Communism—North Korea

The core of the original North Korean communists consisted primarily of Koreans who lived out the Japanese occupation in either the Soviet Far East or in various parts of China. Upon Japan's defeat they returned to Korea and organized into the Korean Workers' Party (KWP); factions grew among KWP members based on their colonial-era locations as refugees. The party served as the nucleus of the communist state since its inception in 1948. Following the Korean War, in 1955 Kim Il Sung (1912–1994) unified the factions through successfully purging his opposition. Throughout the remainder of his life he strengthened his power base through building a near-religious cult, his name appearing on everything from flowers to universities. His "on-the-spot guidance" and that of his son Kim Jong Il (b. 1942), it was reported, helped strengthen North Korea's industrial, educational, and military sectors. He initiated mobilization campaigns, similar to China's Great Leap Forward, to stimulate labor toward increased production. Kim Jong Il officially inherited the elder Kim's titles in 1994 following Kim Il Sung's death; the son (and the North Korean people) had been preparing for this transition from the 1980s.

Bruce Cumings describes this form of communism as "socialist corporatism," a political system built around a social family (Cumings 1998, 398). The glue holding this corporate family together is the ideology of chuch'e (or juch'e), a term that has most often been translated as "self-reliance" but behaves closer to the idea of "self-determination." This thinking was obvious in the 1960s with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK's) success in playing off the two communist giants, the USSR and China. It is seen in the dynamics of the DPRK in its negotiations with the United States. The KWP remains to this day the central organizing body of North Korean communism.

Cumings, Bruce. (1998) Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: Norton.

Scalapino, Robert A., and Chong-sik Lee. (1972) Communism in Korea. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Suh Dae-sook. (1988) Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader. New York: Columbia University Press.