’s economic development strategy under Park Chung-hee cannot be excluded either. In the period immediately after liberation, even right wing parties such as the Korean Democratic Party (Hanmindang) insisted that the main industries needed to be nationalised in order to overcome the society’s backwardness. From this point of view, North Korea’s nationalisation programme of 1946, far from being a break away from capitalism, was only an extreme manifestation of the trend towards the statisation of capital that continued from the 1930s through to the 1960s.

You can even subscribe if you’re desperate to read the rest…