On North Korea

(Letter)

New South Wales, Australia
1 October 2016

Your recent article on North Korea betrays a reliance on unreliable sources. It describes Korea’s division as being “at the 38th parallel”. The dividing line hasn’t been the 38th parallel since 1950. This is no small point, because America prolonged the Korean War for years because it refused to agree to return the border to the 38th parallel.

Your article also accepts that China is not enforcing sanctions on North Korea. I’ve never seen any evidence of this. The UN sanctions are not comprehensive, and do not prohibit normal civilian trade. The article also states that “China is unwilling to entertain the collapse of the North Korean regime, which would plunge the peninsula into chaos”. I don’t think there’s any evidence that the collapse of North Korea would be any more chaotic than the collapse of East Germany. If the regime ceased to function, the South Korean government is well-placed to move in. This statement seems to be based on Western wishful thinking analysis which argues that China should intervene because otherwise it will face floods of refugees etc. How China, with a billion people, could be threatened by immigration from a country of twenty million is unexplained. This kind of analysis just indicates how much Western analysts are trapped in the bubble of their own country’s phobias.

Niall C.

WV replies: Our article “Defend North Korea!” (WV No. 1096, 23 September) referred to the armistice signed in 1953 at the end of the Korean War as “sealing Korea’s division along class lines at the 38th parallel.” The DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), which divides North and South Korea, does roughly follow the 38th parallel. Washington prolonged the Korean War not due to a dispute over where to draw the border, but because U.S. rulers would not accept the existence of the North Korean deformed workers state. As for us, we Trotskyists stand for the revolutionary reunification of Korea through proletarian political revolution in the North and workers socialist revolution in the South.

Regarding the sanctions, the bourgeois press is full of complaints that China is not enforcing the sanctions. For instance, a 27 October article in the Economist notes that “if China enforced existing UN sanctions on North Korea, the regime would be feeling the pain.” A main point of our article, however, was that the bureaucratic castes that hold political sway in the deformed workers states have a long and ignoble record of betraying each other to the imperialists.

The key political point of Niall’s letter is his challenge to our contention that a counterrevolution in the North would “plunge the peninsula into chaos,” implying that such an overthrow would be of little consequence. He cites the example of East Germany (DDR). In fact, the counterrevolution in the DDR, the road to which was paved by the betrayal of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had devastating consequences for workers, women and immigrants in East Germany. Moreover, it set the stage for capitalist counterrevolutions throughout East Europe and the Soviet Union.

Those counterrevolutions, from 1990 to 1992, triggered mass immiseration accompanied by a murderous rise in nationalism and racist terror. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union triggered an unparalleled economic collapse, skyrocketing rates of poverty and disease, and the overturn of decades of social progress. As of last year, according to the UN, capitalist Russia ranks 126th in the world in life expectancy, just barely ahead of Syria. To describe the consequences of that historic defeat for the international working class as “chaos” is in fact an understatement; catastrophic would be a better description.

Capitalist counterrevolution in North Korea would embolden the Japanese and U.S. imperialists as well as Washington’s South Korean client state. It would bring U.S. forces to the border of China, greatly intensifying the military threat faced by the Chinese deformed workers state. This underscores a main theme of our article: the importance for the international working class of defending the gains of the Chinese and North Korean revolutions and the need for proletarian political revolutions to sweep away bureaucratic misrule in those countries.