Imperialist Hysteria After Nuclear Test

Defend North Korea!

On 9 September, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test with an explosive yield of approximately 15 to 20 kilotons. Nuclear testing was initiated by North Korea in 2006. However, this was the second such test this year with a yield about twice the magnitude of any of the previous four documented detonations. During the past year North Korea has conducted several missile tests that have demonstrated its capacity to fire a submarine-launched ballistic missile as well as a solid-fuel, two-stage medium-range missile, covering northeast Asia, including Japan. Nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker pointed to the importance of these events: “At a minimum, the current state of the North’s nuclear arsenal is an effective deterrent to potential hostile external intervention” (38north.org, 12 September).

This achievement deserves the acclaim of the world’s working and oppressed masses. It enhances the defence of the social revolution that survived U.S./Australian imperialism’s efforts to drown it in blood during the 1950-53 Korean War. General Douglas MacArthur and others in U.S. ruling circles were intent on using the peninsula as a launching pad from which to overturn the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Simultaneously, North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and effective delivery systems serves to impede the U.S.’s current campaign—coyly dubbed the “Pivot to Asia”—to encircle and eventually throttle the People’s Republic of China, by far the most powerful of the bureaucratically deformed workers states that have survived in the aftermath of the 1991-92 counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. It is vital for the international proletariat to stand for the unconditional military defence of the North Korean and Chinese deformed workers states.

The U.S. and Australia have repeatedly denounced North Korea’s nuclear tests. Provocatively, in the aftermath of the 9 September detonation, two U.S. bombers, accompanied by Japanese and South Korean fighter jets, flew at low altitude only 48 miles from the North Korean border. Admiral Harry Harris, the head of U.S. Pacific Command, described this operation as a response to “North Korea’s provocative and destabilising actions.” Joining the U.S.-led imperialist hue and cry, Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, labelled North Korea’s nuclear test a “reckless, provocative dangerous action” that “puts the world’s peace at risk.” Meanwhile adopting the role of stooge for the U.S. imperialists, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon—a one-time South Korean deputy ambassador to the U.S.—fulminated over the North’s “provocative actions.” He demanded additional UN sanctions against the Kim Jong Un regime, on top of the harsh measures adopted in March after the first of this year’s nuclear tests. Meanwhile, a South Korean military source threatened to reduce North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, to ashes should the North show any signs of using its nuclear arms. The backbone for this bellicosity is provided by the more than 28,000 American troops currently stationed in South Korea.

It is the U.S. backed by lackeys like Australia that, from the time of the Korean War, has been responsible for an unending series of provocations and savageries. During that war, carried out under the auspices of the UN, the U.S. utilised oceans of napalm to incinerate the population, with a resultant slaughter of over three million Koreans. Australia was the first U.S. ally to commit troops to this blood-drenched anti-communist crusade. It was due to the heroic struggle of Korea’s workers and peasants and the intervention of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army that the imperialists did not succeed in overturning the social revolution in the North. The war ended in an armistice, sealing Korea’s division along class lines at the 38th parallel. Subsequently, Washington went on to prop up a number of dictatorial regimes in the South that ruled through sheer terror, while the U.S. forces permanently stationed there were often used to quell popular unrest and to suppress labour actions.

Since the fall of the USSR, China’s reward for its longstanding cooperation with the U.S. to isolate and weaken the Soviet Union has been to increasingly find itself placed in the crosshairs of the American imperialists. The U.S. has usually avoided using the direct threat of military action against China, often invoking the spectre of attacks launched by North Korea to justify its military operations in the region. Thus, it was North Korea, not China, that was dubbed part of the “axis of evil.” In spite of China’s ardent wooing of the reactionary Park Geun-hye regime in the South, her government has agreed to the installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) missile shield by the U.S. as a defence against the North. This has exercised China, which rightly perceives the system to be a threat to its missiles. In 2009 Thaad was installed in Hawaii supposedly to prevent a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile attack. At that time the North had no such capacity, but China did. Our demand for all U.S. forces and bases out of South Korea is both a defence of North Korea and the Chinese Revolution.

Both the U.S. presidential candidates are running primarily on their purported virtues as the leader most qualified to smash America’s enemies abroad. Although ISIS is the main target of their fulminations, the ultimate target for U.S. imperialism is the Chinese deformed workers state. In the past four years, the number of U.S. soldiers and civilian army workers in Asia has increased from 70,000 to more than 100,000. In response to China’s just and legitimate claim to the Spratly Islands, the U.S. has been conducting aggressive naval operations in the South China Sea, which the Japanese navy will soon join. The U.S. is also seeking to bolster joint military training exercises with Australia. Last year’s biennial U.S./Australia war games, “Talisman Sabre,” included some 30,000 military personnel from the U.S., Australia and New Zealand as well as 40 Japanese troops embedded with U.S. marines. Since 2012, Australia has hosted a rotating force of U.S. marines in the Northern Territory. This combines with U.S. satellite spy bases such as the highly secretive Pine Gap which, along with other facilities, assists in imperialist interventions while targeting the deformed workers states, particularly China.

When North Korea conducted a nuclear test in January, the Chinese Stalinist regime criminally assisted the U.S., even helping to draft the sanctions that the UN imposed in March. Since then, the U.S. has been frustrated by Chinese unwillingness to implement the sanctions, as it now seeks more sanctions, as yet unspecified. Absent China’s implementation, the sanctions have had little impact, as 90 percent of North Korea’s trade is with China. Today, China views North Korea’s nuclear tests as a buffer against the hostile intents of the U.S. But as demonstrated by its support for the March sanctions, this appreciation could change in a second. At this time, China is unwilling to entertain the collapse of the North Korean regime, which would plunge the peninsula into chaos. It has also been planning to deepen military cooperation with Russia (the other major obstacle to U.S. imperialism’s overwhelming military dominance), including a joint naval drill to be hosted by China later this year.

It is unfortunately true that North Korea’s success in developing its nuclear capability is in no way sufficient to the task of defending the social revolution that was solidified in the context of the Korean War. North Korea and China as well as Cuba, Vietnam and Laos are deformed workers states: societies based on the expropriation of their respective capitalist class rulers and where that rule was replaced by working-class property forms—i.e., the nationalisation of production and a state monopoly on all foreign trade. At the same time, these countries are governed by parasitic bureaucratic castes whose rule is based on the political expropriation of the working class.

Our defence of the deformed workers states does not entail political support for the ruling bureaucracies, which in North Korea is deeply nationalist, weirdly nepotistic and brutally repressive. Committed to “socialism” only in its half of the Korean Peninsula, the Kim regime disdains the struggle for socialist revolution in the South and calls for “peaceful reunification” of Korea, a setup for capitalist reunification. We fight for workers political revolution in the deformed workers states in order to sweep away bureaucratic misrule and open the road to the further expansion of proletarian revolution. The parasitic bureaucracies understand that their privileges would not survive proletarian political revolutions, and thus to secure their well-being, they offer their services to the imperialists as they pursue the chimera of “peaceful coexistence” with the world capitalist order. The imperialists, for their part, are willing to deal in the short run while never abandoning their hostility to the survival of proletarian power anywhere on the planet.

For its part, the various manifestations of the Kim dynasty in North Korea have episodically displayed a willingness to abandon their efforts to obtain deterrent capacity in exchange for economic assistance from the American imperialists. Although North Korea has recovered somewhat from the economic disaster that befell it in the aftermath of the destruction of the Soviet Union, its economy remains precarious and will certainly suffer from the extensive damage it sustained in late August as a result of Typhoon Lionrock. It now plans to launch international appeals for donations, causing many bourgeois pundits to indicate that such assistance will not be forthcoming given their bad behaviour, i.e., daring to conduct a nuclear test. As for Australia, the capitalist rulers’ campaign against North Korea combines anti-communism with the “yellow peril” racism and eager subservience to U.S. interests that are hallmarks of Australian jackal imperialism.

Upholding North Korea’s right to defend itself with nuclear weapons is a litmus test for anyone claiming to fight for socialist revolution. Thus it is not surprising that the Labor-loyal “socialists” on the Australian left completely fail this test. The Cliffite group Socialist Alternative (SAlt) is particularly rabid in its anti-communist hostility to our defence of China and North Korea against the imperialist nuclear cowboys in Washington and their Australian junior partners.

SAlt’s political origins go back to the late Tony Cliff and his followers who, caving in to the anti-communist pressures of Cold War I, broke from Trotsky’s Fourth International in 1950. At the outbreak of the Korean War, Cliff’s followers abandoned Trotskyism by refusing to stand in defence of the Soviet Union, China and North Korea against the imperialists. They went on to support any and all reactionary forces arrayed against the Soviet degenerated workers state in the name of “anti-Stalinism” and cheered capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in 1991-92 and the destruction of the East European deformed workers states (see “Socialist Alternative: Cheerleaders for Capitalist Counterrevolution,” ASp No. 201, Winter 2008). Their unveering rightward political trajectory proves that when you abandon the defence of the workers states, you abandon a revolutionary perspective. Today, while the imperialists ramp up their belligerent campaign of economic sanctions and militarist sabre-rattling, SAlt marches along behind, bragging of their hatred of North Korea and the other deformed workers states.

Unlike these frenzied anti-communists we Trotskyists fight for the revolutionary reunification of Korea: proletarian socialist revolution in the South in conjunction with working-class political revolution in the North. A struggle for the revolutionary reunification of Korea would ignite other struggles for proletarian power throughout the region. Today the South Korean economy is in the tank, with unprecedented levels of youth unemployment, and there is evident popular resentment against the planned introduction by the U.S. of the Thaad missile shield. The objective conditions to ignite the struggle for a revolutionary reunification have long existed.

Defence of North Korea, China and the other remaining deformed workers states is integral to the fight for socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, including Australia, Japan and the U.S., the planet’s dominant imperialist power. The International Communist League (ICL) is dedicated to forging the proletarian vanguard parties that, as sections of a reforged Fourth International, can lead the working class in sweeping away the capitalist-imperialist order and building a world socialist society of material abundance. As a section of the ICL, the Spartacist League of Australia fights for a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia.

Adapted from Workers Vanguard No. 1096 (23 September), newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.

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photo caption: This year marks 50 years since the installation of the top secret U.S. Pine Gap satellite spy base, which along with other facilities were key to the imperialists’ Cold War II counterrevolutionary offensive against the Soviet Union. Today, Pine Gap is part of a string of U.S. military installations from Central Asia to South Korea, which assist in imperialist interventions while targeting the deformed workers states. As part of our proletarian internationalist program, we demand: All U.S. bases out now!