Worldwide ‘Red Age’ and Colonial-era Korea An Attempt at Meta-historical Analysis

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The present article is an attempt at a meta-historical analysis of the ‘Red Age’

(1923 to the late 1930s) experiences in colonial-period Korea. The article focuses on contextualizing the experiences of colonial-age Korea’s Communist movement internationally and distinguishing these traits of this movement which are definable as universal. As this article argues, in the wider historical context the

‘Red Age’ Communist movements, the Korean one included, fought, in the end, for deeper democratization of the existing world- system on the social and cultural levels. These movements―usually led by revolutionary intelligentsia and staffed on middle- and lower-cadre level by the cadres of working-class origins―had the evolving Party-state in early Soviet Union as their model of the desirable future.

They saw an overtake of the industrial economy by a revolutionary state as the

‘transition to socialism,’ hoping, on more practical levels, that revolutionary nationalizations and dirigiste economic policies would provide more space for underprivileged majority’s social and cultural advancement. While the Party-state would eschew the orthodox parliamentarism, its workings were supposed to bring forth a more equitable society. Despite the gaps between the ‘Red Age’

Communist dreams and the realities of historical Party-states, the movement played an important role in laying the foundations for the postwar changes, in Korea and elsewhere.

마르크스주의 연구 영어 논문

Worldwide ‘Red Age’ and Colonial-era Korea

An Attempt at Meta-historical Analysis*^{1 8 )} Vladimir Tikhonov(Park Noja)**¹⁹⁾

* This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF-2018S1A3A2075204).

** Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.26587/marx.17.2.202005.006

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Keywords: Communism, Korean Communist Party, ‘Red Wave’, ‘Red Age’, Comintern, Soviet Union.

1. 1919: A Year of a Global Rebellion

There was hardly any one single year which changed the trajectory of Korea’s modern history as much as 1919, the year of the momentous pro-independence demonstrations which engulfed the whole of the country for several weeks after March 1. The demonstrations claimed perhaps as many as several thousand lives (the exact figures are disputed) involving hundreds of thousands of active participants and ushering Korea into a qualitatively new age. ‘Modernity’ is ambiguous term with multiple meanings. However, if we regard the birth of the mass participatory politics as the hallmark of in- cipience of the modern body politic, then 1919 is doubtless the year when modern mass society took a definite shape in the country. True, the Independence Club (Tongnip Hyŏphoe) was experimenting with mass politics of street meetings already in 1896-98, but then, the participating was mainly limited to the male residents of the Korean capital (today’s Seoul), predominantly literate middle- and upper-classes. By contrast, the pan-national dem- onstration crowds of 1919 prominently featured women, adolescents, still discriminated former outcasts (butchers-paekchǒng etc.) and pretty much everybody else―excluding a relatively tiny elite stratum bound by the established patterns of collaboration with the colonizers. The ‘people,’ the quintessential actor of mass politics, were born (Kim, 2019: 59~99).

Why did it happen to be 1919? At that conjuncture, the development of the internal events overlapped with a gigantic global flow: Korea, a colonial backwater of the dynamically developing Japanese Empire, was, its relative

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obscurity notwithstanding, already a part of the globally synchronized events on the worldwide scene. Domestically, the discontent has been accumulating since the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910, bringing together otherwise rather heterogeneous elements, a diverse array of social and religious groups.

While the peasants had all the reasons to dislike the relative worsening of land tenancy conditions, even some landlords and richer merchants, interested in diversifying into industrial investments, were appalled by the colonial restrictions on the local commercial initiative. Fledgling urban middle classes were desperate over the tangible lack of progressive modern developments, Protestant Christians resented the restrictions on religious instruction at the private missionary schools, and the adepts of native Ch´ŏndogyo faith wanted their denomination to be recognized as a proper ‘religion’ (something which the colonial authorities had been persistently refusing so far, defining it as a ‘quasi-religion’ instead). In addition, everybody classified as ‘Korean’

by the colonial administration had good grounds to resent the discrimination which such a classification was implying. Colonial discrimination was su- perbly instrumental in making a ‘people’ a self-conscious subject of history (Kim, Yi and Yi, 2016: 93~111).

On the other hand, globally 1919 was a year of global rebellion, even more so than 1968 when ‘rebellions’ in the centres of capitalist world-system sym- bolically attacked the logic of for-profit production, capital accumulation and mass consumption in the public space but hardly threatened the very ex- istence of the capitalist system in earnest (Vinen, 2019: 1~25, 297~315). In 1919, after the hecatombs of the Great War and amidst the post-war depression, there was indeed a tangible, palpable feeling that the whole system is just a step away from the final, last implosion. It imploded in Russia, the war-ravaged “weakest link” (Lenin) of world capitalism’s global chain, a country with great power ambitions and peripheral, largely dependent, under- developed industrial economy. The waves of radicalization, however, were

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engulfing even the core regions of the capitalist world-system in hitherto unprecedented ways. In defeated Germany―the state which had been emerging as the industrial powerhouse of Europe before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914―Saxony, Bremen and, famously, Bavaria (Munich) saw the attempts to create Socialist (or workers councils-ruled) republics.

Even after the radical outbreaks of 1918 and 1919 were crushed, the workers’ rising continued in the most industrially developed parts of Germany, such as Ruhr or Hamburg (1923) (Broué, 2005: 227~261, 421~449, 491~505, 709~817; Tilly, 1993: 218~233).

Similar events were simultaneously taking place on Europe’s still predominantly agricultural periphery, from Limerick in Ireland to Budapest in Hungary: both places witnessed attempts to established Soviet republics, and the latter ended in large-scale violence which subsequently defined much of Hungary’s pre-Second World War history. Concurrently, hitherto unprecedented simultaneous turbulence appeared throughout the colonial and semi-colonial peripheries of the European capitalist oikumene: 1919 only saw revolutionary events shattering the British dominance in Egypt, chal- lenging British colonial rule in India and waking up popular anti-imperialist nationalism in China (‘May Fourth movement’). It was the latter wave of the post-war anticolonial risings that the seminal events of March 1919 in Korea may be justifiably considered a part of.¹⁾ The task of the present paper is thus to put the events which followed the global uprisings of 1919 in Korea

―namely, the formation of the underground Communist Party (1925) on the basis of the communist groups which existed since the early 1920s, and the consequent two decades of communist militancy and Marxist propagandist and intellectual vigour―into the world-historical context. I will attempt to

1) See a bibliography on the international responses to Russian Revolution in Smele(Smele, 2003: 215~250).

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define what was universal in Korea’s particular experience of the communist revolutionary activities and in the worldviews of Korean Communism’s main protagonists, and to analyse the long-term implication of the Communist struggles and appropriation of Marxist ideas in Korea. I will demonstrate that Korean Communists’ ultimate ideal, a Soviet-type Party-state, was seen as a tool of radical socio-cultural equalization, and was hoped to bring forth a status uplift for colonial society’s underprivileged. In connection with this ideal, I will describe the Korean Communist modus op- erandi inside the framework of the permanent ‘state of emergency’ and dis- cuss its implications, including wide acceptance of supposedly ‘licit’ violence by a revolutionary state and institutionalized ‘spy’ paranoia. I will also demonstrate that time-honoured communist belief in the importance of the

‘democratic revolution’ as the first stage on the way to the triumph of the nationalized dirigiste economy (‘socialism’) laid an important foundation for South Korean socialist Left’s active participation in the epic pro-democracy struggles of the 1960~1980s. Additionally, I will emphasize the intellectual contributions of interbellum Korean Marxism, especially its successful attempts to de-essentialize the notion of ‘Korean-ness’ or ‘Korean national culture.’ All in all, I hope that this article will contribute to a new apprecia- tion of colonial-age Korean Communism’s long-term importance for Korea’s twentieth century and its crowning achievements, such as institutional democratization and the development of anti-hegemonic civil society in South Korea.

2. The 1919~1923 ‘Red Wave’: The Main Characteristics

If we attempt to go beyond the conventional and insufficiently analytical, ster- eotypic definitions of ‘socialist/communist risings’ or ‘anti-colonial struggle,’

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what were the main essential features of the post-First World War global

‘Red Wave’―that is, a series of Socialist uprisings and other forms of workers’ militancy in the core and simultaneous anti-colonial risings on the periphery of the capitalist world-system? First, the struggles were mostly led by coalitions of radical intelligentsia with what one can term the most

‘advanced’ layers of the broader plebeian ‘masses’―for the societies with at least rudimentary level of industrialization it usually meant urban, literate, organized and not necessarily abjectly poor skilled factory workers.

Typically for Europe’s predominantly agrarian periphery―the category under which Russia too could be subsumed―the 1919 Hungarian Revolution had its centre in Budapest’s giant factories: 50 per cent of whatever industry Hungary had was concentrated there, and 37,7 per cent of the total work- force was to be found in the large plants with more than 500 workers. By contrast, the countryside remained mostly either neutral or even hostile towards the revolutionary events (Janos, 1982: 149~201). In Korea’s case, the most active participants in March 1919 events on the ground were Protestant lay folks, predominantly literate, well-organized and often better aware about the international events. Among the 7,835 Koreans detained by the Japanese police as major ‘sedition’ suspects during the turbulent March-June of 1919, 22 per cent were Protestants, although at that point, Protestant be- lievers constituted only ca. 1,3 per cent of Korea’s population (Park, 2003:

135).

Second, the events were supposed to herald both a shift of the elites in control and a shift in the mode of industrial economy’s organization.

‘Proletarian dictatorship’ and other slogans of similar kind in post-war Europe usually signified the shift of power from the entrenched, aristocratic or/and patrician elites to the radical intellectuals as well as the cadres of labour militants, often with experience of political party or union organizational work. While ‘proletariat’ was hardly in position to assume

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‘hegemonic’ position which the radicals tended to assign to it, the relative

‘plebeization’ of political power undoubtedly had a democratizing effect, bring in its wake a huge wave of upward social mobility in such societies as post-revolutionary Russia where the radicals managed to cling to power. The sight of vydvizhentsy (promotees), the Communist recruits from the rank of workers and peasants, who, after some schooling, were entrusted with a number of power positions in Soviet Union (Brovkin, 2005: 51), was indeed inspiring for the radicals throughout the world. Concurrently, the realm of political was to take precedence over the realm of the economical, with the revolutionaries aspiring to take over much of the industrial economy and fi- nance―a move which looked natural and logic given the experience of the state control over the economies of the First World War belligerents in 1914-18. As politically controlled, bureaucratically administrated economy was already a lived experience, the plebeian radicals wanted the shifted to be completed, with ownership rights taken away from the industrialists, labour de-commodified and surplus value redistributed in the ways which would enable the factory ‘hands’ to achieve the levels of cultural capital or health previously associated mostly with middle-class professionals.

If implemented, the measures desired by the radicals of the ‘Red Wave’

would have amounted to a major ‘class uplift’ for previously underprivileged groups and an essential re-calibration of industrial economy from a com- petitive profit maximization to fulfilment of the political objectives dictated by a mass movement from below (Fitzpatrick, 2008: 87~93, 107~119, 130~135, 141~149). In a word, mass politics were to triumph over markets.

On the colonized periphery, in Korea and elsewhere, it was, quite naturally, the recovery of national sovereignty that constituted the main demand: at the same time, it is important to remember that, unlike many independence movement groups of the 1910s which aimed for the restauration of the old Korean monarchy, the Shanghai Provisional Government (Sanghae Imsi Chǒ

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ngbu), organized in the wake of March 1 movement in exile, with initial participation by some early socialist leaders, proclaimed Korea a democratic republic (Wells, 1990: 101). On the world-systemic periphery too, democratization was one of the most central demands of the ‘Red Wave.’

Third, and particularly important, was the combined, complex nature of the democratization demands presented by the post-First World War ‘Red Wave.’ Economic democratization, with mass-based politics conquering the corridors of power and taking over the industrial production, was central but it was only a part of a huge stream of emancipatory demands from below.

Women, who took a very active part in overthrowing Tsarist authorities in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in February 1917, were an object of special attention for the Bolshevik propagandists even before the October 1917 revolution and given voting rights by the Bolshevik government (Rabinowitch, 2007: 62~65, 265); in March 1919 events in Korea, women played a very visible part breaking away with the centuries-old patriarchal norms (Katsiaficas, 2012: 45). Minorities of all sorts were empowered, and not only ethnic minorities: in March 1919 Korea, the butchers (paekchǒng), previously a hereditary low-status group, still de facto discriminated even under the supposedly ‘modernizing’ colonial rule, were actively participating in the demonstrations and launched a liberation movement of their own soon there- after (Kim, 2003: 37~68). Conservative sexual norms were shaken to the ground, as Bolsheviks decriminalized homosexuality and even allowed some of the first-ever gay marriages in Europe’s modern history (Healey, 2001:

100~125). Early Soviet schools not only prohibited all forms of physical punishment but also introduced elements of self-rule for the pupils and es- chewed the evaluation through grades as inherently authoritarian and foster- ing competition instead of collaboration (Rosenberg, 1990: 32~33). In a word, one can say that, in a global historical context, the post-First World War ‘Red Wave’ signalled the advent of the second wave of democratization

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―the first wave being represented by the democratic revolutions and liberal movements in late eighteenth-early nineteenth century Europe and North America. Of course, these demands were articulated in divergent ways inside the different global zones. In colonies, Korea included, the political demands had to be prioritized, while in the world-systemic core, the priority was a radical redistribution of both wealth and social statuses. It is important, however, that in 1919-1923 these demands from different zones of world economy for the first time were formulated together as parts of the single

‘package’ aimed at comprehensive global transformation (Losurdo, 2020:

288~297). Such a global ‘synchronization,’ and centre-periphery cooperation of the kind worldwide Communist movement represented, were novelties:

nothing like this ever occurred before, for example, during the pan-European (but not global) revolutionary wave in 1848.

3. The ‘Red Age,’ 1923 to the Late 1930s: The Essential Traits

By ca 1923~1924 the peak of the worldwide rage was decidedly over. The situation was somewhat different in colonial Korea where, while the flares of the mass movement somewhat calmed down after 1919, the radicalization of the educated society an organized labour was still following an upward curve. In April 1922, following a socialist-led campaign against honouring a deceased moderate luminary, Kim Yunsik (1835~1922), with a funeral by civil society representatives and the decisive parting of the ways between Seoul faction radicals and their erstwhile moderate nationalist allies who stood now accused of misappropriating Soviet financing, Seoul faction established itself as more or less purely socialist grouping, with Seoul Youth League as its legal front (Yi, 2003: 200~209). This and other groups of radicals, mostly former nationalists themselves, were attempting to prepare the

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grounds for establishing a proper underground Communist Party in Korea.

In most larger countries, however, it seemed as if a return to a ‘normal,’ of sorts, was taking place. On the surface, the global capitalism and global inter-state system stabilized, the “Red Wave” transforming itself into the legendary “roaring 1920s.” In Germany, the hoped-for potential ‘locomotive’ of the European revolution, both ultra-right-wing putsch and Communist upris- ing attempts failed in 1923, ushering Weimer Republic into a short period of relative calm afterwards (Kolb, 2004: 53~85). In India, world’s most pop- ulous colony, Non-cooperation Movement was suspended in 1922 following the violent clashes (‘incident’) in Chauri Chaura (Amin, 2005: 8~18): the anti-colonial onslaught of the early 1920s was now over. China, the largest for- mally independent state of the world periphery, saw its nascent industrial economy booming amidst the political decentralization (“warlordism”). It was helped both by wartime demand in 1914~1918 and by the foreign goods boycotts following the anti-imperialist upsurge of 1919 (‘May Fourth movement’) (Fenby, 2013: 142~156). Already by 1919, China had estimated 1,5 million industrial workers (Chesneaux, 1968: 42) whose radicalism throughout the 1920s provided inspiration to neighbouring Korea’s radicals. In a world, there was a feeling by the 1920s that the world managed to return to a semblance of pre-1914 prosperity. Indeed, in the world-systemic core notice- able progress was palpable. By 1929 France, for example, boasted the per capita income a one-fifth higher than in 1914, and ca 50 per cent increase in exports compared to the last pre-war year (Kershaw, 2016: 153).

The ‘stability,’ however, was highly deceptive. Neither the 1919 Versailles Peace nor post-war policies of major states did anything to solve the root causes of the 1919~1923 ‘Red Wave.’ Except for a few cases, mostly in Europe (Iceland in 1918, Ireland in 1922, and a number of former pos- sessions of Russia and the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire), colonies mostly remained colonies: Korea, for example, was allowed some space for

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economic and cultural development as well as social organization (‘culture policy’), but nothing more than that (Robinson, 1988: 78~106). The inter-state system remained strictly hierarchical even outside of the colonized parts of the world: the loser states of the First World War, principally Germany, were suffering the burden of reparations (McElligot, 2009:

50~52), while China and some other peripheral states were still struggling for the removal of humiliating ‘unequal treaties’ (Wang, 2005: 66~76).

Universal suffrage including even the most destitute categories of the workers (but still excluding women in many countries, notably France and Japan) was increasingly becoming an accepted international norm, but even if the workers gained political citizenship in democratic or semi-democratic states, their social citizenship still remained an elusive dream. Social housing programs in post-war Europe (‘council houses’ in Great Britain and similar programs in Germany or the Austrian capital of Vienna) or unemployment in- surance were making their first steps, but welfare state development was still at a rudimentary stage even in the world-systemic core areas, not to speak about the periphery or colonies, Korea and others. With no significant steps towards any essential amelioration of the national and social tensions, it was hardly possible to expect that the 1919-1923 ‘Red Wave’ would disappear into thin air. Indeed, it rather transmogrified into the ‘Red Age’―the period of heightened anti-capitalist militancy in the core of the world-system, combined with the upsurge of radicalized anti-colonial movements on the periphery. ‘Red Age,’ marked by such momentous events as the failed Socialist revolution in Germany in 1923, creation of the first-ever Communist quasi-state in China (Jiangxi Soviet Republic) in 1931, or Spanish Civil War in 1936~1939, encompasses much of the interbellum period, all the way until the eruption of the new general war between 1937 and 1939. It was this ‘Red Age’ that provided the backdrop for Korea’s socialist movement of the 1920~1930s the topic of the present article.

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There were radicals before the ‘Red Age’ of 1923~1937, and there were outbursts of political radicalism after that. Three special traits, however, dis- tinguish the interbellum Communism radicalism. First, never before and never after this period the mainstream radical parties of the whole world― some of them with genuine support among the broad layers of the underprivileged―were moved from a single centre. Of course, as the researchers of the interbellum Communist movement know very well, neither Comintern (1919~1943)―the Moscow-headquartered global Communist ‘chief of staff’―nor its affiliates around the globe were in reality particularly monolithic.²⁾ As I demonstrated elsewhere (Tikhonov, 2018a), it was not the case in such faction-ridden movement as the Korean one either. However, as Eric Hobsbawm has persuasively argued, Comintern managed to establish something quite close to a monopoly on the Marxism-derived radicalism:

“nobody else within sight offered both to interpret the world and to change it, or looked better able to do so” (Hobsbawm, 1996: 75). In fact, the case of Comintern monopoly was clearer in 1920~1930s Korea compared to other East Asian countries: unlike China or Vietnam, Korea had no sizeable Trotskist movement, and unlike Japan (Gordon, 1991: 206~236), it did not develop any social democratic movement to speak of (it first emerged in 1950s South Korea, in the form of the Progressive Party).³⁾ Unlike China, where Communists could throughout the 1930s construct their independent quasi-states, first in Jiangxi Province and subsequently around their ‘red capital’ of Yan’an, and therefore possessed some taxable economic basis (Pantsov, 2007: 332~475), Korean Communists were numerically small un-

2) On the case of early Japanese Communists and their complicated relations with Comintern, for example, see Linkhoeva(Linkhoeva, 2020: 159~185).

3) On the history of socialist and social democratic parties in South Korea since the 1950s, see Cho(Cho, 2009).

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derground groups which often had to count on the support from the outside.

Unless one takes non-Marxist anarchists into the consideration, Comintern orthodoxy experienced little competition in interbellum Korea, both organizationally and intellectually.

Second, the ‘Red Age’ was the golden age of Leninist ‘new type’ parties

―centralized organizations being members of which implied not simply payment of duties, voting or agreeing with party’s platform, but, primarily, activism, even at possible risk for one’s life. Indeed, given the basic impossi- bility of any legal anti-colonial movement in colonial-era Korea, an underground Leninist party or an underground group aiming ay building such a party were perhaps the best-suited vehicles for the anti-establishment radicalism on the Korean Peninsula in the 1920~1930s. Just as Comintern was hardly a ‘global monolith’ imagined both by some of its supporters and its antagonists, Leninist parties did not have to be dictatorial conspiracies of the type so often denounced in Cold War-era anti-Communist scholarship. As 1 attempted to demonstrate elsewhere (Tikhonov, 2018a), Korean Communism developed a vibrant culture of intra-party discussion and self-reflection: critical attitude towards one’s own work and that of the others was as demanded from the Korean Communists as the preparedness to sacrifice oneself for the common cause. Communist Party, even an underground one, was an essen- tially public organization, with detailed and publicly announced pro- grammatic documents, as well as a complex set of organizational rules and by-rules for internal use (Tikhonov and Lim, 2017). At the same time, the culture of debates, self-reflection and criticism was supposed, in the end, to strengthen the cohesion and discipline rather than to weaken it.

Intellectually, the discipline was based on the shared loyalty to Comintern’s ideology and its instructions―the latter could be, and were interpreted in different ways, but were not supposed to be openly opposed.

Organizationally, both the underground Korean party when it existed as a

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Comintern affiliate (1925 to 1928) and the Communist groups aiming at (re-)building the party, were vertically structured, with internationally con- nected, multilingual and better educated activists of middle- or upper-class background on the top and ‘workers and peasants’ supposed to be led and enlightened by their betters in movement’s ranks below them.⁴⁾ Unlike the Chinese Communist Party of the 1930s, however, Korean Communists almost never developed a full-blown armed structure subordinated to the party, the ‘red’ Manchurian guerrilla groups of the 1930s being perhaps one rare exception (Armstrong, 1995). Korean Communist Party and motley Communist groups remained civil organizations, often led by people pro- fessionally accustomed to working in the emerging modern public sphere, such as journalists: Pak Hǒnyǒng (1900~1956), one of the founders of the underground Korean Communist Party in 1925 and then an important post-1945 political actor, was, typically, originally a journalist (Im, 2004:

100~102). Hierarchically structured as it was, the Communist movement was of enormous importance to its rank-and-file participants providing them with an opportunity to put their local struggles into global context and to articulate their demands and experience in a language of ‘theory,’ however vulgarized this theory could be. Indeed, in Korea as elsewhere, ‘Red Age’

brought further democratization of the politics.

Third, the ‘new type’ parties of the ‘Red Age’ started to create a qualitatively new type of the state―the Party-states. The Leninist parties, as Eric Hobsbawm powerfully argues, belonged rather to the Jacobin tradition of the belief into a disciplined organization of enlightened revolutionaries working on people’s behalf than to the tradition of social democratic working-class organization in more liberal and democratic parts of pre-1914 Europe, in which the organizational forms were much looser and more de-

4) On the social backgrounds of colonial-age Communists, see Chǒn(Chǒn, 2004).

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centralized (Hobsbawm, 1996: 385~390). A Leftist Party-state, unlike

‘mainstream’ Western European social democratic parties or unions, was not supposed to be primarily a tool for working-class efforts for improving its socio-economic position: indeed, when it comes to the matters of per capita income per se in real, purchasing power-based terms, the average Soviet worker was hardly better off in the late 1930s compared to the late 1920s (Fitzpatrick, 1999: 40~66). The Party-state was, in principle, committed to providing the basic subsistence to the ‘masses’ it was to ‘lead,’ but even this commitment could not always be honoured amidst the world-historical up- heavals of the interbellum world. However, even if it was divorced from any meaningful electoral procedures and not subject to any form of voters’ control (or any other checks on its power), the Party-state was still committed to democratization in a broader social, economic and cultural meaning of the world. Its plebeian support base as well as its activists, mostly workers and peasants themselves on their way to better positions to be secured by Party membership card and the educational opportunities the Party was providing, genuinely wanted the modern industrial economy to develop (and give themselves more opportunities to climb to the managerial roles there), modern education to blossom (and give their former village neighbours, relatives and friends some opportunities for status mobility) and modern culture to spread around to these who hardly could enjoy its fruits in the past (Fitzpatrick, 2008: 130~148). As mass consumption was starting to change the societal landscape in the core areas of the world system during the ‘roaring 1920s,’

the Soviet-type Party-state and the tangible improvements in the cultural or educational lives of the former plebeians of Tsarist empire was inspiring the revolutionaries of the periphery, Koreans included. Koreans were inspired to see Soviet workers queueing at the doors of the Bolshoi Theatre in 1920s Moscow (Tikhonov, 2017), and peasant women empowered and promoted to leadership roles in the Communist-controlled ‘liberated areas’ of war-torn

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China in 1945 (Tikhonov, 2018b). In fact, gender empowerment, an important point on the Soviet or Chinese Communist agenda, was also among the crucially central promises of the colonial-age Korean Communists and their fellow-travellers: much of ‘proletarian literature’ from 1920s-1930s Korea deals with female workers’ struggles against their managers’ sexual predations (Barraclough, 2006), a topical issue even in our days. On the world-systemic periphery, where one hardly could expect parliamentary procedures working or consumerist abundance forthcoming, Communist-style drastic measures for ‘illiteracy liquidation,’ ‘women liberation’ or ‘cultural level improvement’ could indeed be a beacon of hope, and not only for the hardcore adepts of the Communist cause.

4. The ‘Red Age’: The ‘State of Emergency’ as a Basic Norm

One point must be emphasized before we proceed any further. While radicalism as such is a long-term, persistent tradition which lives on in our own days, the basic system of coordinates inside which the ‘Red Age’ radicals had to chart their way forward was as different from contemporary radicals’

lived experiences as interbellum capitalism or inter-state system were different from today’s late capitalist realities. At a very general level, it may be said that the interbellum world was more oppressive vis-à-vis the radical

‘subversives’ and exhibited much less willingness to integrate the radical fringes into the societal mainstream compared to, say, post-war core regions of the capitalist world-system. Even supposedly democratic states where political radicalism was in principle legal often did not shun from the re- pression on the scale which would be uncharacteristic for post-war Western Europe or North America. While mostly forgotten today due to the enormity of violence which engulfed Germany, Europe and the whole world several

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years later, ‘Bloody May’ (Blutmai) of 1929 when Berlin police― under Social Democratic leadership!―shot and killed ca thirty unarmed civilians as part of its military-style suppression of the Communist May First marches was a hotly debated event in late 1920s-early 1930s world. It made clear how powerful was the position of deeply authoritarian instruments of state coercion even in supposedly liberal-democratic Weimar Germany, and how far even a moderate labour party, Social Democrats, could go to smother down the radical dissent (Bowlby, 1986).

As naked violence was visibly more prominent than systemic integration in many states’ responses to radicalism, the radicals, especially in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, had to militarize themselves. Typically, German Communist Party kept its own para-military wing, Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front Fighters), which numbered almost 130 thousand by 1929. Aside from its own ‘army,’ German Communists also ran their own intelligence service and terror units in 1923 when they were attempting―in vain, as it turned―to organize a revolution in Germany (Fowkes, 1984: 103). Confronting a violent state, the radicals had to build up the apparatus of supposedly ‘just’ and ‘licit’ violence of their own. This ne- cessity was even more pronounced in more repressive states, or in the wartime situations in which any politics, by definition, had to be militarized.

The only military wing of interbellum and wartime Korean Communism were the armed guerrilla groups operating on Chinese territory. No wonder a quintessential civilian urban radical, writer Kim Saryang (1914~1950), ad- mired the Korean radical militants fighting in China so much, the legendary Kim Il Sung’s (1912~1994) guerrilla band included (Tikhonov, 2018b).

With the Schmittean ‘state of emergency’ (Ausnahmezustand) being an essential element of politics on both Right and Left,⁵⁾ the interbellum radicals

5) See, for example, Walter Benjamin’s contemporary speculations―from a broadly

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―especially outside the few states where the metropolitan (but not necessarily colonial) radicals were generally tolerated (Britain, France, Scandinavia excluding Finland and very few others)―developed a particular weltan- schauung indeed more reminiscent of the 1793~1794 Jacobins rather than pre-1914 Western European Social Democrats. In the battlefields without uniforms and clear lines between ‘us’ and ‘enemy,’ a paranoiac fear of

‘enemy spies’ or (in case of Soviet Union, the beacon of interbellum radical hopes) ‘hidden counter-revolutionaries,’ ‘wreckers’ and ‘deviationists’ was a fixture of everyday life. It is clear that the ubiquitous paranoia about ‘enemy spies’ was cleverly used by Stalin’s political clan to consolidate and cement its hold on power, culminating in the (at that point, already physical rather than organizational) destruction of any potentially rivalling power loci (military command, heavy industry’s top managers, veteran revolutionaries with independent political weight etc.) during the 1937-8 Great Purges (Kotkin, 2017: 376~378, 383~398, 403~405, 411~416, 440~443). It is also clear that the minorities, especially these who has either their statehood or their main populace based outside, under the control of the presumed inimical forces, were destined to be more vulnerable than the titular majorities surrounding them.

Koreans were the case in the point. The minority Korean militants were targeted by their Chinese comrades-in-arms during the witch-hunt against the presumed supported of the pro-Japanese self-defence group Minsaengdan among the Manchurian Communist guerrillas in 1932~1936 (Han, 1999). In the ensuing 1937, almost two hundred thousand-strong Korean minority in Soviet Union’s Maritime Province was collectively deported to Central Asia, under the spurious pretext of ‘Japanese espionage.’ All in all, ca four thou-

leftist standpoint―on ‘pure’ (‘divine’) violence as a trope for a law-setting revolutionary action (Hamacher, 1994).

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sand ethnic Koreans, mostly cadres, guerrilla veterans or people with (suspected) transborder connections, perished during the Soviet Great Purges (Chang, 2016: 112~167). It must be remembered, however, that, tragically enough, the victims often shared in the worldview of the victimizers.

Moscow-stationed Korean Communist exiles were denouncing each other in strikingly similar-sounding terms, with the Soviet secret police arresting,

‘trying’ and executing both the denouncers and the denounced alike.

Well-known example is Kim Tanya (1901~1938), one of the founders of the underground Korean Communist Party and the Korean Communist Youth League in April 1925. Kim, originally a stalwart of the orthodox Tuesday faction (Im, 2000), was denounced by Yi Sŏngt’ae (1901~1938), a former member of the rival Seoul faction, in a report to the Secret Department (basically, a branch office of the Soviet secret police) of the Comintern Executive, dated by September 28, 1937. Yi (correctly) mentioned that Kim’s natal family could be classified as ‘well-off landowners’

(contrary to Kim’s self-presentation as a scion of middling peasants) and then further proceeded to allege that both Kim himself, his activist, Moscow-educated wife Ko Myŏngja (1904-?) and his Tuesday faction comrades Pak Hŏnyǒng (1900~1956) and Cho Pongam (1889~1959) were Japanese police spies. That was, according to Yi, the reason why Kim came back unscathed from several high-risk undercover missions to Korea proper while so many other Korean militants dispatched back to Korea ended up being apprehended and imprisoned.⁶⁾

6) The FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service) Central Archive, Kim Tanya File, pp.

73~74 (reproduced in Ku-Degai, 2009: 156~158). The personal files for all the Korean revolutionaries who were tried by Soviet authorities are kept in the archives of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the indirect heir to Stalin age’s secret police, NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

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While Yi’s denunciation was most likely false―neither extant Japanese police archives nor any other sources yield any evidences of Kim. Ko, Pak and Cho, all prominent Communist leaders with training from Moscow, ever secretly collaborating with the Japanese police―Kim Tanya was hardly ali- en to the spy witch-hunt himself. In a futile attempt to buttress his reputation with the Soviet authorities, he submitted to the Comintern Executive a longish description of his illegal―undertaken under assumed identity―voyage to Seoul in 1929, offering his explanations regarding the reasons why the Japanese police failed to apprehend him and boasting of his own ‘record’ in denouncing ‘Japanese spies’. Among his own former Tuesday faction comrades whom Kim suspected of possible ‘espionage’ was Yŏ Unhyǒng (1886~1947), one of movement’s veterans and the pioneering translator of the Communist Manifesto into Korean.⁷⁾ In the end, both Yi and Kim were arrested and executed by Stalin’s secret police on the uniform ‘Japanese espionage’ charges; both had their names posthumously cleaned after Stalin’s death. Most of the Korean revolutionary exiles in Moscow ended up falling victim to Stalin’s Great Purges. Pak Hŏnyǒng―who avoided the Stalinist purges since he left Moscow in 1932―was executed as an ‘American spy’

by Kim Il Sung regime, which, since 1953, was also utilizing the wartime

‘spy’ paranoia for consolidating its power and purging all potential challengers (Im, 2004: 462~478). Yŏ Unhyǒng was assassinated in 1947, pre- sumably by a violent right-wing extremist (Deane, 1999: 46~51), Ko Myŏngja presumedly went North and disappeared there during the Korean War (Park, 2013: 980), whereas Cho Pongam was executed in 1959 by South Korean government on trumped-up ‘pro-North Korea espionage’ charges (Brazinsky, 2007: 106), a grim reminder of the ubiquity and severity of both

‘spy’ paranoia and political violence in twentieth-century Korea: neither phe-

7) The FSB Central Archive, Kim Tanya File, pp. 40-55 (ibid, 2009: 116~125).

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nomenon was the exclusive preserve of the political Left.

5. The World Divided between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: ‘Inevitability’ of Coercion, Rationalizations of Violence

With ‘state of emergency’ being largely normalized and turned into permanent condition, both political violence and belief in its inevitability tinged Korean Left’s perception of the outer world. While the full extent of state violence inside Stalin’s USSR was hardly known to the Korean radicals in Korea proper, both Moscow Trials against some of the best-known Bolshevik leaders and the 1937 deportation of Soviet Koreans to Central Asia were all covered in media, both Japanese and vernacular Korean.

Indeed, a popular monthly, Samch’ǒlli, published an extremely detailed report on the forced deportation of Soviet Koreans, which mentioned also the dissolution of the ethnic Korean military units in the Maritime Province and the imprisonment of many Soviet Korean Communist cadres, “whose use value is not considered high by the Soviet authorities any longer.” The report suggested that Soviet authorities might have feared that the presence of strongly nationalist, anti-Japanese ethnic Koreans on the Soviet-Japanese border could provoke Japan and concurrently wanted to remove Soviet Koreans far away from their compatriots in Korean proper in order to pre-empt any possibilities for organized ethnic unrest and strengthen the control over the border areas (Anonymous, 1938). Han Yongun (1879~1944), a famed Buddhist intellectual and self-proclaimed ‘Buddhist socialist’

(Tikhonov and Miller, 2008: 22~25)―obviously not a somebody who could be suspected of anti-Communist or anti-Soviet bigotry―penned a longish piece on the intensification of the anti-religious persecutions in the USSR in 1937, suggesting its connection with the generally oppressive atmosphere of

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the witch-hunts against the supposed ‘Trotskists,’ ‘wreckers’ and ‘fascist spies’. As Han (correctly) understood, the witch-hunt victims were in many cases Stalin’s political antagonists, real, potential or imagined, rather than authentic ‘spies’ or ‘wreckers’ (Han, 1938). So, the full extent of the Stalinist brutality might have been unknown to the contemporaries inside Korea proper, but some information was readily available. The question was whether the Korean Communists and their sympathizers in the broader com- munity were in a position to adequately register the information which con- tradicted the basics of their worldview, and reflect on its implications, rather than writing the brutalities off as inescapable excesses or even ‘necessary measures’ of self-defence.

As we may easily find out, the latter was usually the case. The world which was divided into the inimical camps―the protagonists of the ‘Red Age’ versus the assorted forces of the old order―and engulfed into a seem- ingly permanent ‘state of emergency’ as the new global war was swiftly ap- proaching while Japanese army was brutalizing China (which it invaded at full force in 1937, exactly when the Stalinist terror peaked in the USSR), was not exactly the right place for the critical self-reflection about the inherent limitations of one’s own side. The news about, for example, Chinese Trotskists’ attempts to contest revolutionary movement’s leadership against

“China’s Stalinists” (Chinese Communist Party) using their propaganda out- lets did reach late 1930s Korea (Kwangdong Hwanghak Ruin, 1939), but neither these news from a neighbouring country nor Trotsky’s criticisms of the Stalinist ‘betrayal’ did not seem to attract much attention. Of course, the confirmation bias was hardly an exclusive prerogative of the Korean Left: in the divided world of the late 1930s, under the Damocles’ sword of the fascist threat, the figures of no less stature than Romain Rolland (1866~1944),one of Europe’s most prominent writers of the era, joined the ranks of Soviet Unions’―and Stalin’s―friends (David-Fox, 2005). In contrast to the

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neighbouring China, neither Trotskist nor any other explicitly anti-Stalinist Communist movement ever developed in late 1930s-early 1940s Korea:

Soviet Union, Stalinist or whichever else, was, after all, presenting a realistic hope for the liberation from the colonial yoke in the (likely) case of a Soviet-Japanese conflict. The reports on the outbursts of Stalinist state terror were sometimes cited by the former Communists who decided to renounce their convictions. They often ended up applauding the Japanese ‘successes’

in constructing a ‘new order in East Asia’ instead. A good example is the

‘thought conversion’ statement by In Chǒngsik (1907~?), where its author, originally a Communist activist and one of Korea’s most prominent Marxist agricultural economists, decries ‘Soviet imperialist moves’ in Xinjiang and elsewhere while pronouncing the ‘guidance of our Japanese Empire’ the best hope for China’s struggling peasants (In, 1938). However, many loyalists chose to keep their faith: apparently, on their calculus, the structural violence of the existing worldwide order, or the national betrayal any ‘thought conversion’ could imply under the prevailing circumstances of the Japanese colonial rule, were incomparably more heinous than any excesses which the Soviet antagonists of the Japanese Empire could have possibly committed.

Moreover, the challengers could also boast some authentic successes which might well appear as the sprouts of a genuinely alternative modernity.

Moscow, the ‘Red Capital,’ demonstrated the patterns of gender or racial equality which the old capitals of Western Europe were decisively lacking.

Despite all the visible traces of poverty and deprivation, it was giving the hitherto socially and culturally disenfranchised ‘masses’ the sort of access to high-brow culture which they, as everybody in colonial-age Korea knew, never enjoyed in Korea or even Japan proper, the colonial metropolis (Tikhonov, 2017). Radicalism’s purportedly anti-systemic violence could, it seems, bring qualitative leaps in human development, democratizing society and its culture; at the same time, ancien regime, in Korea, Japan and else-

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where, was never hesitant to unleash deadly violence against any perceived challengers and, moreover, was responsible for the mind-boggling carnage of the First World War. Could Korea’s radicals, and a large proportion of the sympathetic public around them, allow their sympathy for the Soviet and other worldwide protagonists of the ‘Red Age’ to be diminished by the reports―often printed in the pro-Japanese media, by definition less trust- worthy from the vantage point of these opposed to the colonialism―about siege mentality or police terror in the USSR? The answer is self-evident.

6. The ‘Red Age’: Limitations and Contributions

The limitations of the ‘Red Age’ were, in the end, the limitations of the interbellum era itself. In the age when modern nation state arguably reached the pinnacle of its capacity to mobilize and control the society (van Creveld, 1999: 242~263), the radicals―excluding anarchists, or a few leftist dis- sidents, typified by George Orwell (1903~1950)―were often just as staunchly statist as more mainstream thinkers. Korean Communists were undoubtedly planning for a ‘progressive’ national state of the future, Soviet Union being the obvious ideal model (with all the unavoidable caveats about Korea’s ‘specificity’ and ‘different stage of development’). Strong and inter- ventionist state as the paramount tool for the betterment of human race, industry as inherently more ‘progressive’ sector than any pre- or non-industrial economical pursuits, and history’s unilineal progress from ‘primitivity’ via

‘slave-owning’ and ‘feudalism’ to the heights of industrial modernity―all these crucially important coordinates of Korean radicals’ worldview were quintessentially modernist, and indeed widely shared among modern urban intelligentsia across the whole political spectrum.⁸⁾ Still, all the epochal limitations notwithstanding, the ‘Red Age’ socialist radicalism contributed also

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something new and previously unseen to Korea’s modern culture.

The most important contribution was perhaps the ability of Korea’s Communists to articulate the interests of the vast majority of Korea’s ordinary inhabitants. Communists saw themselves as the ‘vanguard’ designed to

‘enlighten and lead’ Korea’s ‘masses’ along the revolutionary road, a Jacobin rather than classical Social Democratic self-positioning which hardly bode well for the future of parliamentary democracy in the hypothetic post-revolutionary Korea: was the ‘enlightened vanguard’ minority going to allow itself to be checked and balanced? However, it is impossible to deny that Communist programs, with radical land reform, gender equality, eight-hours working day for the urban workers, universal schooling and universal welfare (from annual paid vacations to maternity leaves) all duly mentioned there, offered the underprivileged majority at least a hope for a type of modernity which would benefit it rather than to simply use it for the sake of capital accumulation (Tikhonov and Lim, 2017). While multilingual, well-travelled intellectuals (typified by the likes of Kim Tanya or Pak Hǒnyǒng, mentioned above) dominated the ranks of the leadership, the middle- and lower-ranked cadres often represented the type of the Gramscian

‘organic intellectual’―workers and peasants, autodidacts or primary school graduates, for whom their political engagement was both an opportunity to struggle for the long-cherished dreams of their communities and milieus and a chance to enter the realm of more sophisticated literary culture (intellectual polemics, political pamphlets, ‘proletarian’ novels etc.) hitherto denied to them.⁹⁾ Just as the pre-1945 Japanese Communist Party was the only politi-

8) On the shifting definitions of what was to be considered ‘progressive’ and

‘conservative,’ as well as ‘modern’ as opposed to ‘unmodern,’ in Korea’s twentieth century, see Ilsong Kinyǒm Saǒphoe (Ilsong Kinyǒm Saǒphoe, 2014).

9) See, for example, a detailed description of the factory-floor workers-turned-activists

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cal party in Japan which, in its program, envisioned independence for Japan’s colonies, Korea and Taiwan, and supported the Chinese revolutionary cause (Linkhoeva, 2020), Korea’s Communists were the only political force in Korea which clearly articulated the demand for a radical agrarian reform in the countryside and for an essential improvement in urban workers’ conditions, as well as establishment of a generalized welfare system (Pak,1992). A blueprint for latter could be found in the USSR where, by the end of the 1930s, medical services were already made free (Leichter, 1980:

226) and higher education was (excluding the 1940~1956 period) free, even for the foreign students (Vershinina, Kurbanov, Panich, 2016). Whatever the limitations of the interbellum radicals might be, in Korea, Japan or elsewhere, they were, in many, ways, harbingers of the post-1945 world, with its agrarian restructuring, de-colonization, progress in gender equality and welfare states.

They were also anticipating the future of the post-1945 intellectual world.

In the mid- and late 1930s, when ultra-nationalist state ideologies were gain- ing popularity both in many parts of Europe, in the Japanese Empire and in nationalist China, Korea’s pioneering Marxists were offering their critical analyses of the intellectual, philosophical and socio-political roots of fascism.

They were among the few opponents of Kyoto School’s essentializations of

‘national culture’ and Korea’s own contemporary cultural nationalism which was being constructed largely along similar lines. They were first to take the issue with the essentialized construction of ‘nation’ or ‘national history,’

making it clear that nations are being born in the process of modern capitalist development and do not possess eternal, ahistorical and unchanging traits, so

who collaborated with a known Seoul Communist organizer, Yi Chaeyu (1905-1944) inside the underground Communist labour movement milieu of the early 1930s, in Kim (Kim, 2007: 75~100).

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often articulated into ‘national character’ in the popular nationalist writings.

They were among the few intellectual polemists of the 1930s who pointed out to the dangers inherent in the uncritical fetishization of the supposed pri- meval, primordial Korean-ness of the Korean antiquity and the nationalist cult of Korea’s mythical progenitor, Tan’gun (Tikhonov, 2018c). They were prophetically mentioning the outburst of a ‘new imperialist war’ in the Pacific as the most pressing danger of the day (Tikhonov, 2018a). Pak Ch’iu (1909~1949), a brilliant Marxist of the 1930s, also managed to accurately predict in the first post-Liberation year the future ascendancy of the ultra-rightist, ‘blood-and-soil’ type of nationalism on the Korean Peninsula (Wi, 2012: 739~762). While the political philosophy of the interbellum radicalism in Korea was Jacobin in its aspiration to rebuild the society through the agency of an all-powerful post-revolutionary Party-state, it was at the same time able to offer the most pointed criticism of the right-wing varieties of the statist nationalism colonial-age Korea ever saw.

7. North Korea: Anti-imperialism, Nationalist and Internationalist

It is indeed highly ironic that avowedly ‘socialist’ North Korea proclaimed Tan’gun a ‘really existing historical figure’ in 1993 and even ‘excavated’ its presumed ‘relics’―effectively contradicting the previous official interpretation which clearly saw Tan’gun narrative as a myth (Song, 2002: 147~150).

North Korea’s relationship with the legacy of colonial-age Communism is tenuous and highly contradictory. Since the mid-1950s, parallel with the purges or marginalization of the colonial-age ‘domestic’ Communists un- related to Kim Il Sung’s (1912~1994) 1930s guerrilla activities in Manchuria, North Korean historiography started to treat the ‘faction-ridden and alienated from the working-class’ domestic Communist movement of

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the colonial age as a sideshow incomparable to Kim Il Sung’s feats of armed struggle (Chang, 2003). Still, North Korea’s anti-imperialist nationalism, and its keen proclivity in the 1960-80s to support assorted nation-liberation movements and avowedly anti-imperialist regimes throughout the Third World and even some anti-systemic radicals in the First World¹⁰⁾ obviously echoes Comintern’s agility in recruiting anti-colonial nationalists to its cause in the 1920~1930s. It is undeniable that ‘nation’ almost supplanted ‘class’ as the focus of North Korea’s international revolutionary efforts of the 1960-80s, and that these efforts largely died out during and after the 1990s, with the decline and fragmentation of the erstwhile Third World movement and unprecedented economical crisis in North Korea itself. However, all the specificity of North Korean ideology and statehood notwithstanding, it is still undeniable that the remote prototype of its state structures was the Soviet Party-state of the interbellum period around which the Comintern radicals, Koreans included, coalesced.

8. In Place of Conclusion: Pro-Democracy Struggles, and the post-1945 Transmogrifications of Socialism in South Korea

Korean Communists, as most other Comintern affiliates elsewhere in the

‘colonial and dependent world,’ from China (Kataoka, 1974: 183~187) to South Africa (Filatova, 2012), espoused the theory of two-stage revolution.

The first stage was to be national-democratic, focused on the struggle for the restoration of the independent Korean statehood in such a democratic form which would allow the ‘masses’ under the leadership of the ‘proletarian van-

10)See, for example, Young (2015) on North Korea’s Black Panther connections of the 1970s.

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guard,’ to further fight for the ensuing ‘socialist revolution’ (Tikhonov and Lim, 2017). The limitations of the ‘stageism’ are too well-known and too obvious to dwell on them here. A ‘democratic national state’ could easily switch into the direction of extreme right under the post-Depression conditions (as is visible in the fate of Germany or Austria in the mid-1930s), or, under different conditions, consolidate to the degree which would make any further radicalization extremely problematic: the latter was indeed South Korea’s case since its institutional democratization in the late 1980s.

However, ‘stageism,’ with all its obvious limitations, had one advantage:

while Communists hardly approached the ‘masses’ as their political or intellectual equals, they were, in principle, committed to the idea of political democracy as one of their objectives, albeit not necessarily the ultimate one.

In any case, with or without Comintern’s theoretical underpinnings, it was practically clear to them that democratic―as opposed to right-wing authoritarian―statehood was conducive to the fulfilment of their aims, in both provisional (re-establishment of Korean national statehood) and ultimate (further struggle for the goals beyond ‘democratic national revolution’) senses of the word. This original, colonial-age commitment to political democracy as at least a useful tool for the further ‘socialist construction’ was echoed in post-1948 South Korea by socialist radicals’ crucially important participation in the pro-democracy struggles. Cho Pongam, a former Communist leader who evolved into a social democrat since 1946, and his Progressive Party, mostly led by the veterans of the colonial-age radical movement, were the main opponents of Syngman Rhee’s increasingly dictatorial regime in the mid-1950 (Kim, 2016: 53~84). Park Chong Hee’s dictatorial rule (1961~1979) was repeatedly challenged by underground groups of broadly socialist or left-nationalist persuasion which mostly tended to regard the colonial-age leftists as their ideological and political predecessors (Kim, 2000: 50~76). It was perhaps ironical that inside the loose coalition of stu-

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dent circles and illegal workers’ unions which were preparing the ground for the massive demonstrations and strikes of 1987, crucially important in turn- ing South Korea, then under the thumb of Chun Doohwan’s military junta, into a ‘normal’ parliamentary democracy, Leninism―which ultimately re- jects conventional parliamentarism as ‘bourgeois’―was perhaps the most essential underlying intellectual ferment (Lee, 2007: 145~240). Self-styled Leninists fighting for ‘bourgeois’ democracy were a paradoxical phenomen- on, which still may be explained in the historical terms by the prominence of

‘stageism’ since the earliest stages of Korea’s history of socialist radicalism in the 1920s. Leninism of the South Korean radicals mostly faded away as Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites disappeared in the early 1990s. Mass conversion into social democracy followed, and the first large-scale attempt in organizing a mass-based Leftist party after the formal democratization saw the creation of Korean Democratic Labour Party, iden- tifiable as a radical social democratic coalition, in 2000. The pro-democracy activism of the 1980s provided the Leninists-turned-social democrats with the ‘initial political capital,’ the legitimacy which they needed to con- tinuously struggle for a number of items on the progressive agenda, from a comprehensive welfare state to workers’ participation in workplace management (Gray, 2008).

Granted, welfare state or workers’ participation on the management boards are nowhere as radical as the ‘socialist construction’ which the colonial-age Communists used to struggle for. However, there is an obvious common thread. As I have made clear above, the ‘Red Age’ radicals wanted their dreamt-for Party-states to socially and culturally democratize their societies by allowing the hitherto socially disenfranchised ‘masses’ the possibilities of large-scale upward mobility, up to the positions of the managers of the nationalized economies. Current South Korean heirs to the radicalism of the previous decades, in most cases, no longer dream of nationalizing the

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economy. However, they do aim at the reforms which would make for a more democratic society in the socio-economic and cultural senses of the word. They wish free higher education to ensure the upward mobility possibilities for the children of the underprivileged and workplace democracy to strengthen the agency of the workers, making them less of the human ex- tension of the machines and more of the masters over the production process (Chǒng, 2016; Lee and Lim, 2006). While the degree of radicalism in South Korea’s Leftist movement today―as in most other industrial societies elsewhere―is hardly anywhere close to that of the ‘Red Age,’ both are essen- tially animated by the same or related inspirations. The struggle continues, albeit in different forms.

(Received 2020-04-14, Revised 2020-05-12, Accepted 2020-05-13)

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