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PYONGYANG
WATCH
Stalinism,
revisited
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Why do they do it? What on earth are they
playing at? What's their game? Questions like these
recur with tiresome regularity when it comes to North
Korea. Their baffling behavior at the recent three-way
talks in Beijing - sending a lowly bureaucrat, who
apparently 'fessed up to having nukes to the US delegate
over lunch - seems calculated both to gladden hawks in
Washington and alienate the Chinese, the North Koreans'
last remaining ally, rather than advance Pyongyang's
interests; much less promote regional
peace.
Questions are one thing, answers another.
As a card-carrying sociologist, my advice is: If in
doubt, take refuge in theory. This isn't as evasive as
it sounds. Like all social phenomena, North Korea cries
out for explanation: a task only feasible by finding
concepts that can account for observed facts and
behavior.
The necessity for theory is endorsed -
unexpectedly, perhaps - by an editorial in the latest
issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER). This
begins: "Trying to figure out what to do with North
Korea requires understanding the nature of its regime."
Correct. There follows a self-criticism: "The
description often tossed around, 'Stalinist', isn't
really useful (though we confess we've used it on the
odd occasion)."
There's an irony here. Normally,
those who abhor applying the S-word to North Korea do so
because they deem it undiplomatic, or even insulting.
The FEER has no such inhibitions: for them, "Kim
[Jong-il] is a thug, an Idi Amin with brains". They do
grant some similarities with Stalinism - "a personality
cult, gulags, etc" - but also insist on a key
difference: "[Joseph] Stalin was a communist bent on
continuing czarist Russia's expansion; Kim Jong-il has
no grander ambition than to remain comfortably in
power."
I beg to differ. While agreeing that
survival is ultimately the name of the game for the Dear
Leader, I'd maintain that the sobriquet Stalinist is of
great analytical utility in explaining North Korea as a
system. Indeed I've argued as much here before (see Is North Korea Stalinist?, September
5, 2001).
Without repeating all the details now,
I fully endorse the Australian Koreanist Adrian Buzo's
view. In his fine book on North Korean politics, The
Guerrilla Dynasty (Westview, 1999), Buzo listed no
fewer than 24 separate ways in which the term
"Stalinist" applies there: ranging from party
organization and political style to ideology and
economic organization. Which pretty much covers the
waterfront.
Here are just a few of Buzo's
examples. A militarized and abusive political
vocabulary. Violations of even socialist legality, eg
irregular party congresses. Exaltation of violence, and
of acute class struggle. Remolding human nature to
create the new socialist man. Heavy use of kinship
metaphors ("Fatherly leader", etc). Liquidating all the
Leader's rivals: first physically, and then rewriting
history to wipe them out again. A wholly planned
economy: too much emphasis on heavy industry, too little
on consumers; constant speed battles, grandiose
monuments. And so on, and so on. Sound
familiar?
Granted, Stalinism is by no means the
whole story. But it is where North Korea is coming from.
Uncle Joe was Kim Il-sung's first and abiding role
model. Stalinism with Korean characteristics, to be
sure. Also the last survivor of the breed - which is why
those too young to remember, or who don't know their
history, tend to give too much credence to Pyongyang's
own flaccid boasts of utter uniqueness.
Whereas
the truth is that, while Kim Il-sung and son may have
taken such features as personality cult, party control,
and central planning to new extremes, no way did they
invent them. Fact: Not only is North Korea not nice;
it's not even original. Even its dire music sounds more
Western than Asian.
Why does this still matter?
For example, just to say that Kim Jong-il seeks to
remain in power begs the question: what formed the
mindset with which he mulls how best to do this? Why, in
particular, does he not emulate China since Deng
Xiaoping: strengthening his state and position via
economic reform, instead of the false and downright
dangerous pseudo-security of nuclear and other noxious
weapons?
Answer: Stalinism, in more ways than
one. Kim Jong-il himself may be a cynical sybarite, but
North Korea's ideologues and generals are still fighting
the good fight. For them, truth and strength reside in a
totalitarian militarized party state, and nowhere else.
On this view, the rot set in with Nikita Khrushchev and
"modern revisionism", and ended with Mikhail Gorbachev
and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's their
nightmare.
Ideologically too, even something
seemingly as idiosyncratic as North Korea's juche
(self-reliance, sort of) philosophy is an echo of
Stalin's "socialism in one country". Contra the FEER, it
was Lenin and the old Bolsheviks who sought to foment
world revolution. Stalin by contrast turned inward. Had
Adolf Hitler not invaded in 1941 and been defeated, it's
far from certain that communist rule would have expanded
as it did, in the wake of World War II, to Eastern
Europe - or, for that matter, northern Korea. (China and
Vietnam, or indeed Cuba, which had their own home-grown
revolutions, are a different matter.)
I could go
on. Indeed I will go on, but another time. For while
Stalinism is, I contend, still an essential concept for
comprehending North Korea, it's by no means the whole
story. To be continued ...
Aidan
Foster-Carter is honorary senior research
fellow in sociology and modern Korea, Leeds University,
England.
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