War, the state and the formation of the North Korean industrial working class, 1931–60

Abstract

This article examines how Koreans became industrial workers in the first and second phases of industrialisation on the peninsula: under Japanese colonial rule, 1931–45 and under the DPRK’s post-Korean War heavy industrialisation, 1953–60. While the political regimes of the Japanese colony and postcolonial DPRK were different, industrialisation occurred under similar conditions, characterised principally by war, state capitalism and imperialism. Processes of proletarianisation also reveal similarities in the two periods, including the widespread use of forced mobilisation and immobilisation of workers, and a bureaucratic apparatus supporting close control of labour. The article contributes to the critique of conventional views about the role of ‘free wage labour’ during the transition to capitalism.

Keywords:

• Korea
• industrialisation
• proletarianisation
• wage labour
• state capitalism
• war

Notes

1. See, for example, World Bank, The East Asian Miracle.

2. For reasons of space and focus the question of worker resistance and organisation will not be addressed in this article. It is nonetheless an integral and important part of the story of proletarianisation and economic development on the Korean peninsula and the author plans to address this in further research.

3. Marx, Capital, 500.

4. Marx, Capital, 501.

5. Marx, Capital, 516.

6. Marx, Capital, 501. Trotsky later developed this aspect of Marx’s insights further in his polemics against the Second International Marxists.

7. Marx, Capital, 516.

8. Ibid.

9. Munslow and Finch, Proletarianisation in the Third World, 1.

10. Munslow and Finch, Proletarianisation in the Third World, 1–2.

11. Munslow and Finch, Proletarianisation in the Third World, 4.

12. Munslow and Finch, Proletarianisation in the Third World, 12.

13. See Rioux, “The Fiction of Economic Coercion” for a critique of the political Marxist account of the establishment of ‘free wage labour’ under capitalism.

14. Van der Linden, Workers of the World, 20.

15. Van der Linden, Workers of the World, 22.

16. Van der Linden lists debt bondage, indentured labour, certificates of leave, physical compulsion (locking up workers in company compounds), social security provisions and special benefits, and social or economic connections between employer and employee outside the employment relationship as some of the main forms of ties.

17. Banaji, “The Fictions of Free Labour,” 134.

18. Banaji, “The Fictions of Free Labour,” 137.

19. Banaji, “The Fictions of Free Labour,” 142.

20. Banaji, “The Fictions of Free Labour,” 145.

21. Christopher Cramer does discuss the role of war and conflict in development. Cramer, ‘Civil War is not a Stupid Thing’, 19–22.

22. The similarity of capitalist developmental states and ‘communist’ states has been pointed out frequently, often by scholars who would not subscribe to any version of state capitalism theory. See for example Philip McMichael, who has written, ‘although the two political blocs subscribed to opposing representations of human destiny, they shared the same modernist paradigm. National industrialisation would be the vehicle of development in each.’ McMichael, Development and Social Change, 30.

23. On the distinction between state capitalism and bureaucratic state capitalism, Cliff wrote: ‘To say that Russia is state capitalist is perfectly correct, but not sufficient; it is also necessary to point out the differences in the juridical relations between the ruling class in Russia and that in a state capitalism which evolved gradually from monopoly capitalism. The most precise name for the Russian society is therefore Bureaucratic State Capitalism.’ Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, 182.

24. For what is considered to be the classic statement of state capitalism theory in relation to the USSR, see Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia. In a similar vein, see also Binns, “The Theory of State Capitalism”; and Harman, “The State and Capitalism Today.” For an overview of a variety of theories of state capitalism in relation to the USSR, see Van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, 49–63, 107–126, 180–193, 258–280. For early applications of state capitalism theory to the East Asian context, see Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, 288–330; Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, 247–251; and Cliff, Mao’s China. For a more recent and rather different take on state capitalism and China, see Gabriel et al., “What Happened to Chinese Communism?”

25. On state capitalism, military competition and accumulation, see Harman, “The State and Capitalism Today.”

26. This statement requires some qualification, however, since it is not the case even in the most bureaucratic state capitalism like North Korea’s that the freedom of labour was completely removed. It can be shown that, even in these cases, workers retained some degree of mobility and a sort of covert labour market did exist, as enterprises competed to recruit and retain good workers and the state as a whole sought to raise productivity by incentivising workers through wage differentials and other benefits. See Kim Yŏnchŏl, “1950 nyondae pukhan.”

27. Cumings, “The Origins and Development.”

28. See Kim, To Live, to Work.

29. Park Soon-won, Colonial Industrialization and Labor, 14.

30. Park Soon-won, The Emergence of a Factory Labour Force, 51.

31. Park Soon-won, Colonial Industrialization and Labor, 29.

32. Park Soon-Won, Colonial Industrialization and Labor, 16–18.

33. According to Park, the female factory workforce peaked at 45% in 1932 and declined to 33% in the late 1930s. Park Soon-won, “Colonial Industrial Growth,” 141.

34. Ibid.

35. The figure of 65% comes from CIA National Foreign Assessment Center, Korea, 1.

36. On the land reforms of March 1946, see Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 74–86; and Kim, “The Decision-making Process.”

37. According to official DPRK statistics published in 1960, national income doubled between 1945 and 1949. Although we may want to be sceptical about published North Korean statistics, this sort of growth is not unfeasible, since Korea’s economy and industrial facilities would have been in a parlous state at the time of liberation in 1945 because of the overall economic situation of Japan towards the end of the Pacific War. See Central Statistical Board, Statistical Returns, 24.

38. Szalontai, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” xviii.

39. Van Ree, “Limits of Juche,” 58–61.

40. It was actually said to have been completed a year early in 1960.

41. Van Ree, “Limits of Juche,” 55.

42. For a comparison and discussion of DPRK economic growth figures, see Yang Munsu, Pukhan kyŏngje ui kujo, 26–29.

43. Since so much was destroyed by the Korean War, there is some debate over what the DPRK actually gained from Japan’s industrialisation of northern Korea. However, while buildings were destroyed, it is clear that much remained for the North Koreans to build on: industrial sites, infrastructure, industrial plant saved by being moved across the border into China, technical expertise, blueprints, and so on.

44. This is the population figure for 1960. In 1953, shortly after the Korean War, the population of the DPRK had been 8.491 million. See Central Statistical Board, Statistical Returns, 16.

45. The figure of 165,000 immediately following the war seems very low when compared with the figure of 1.22 million for the industrial working class in 1943. This can be explained by a number of factors. The categories used in the sources are different, so the figure of 318,000 for 1953 (combining workers in industry, transportation, communications and construction) is the one that should be compared to the 1943 figure. It is also necessary to take into account the fact that, while heavy industry was concentrated in the north, at the time of division South Korea had a much higher population and around two-thirds of the Korean working class. An additional factor that explains the low figure for industrial workers in 1953 was the war, which devastated North Korea’s industrial facilities and killed large numbers of working-age men. The statistical booklet published by the DPRK in 1960, from which these figures come, does not elucidate how it categorises the various branches of the economy that it uses to divide up the workforce. Presumably the category ‘Industry’ here means all forms of manufacturing.

46. Central Statistical Board, Statistical Returns, 125.

47. Central Statistical Board, Statistical Returns, 128. The complete elimination of the old independent peasant class in the 1950s raises the question of whether the peasantry was also proletarianised by collectivisation. In other words, it may be possible to see the sharecropping of cooperative farmers as a form of wage labour, as Banaji has suggested. Banaji, “The Fictions of Free Labour,” 145.

48. It should be noted that by the 1930s there was already a long history of recruiting Koreans as workers for Japanese industries, dating back to the 1910s. See the interesting discussion in Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble, 28–43.

49. Park Soon-won, Colonial Industrialization, 38–39.

50. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 141.

51. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 142.

52. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 144.

53. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 145.

54. Palmer notes that 73 factories and 56 mines in Korea were conscripted by the Government-General in February 1943. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 146.

55. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 146–147.

56. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 150.

57. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 158. It should be emphasised that this figure does not represent a total of individuals mobilised but a total number of mobilisations and many Koreans would have been mobilised multiple times during the course of the war. Many of those who were mobilised were not proletarianised in any real sense, as they may have only been mobilised for a few days or weeks for infrastructure work before returning to their rural homes and farming occupations.

58. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy, 152–155.

59. On North Korea’s conscious creation of a working class both ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’, see Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 86–92.

60. According to official statistics, as a proportion of the total population workers increased from 12.5% in 1946 to 19% at the end of 1949. Central Statistical Board, Statistical Returns, 17. See also Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 160.

61. Han Sŏnghun, Chonjaeng kwa inmin, 82.

62. Han Sŏnghun, Chonjaeng kwa inmin, 80; Kim Yŏn-chŏl, “1950 nyondae pukhan,” 394; and Kim Cheehyung, “The Furnace is Breathing,” 39–47.

63. Han Sŏnghun, Chonjaeng kwa inmin, 90–91.

64. The first Five-Year Plan was officially completed a year early in 1960.

65. Kim Yŏnchŏl, “1950 nyondae pukhan,” 390.

66. Kim Yŏnchŏl, “1950 nyondae pukhan,” 391–392; and Ha Chaeryong, “Pukhan sanŏphwa,” 83.

67. Ha Chaeryong, “Pukhan sanŏphwa,” 84.

68. On the DPRK’s rural collectivisation programme, see Lee Chong-sik, “Land Reform.”

69. Kim Yŏnchŏl, “1950 nyondae pukhan,” 392–393.

70. The North Korean government actually took great pride in its use of this sort of labour, showing pictures of Pyongyang citizens working on the reconstruction of their city in publicity material such as the photo album Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (1958). This form of mobilisation continues today in the DPRK.

71. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak, 57.

72. Kim Yŏnchŏl, “1950 nyondae pukhan,” 394–395.

73. Kim Yŏnchŏl, “1950 nyondae pukhan,” 394.

74. For a discussion of the mixing of Japanese and Soviet influences in North Korea, see Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 191, 242–243.

75. In practice the formal, legal equality established in the early DPRK largely meant the equal right to be exploited by the state.

76. It is an open question just how long-lasting the coercive intervention of the state might be and how far the North Korean case might be typical of developing countries in the mid-to-late twentieth century. While deep state intervention in proletarianisation might be the norm in the earlier stages of late industrialisation, some would argue that all capitalist societies tend to move towards Marx’s ideal-type, in which ‘free wage labour’ becomes dominant. This goes to the question of how far the state capitalist regimes were/are a ‘normal’ part of capitalism or a historically limited aberration. However, this question is beyond the scope of this article.