Essential translations alert
I wanted to highlight two very useful recent Korean articles that have been translated into English. Now that the Hankyoreh newspaper’s English site is fully up and running it seems that Vladimir Tikhonov’s regular columns are being translated into English. His latest piece is entitled “The flaws of ‘collapsist theory’” and points out that the illusions of the US ruling class over North Korea are based on false assumptions they have made about supposed similarities between the former Stalinist states of Eastern Europe and the DPRK.
Once again Kyle who runs the Counterfire blog has provided a great translation from the Counterfire newspaper setting out a response to the Korean government’s recent attempt to attack the Democratic Labour Party by accusing some senior members of spying for the North. A particularly good bit on the role of the National Security Law in South Korean politics:
The number of people arrested for breaking the National Security Law went up for the first time in 10 years this year. Right wing forces are once again wielding their traditional weapon against their scapegoats for the NK nuclear crisis.
This weapon is no doubt also helpful for Roh Moo-Hyun who, with his 10% approval rating, also needs a scapegoat for the dire political crisis he’s facing.Roh is following the precedent of his predecessor Kim Yung-Sam, who remarked that “Once in office, I could see the necessity of keeping the National Security Law.”
Therefore it’s not just paranoid right wingers that cling to the National Security Law. The majority Uri Party, the Grand National Party, and the Democratic Party all wish to retain the Law in more or less its present form.In other words, the National Security Law has been, and will continue to be, a favorite weapon of this country’s rulers regardless of their party affiliations.
hey dongji,
i was living many years (until 1985) in east germany(GDR), but i really would not say that this (of course f..) society was “stalinism”. the so-called “stalinism” was already abolished in the late 1950’s.
perhaps you know, but “stalinism” is just a struggle term of the enemy, the ruling class..
Comment by CINA — November 19, 2006 @ 4:29 pm
Hi, nice to see you here.
I take your point in the sense that the term ‘Stalinism’ can be used too freely to describe any sort of society that one just doesn’t like. Personally though, I think it is a useful term to describe all those societies that had their origins in Stalin’s Russian counter-revolution of the late 1920s. The Eastern European states and North Korea were formed after WWII as ‘people’s democracies’ which was basically a way of attempting to create client states that would extend the Russian sphere of influence beyond its borders. But they were also ‘Stalinist’ in other ways - they modeled their economic development on the Russian state as well as aspects of their political systems, security apparatus etc. This is not to say that they were exactly the same as Stalinist Russia, but just of a similar type. I also don’t mean to imply that they didn’t change from the fifties onward, but I would argue that they remained fundamentally the same sort of society (ie state capitalist) whether or not Stalin was still alive.
Again, I can agree with your final point if you mean that ‘Stalinism’ is often used without justification purely as a term of abuse by rightwing commentators and historians. But when I use it about North Korea or the former Eastern Bloc countries I’m referring to an actual historical system of politics, economy and ideology that had a definite origin in the Stalinist counter-revolution.
Comment by kotaji — November 30, 2006 @ 2:07 pm
1. “Stalinist Russia”.. it was called the Soviet Union/USSR..
2. IF there was a “counter-revolution”, it started at the time when the first soviets(founded after the February revolution 1917) were suspended.. When the CPR(B) decided to turn the trade unions into “military units”/forbid all kinds of worker’s strikes.. After parts of the red guards were sent to crackdown revolutionary uprisings such as in Kronstadt (Trotsky: “kill them like rabbits”)..
Created the first “gulags”.. And so on, and so on..
BTW.. NK have nothing to do with any kind of socialism(SOCIALISM IS THE TRANSFORMING SOCIETY BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM, THE SOCIETY OF COMPLETE FREEDOM, WITHOUT EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION) - it’s just a “red painted” feudal society (aeh.. in some/many parts it’s a kind of fascism!!).
Comment by CINA — December 2, 2006 @ 3:37 pm
I know that every good anarchist must bring up the word ‘Kronstadt’ at the earliest opportunity, but I don’t really see the relevance here. In fact you do not know my opinions on that subject and you write as though you have not understood my opinions on North Korea either.
By coincidence I’ve been reading Victor Serge recently and he had some interesting things to say about Kronstadt. In particular in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1967 OUP English-language edition, pp. 124-132) and in this letter available at the Marxists Internet Archive.
Comment by kotaji — December 29, 2006 @ 7:34 pm