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	Workers Vanguard No. 1085	11 March 2016

Down With Imperialist Sanctions Against North Korea!

MARCH 7—Seizing on North Korea’s announcement of a successful hydrogen bomb test in January and its launching of a satellite in February, the United Nations Security Council last week approved the toughest sanctions on the country in two decades. For nearly 70 years, the imperialists, led by the U.S., have tried through various means—war, nuclear brinkmanship, a starvation embargo—to overturn the social revolution that freed North Korea from imperialist domination and established collectivized property forms. Now, with the criminal complicity of the Chinese Stalinist regime, which helped draw up the sanctions, the U.S. has once again used its UN tool to try to squeeze North Korea into submission.

The unanimous Security Council resolution mandates inspections of all cargo headed for and coming from North Korea and bans sales or transfers to Pyongyang of small arms, light weapons and aviation fuel. A few days after the UN vote, the Philippine government impounded a North Korean freighter, intending to deport its crew. The resolution also bans those exports of coal, iron and iron ore that are deemed to fund the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs as well as all exports of gold, rare earth and other minerals. Among a raft of financial strictures, other countries are required to freeze the assets of any entity linked to those programs and to terminate all banking relationships with North Korea within 90 days. Other measures specifically target individuals associated with the Kim Jong Un regime. Meanwhile, the U.S. and South Korea are also moving ahead on their own sanctions.

It is the duty of the working class internationally to defend the workers state in North Korea, despite the deforming rule of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, and every other country where capitalist rule was overthrown. That means opposing all sanctions and defending North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and associated delivery systems, which would give the country a measure of deterrence against the rapacious U.S. rulers, their Japanese imperialist allies and their South Korean underlings.

The new round of sanctions, itself an act of war, comes on top of a series of brazen U.S. military provocations. Days after the nuke test, a nuclear-capable B-52 bomber flew over South Korea. On February 17, the U.S. deployed four F-22 stealth planes, its most advanced fighter jets, to Osan base near Seoul. In a nationally televised parliamentary address the day before, South Korea’s right-wing president Park Geun-hye had threatened the North with “regime collapse” if it did not abandon its nuclear program. The U.S. is also dispatching the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis to the region for a seven-month deployment. As we go to press, the U.S. and South Korean militaries are conducting the largest-ever installment of the annual Key Resolve and Foal Eagle military exercises, which include rehearsals of attacks on North Korean nuclear and missile facilities and special forces “decapitation raids” against the North’s leaders.

Warmonger Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the UN, declared that the sanctions are aimed at countering the “reckless and relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction” by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). What would be truly reckless would be to abandon the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent. Writing in CounterPunch (17 February), Gregory Elich described an operational war plan adopted by the U.S. and South Korea last year: “Dubbed Oplan 5015, it covers limited war scenarios and includes a preemptive strike on the DPRK’s strategic targets and ‘decapitation raids’ to kill North Korean leaders. The more North Korea’s nuclear weapons program advances, however, the less likely Oplan 5015 can ever be implemented.” As a North Korean government statement put it, giving up nuclear weapons would be “as foolish as for a hunter to lay down his rifle while a ferocious wolf is charging at him.”

The North Korean nuclear nightmare conjured up by the American capitalist media and the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates serves to obscure the real danger to the world’s masses: the U.S. imperialists. Not only is the U.S. the only country to have ever used atomic weapons, incinerating 200,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but it also came close several times to using nuclear weapons in the 1950-53 Korean War; it was hindered mainly because the Soviet Union also had nukes. Under UN auspices, U.S. forces obliterated cities and towns up and down the Korean Peninsula during the war. More than three million people were slaughtered in the imperialists’ attempt to crush insurgent workers and peasants in the South and to overturn the social revolution in the North, seen as a stepping-stone to overturning the 1949 Chinese Revolution. It was due to the heroic struggle of Korea’s workers and peasants and the intervention of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that the imperialists did not succeed.

The war ended in an armistice, sealing Korea’s division along class lines at the 38th parallel. Washington went on to prop up a series of military regimes in the South that ruled through sheer terror. Having donned a thin “democratic” veil in the late 1980s, the South Korean bourgeoisie continues to viciously repress militant trade-union struggles and to quash expressions of support to the North. Feeding off the manufactured hysteria over Pyongyang’s bomb test and satellite launch, the Park government has pushed through “anti-terrorism” legislation that drastically increases the reach of the notorious secret police. This throwback to the days of military rule goes hand in hand with a series of new labor “reforms” that take direct aim at South Korea’s combative trade unions (see “South Korea: Down With Anti-Labor Offensive,” WV No. 1084, 26 February).

These new repressive measures demonstrate that defense of North Korea is completely intertwined with the pursuit of class struggle against the South’s capitalist rulers. That link is further highlighted by the presence in South Korea of 28,000 U.S. troops—a daily threat to not only North Korea and China but also to the South Korean proletariat. As part of our unconditional military defense of the North Korean and Chinese deformed workers states against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution, we demand: All U.S. forces and bases out of South Korea!

With its repeated efforts to pressure Pyongyang to give up its nukes, the Chinese Stalinist regime spits on the memory of the hundreds of thousands of PLA troops who died fighting imperialism in the Korean War. We have long warned that Beijing’s collaboration with Washington against Pyongyang—an expression of the nationalist Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country” and its corollary, “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism—undermines defense of both China and North Korea. The U.S. has now made this danger more concrete with its threat to install an advanced missile shield known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, in South Korea. Ostensibly aimed against an attack from North Korea, the system uses missile-tracking radar that can cover a broad swath of China. An article by Peter Lee in Asia Times (15 February) noted that this would give the U.S. the potential to degrade “the viability of the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] land-based strategic nuclear deterrent.”

The bureaucracy that sits atop the Chinese workers state, mindful of its self-interest above anything else, has kept up a delicate balancing act as it comes under increased pressure from the U.S. Even as it collaborates with Washington, Beijing has resisted demands to crack down further on North Korea by, for example, canceling mineral imports and terminating food shipments to the country. Three-quarters of North Korea’s imports come from China, a crucial lifeline given the North’s bleak economic condition.

North Korea was not always in such a state. For two decades following the Korean War, its industry and infrastructure were far more developed than South Korea’s, with Soviet aid buttressing the collectivized economy. The capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR in 1991-92 threw North Korea into a tailspin. Isolated and faced with a continuing imperialist embargo, its industrial base shriveled and severe malnutrition stalked its population. Today, Beijing is well aware that if it acceded to imperialist demands to cut off shipments of food and other necessities to its neighbor, it would likely spell the end of the Pyongyang regime. Along with that would come the threat of social chaos spilling across the Chinese border and further imperialist aggression toward Beijing.

As Trotskyists, our defense of the Chinese and North Korean workers states against the capitalist enemy is the necessary precondition for the fight for political revolutions to oust the parasitic bureaucracies and replace them with regimes based on workers democracy and proletarian internationalism. The nationalist, nepotistic Stalinist regime in Pyongyang is an opponent of the struggle for socialist revolution in South Korea, and everywhere else. Each generation of the Kim dynasty has called for “peaceful reunification” of Korea—a formula that does not challenge capitalist rule in the South. We call for revolutionary reunification, through workers political revolution in the North and socialist revolution in the South.

Defense of North Korea and the other remaining deformed workers states is integral to the fight for socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist societies, including Japan, the imperialist powerhouse of Asia, and the U.S., the planet’s most dominant power. The International Communist League dedicates itself to forging the proletarian vanguard parties that, as sections of a reforged Fourth International, can lead the proletariat in sweeping away the capitalist-imperialist order and building a world socialist society of material abundance.