The DPRK Is A Refuge From The Hell Of Neoliberal Imperialism

The Township of the DPRK’s Samjiyon County

Since the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea started on its path to recovery after the Korean War, its people have looked upon a world that’s drastically diverged from the direction of their own society. In the mid-20th century the U.S. empire, helped by its new political interference tool the CIA, started on a decades-long campaign to overthrow socialist governments and enact corporatist policies throughout the Third World. This imperial expansion precipitated the rise of neoliberalism and an ongoing increase in global inequality.

In 1953, the same year the Korean War ended, the CIA installed the shah of Iran so that he could carry out capitalist development for the benefit of the U.S. The imprisonment and torture of largely political prisoners which took place under the shah’s autocratic rule were only some of the horrors that U.S.-installed regimes have inflicted. The U.S. has installed or supported brutal right-wing dictators in numerous countries, most infamously Chile, where Pinochet killed 1,200 to 3,200 people, interned as many as 80,000 people, and tortured tens of thousands.

When the U.S. hasn’t imposed its agenda of corporatization onto vulnerable countries through coups, it’s done so by assimilating nations into the American corporatocracy through threats and backhanded maneuverings. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, ex-corporate deal-maker John Perkins describes the process that the empire uses to bring countries under its control: “Basically, what Economic Hit Men are trained to do is to build up the American empire. To create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful.”

In the case of a country like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, assesses Perkins, the approach becomes more aggressive. “In Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn’t buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.” When the jackals fail to threaten a government into compliance or replace the government in a coup, the next option is to invade the country and set up a new U.S.-backed regime. This is of course what’s happened in Iraq.

When the functionings of the empire are so dependent on strong-arming countries into working within the global capitalist system, it’s no wonder why the empire intensely demonizes and targets the countries that it’s not managed to subdue. For the last seven decades, the U.S. has put the DPRK under perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation, carried out war games near its borders, and enacted starvation sanctions against it, and none of this has taken the country’s communist government out of power. All of the empire’s tricks have failed when it comes to the northern half of Korea.

Because the DPRK is ever out of the empire’s reach, the empire does all it can to make the DPRK globally isolated and hated by the Western public. This is the ultimate purpose of the economic embargo that’s been imposed upon the DPRK, as well as the unprovoked threats of military action against the country; to perpetually punish the country for not working in line with the corporatocracy.

It’s also the purpose behind the villainizing narrative that bourgeois propaganda has created around the DPRK. Drawing upon frequently inaccurate claims from paid north Korean  defectors, and from sensationalistic stories from south Korean tabloids, the Western media paints the DPRK as a sinister dictatorship. The country’s planned economy, which provides its people with universal healthcare and free housing amid brutal foreign sanctions, is portrayed as the source of the country’s economic deprivation. The country’s nuclear weapons, which are what has saved it from U.S. invasion, are portrayed as proof of its “belligerence.” The country’s political system, despite being based in electoral democracy, is characterized as a monarchy where the people have been brainwashed into worshiping Kim Jong Un.

These are the kinds of distorted lenses that the imperialist propaganda centers will inevitably use to portray anti-imperialist nations. In a logical extension of the classic “Red Menace” narratives about communism, an advanced socialist nation like the DPRK is painted as an utterly menacing and alien presence.

It’s for this reason that Americans are overwhelmingly in the dark about how to how to fight capitalism and imperialism, and are mostly uninformed about why capitalism and imperialism are problems to begin with. We’re not supposed to know about successful socialist projects like the one in the DPRK, because then we would know the Marxist-Leninist tools that are required for overthrowing and replacing a bourgeois state.

Instead of being exposed to these tools for revolution, the American proletariat is bombarded with diversions and false solutions which prevent class struggle. Right now the most prominent among these examples of false consciousness is social democracy; politicians like Bernie Sanders are going to the country’s struggling proletariat, and telling them that our crises can be solved simply by strengthening the welfare state within the capitalist framework. Sanders’ mentality of capitalist reformism has won many Americans over, even those who are most aware of the workings of the empire; John Perkins has said that he supports capitalism, and has concluded that the corporatocracy will be brought down if people work with corporations to enact various systemic improvements.

To overthrow capitalism and imperialism, we must do away with these kinds of rationalizations for keeping the system in place and charge towards proletarian revolution. In this mission, the DPRK and the other Marxist-Leninist states China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos serve as examples. The proletariat in these countries came to power by building movements which function according to Lenin’s principles for overthrowing a bourgeois state. And as the commentator Black Marxist-Leninist-Maoist has assessed, their militant approaches at insurrection must be emulated by today’s revolutionaries:

There are people who have made armed struggle in the United States — failed armed struggle, but armed struggle nevertheless. Maoists hold that armed struggle is the highest stage of class struggle, if you are not gearing up for armed struggle but instead engaging in reformism as strategy, you are not a socialist. You can not be a Socialist and promote class collaboration — meaning uniting millionaires and temp workers in the same party. Communism is the ideology of the lowest and deepest masses and those who have thrown themselves 100% in their corner on the field of class struggle.

This is how we create more places in the world like the DPRK-places so well guarded from the forces of imperialism and capitalist reaction that they function as armed socialist fortresses. In line with the historically necessitated communist practice of armed struggle, the DPRK has long fostered a strong military culture, with the country’s people largely making up a volunteer army of trained fighters. The Bolivarian socialist Nicolas Maduro is following in the lead of these and other Marxist revolutionary experiments, with Maduro’s project for a people’s militia now involving 3.3 million members.

But the gathering strength of the proletariat is much grander than even these massive achievements. Class struggle is intensifying around the world. People around the globe are rising up against their neoliberal governments through strikes and protests. The American corporatocracy, facing a sharp decline of U.S. power and an imminent global recession, is becoming less stable. 

The Bolivian proletariat may have had their socialist president removed last month in the latest U.S. coup, but the corporate fascist regime that was recently installed in Bolivia likely won’t last for too long; we’re in a situation where much of the empire’s territory could soon be lost to the forces of class liberation, just like has already happened in socialist Korea.

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