President Kim Il Sung and Britain

by Dermot Hudson

The highly significant 105^th anniversary of the birth of the great Korean communist leader, comrade Kim Il Sung, is a reminder of how important it is to reflect on the relevance of his teachings and ideas to Britain. How are the ideas of Kim Il Sung applicable to Britain?

Firstly, the great Juche idea is applicable to Britain because it teaches that every country and every people should be independent and masters of their own destiny. The Juche idea is expressed in practical terms as Juche in ideology, independence in politics and self-reliant in defence. These are policies that a new progressive government could and should implement. Although Britain is an imperialist country it is at the same time deeply subordinate to US imperialism and pursues the so-called special relationship.

A new government in Britain could apply Juche by leaving NATO and kicking out

US troops. This would be a basic prerequisite to achieving independence in politics. Kim Il Sung understood the need for capitalist countries to be independent, saying:  "Ours is an era when the people demand independence. Today even the people of the capitalist countries, to say nothing of the socialist countries, want to take the road of independence and especially the people of the Third World who were exploited and oppressed by the imperialists over a long period are advancing under the uplifted banner of independence."

            Kim Il Sung showed the way to independence for the peoples of the capitalist, socialist and Third World countries. Indeed, the Juche idea reflects the aspirations of the peoples of all countries for independence – this is an undeniable fact.

            To establish Juche and achieve both political and economic independence, Britain would need to break with international capitalism and imperialism by leaving the European Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The British people recently voted, decisively, to leave the hated EU. President Kim Il Sung condemned the predecessor of the EU, the Common Market, pointing out that: "The ‘European Common Market’, the ‘integration of the world economy’ and the like, loudly advertised by the imperialist powers today, all pursue the heinous, aggressive aims of strangling the economic independence of the newly independent states and subordinating these countries to their rule."

Indeed, as Britain prepares to withdraw from the EU the teachings of Kim Il Sung on building an independent national economy are highly relevant to the British people. When some big power chauvinists and revisionists tried to force the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to join the former Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or COMECON), a Soviet-led economic bloc dominated by the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies, this was opposed by President Kim Il Sung. The leader of the Workers Party of Korea upheld the banner of self-reliance and the independent national economy, saying later that: "It has become more clear today that our decision to build socialism by our own efforts on the principle of self-reliance and not enter the CMEA was quite correct."

He defined the building of an independent national economy as: "Building an independent national economy means building a diversified economy, equipping it with up-to-date technology and creating our solid bases of raw materials, thereby building up an all embracing economic system in which every branch is structurally interrelated so as to provide domestically most of the products of heavy and light industry and the agricultural produce needed to make the country wealthy and powerful and to improve the people's living conditions."

            Instead of trying to strike free-trade deals with countries such as the USA (who will only exploit and plunder Britain through so-called ‘free trade’) and lowering wages in order to be 'competitive', Britain could take on board the Juche idea, the line of self-reliance, and build an independent national economy like the DPRK.

              The example of Juche-based socialism, which is the fruit of the leadership and teachings of the great leader Kim Il Sung, is an inspiration to the people of Britain in their fight for socialism. Democratic Korea has provided people with the right to work, housing is provided at a very low cost or even totally free (one could only sigh when you contrast this to the recent headline about house prices in London going up even faster). Education is also free up to all levels, including university and post-graduate study. School clothes and other things for children are either free or sold at 50 per cent of cost price. Mothers with more than three children can work a six-hour day but be paid for eight hours. The retirement age is 60 for men and 55 for women. Taxation, including local autonomy tax, was abolished in 1974.

            Free medical care was introduced in 1953 and buttressed by further legalisation in 1960 and 1980. All treatment including medicine is free and the state even pays travelling expenses to the sanatorium!

Such measures have not been taken in all socialist countries nor in rich countries, but have been taken in the DPRK because of the profound concern of the great leader comrade Kim Il Sung for the people and the belief that the country should shoulder full responsibility for the destiny and well-being of the people. President Kim Il Sung made sure that improvement of the people’s living standards was enshrined in the principles of both the Workers Party of Korea and the DPRK. Juche Korea became the model of socialism for the world, including Britain.

            Lastly, President Kim Il Sung always supported the struggle of the working people of the capitalist countries, including Britain, for their rights and for socialism. In 1983, for example, he declared: "firm solidarity with the working classes and peoples in the capitalist countries battling against oppression and exploitation by capital."

            At a time when many British progressives and communists had lost heart because of the overthrow of socialism in the USSR and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe, the DPRK stuck to the socialist road, showing that socialism was alive and not dead!

President Kim Il Sung met with a delegation of the New Communist Party of Britain in 1990 and also with a delegation of the Communist Party of Britain at a later date, as well as a leading British social scientist. Twenty-five years ago on the 20^th April, 1992 President Kim Il Sung unveiled the Pyongyang Declaration: Let Us Defend and Advance the Cause of Socialism, which was adopted by 70 parties. Now over 258 parties, including five British communist parties, have endorsed it.

            In conclusion, the revolutionary activities and teachings of the great leader comrade Kim Il Sung are vitally relevant to British people today. The Juche idea authored by comrade Kim Il Sung lights the road of independence for the British people.

The Victory of the Korean People

Statement from the New Communist Party of Britain

25th July 2009



On 27th July 1953 the guns fell silent on the Korean peninsula. US imperialism and its lackeys had been defeated. The Korean people, led by Kim Il Sung and the Workers Party of Korea, had preserved the independence of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and forced the greatest imperialist country in the world to the armistice table.
The heroism of the Korean People’s Army and the Korean people had beaten off the might of US imperialism and its satellites.
The imperialists had hoped to smash Korean socialism in 1950. Their legions believed that carpet bombing and terror would crush the spirit of the Korean revolution that had liberated the country from Japanese colonialism. They were proved wrong.
American imperialism. flying the false flag of the United Nations, believed that Democratic Korea could be isolated and crushed. But the socialist world rallied to assist the Korean people in their just struggle. The Korean people did not stand alone. The Chinese Volunteers and the assistance from the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies of eastern Europe was a concrete demonstration of proletarian internationalism while the peace movement across the world, not least in Britain and the United States, exposed the crimes of the imperialists and mobilised world public opinion to end the war.
But the consequences of the Korean war remain unresolved. Though the Americans had pledged to end the partition of Korea to end the fighting Korea remains cruelly divided and the DPR Korea continues to be subjected to a US embargo in breach of international law.
Throughout his life Kim Il Sung worked tirelessly to fulfil the dream of the entire Korean nation for the peaceful re-unification of the country. His proposal for a reunified Confederal Democratic Republic of Koryo based on the principle of “one country/two systems” remains on the table. Korean leader Kim Jong Il has striven to normalise relations with the south Korean authorities to end tension on the peninsula and pave the way to reunification.
All these efforts have been thwarted by US imperialism that seeks to retain south Korea as a protectorate and military base as part of their efforts to dominate the region. Americans imperialism reneged on their commitments forcing the DPR Korea to resume its nuclear research. American imperialism stepped up its military threats and economic blockade forcing the DPR Korea to develop and test its own independent nuclear deterrent.
Now US imperialism stands isolated and exposed. The DPR Korea has stood firm breaking the diplomatic and economic embargo in the 1990s and the people have closed ranks around the Workers Party of Korea with renewed determination to defend their independence and socialist system.
Today communists throughout the world join their Korean comrades in reflection on the anniversary of the victory of the Fatherland Liberation War to pay tribute to the sacrifice made by the generations before us in the struggle for socialism and the emancipation of the working class.





Andy Brooks
General Secretary
New Communist Party of Britain

Kim Il Sung: a life dedicated to the people

by Andy Brooks - General Secretary NCP

IT HAS LONG BEEN a Marxist tradition to elevate the lives of comrades whose daily work was an example to others, developed and advanced Marxist-Leninist theory or led the struggle for liberation. Kim Il Sung was all of these. A fighter, a thinker and a leader, Kim Il Sung was an outstanding communist of the 20th century whose name will forever be remembered as the founder of the modern Korean communist movement that began amongst the patriotic youth of Korea when he was a student in the 1920s.

Kim Il Sung was born into a world dominated by the great colonial powers of Europe, the United States and Japan. In Korea the old feudal rulers had been ousted by the Japanese imperialists and the peninsula turned into a colony of Japan.

Wherever there is oppression there is always resistance and Korean patriots tried to fight-back in whichever way they could. Some nationalists, those representing the landowners and bourgeois elements looked to Nationalist China and America for help. Others were inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

In the 1920s the Korean communist movement was riddled with divisions that had left them isolated from the masses. Kim Il Sung condemned those who simply hoped to rely on outside forces or those who strove for the recognition of others, as a disgrace to the Korean nation.

Kim Il Sung saw the uselessness of the sectarians, flunkeyists, dogmatists and factionalists who called themselves communists in the 1920s. So he decided to form a communist movement from the youth and the grassroots of the villages and factories.

Kim Il Sung stressed that a revolutionary movement was not something to carry on with the approval of others but a work to be done out of one’s own conviction. Problems should be solved by oneself, he said, and only when the struggle was waged well would others recognise it.

In words as relevant today as when they were written Kim Il Sung said: “Factionalism is a product of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideologies, particularly of self-heroising, fame-seeking and careerism. It has nothing in common with the revolutionary ideas of the working class”.From student leader to guerrilla commander Kim Il Sung grasped the fundamental principles of Marxism and applied the lessons of the Great October Russian Revolution to the concrete conditions of the Korean people, who were slaves of the Japanese Empire. The “Young General”, as he soon was called, gathered a group of young communist men and women prepared to take on the might of the Japanese army.

Over the years that small band of heroes grew into a people’s army that humbled the Imperial Japanese Army in 1945 – a victory that led to the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And it was that People’s Army that fought US imperialism and its lackeys to a standstill during the Korean war and forced the American imperialists on their knees begging for an armistice in 1953.

Kim Il Sung was a great commander in war and a great leader in peace. In the north of Korea, so brutally partitioned by imperialism, he built a modern communist movement dedicated to serving the working people of Korea and he led the people in the mass struggle to build a new life after they had won their freedom in 1945.

The Workers Party of Korea with Kim Il Sung at the helm led the battle for land reform, education and socialist construction in the 1950s and 60s and then pushed forward on the engineering, technical and scientific fronts to build a modern socialist republic where every individual worker is master of his or her own life.

In western Europe communists understood the economic case for scientific socialism but ignored the philosophical aspects of the teachings of Marx and Engels. Though the role of mass action was clearly understood, the role of the individual was often ignored. Though the achievements of the Soviet Union led by Lenin and Stalin were studied, they were often not properly understood.

Kim Il Sung not only grasped Marxism-Leninism but he applied it to the concrete conditions of the Korean people. He knew that once the masses realised their own strength they would become unstoppable. He knew that serving the people was the be-all and end-all for the Korean communists and for the Workers’ Party of Korea that he launched in 1945. He developed Korean style socialism into the Juché idea – which elevates the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism as well as its economic theories – and focuses on the development of each individual worker, who can only be truly free as part of the collective will of the masses. In the western world Juché is simply described as “self-reliance” but it is much more than that. Kim Il Sung said that working people could only become genuinely emancipated if they stood on their own feet. But the Juché idea doesn’t negate proletarian internationalism. The Soviet Union, People’s China and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe all closed ranks behind Democratic Korea during the Korean war. The Korean people responded with their trade and assistance whenever they could, while Korean experts and advisers helped the Vietnamese, the Arabs and the Africans struggling to break the chains of colonialism and continue to do so today.

In the world communist movement Kim Il Sung steered a careful path during the Sino-Soviet ideological conflict remaining on good terms with the Soviet and Chinese parties.

Unlike British communist leaders in the past, and indeed many others in Europe and beyond, Kim Il Sung stressed that Marxism-Leninism goes far beyond simple economic formulas and the Soviet “model”.

Kim Il Sung knew that material prosperity and ideological strength were of equal importance to the people. He called this the twin towers. Though both couldn’t advance simultaneously, when progress in one was made the other had to be advanced to catch up.

This was pointed out by Stalin in the 1930s when he told Soviet shock workers, the Stakhanovites, that working people had benefited concretely from the revolution. All previous revolutions had failed but: “Our proletarian revolution is the only revolution in the world which had the opportunity of showing the people not only the political results but also material results” Stalin declared.

“It is a good thing, of course, to drive out the capitalists, to drive out the landlords, to drive out the Czarist henchmen, to seize power and achieve freedom. That is very good. But unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone. In order to live well and joyously, the benefits of political freedom must be supplemented by material benefits”. Stalin said.

But Stalin’s revisionist successors abandoned the ideological tower and failed to even maintain the material benefits for the Soviet masses.

And after the counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and the eastern European socialist countries, an enormous setback for communism globally, when parties were becoming demoralised and failing around the world, Kim Il Sung stopped the rot by summoning a global conference of communist and workers’ parties in Pyongyang in 1992.

When Kim Il Sung passed away his successor, Kim Jong Il, told the Korean people and the world that they could “expect no change from him” and with Kim Jong Il at the helm, the Workers’ Party of Korea has won great victories in recent years. Natural disasters have been overcome.

Diplomatic isolation has been broken, the intrigues of US imperialism have been exposed and Korean rockets reach for the stars.

Kim Il Sung, the great leader of the Korean revolution, died in 1994 but his work lives on in the Workers’ Party of Korea and in the colossal achievements of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea today.