21 year old boricua grrrl looking for the Marceline to my Princess Bubblegum. My name is Melanie.By Sam Marcy (July 21, 1994)
Comrade Kim Il Sung devoted his whole life to the Korean people’s struggle for national self-determination and the international working-class struggle for socialist emancipation. With his leadership, the Korean people defeated the Japanese colonial occupation and soon after brought about the first defeat of the U.S. imperialist military machine.
For over 40 years since the armistice, the U.S. military has continued to occupy the south of Korea with troops and nuclear weapons. This occupation has been the chief obstacle to peaceful reunification of Korea and poses the chief danger of a new war on the peninsula.
The recent nuclear crisis is the latest episode in a long history of Pentagon threats and provocation against Korea. At a time when the people of the United States are suffering from unemployment, racism and a general decline in living standards, another U.S. war against Korea would be a terrible crime against the poor and working people of the U.S. as well as against the people of Korea.
Comrade Kim Il Sung worked tirelessly to bring about the peaceful reunification of Korea and to forge a lasting peace on the peninsula. Workers World Party, representing class-conscious workers in the U.S., understands that Comrade Kim Il Sung’s great efforts to achieve peace and reunification met the aspirations of the Korean people and also benefited the poor and working people of the U.S.
It is Kim Il Sung’s remarkable achievement that in his own lifetime he became a symbol of national liberation and reunification for the Korean people, and a symbol of the anti-imperialist and socialist struggles of all the world’s peoples. Although U.S. imperialism tried at every opportunity to blockade, threaten and sabotage the construction of socialism in the north, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stands strong. The accomplishments of socialist construction will be a lasting monument to the leadership of Comrade Kim Il Sung.
#kim il sung #sam marcy #memorial #anniversary #communist #revolutionary #national liberation #socialism #dprk #revolution #revolutionary #anti-imperialist #korea #korean war #japan #reunification
Ho is one of the greatest revolutionary leaders on the twentieth century, and a lot more focus should be put on the historical and continued anti-imperialist and socialist experience of Vietnam. Rather, lefties in the west like it when our people die in their tens of thousands in our wars of liberation against empire, but when our people build up our countries after the resistance, the western lefties aren’t interested any more and usually denounce that which we have successfully built.
It was in reality the radicalisation in usa society borne out of the Black Liberation Movement, especially the Panthers and other radicalising groups like the Young Lords, Brown Berets, Weather Underground, White Panthers, that disturbed the usa ruling class. All organisations which most of the western left at best patronise or more usually denounce as being too this or too that for their liking.
Ho Chi Minh, as the documentary states, spent over thirty years living in the west, including in London and Paris, he was also a founding member of the Communist Party of France in 1920 but was constantly frustrated by the way French colonialism infected the French CP particularly as the CP at times was in the French government and as Vietnam was a French colony at the tie, Ho felt the party could have played a better anti-imperialist role.
He saw in the usa that the blacks were the most oppressed section of the population and supported their militant resistance against white supremacist terror.
Ho Chi Minh was a firm believer of the unity of the socialist camp, and was disturbed and upset when the Communist China fell out with the USSR in the early 1960s, and even in his last words desired the two countries to reunite:
“Being a man who has devoted his whole life to the revolution, the more proud I am of the growth of the international communist and workers’ movement, the more pained I am by the current discord among the fraternal Parties.
I hope that our Party will do its best to contribute effectively to the restoration of unity among the fraternal Parties on the basis of Marxism - Leninism and proletarian internationalism, in a way which conforms to both reason and sentiment.
I am firmly confident that the fraternal Parties and countries will have to unite again.”
#ho chi minh #vietnam #revolutionary #communist #socialist camp #unity #imperialism #vietnam war #solidarity #national liberation #african american #racism #lynching
By Sukant Chandan, Sons of Malcolm
Che himself would have been most outraged probably not at the commodification of his persona, but at the way in which lefties/Marxists etc have belittled his political experience, teachings and legacy. This is not helped by the Che film that was released a few years ago.
The film is well made, and covers a lot of Che’s revolutionary struggles, but there are two fundamental areas of Che that the film failed utterly to show:
1, his time and struggles in Africa, Congo, and
2, that the Korean but even more the Vietnamese resistance to imperialist occupation and the building of socalism was something he saw as defining his ideological and strategic approach to the world revolution.
Also not covered in the film, and seldom ever mentioned by lefty eurocentric (and I include our South American family and comrades in this eurocentricism, more on this below), is that Che was an intense internationalist, engaging and becoming comrades with so many revolutionary fighters across the world including Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Tito of Yugoslavia. He also made many travels around the world representing the Cuban Socialist Republic, none of which is talked about by western-based Che-lovers.Che does not need to be defended from this, as Che has defended himself plenty on this front, and you can engage with Che’s defence by reading his speeches and articles, after which no one will be in any doubt. But reading revolutionary teachings and writings of pioneers like Che is not in fashion, people on the left like the consumers of tack would rather sit comfy with Che without the actual content of Che. Too many people behave in the same manner towards Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton and others.
Che Guevara is ours, he doesn’t belong to the the west or to the east, he belongs to every oppressed person burning with rage, being driven to liberation from imperialism by any means necessary. But there has been an attempt at emasculating him of his revolutionary content, and being turned into a mascot of Latino/eurocentric hollowness. Che fought in South America, as well as Africa, and saw in China, Korea and Vietnam the future path to the liberation of humanity.
#che #films #eurocentrism #racism #communist #revolutionary #national liberation #internationalism #solidarity #latin america #cuba #socialism #national liberation #africa #vietnam #korea
http://malheureuxmarxist.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/young-lords-history-1-tb-truck-liberated/
lately i’ve been interested in the idea that the lumpenproletariat (or the unemployables as huey p newton called them) should be the focus of radical organizing. this week, i’m going to post different actions, programs, and writings of the young lords and other organizations that took this analysis. im probably going to focus more on the young lords, because people are less familiar with them from my experience
I originally read all of these in The Young Lords: A Reader. If you’re unfamiliar with the Young Lords, the introduction is available on google books here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Iod_Z41WIT0C&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
TB Truck Liberated
(From the newspaper Palante, 3 July 1970, volume 2, number 6)
Everyday, Puerto Rican people are faced with the same deadly health problem tuberculosis – a disease that affects our lives and a disease that can be prevented. The reason that t.b. isn’t being prevented is that preventing diseases like t.b. cuts the profits of the capitalists that run the city hospitals. Therefore, the hospitals don’t work on preventing these diseases.
The YOUNG LORDS PARTY has always said that the time will come when the people take over all the institutions and machinery that control and exploit our lives. On June 17, the YOUNG LORDS PARTY put this idea into practice. On this day, we liberated an x-ray truck from the politicians that had been using the truck only for propaganda purposes that serve their own interests and profiteering businessmen that only think about making money.
The truck was seized only after members of the YLP had gone to the Tuberculosis Society several times asking them for the use of the truck. Each time, the request was refused. By refusing us, they made it clear that they aren’t concerned with the health of our people. These trucks have been seen in our community only on a very limited part-time basis. We realized that the reason our people didn’t use it was because the people running the show prior to the LORDS were outsiders who couldn’t relate to our people, our language, and our customs. They never made any real attempt to get the people to use the x-ray facilities.
In the three days that we have had the truck, we have already tested 770 people. According to the technicians, the usual amount of people taken care of in the same amount of time is about 300. So, as far as the YOUNG LORDS PARTY is concerned, this truck rightfully belongs to the people!
The last point of our 13 Point Program and Platform states that “We want a socialist society.” Under a socialist society, medical services are extended outside of the hospital by setting up clinics in all communities and by visiting people’s homes. This type of medical service is called preventive medicine. Although doctors admit it is needed, preventive medicine will never be done in amerikkka as it is today, because in the capitalist society in which we live, capitalists run health services in order to make more money, not to improve health care. The sicker we are, the more money the capitalist makes. ‘The YOUNG LORDS PARTY believes that health care should be a right for all people not a privilege. That is why we put the x-ray facilities in the hands of the people.
The Ramon Emeterio Betances Free X-Ray Truck now belongs to the people. It will be on the streets 7 days a week, 10 hours a day. This truck is here to service the needs of our people.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL!
LIBERATE PUERTO RICO NOW!
Carl Pastor
Ministry of Health
YOUNG LORDS PARTY
#puerto rico #boricua #communism #communist #socialism #socialist #borikua
http://malheureuxmarxist.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/the-ideology-of-the-black-panthers/
Continuing in my series looking at organizations that believed the lumpenproletariat should be the focus of organizing, here’s portions of a speech given by Huey P Newton. i’m posting excerpts but the entire thing is a fantastic read
http://hueypnewtonarchive.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/speech-at-boston-college-18-november-1970/
In 1917 an event occurred in the Soviet Union that was called a revolution. Two classes had a contradiction and the whole country was transformed. In this country, 1970, the Black Panther Party issued a document. Our Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, who now is in Algeria, wrote a pamphlet called “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party.” In that work Eldridge Cleaver stated that neither the proletarians nor the industrial workers carry the potentialities for revolution in this country at this time. He claimed that the left wing of the proletarians, the lumpen proletarians, have that revolutionary potential, and in fact, acting as the vanguard, they would carry the people of the world to the final climax of the transformation of society. It has been stated by some people, by some parties, by some organizations, by the Progressive Labor Party, that revolution is impossible. How can the lumpen proletarians carry out a successful socialist transformation when they are only a minority? And in fact how can they do it when history shows that only the proletarians have carried out a successful social revolution? I agree that it is necessary for the people who carry out a social revolution to represent the popular majority’s interests. It is necessary for this group to represent the broad masses of the people. We analyzed what happened in the Soviet Union in 1917. I also agree that the lumpen proletarians are the minority in this country. No disagreement. Have I contradicted myself? It only goes to show that what’s apparent might not actually be a fact. What appears to be a contradiction may be only a paradox. Let’s examine this apparent contradiction.
The Soviet Union, in 1917, was basically an agricultural society with very large peasantry. A set of social conditions existing there at that time was responsible for the development of a small industrial base. The people who worked in this industrial base were called proletarians. Lenin, using Marx’s theory, saw the trends. He was not a historical materialist, but a dialectical materialist, and therefore very interested in the ever-changing status of things. He saw that while the proletarians were a minority in 1917, they had the potential to carry out a revolution because their class was increasing and the peasantry was declining. That was one of the conditions. The proletarians were destined to be a popular force. They also had access to the properties necessary for carrying out a socialist revolution.
In this country the Black Panther Party, taking careful note of the dialectical method, taking careful note of the social trends and the ever-changing nature of things, sees that while the lumpen proletarians are the minority and the proletarians are the majority, technology is developing at such a rapid rate that automation will progress to cybernation, and cybernation probably to technocracy. As I came into town I saw MIT over the way. If the ruling circle remains in power it seems to me that capitalists will continue to develop their technological machinery because they are not interested in the people. Therefore, I expect from them the logic that they have always followed: to make as much money as possible, and pay the people as little as possible – until the people demand more, and finally demand their heads. If revolution does not occur almost immediately, and I say almost immediately because technology is making leaps (it made a leap all the way to the moon), and if the ruling circle remains in power the proletarian working class will definitely be on the decline because they will be unemployables and therefore swell the ranks of the lumpens, who are the present unemployables. Every worker is in jeopardy because of the ruling circle, which is why we say that the lumpen proletarians have the potential for revolution, will probably carry out the revolution, and in the near future will be the popular majority. Of course, I would not like to see more of my people unemployed or become unemployables, but being objective, because we’re dialectical materialists, we must acknowledge the facts.
…
Today’s capitalist has developed machinery to such a point that he can hire a group of specialized people called technocrats. In the near future he will certainly do more of this, and the technocrat will be too specialized to be identified as a proletarian. In fact that group of technocrats will be so vital we will have to do something to explain the presence of other people; we will have to come up with another definition and reason for existing.
But we must not confine our discussion to theory; we must have practical application of our theory to come up with anything worthwhile. In spite of the criticism that we have received from certain people, the Party has a practical application of its theories. Many of our activities provide the working class and the unemployed with a reason and a means for existing in the future. The people will not disappear-not with our survival programs they will not. They will still be around. The Black Panther Party says it is perfectly correct to organize the proletarians because after they are kicked out of the factory and are called unemployable or lumpen, they still want to live, and in order to live they have to eat. It is in the proletarian’s own best interest to seize the machinery that he has made in order to produce in abundance, so he and his brethren can live. We will not wait until the proletarian becomes the lumpen proletarian to educate him. Today we must lift the consciousness of the people. The wind is rising and the rivers flowing, times are getting hard and we can’t go home again. We can’t go back to our mother’s womb, nor can we go back to 1917.…
#black panthers #racism #socialism #communism #socialist #communist
http://malheureuxmarxist.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/the-1-vs-99-analysis-is-not-a-class-analysis/
Many first world communist parties have attached themselves to the “1% vs 99%” analysis of capitalist society. However, they have done so uncritically. A 99% v 1% analysis is fundamentally too vague to be useful as an analytical tool when looking at how policy is formulated and carried out in any political system.
This is reflected by occupy’s focus on campaign financing and relatively inconsequential legal fictions like corporate personhood. One example of this is a Democracy Now interview with an occupier:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfuMhV-tWPY
The focus on corporate personhood and campaign financing is a result of using a pluralist analysis of society. Pluralism says that policy is formulated by a bunch of different groups in society (corporations, unions, women’s advocacy groups, universities, civil rights organizations etc) competing and eventually compromising based on their power and influence within political institutions. The view of pluralists is that the political system can be fixed by increasing the power of the “99%” institutions relative to the “1%” institutions. They see one of the primary problems with the American political system is that the “1%” institutions have more money to spend on influencing lawmakers and buying their elections, and propose that a way of fixing this would be public campaign financing and spending limits on campaigns. The problem is that pluralism is a load of shit.
The pluralist analysis only looks at the overt methods of capitalist domination of society, while a class analysis understands that even with affordable elections and public financing, it doesn’t affect capitalist hegemony. In fact, it adds a legitimizing factor to capitalist domination of society, like in Western Europe. A class analysis recognizes that capitalist control of society is direct and indirect. The main direct methods of capitalist control are the selection of officials and lobbying. The indirect methods of control are far more powerful, because socialists and communists elected to office are still controlled by them. The four main methods of indirect capitalist control are explained in Al Szymanski’s The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class :
1. Capitalist values permeate the society and are propagated through the schools, military, media, and churches. Officials typically accept capitalist ideology as their own and authentically act as if capitalist rationality were the only rationality. Attempts by state officials to enact measures that would violate capitalist ideology would generate considerable opposition, even from the oppressed, as long as they accept capitalist ideas.
2. If the state attempts to follow policies that business doesn’t like, businesses can move to other countries or they may curtail production, lay off workers, or follow other restrictive policies, thereby promoting an economic crisis for which the state would be blamed. Businesses can refuse to invest unless the state follows probusiness policies. Banks have the special advantage of refusing to make loans to the state unless the state follows policies directed by them. Such actions by business might not be malicious, but might be merely economically rational and dictated by the necessity of maximizing profits.
3. States that attempt anticapitalist policies are subjected to the threat of military intervention, either by foreign states that want to prevent the abolition of capitalism, or by their own military, which may well be closely tied to the capitalist class.
4. Officials who follow anticapitalist policies may be cut off from campaign financing, slandered in the capitalist-class-controlled media, and forced to face well-financed and promoted opponents in their campaigns for reelection as well as being confronted with embarrassing demonstrations, disruptions, and possible social and political crises.
By looking at policy merely as a result of different groups compromising, it gives a distorted view of the role of the state. It sees the state as a place to mediate the interests of different interest groups in society, and doesn’t have the depth, richness, and explanatory power that a class analysis has. Again, from The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class :
The capitalist state has five basic functions for capitalism: 1) the state operates to preserve the existing class relations in society through guaranteeing private property and law and order; 2) the state makes continual capital accumulation and profitability possible through regulating the labor force, ensuring sufficient buying power in the economy, regulating the economy, and otherwise helping business; 3) the state secures the legitimacy of capitalist society through its control over the schools, its management of the cult of patriotism, and the ideological function of voting to persuade people that the state is being run by and for them, when the reality is quite different; 4) the state operates to “aggregate” the diverse interests and wills of the different segments of the capitalist class - that is, form the capitalist class will - so that the state can implement unified compromise policies tempered by the demands of other classes (this is the function of the Congress and the various regulatory and administrative agencies); 5) the state raises money to fund the bureaucracy and otherwise acts to maintain the apparatus to perform the first four functions.
One of the clearest examples of capitalist class domination was the pressure put on New York city in 1975 when a cabal of bankers, led by Citigroup, refused to roll over the debt of NYC. Capitalist restructuring and deindustrialization eroded the economic base of the city and suburbanization left it impoverished. What happened was essentially a financial coup, the bail out package mandated that bondholders be paid off first, and essential services would come second. The city’s economy was reconstructed around creating financial and cultural centers geared towards the elites. This management was a pioneering battle in the neoliberal project, and this neoliberal approach to crisis has been repeated numerous times by the IMF and by the European Central Bank’s handling of Greece today.
Lobbying and corporate donations have to be seen as one tool in the vast toolbox of capitalist control of society. While many people use the “99% vs 1%” analysis as a sort of watered down class analysis, the pluralist usage of it is inadequate to deal with the realities of capitalist control of society.
#occupy #ows #occupy wall street #communism #socialism #socialist #communist #marxism
#dprk #artists #stamps #monument #revolution #korea #kim il sung #pyongyang #socialism #communist #national liberation
– Huey P Newton (via thisbeautifulwound)
(via fuckyeahmarxismleninism)
#bpp #huey #communist #revolutionary #youth #schools #jobs #unemployment #capitalism #imperialism #racism #crisis
Wealth in the imperialist nations is directly, and dialectically, related to the stunting and underdevelopment of the colonized world. The mass channeling away of resources, labour and value from the colonized world to the imperialists is the source of this divide. Indeed, the very process which transformed European serfs, tied as they were to the land and their feudal lords, to landless wage labourers was powered by the rape of colonial world, a process which German revolutionary, philosopher and economist Karl Marx identified as the ‘primitive’ (meaning first, or initial) accumulation of capital. Marx noted quite correctly that the veiled wage slavery of the industrial European worker required as its base slavery pure and simple in the ‘New World.’
The imperialist plunder of the colonized world has benefited all social classes in the imperialist nations. In order to pacify class struggle inside of the imperialist nation the bourgeoisie allows for a certain amount of the stolen wealth of the colonized world to trickle down to the imperialist working class. This is the material basis of the social peace between the workers and the bourgeoisie in the imperialist centre, the suppression of class struggle and the general tendency of workers in the imperialist countries to support imperialist actions.
The most important effect of this process has been the shifting of the world revolutionary centre away from the working classes of the imperialist nations. In fact, it was never there to begin with. Not understanding this was the most important folly of otherwise great revolutionaries like Marx. Contrary to Marx’s formulations, the principal world contradiction and the primary driving struggle is between imperialist white power (and other imperialist powers) and the colonized nations of the world.
Most worrying perhaps though, even to many of those who benefit from the global imperialist system, today imperialism not only oppresses the colonized nations of the world, but wages a war on the very Earth itself as it attempts to drive profits ever higher. Imperialism now threatens the very continued existence of human and animal life as we know it. The situation facing the world today is truly grave.
The statistics bear out the physical cost of imperialism on the very Earth itself. 90 percent of large fish in the oceans are gone. 97 percent of native forests are now destroyed. 98 percent of native grasslands have been destroyed as well. There is ten times as much plastic in the world’s oceans as there is phytoplankton and the world’s amphibian, migratory songbird, mollusk and fish populations are in states of collapse. Each and everyday imperialism drives 200 hundred species to extinction.
While white liberal and social democratic forces in the imperialist centre push consumerist, capitalistic solutions to the crisis facing us, the oppressed people of the world know the truth. Imperialism must be brought down and capitalism destroyed. A new global social order must be brought into existence and build on the ruins of the old world. Only this will save the world on which we live.
”– http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/let-this-be-the-year-of-the-most-powerful-offensive/ (via malheureuxmarxist)
(via malheureuxmarxist)
#communism #marxism #socialism #communist #socialist
The morning of Dec. 19 started like a normal Monday for the Korean staff at the Hae Dang Hwa restaurant in Beijing. The greeting staff welcomed hungry customers at the front door, the chefs began prepping their fine selection of kimchi and other Korean dishes and the waitresses and waiters began taking down orders for their guests. All of that changed when a China Daily reporter mentioned in a conversation with a waitress that Kim Jong-Il, the head of state for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), had died that morning of a heart attack. In minutes, the entire Korean staff - from the waiters to the chefs in the kitchen - broke down in tears and, after apologizing to the customers, closed the restaurant early for the day so they could grieve the national tragedy together.
Several thousand miles away in Pyongyang, mass sorrow like that experienced in this Beijing restaurant took the swept the capital as men, women and children – from the most esteemed party official to the steel worker – took to the streets to mourn Kim’s death.
Most people in the United States have a hard time understanding the sorrow of the Korean people and the Western media spent the better part of the past few days ridiculing this mass display of grief. After all, it’s inconceivable to imagine the death of any U.S. leader – President or otherwise – eliciting unanimous mourning from the American people. Nevertheless, even the harshest critics could not deny the sincerity of the tears shed by the Korean people, both in the DPRK and abroad, on the morning of Dec. 19.
The Western media tells us that DPRK government is ruthlessly oppressive, and yet the Korean people’s reaction seriously contradicts this image. What is it about Democratic Korea and its leaders that cause its people, even those far away from the eyes of government authorities, to mourn like this?
#dprk #korea #kim jong il #memorial #frso #solidarity #socialism #communist #media #imperialism
North Korea is a country that is alternately reviled and ridiculed. Its leader, Kim Jong-il, is demonized by the right and — with the exception of Che Guevera in 1965 and many of his current admirers — mocked by the left. Kim is declared to be insane, though no one can say what evidence backs this diagnosis up. It’s just that everyone says he is, so he must be. If Kim had Che’s smoldering good looks he may have become a leftist icon, leader of “the one remaining, self-proclaimed top-to-bottom alternative to neo-liberalism and globalization,” as Korea expert Bruce Cumings puts it. Instead, the chubby Kim has become a caricature, a Dr. Evil with a bad haircut and ill-fitting clothes. The country he leads, as befits such a sinister character, is said to be a danger to international peace and security, bent on provoking a nuclear war. And it’s claimed that years of economic mismanagement have reduced north Korea to an economic basket-case and that its citizens, prisoners at best, are starved and repressed by a merciless dictator.
While many people can recite the anti-north Korea catechism – garrison state, hermit kingdom, international pariah – they’ll admit that what they know about the country, apart from the comic book caricatures dished up by the media, is fuzzy and vague. But this has always been so. As early as 1949, Anna Louise Strong could write that “there is little public knowledge about the country and most of the headlines distort rather than reveal the facts.” Cumings dismisses US press reports on north Korea as “uninformative, unreliable, often sensationalized” and as deceiving, not educational.
One of the reasons the headlines distort, even today, especially today, can be summed up in a syllogism. World War II, as it was waged in the Pacific, was in large part a struggle between the dominant economic interests of the United States and the dominant economic interests of Japan for control of the Pacific, including the Korean peninsula. Japan had occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, until it was driven out by the Korean resistance, one of whose principal figures was north Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war. After Tokyo’s surrender, the US tried to assert control over Japan’s former colonial possessions, including Korea. Kim’s guerilla state upset those plans. The corporate rich and hereditary capitalist families that dominate both US foreign policy and the mass media recognize north Korea to be a threat to their interests. The DPRK condones neither free trade, free enterprise nor free entry of US capital. Were it allowed to thrive, it would provide a counter-example to US-enforced neo-liberalism, a model other countries might follow, a model revolutionaries, like Che, have found inspiration in. The headlines deceive, rather than educate, because north Korea is against the interests of those who shape them.It’s clear why Che Guevara, and other revolutionaries, considered north Korea of the 60’s, 70’s and even early 80’s, to be an inspiration. Emerging from the womb of the guerilla wars of the 30s, the north had fought two imperialisms. It had won against the Japanese and held the US to a standstill. It was building, in the face of unremitting US hostility, a socialist society that was progressing toward communism. The country offered free health care, free education, virtually free housing, radical land reform and equal rights for women, and its industry was steaming ahead of that of the south. By contrast, the neo-colony Washington had hived off for itself below the 38th parallel was a vast warren of sweatshops reminiscent of England’s industrial revolution. People lived harsh, miserable, uncertain lives, in incessant struggle with a military dictatorship backed by the US, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to Europe’s pre-war fascist regimes.
Would Che be inspired by the north Korea of today, an impoverished country that struggles with food scarcity? Probably. What have changed are the circumstances, not the reasons to be inspired. The projects north Korea has set for itself – sovereignty, equality, socialism – have become vastly more difficult, more painful, more daunting to achieve in the face of the void left by the counter-revolution that swept the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and China’s breakneck sprint down the capitalist road. Would Che have soured on north Korea, because the adversity it faces has grown tenfold? I doubt it. A revolutionary, it’s said, recognizes it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. North Korea has never lived on its knees. I think Che would have liked that.
#dprk #korea #socialism #revolution #guerrillas #communist #kim il sung #kim jong il #imperialism #korean war #nukes #che #solidarity #japan
