Our party’s internationalist tasks: support for revolutionary Korea
Why do we support the revolutionary government in Korea? How does this connect with our revolutionary tasks here at home?
The following is part of the speech delivered by Vice-chair Ella Rule to an audience of party members, supporters and guests at the CPGB-ML’s international solidarity barbecue on 28 July 2018.
As you know, the timing of this event is dictated in part by the anniversary of the signing of the armistice at the end of the Korean war on 27 July 1953, signalling a victory for the socialist forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in defending their land and their socialist political and economic system from the attempts by imperialism and its puppets in the southern part of Korea to obliterate it by force.
It was a victory which came at huge cost – 4 million Koreans dead and the total destruction of Pyongyang and other towns, but it is also a testament to the power of a determined people with a competent and efficient Marxist-Leninist leadership to defeat even the most gigantic and powerful enemies in defence of their freedom, of their emancipation from wage slavery and other forms of exploitation and oppression.
The millions who died in that conflict defending their precious socialist homeland, including those who had come from China to render fraternal support, are the heroes and martyrs who move history forward towards the dawn of a new era when humanity will have finally achieved civilisation – free of wars, free of human misery, with everybody working cooperatively to solve the problems that Mother Nature eternally places in our path.
None of us here will live to see that day – we can only aspire to live to see in more countries of the world, and perhaps even our own, the establishment of working-class state power and the planned economy that is essential before that goal can be reached.
It is nevertheless an honour and a privilege to be living at a time in the history of humanity when it is on the brink of ending the 10,000-year history of division of society into exploiter and exploited classes because humanity has over these 10,000 years developed the wherewithal to be able to do away with this injustice forever.
But as we know to our cost, the past does not easily release us from its embrace. The exploiting classes and countries are rich and powerful and ruthlessly resist all attempts to relieve them of their privileges.
The exploited are subjected to cruel intimidation that makes them fearful of pursuing their interests, and the exploiters are adept at the tactic of divide and rule, as well as other forms of deception that are given broad currency through the exploiters’ control of mass media, the curricula of schools and universities, and of mass culture.
In Britain, just to overthrow the feudal exploiting class in order for it to be replaced by the capitalist exploiting class took two centuries of bitter struggle, during which a tenth of the population died prematurely.
Inevitably, the struggle to do away with exploitation altogether cannot but be even more deadly, although today we do have the advantage of Marx and Lenin’s work laying bare the forces that are in play, so that it is possible, understanding them, to follow the most advantageous course for dealing with them, and to expose incontrovertibly the deceptions by which the ruling classes attempt to hold back the forward march of human history.
This year, the Korean people were able, despite all the machinations of imperialism, to move a step closer to the reunification of their country.
Because of their socialist system of economic planning, which is meticulous in ensuring that all citizens are educated and trained and have the opportunity to serve their society to the maximum extent possible, eliminating the criminal waste of human life that prevails in capitalist societies with their scourge of unemployment, underemployment and under-education, the DPRK was able to build for its self-defence both nuclear bombs and the missiles needed for sending them to the imperialist heartlands, thereby minimising the danger of any further imperialist armed intervention against their country.
For a tiny country subjected to the worst-possible economic sanctions, this was a truly incredible achievement, effected by the same determined people and their same Marxist-Leninist leadership as were able to rout the enemy in 1953.
The people of south Korea, many of whom had been duped by the exploiters into believing that the DPRK was their enemy and the United States was their friend, were horrified to learn that, while north Korea was able to pledge that its nuclear weapons would never, ever be used against the south, US imperialism was quite happy to threaten the use of nuclear war against the north even though this would spell catastrophe for the south as well.
The subsequent rapprochement between the government of south and north Korea at the beginning of this year soon sent US imperialism’s current chief executive, Donald Trump, scuttling into talks with DPRK leader Comrade Kim Jong Un, and, for the time being at least, this has led to some relaxation of tension in the area with the abandonment of some projected provocative anti-DPRK wargames.
We extend our hearty congratulations to the DPRK, its government, the Workers’ Party of Korea and its leader, Comrade Kim Jong Un, for the progress that has been made so far, and hope that it will not be too long before we see the set-up of the Federal Republic of Koryo, as has been the consistent aim of the DPRK since the days of its founding president, Comrade Kim Il Sung himself.
