Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961

Abstract

At its core this is a book about industrial work, in which North Korea serves as an example. As stated at the outset, the central questions of this study are “What does it mean to work? What does it mean to be a labor hero?” and “How is the state or the nation tied to the activity of work?” (2). Situating North Korean industrial work alongside other examples—capitalist and socialist—throughout the world, Heroes and Toilers promises to fill a gap in the labor history of North Korea among English-language publications, and Kim is at his best when using North Korean sources to illustrate the detailed texture of work in North Korea as part of state policy (chapter 2) and in shaping the rhythm of everyday life (chapter 4). Using primary sources such as Rodong, the journal published by the General Federation of Trade Unions in Korea (GFTUK), in chapter 2 and cultural materials such as fiction, poetry, paintings, films, and memoirs in chapter 4, Kim weaves together a dialectic movement between, on the one hand, how the troika of state, party, and union organized industrial work to maximize efficiency “by calibrating workload, work time, and work space . . . through various types of wage” (44), and, on the other, how the workers relied on their own improvisation and motivation to fulfill state plans (121).The challenges in such a study are many, related to the particularities of research on North Korea, especially with the kinds of sources available for the postwar period, none of which in this case are archival. Whereas the so-called North Korean Captured Documents from the Korean War have provided a good archival source for the immediate postliberation period from 1945 to 1951,1 there are no comparable archives for the postwar period other than—to the extent that they are available—diplomatic papers from countries with which North Korea has had relations.2 As a result, most studies of North Korea after 1951 that treat matters other than political history must rely on official North Korean publications and secondary sources. Interesting studies can undoubtedly be done—this book being among them—but there are clear limitations. For one, official sources attribute a disproportionate amount of attention and power to the leadership, or the “ruling class” in the author’s preferred term; therefore, studies relying solely on official sources inadvertently reproduce the rhetoric of state power. Such challenges and the lack of discussion of sources and methodology notwithstanding,3 Kim makes skillful use of a variety of materials to argue that state power and planning were incomplete and, indeed, relied on individual spontaneity and efforts to function at all. Ultimately, the book productively raised for me a number of critical questions for the field as a whole. What is socialism and North Korea’s place in it? How do we decolonize knowledges about North Korea? What is our scholarly responsibility vis-à-vis North Korea? I tackle each of these below.The most poignant argument of the book is that “the heroic work of ordinary people emerged essentially from everyday disorder, in which state power—represented by the central plan—was ineffective. Extraordinary acts of ordinary workers were thus symptoms of an ineffective central plan, whose goals was reached not so much by systematic adherence to the plan but by the unplanned actions and creativity of ordinary nonskilled workers in everyday space who played no part in making the plan” (193). Elevating workers against the power of the state, Kim applies Marxist critiques of capitalism to state socialism as yet another form of capitalism. While Kim does not use the language of state capitalism, state socialism is subsumed as another variant of it: “State socialism is a category of capitalist formation in which the state is the active mediator of capital” (10). North Korea and other state socialist countries are in this case targets of criticism from the Left rather than the Right.4In doing so, Kim revisits the rather archaic debate about the character of actually existing socialism. Kim’s central position is “that the permanent authority of the [socialist] state in industrial production re-created the exploitative conditions of capitalism, especially as the state became the mediating agent in the exchange of labor power for wage,” a position that he admits is “based on the premise that socialism, as it existed in the twentieth century, could not skip over the historical stage of capitalism” (7). As a result, despite the use of socialism in the book to refer to state socialist systems, ultimately Kim finds the term difficult to define and empty of meaning, especially when considered in terms of Marxist ideas of class liberation and human emancipation (97). While acknowledging the end of private control of the means of production as a defining feature of socialism, Kim’s focus on surplus as the inevitable result of exploitation in the form of unpaid wage labor under state socialism renders socialism equivalent to state capitalism as “another kind of class rule” (10). Although he grants the “experientially real differences” between socialism and capitalism, these are not absolute differences but “equivalents, which arise as distinct experiences but have the same aim of advancing capitalism” (47).The crux of the problem is whether Kim’s rendering of wage labor in North Korea is accurate. Despite citing an important 1955 “definitive book on wage” by two North Korean labor researchers that defined socialist wage as “remuneration for labor and not the price of labor power” unlike in capitalist economies, Kim dismisses this distinction as merely “formal” because “strictly speaking, there was no true way of determining wage except as a socially accepted amount . . . and because the socialist wage system also depended on surplus, which was appropriated by the state before it could be turned into wage” (65). But surplus already implies profit through exploitation extracted from the difference between the socially necessary labor time in producing a particular commodity and the given wage. In socialist states, this “surplus” is not profit but is, in principle, meant to fund healthcare, housing, education, and other social services that provide for the reproduction of daily life. As Kim himself cites from party directives, the state took charge of the reproduction of labor power (which under capitalism occurs through wages spent on domestic consumption), providing supplementary foods, housing, childcare, and entertainment or leisure activities (25).While this debate may seem pedantic, the significance lies in whether and what to rescue from the excesses of twentieth-century socialism. For Kim, “socialism beyond capital has yet to arrive and remains a choice for humanity’s common progress” (16). The problem of course is that in deferring socialism to “beyond” capital, the utopian impulse fails to recognize the transitions—often painstaking and incremental—necessary for any social change, losing sight of potential insights. As Kim notes only in passing, “the force of the market (and market logic) was formally removed from all levels of production and distribution” (98) as private plots supported local consumption. And, as Kim readily points out in his discussion of the Vinalon Factory in chapter 5, a third of the floor space was reportedly devoted to “nonproductive time, including break rooms, toilets and showers, and recreational facilities” with “a water fountain, a flower garden, and a wide green area lined with trees” outside on factory grounds (187). These are important examples that require further unpacking to understand what works (and how) as opposed to what fails, according to predetermined theories. This is particularly important because, by sheer necessity, underresourced countries like North Korea have had to come up with creative ways to address the limits of industrialism, including the effects on the environment. In that sense, we are long past an anthropocentric history toward human progress.This still leaves open to question the contested definitions of socialism. While the potential equivalencies between socialist and capitalist production regimes are well taken (labor, after all, is required to sustain livelihood, no matter when and where), less convincing are arguments that the socialist wage system is driven by profit, or capital. How then to explain “inefficiencies” in socialist economies? Whereas Kim relies on the notion of surplus gained from unpaid labor as the same form of exploitation, whether capitalist or socialist, I would argue that the kind of exploitation under socialist economies is not equivalent to unpaid labor, and this compels us to consider experiences outside Western theory seriously. What would it mean to decolonize knowledges about North Korea to allow its experience and praxis to drive theory, rather than the other way around?5Placing North Korea’s industrial plants alongside Gary Works in the United States and Pohang Iron and Steel in South Korea (197), Kim is at pains throughout the book to situate North Korea in a transnational frame, and to show that “its problems are humanity’s problems” (16) and work is a “universally observed practice in the modern era” (4) as a “logic of industrialism central to modernization all over the world” (22). While this effort is commendable for avoiding the pitfalls of orientalism, missing is North Korea’s own historical specificity. If North Korea is equivalent to “most industrializing or industrialized countries of the twentieth century” (158) and “all the problems found in North Korea are also found in all other countries” (197), why should North Korea be the target of critique to offer “reflections on global problems of labor exploitation and state authoritarianism”? (19–20). What is singular about North Korea that helps us understand industrial work and everyday life in new ways? Without an answer to “why North Korea,” the historical meaning of work in chapter 1 ends up rehearsing the arguments from Aristotle to Marx, Weber, and Lenin with no discussion of notions of work in premodern or colonial Korea. Nor does the discussion of everyday life in chapter 3 go beyond the minimal task of “normalizing” North Korea as yet another iteration of the everyday in its “misrecognition” of hegemony for genuine experience (102).To be sure, Kim admits that “the concept of work presented here is thus largely an elite concept,” drawn from official sources such as the state and the party “as a mode of domination” (21). Kim’s analysis therefore seems to be implicitly undergirded by a kind of Hegelian idealism in which theory drives the analysis rather than a historical account. As a result, motivations—whether of the North Korean state or individual North Koreans—are consistently read as being manipulative to extract surplus. For example, the attempt by one of the legendary female labor heroes, Kil Hwaksil, to motivate her coworker by encouraging her passion for singing and putting her in charge of the choir is read as an act of “a small tyrant who uses another individual’s passion and talent as instruments of surplus production . . . render[ing] singing into a device of control” (161–62). Kim dismisses any sense of fulfillment in work as masking “the hegemonic workings of the production regime” (163).If work is expanded beyond industrial labor however, the picture is more complicated. While periodization is central to any history, the years bracketing a study should be chosen carefully to avoid making claims that can be challenged by earlier or later events. The start of the book in 1953 makes sense with the end of the Korean War, but 1961 as an endpoint presents a problem due to reversals in state policy by the mid-1960s. The end of the 1950s, with particular emphasis on 1958, is often cited in the literature as the completion of collectivization and nationalization, and for Kim 1959 takes on even more significance as a “key moment in socialism’s dissolution in North Korea . . . when the General Federation of Trade Unions openly accepted the party’s goals as the unions’ goals” (7). However, as noted by previous studies, a policy reversal toward decentralization by the mid-1960s incentivized cooperative farms through smaller work teams and collective (rather than state) ownership due to problems in increasing production and difficulties in the state planned distribution of inputs.6All of this is to suggest that there is still much left to learn about the (arguably) last existing socialist system, where work, as elsewhere, means more than toil. The nature of work, even industrial work, is complex. Physical labor is grueling, but it can also be rewarding as confirmed by the heroic feats of the workers themselves detailed in Heroes and Toilers. The notoriously unreliable statistics from North Korea notwithstanding, even CIA numbers show North Korea to have a 100 percent literacy rate with an eleven-year compulsory education system, nationalized housing, and health care with significantly lower infant and maternal mortality rates compared to other places with a similarly low GDP per capita.7 Challenging the author’s arguments about North Korean socialism is not to argue that North Korea has solved the problems of industrial labor or that there is no exploitation or oppression under its socialist system. There are undoubtedly serious issues to address, but the unprecedented elevation of physical work and the status of workers in the context of Korean history merits its own narrative.While Kim ends the book reiterating Henri Lefebvre’s call for workers to negate work and Kojin Karatani’s call for consumers to boycott products, arguing that “capital has the power to force people to work but not to make them buy,” neither of these options is so readily available. Despite the author’s honorable intentions to “move beyond the logics of market, security, and sovereignty” (206), the academy itself is increasingly run according to market logics, where enrollment numbers dictate whether classes can be run, contingent labor makes up the majority of instructors, and students are obliged to participate in the neoliberal logic of self-improvement, compelled to both work and buy. In that sense, the questions about socialism, decolonization, and the place of scholarship raised by this thought-provoking book are still in need of urgent answers.