Book Review: Kim Jong Un

The book is by Anna Fifield and is entitled The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un. Ms. Fifield is the Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post and has made many trips to North Korea (DPRK). She speaks and reads Korean--already an accomplishment, since for English speakers it is among the hardest languages to learn.

Born in 1984, Kim Jong Un led a very protected childhood. He was not allowed to play with other children--indeed, his Japanese sushi chef was appointed as his playmate. He lived in the royal palace in Pyongyang, but not just that. The palace was separated into family units that were sealed from each other, so Un couldn't even play with his half-siblings or cousins. On summer holiday he went to the beach resort of Wonsan--the regime's playground--on lavish but similarly isolated holidays.

Un had four siblings (mentioned in the book; Wikipedia lists some others). The oldest was Un's half brother Kim Jong Nam, whose mother was Kim Jong Il's mistress. She was an actress who spent many years living in Russia. Because Nam was Jong Il's eldest son, he was the logical successor to the throne. Which is why he was assassinated by North Korean agents in Malaysia in 2016.

Kim Jong Il eventually took a real wife, Ko Yong Hui--a dancer born in Japan--who bore him three children. The eldest was Kim Jong Chol, described as effeminate and "bosomy," and never a serious contender for leadership. Then came Un, whose mother worked hard to earn him pride of place, purposely discrediting both Kim Jong Nam and his mother. Finally, they had a baby sister, Kim Yo Jong--the woman who represented the DPRK at the Olympics in South Korea in 2018.

Chol, Un, and Yo lived in luxurious isolation from other relatives--and from the rest of North Korea. It's possible that Un didn't even know about the famine that ravaged the country in the 1990s.

In 1996 Un joined his brother Chol in Switzerland to attend school. They lived with a maternal aunt. Un was not especially interested in academics, but in those days cared more about sport.  There are photos of Un swimming on the Riviera and skiing in the Alps. Most of all he was a basketball fanatic, spending all his spare time shooting hoops. A devoted fan of the Chicago Bulls, in later years he befriended Dennis Rodman, who made several trips to party with the Great Successor.

Un made few friends--his language skills stood in the way, and he hated playing with other children, accustomed as he was to adult company. But all that Franco-German food began to take its toll--during those years he acquired his double chin.

Today, standing 5'7", Un weighs nearly 300 lbs. He suffered gout in his ankle, necessitating an embarrassing, weeks-long absence from public life. He returned to service walking with a cane. Short hikes with South Korean president Moon Jae In--30 years Un's senior--left the Great Successor breathless.

[W]hen they all went to Mount Paektu together in September, Kim Jong Un was panting heavily. He observed that Moon didn't seem out of breath at all. Not for a walk as easy as this, responded the South Korean, who loves to hike.

Mount Paektu, the peninsula's tallest peak, has spiritual significance for all Koreans. Kim Il Sung claimed the mantle of Mt. Paektu. His son, Kim Jong Il (born in a Russian labor camp) was (in legend) born on Mt. Paektu. According to Pyongyang's leading newspaper, "The Majestic Comrade Kim Jong Un, descended from heaven and conceived by Mt. Paektu."

So no wonder that Western leaders, including Donald Trump, couldn't take this very strange, funny-looking, little man seriously. The insults flew as only Trump can throw them: mad man, little rocket man, maniac, bad dude, to name a few. Here's a list of 15 insulting nicknames directed at the inheritor of Paektu.

The surprise is that Kim Jong Un is in fact a master Machiavellian. President Trump has learned that the hard way.

Upon Kim Jung Il's death in 2011, Un had to consolidate his power. The first step was to eliminate any rivals.

Generally, the risk in this early period is killing too many people, not too few, Bueno de Mesquita told me when I went to see him in his office at New York University. If you get rid of too many, those who remain think their leader is indiscriminate and have a reason to live in fear. But if you kill too few? Well, that's easy enough to fix.

The assassination of his older brother, potentially a rival claimant, was essential. Then his father's cronies--older men who saw themselves as regents or as powers behind the throne--had to be eliminated. Most consequential was the execution of his powerful, gregarious, and charismatic uncle, Jang Song Thaek. And not just him but dozens or even hundreds of his coterie. Most dramatic was the killing of General Hyon Yong Chol, who apparently fell asleep during one of the Great Successor's speeches and "was publicly executed by antiaircraft guns, a method that would have blown him to a pulp."

Un understood that he needed friends to stay in office. So he allowed a sizable clique of people to become rich--a group with a sufficient stake in the system to defend it, who also understood that their wealth depended entirely on Un's pleasure.

Then he realized that economic progress was essential. Failure to improve living standards across the country would lead to his downfall. So he liberalized the economy allowing private markets to flourish. It was a capitalist-like solution, but definitely not capitalist. A capitalist owns the means of production. In the DPRK Kim Jong Un owns everything--nobody else can profit except by stealing. But the crime was ignored--until it wasn't. At that point, from one day to the next, the "capitalist" could lose everything and end up in a prison camp.

Still, the reform improved people's lives across the board.

Finally, North Korea is always afraid of attack from the US or one of its neighbors, and for that reason feels it must have nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Much to everybody's surprise, Un built and tested a hydrogen bomb, along with true, intercontinental ballistic missiles. Accordingly, Un followed a policy of byungjin: pursuing both nuclear weapons and economic growth at the same time.

According to Ms. Fifield the North Koreans have no further need to test either instrument, and their concession to stop blowing up mountains and shooting rockets over Japan is, in fact, an empty gesture. They weren't going to do that any more anyway.

I don't think Trump understood that before, but I believe he realizes it now. He still claims credit for stopping the DPRKs missile tests, but that's just for public consumption. Unlike previous American administrations, he's kept the sanctions on full blast--not relieving them even a little bit. Until Un makes some real concessions, Mr. Trump isn't going to make any, either.

American sanctions under Trump are somehow made of sterner stuff than in past times. They have real bite--the DPRK is under what amounts to a naval blockade. That, along with bad weather, is resulting again in widespread famine. This has to undermine the Kim regime.

Kim hopes to die peacefully in his bed and pass power on to one of his children (it seems he has at least three). But at age 35 he's seriously obese, a heavy smoker, and suffers from heart disease and diabetes. He may not be long for this world.

The Paektu dynasty might be coming to an end. Let's hope so.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Gorbachev
• Book Review: Grover Cleveland
• Book Review: Lih's Biography of Lenin

Book Review: The Complacent Class

Don't get me wrong--I thoroughly enjoyed reading Tyler Cowen's recent book, The Complacent Class. It's full of facts, figures, recent trends, and conversation that is all food for thought, presented in a lively and entertaining style. As usual, Mr. Cowen takes a relatively pessimistic view of our current circumstance, but unlike with some of his previous books, I am more willing to accept it.

Still, I got issues, the first being the title. The word class (especially coming from an economist) implies some kind of socioeconomic status, or perhaps one of the poles in a dialectical struggle. David Brooks, in his classic Bobos in Paradise, describes just such a group, bourgeois bohemians, whom he could have dubbed complacent if he'd wanted to.

But not so in Mr. Cowen's book. Never does he define who belongs to this class, nor do we meet any doughty dynamicists who stand in opposition. We're all more or less happy with the status quo, regardless of social position. It's not so much a class that he's talking about, but more an era or a zeitgeist. I'll happily concede that The Complacent Zeitgeist doesn't trip off the tongue, so I don't totally blame Mr. Cowen for his moniker. But let's be clear: it's a literary conceit, and not a term or category to be taken seriously.

Another (unwieldy) title Mr. Cowen could have chosen is The Herrnstein Centrifuge Goes Into Overdrive. For his book describes more or less precisely what Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray predicted back in 1994 in The Bell Curve. Mr. Herrnstein forecast that people with high IQs would marry other people with high IQs, they would have really smart children and then segregate themselves into neighborhoods with other people with really smart children. This is what has happened, as documented by Mr. Cowen, and also by Charles Murray himself in Coming Apart.

Arguably The Bell Curve oversimplified things a bit by emphasizing only IQ. In reality, social segregation depends on lots of personality traits, not just IQ. As Mr. Cowen says,

For instance, intelligence, ambition, conscientiousness, and some personality traits all seem to possess some degree of heritability or at least intergenerational transmission. We have perhaps the best estimates for intelligence, and there the degree of heritability seems to run in the range of 40 to 60 percent, depending on which studies you consult.

Mr. Cowen takes Herrnstein's idea and generalizes it into what he calls matching. The Internet allows us much greater choice, not just in marriage partners, but in all sorts of other things--where to live, schools, restaurant choices, even pets. The net result is that people are more segregated than ever, with ever more power to select their friends, neighbors, and lifestyles--the centrifuge on steroids.

He has some new (to me) things to say about matching. It is well known that measured total factor productivity has declined markedly since 1970. Why? Mr. Cowen treats matching not just as a social phenomenon, but also as an economic one. He cites the usual litany of improvements in our lives that the statistics may not capture, e.g., the ready availability of free search engines. But then he suggests that the ability to match is much more important than anything on that usual list. If there really is an improvement in productivity, it likely shows up in better matching as much as anyplace else.

I think this is an important point. Thus a very important new aspect to our lives--arguably the most important new aspect to our lives--contributes nothing to GDP. So economic statistics don't catch the important consequences of the IT revolution.

But perhaps Mr. Cowen doesn't take his insight as far as he could. For example, Google-Waze technology has noticeably improved my life by sparing me many hours sitting in traffic jams. I pay (nearly) nothing for this service. But by participating in Waze, my data is used to to help other people match their travel to available roadways--I'm trading my information (my location and speed in traffic) for their information (fastest possible route to my destination). So this is in effect a direct consumer to consumer exchange, albeit with no money changing hands. It is a form of barter.

Similar statements can be made about Yelp, TripAdvisor, and even Match.com. All of these are direct economic trades from one consumer to another, unmediated by money. We pay only a small amount to support the platform, which is the only bit that shows up in the statistics. The value of these trades must be enormous, which implies that productivity statistics are woefully short of the mark.

I'm not sure complacent is the appropriate adjective for this. Revolutionary might be a better description. I'm grateful to Mr. Cowen for the insight.

Mr. Cowen maintains that however much we may enjoy good matches as individuals, there is net harm to society as a whole in the form of Herrnstein's centrifuge. Call this a market failure. No doubt there are winners and losers from the centrifuge. The poor are losers precisely because they get centrifuged out. But then the poor can't buy Mercedes-Benz cars either, and nobody calls that a market failure. I'm not at all convinced that society as a whole is worse off. Matching makes (most) people both happier and richer, and less reason for the government to come in and regulate it. (Which is no reason not to help the poor.)

The weakest chapter in the book is “Why Americans Stopped Rioting and Legalized Marijuana.” The obvious problem is that the word marijuana is never mentioned in the chapter at all besides the title. So it doesn’t deliver. I would have enjoyed learning about Mr. Cowen’s take on the opioid epidemic--surely as complacent a drug as can be imagined.

Then he attributes the stunning decline in the crime rate since 1970 to "complacency," suggesting that other explanations (incarceration, better policing, eliminating lead from the consumer environment, etc.) can’t explain the phenomenon. I’m not sure I believe him--I don’t know how one can measure the magnitude of a hypothetical with any precision. Then later in the book he refutes his own argument, suggesting that crime isn’t down as much as it has changed. Today we’re afflicted with cybercrime instead of street crime.

Another point he could have made is that street crime is less lucrative today--neither people nor stores carry as much cash as they used to. I think in this chapter he carries his complacency theme a bit too far.

The most compelling section of the book comes at the end, on the topic of global affairs. I’ll rephrase his point in my own words:

We, being complacent and rich, have absolutely no desire to go to war. After all we have the most to lose. North Korea has nearly nothing to lose--it would be hard to knock out their non-existent electricity system. So psychopath Kim Jong-un is using that asymmetry to blackmail us, knowing full well that all-out war will hurt us far more than it would hurt him (assuming he can save his own skin).

Our very complacency is leading us (nearly) inevitably toward war.

Nothing I say here should deter you from reading Mr. Cowen’s book. It’s a wonderful read, you’ll learn a lot, and you’ll probably reach different conclusions from me. Enjoy.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Rise and Fall of American Growth
• Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy
• Where Have All The Workers Gone?

North Korea

North Korea appears as a black expanse of sea between neighbouring China (left) and South Korea (right) NASA/Reuters (The Independent, 2015)

The A-bombs—the bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945—were soon supplanted by hydrogen or H-bombs, whose destructive power was 5000 times greater. Scientists at that time warned that 10 such bombs dropped in key urban areas across the U.S. could obliterate much of the U.S, population, while reducing the country to an uninhabitable radioactive nightmare.

So writes Jeff Mackler in a Socialist Action (SA) article entitled Nuclear insanity: US threatens North Korea. Odd then that he's not bothered by North Korea's development of nuclear weapons.

But he's not. Instead the nuclear villain is the United States.

Yet this insanity is routinely contemplated by U.S. imperialism’s chief representatives, whether they be Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump—none of whom has declared that the use of these doomsday weapons is unthinkable. To the contrary, President Obama authorized the development and production of a “modernized” nuclear weapons program at a cost of $1 trillion over the course of the next 30 years.

Nowhere does Mr. Mackler even mention North Korea's ballistic missile and nuclear weapons program, which are obviously intended as offensive weapons. The US is certainly not going to reduce its own cities to "an uninhabitable radioactive nightmare." But Kim Jong-un has explicitly threatened that outcome on numerous occasions. For the moment he lacks the capability, but he is certainly working on fast acquiring it.

The Norks already have the power to reduce metropolitan Seoul (24 million people) to rubble. One supposes Mr. Mackler thinks that's a good thing.

He devotes only one paragraph to describing North Korea.

North Korea is once again in U.S. gunsights, including endless caricatures of the “boy dictator” head of state, Kim Jong-un, not to mention the never-denied U.S. cyberwar directed at North Korean military installations. (North Korea is ruled by a repressive Stalinist regime that oversees a fundamentally capitalist economy with the military bureaucracy at its center, but it is the task of the Korean people, not the United States, to overthrow it.)

The parenthetical comment is bizarre, to say the least. By what strange definition is North Korea a "fundamentally capitalist economy?" And were that true then why is Mr. Mackler and his ilk so strongly rising to its defense? However weird, that one sentence is the sole place in the entire piece remotely critical of the Kim regime.

Most of the article is a litany of American sins, beginning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We're apparently exclusively responsible for ("Princeton educated") Syngman Rhee, South Korea's first postwar dictator, along with whatever massacres he committed. Then the Korean War was entirely our fault.

The insightful Washington, D.C. journalist I.F. Stone authored a valuable book, “The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950-51,” that refutes the U.S. McCarthy-era pretext that the Korean War began only with the invasion of 50,000 North Korean troops. Actually, the attempt by Northern forces to re-unify the country had great popular support in the South.

Of course the South Korean masses wanted nothing more than to be ruled by a bunch of psychopathic dictators. Only the USA prevented that utopian outcome from occurring.

The litany continues, with evil US imperialism spreading darkness over India, Guatemala, Philippines, Syria, and (of course) "the racist, colonial settler state of Zionist Israel." Nothing like a little antisemitism to spice up an article about Korea.

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) ) takes a very similar position on North Korea (albeit minus the antisemitism). Mary Martin, SWP candidate for mayor of Seattle (which position undoubtedly includes a North Korea portfolio) states the case plainly in the lede paragraph of her campaign statement.

The Socialist Workers Party calls for an immediate end to Washington’s economic and financial sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We demand that the U.S. government withdraw its more than 28,000 troops from the Korean Peninsula, and U.S. planes and ships from Korea’s skies and waters. We stand in solidarity with the more than 70-year-long struggle to reunify Korea, ripped apart by U.S. imperialism at the end of World War II, as well as the Korean people’s aspirations for a nuclear free Korean Peninsula and Pacific.

Then follows a brief recount of the litany described above, which concludes with this paragraph.

Washington’s campaign that North Korea get rid of nuclear weapons, and insistence that Tehran renounce them, is both cynical and hypocritical, to say the least. But the development of nuclear arms and delivery systems by these governments weakens the defense of the Korean and Iranian people against Washington. It saps the fighting capacities of the toilers in face of imperialism’s dictates, depriving them of the political and moral high ground in the eyes of working people worldwide. The leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution provides an example to emulate.

Unlike SA's piece, this at least mentions the Nork's weapons program, and critically, too. Still, in any showdown between the US and North Korea it is pretty clear where the SWP will stand: Pyongyang.

Steve Clark wrote a 3-part series on Korean history originally published in 2013, and reprinted here. Unlike Mr. Mackler, he at least provides some source references for his conclusions, which means one can have a civilized discussion. But the litany is much the same--the US is singlehandedly and unequivocally at fault for any bad things that ever happened in Korean history since 1945. In his view the true history of the Korean peninsula has been kept carefully under wraps by the bourgeoisie and is only gradually coming to light. Indeed...

Aside from the pages of the Militant, one of the few places factual information could be found in those years, much of the truth about what had happened in Korea only began to come out under the impact of the fight for national reunification by the Vietnamese people in the 1960s and 1970s, and the worldwide movement against the U.S. war there.

Of course all this history is irrelevant. Most of it ends by 1960, with only a few riots and murders extending in the 1980s. But my Trotskyist friends are strong believers in by any means necessary, also known as the end justifies the means. By this measure we only need to look at what exists now, namely the picture at the top of this article.

Can any of my Trotskyist friends look at that picture and say, with a straight face, that the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea represents a path to human happiness and well-being?

Of course not! So that begs the question--why do they keep claiming that when it's so impossible to believe?

I think it's a very weird form of virtue-signalling. Both the SA and SWP proclaim themselves as radicals, and radicals necessarily must take radical positions. Their positions have nothing to do with happiness for the Korean people, but are entirely about reinforcing their self-image as bad-assed revolutionaries.

And as long as Kim Jong-un remains a remote figure in a hermit kingdom far away, they can get away with that. But if--may heaven forbid--there really is a war between the US and North Korea, and Seoul or even an American city is reduced to "an uninhabitable radioactive nightmare," then the political calculus becomes much different.

After all, nuclear destruction falls on the just and unjust alike--both bourgeois and proletarian.

I don't think the American people will look very favorably on grouplets that advocate mass murder of American citizens and the wholesale destruction of American cities.

Further Reading:

• In Principled Opposition to Gangnam Style
• Viva Poverty!
• Imperialism

The Doctrine of Secret Socialism

Back in 1998 Jack Barnes (head of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)) published his book about the collapse of the Soviet empire entitled U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War. Since, according to Marxist theory, a full-scale war is needed to restore capitalist property relations, and since no war had occurred in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, therefore there has been no capitalist counter-revolution. In other words, nothing happened in 1991.

I dubbed this the Doctrine of Secret Socialism. It maintained that people in Eastern Europe still lived in socialist societies, despite being entirely unaware of that fact. The citizens of East Germany, for example, would have been astounded to read in The Militant that they were engaged in a brutal effort to prevent the restoration of capitalist property relations. This showed up in conflicts over child care facilities and abortion laws. Somehow strikes in Romania and Poland were adduced as evidence that the countries were still workers' states. It was silliness all the way around. The theory has quietly been dropped, though to my knowledge never repudiated.

Secret Socialism is an extreme example of low consciousness among the working class. Apparently, the benighted workers can't even tell the difference between capitalism and socialism. The role of the revolutionary Party is precisely to bring them up to speed, i.e., to tell them what they really want so they can want it for themselves. The SWP's doctrine is the most extreme example of the phenomena among the grouplets that I follow, but they're not really alone.

It shows up in The Militant's coverage of the Puerto Rican independence movement. At a UN hearing, for example,

[m]any speakers referred to the Nov. 6, 2012, nonbinding referendum in Puerto Rico on the island’s colonial status — the fourth such vote in 45 years. A few speakers, advocating either statehood or the current commonwealth status, pointed to such votes as a vehicle to achieve their goal. 

'So-called plebiscites administered in a colony can only benefit the colonial authorities,' said independence fighter Juan Antonio “Papo” Castillo of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Solidarity Coordinating Committee, based in Worcester, Mass.

In that plebiscite only 5.5% of voters opted for independence. But, consistent with the doctrine of secret socialism, the slobs don't really know what they want--the Party speaks for them. That's why so-called "revolutionaries" dismiss the result as meaningless.

So we have two examples from the most recent Militant (pdf). A front page editorial comes with the headline No to Assad butchery! No to US intervention! In these sentiments they are of a mind with Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, among many others. Indeed, those demands are incontrovertible--nobody except Assad supports his continued butchery, and even neoconservatives advocate US intervention only as the last resort.

Yet the piece closes with this very strange paragraph.

The working people of Syria are fighting for political space and against a brutal regime as they also fight to block reactionary Islamist-jihadi forces seeking to take advantage of the war to broaden their field of operations in the region. We call on working people in this country to stand in solidarity with this fight.

So the war in Syria is about "political space." Who knew? What the hell does that mean? I can just hear some grieving father telling a reporter "My son died so that others can have political space."

Actually, "political space" is just a euphemism for secret socialism. Though they themselves are completely unaware of it, the vast majority of workers and farmers in Syria are communists. They're just waiting for some vanguard Party to tell them so. Or at least that's Dan Fein's theory.

“There is no revolutionary workers party in Syria today,” Fein said. “That will take time and come through struggle and further experience. It’s true the workers and farmers face difficult conditions in the fight to bring down Assad. But look at Egypt! The workers and farmers of that country — in the space of less than two and a half years — overthrew both the hated Mubarak government and then the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood regime that replaced it, winning more political space to organize and defend their interests and keep fighting. Solidarity with the Syrian toilers to do the same!”

So there it is--the Arab Spring is all about political space. The idea is you just keep revolting until you luck out with the right, Communist dictator, which, as a result of the doctrine of secret socialism, you eventually will. If the US intervenes and cuts short the process, then communism will never emerge in the Arab Middle East.

As far as I can tell, there are only two countries in the world where socialism is not secret: Cuba and North Korea. In honor of the 60th anniversary of "the Korean people’s triumph over Washington’s murderous 1950-53 war to conquer that country," Comrades Steve Clark, Tom Baumann, and James Harris took a trip to Pyongyang. They don't say much about what they learned in Pyongyang--presumably that will come, as this is only the first article of a series--but they did take in some of the tourist sites:

Among the anniversary events was the inauguration of a new building and park that substantially expand the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, first built in 1953. Although most of the new exhibits were not yet open to the public, we visited the outdoor pavilions displaying captured U.S. and South Korean planes, helicopters, tanks, armored vehicles and ordnance from the Korean War, as well as from military actions by Washington and Seoul right up to recent years.

Then follows a long, tendentious history of the Korean war and it's aftermath. Accompanying the article is the annual, execrable statement of support for the North Korean regime.

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the 65th anniversary of the September 9, 1948, founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We reaffirm our commitment to the fight to reunify Korea and to end the partition Washington sought to legitimize earlier that year with bogus UN-“supervised” elections imposing the Syngman Rhee tyranny on working people below the 38th parallel.

So that plebiscite also failed to ratify the secret socialist ambitions of the Korean people. By voting for Syngman Rhee, South Koreans were doomed to become one of the richest nations in the world. Apparently, in their heart of hearts, they still lust to be ruled by that genius of a man, Kim Jong-un. Only your revolutionary vanguard Party knows.

The Militant's slogan is Korea Is One! That will happen, but not because of secret socialism. Instead, North Koreans will have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in a global, capitalist economy that will be both very challenging and very enriching.

Unlike Marxists, we say Down With Poverty! And there's nothing secret about it.

Further Reading:

• Jack Barnes' Next Book
• Barry Sheppard: A Wasted Life
• In Principled Opposition To Gangnam Style

Homage to Kim Jong-un

The Militant includes a pathetic piece in the current issue that sympathizes with  North Korean prison camp Democratic People's Republic of Korea sadistic, psychopathic dictator General Secretary Kim Jong-un. I have little more to add to this that's not in my previous post, here.

I really have to wonder what kind of psychic bennies there are to associating with the most vile regime on earth. I mean, not even my former comrades can possibly believe that this society represents human progress. I really have no clue. It just seems to me to discredit the entire organization. 

In Principled Opposition To Gangnam Style

The South Korean rapper, PSY, has released a viral video entitled Gangnam Style. It's been viewed by nearly a billion people worldwide. If you're one of the remaining five billion who hasn't seen it yet, follow the link. It's catchy and very well done. Plus it's a good dance tune.

Gangnam is a neighborhood in Seoul roughly equivalent to our Beverly Hills. It's where the movie stars and the rich people live--home to the 1%. Gangnam Style aspires to a life of affluence, ease, and sex with beautiful women--a dream which apparently much of the world shares.

But not, it seems, our comrades in the Trotskyist movement. All of the grouplets I follow have no use for Gangnam Style, but instead offer "critical support" to the Democratic People's Republic Of Korea (DPRK), aka North Korea. Critical support is a uniquely Trotskyist term of art, and refers to countries that have done the hard work of socialist revolution, but have subsequently degenerated under Stalinist mis-leadership. Trotskyist parties compliment such societies on their hard work, and mostly as an afterthought criticize the Stalinist deviation from pure socialism. In this view, the DPRK represents a step forward for human progress--quite unlike the lewd, crude and bourgeois Gangnam Style.

Socialist Action reported on Kim Jong-Il's death with this lede:

The death of Kim Jong Il, on Dec. 17, caught the attention and imagination of the capitalist media hucksters. His death, which wasn’t reported for two whole days, was in many ways symbolic of his life. It was a life that, through the lens of the Western media, was obscured by secrecy and unflattering portrayals. This distorting lens is designed to sell American workers on U.S. intervention in Korea.  

Hmm--Kim Jong-Il's evil reputation is principally an artifact of the American media? This hypothesis is just silly.

Half way through the article we finally encounter the "critical" part of critical support. "There is no denying the fact that North Korea is indeed a brutal Stalinist dictatorship that represses its own people and puts the interest of the ruling bureaucracy and its armed forces above all else. Nevertheless, it is not the job of the United States to police the Korean peninsula."

If Socialist Action merely excuses the DPRK, The Militant goes whole hog. Their 2009 Convention drafted an official statement, which opens: 

September 4, 2009

Kim Jong Il
General Secretary
Workers’ Party of Korea
Pyongyang,
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Dear Comrade Kim Jong Il,

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists send revolutionary greetings on the 61st anniversary of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.... We salute the DPRK’s recent initiatives on cross-border transport, family reunions, and other matters."

The letter concludes

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists congratulate you on this 61st anniversary of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We welcome the DPRK’s latest initiatives to advance peace and national unity in Korea. And we stand together with our brothers and sisters in Korea and worldwide in demanding: End the sanctions against the Korean people! Stop the piracy against the DPRK’s ships and cargo, under United Nations or any other auspices. U.S. troops, “anti-ballistic missile” ships, and weapons—conventional and nuclear—out of Korea and the Pacific!

Korea is one!

Comradely,
Steve Clark

Steve Clark is a long-time leader of the SWP whom I knew quite well from my time in Chicago.

I am reminded of this by an article in this month's Commentary (Jay Lefkowitz, Escaping from the North Korean Stalemate, December, 2012, p. 39). The article describes the miserable life of a certain Shin In-Geun, born and raised in a Democratic People's Republic prison camp, who witnessed the executions of his mother (hanging) and brother (firing squad), before himself being tortured over burning charcoal until he passed out. This, apparently, is Pyongyang Style, and represents progress toward our socialist future. Uniquely, Steve Clark and his Trotskyist comrades prefer this proletarian, consciousness-raising experience to the socially and morally degenerate ideas of Rapper PSY. The technical term that Trotskyists use is "human progress." They're welcome to it.

PSY doesn't have completely clean hands. He participated anti-American protests in the past, ungrateful for our country's sacrifices on his behalf. He's had the decency to subsequently apologize. Whatever mistakes Truman and MacArthur may have made sixty years ago, the USA was surely on the side of angels.

Trotskyists are fools (or worse). PSY may be ungrateful, but he is an entertainer and one needn't take his political views too seriously. As for me, I'm a fan of Gangnam Style.