Talk:Korean Workers' Party

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Removed quotation marks. Seen too many of them in old Taiwanese newspapers talking about the Beijing "government" and new Beijing newspapers talking about the Taiwanese "legislature".

Roadrunner 22:21, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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Removed the quotes again. It's far better to say something explicitly than to say leave it implied, but keep in mind that

• the parties did merge. Whether it was a coerced merger or a bogus merger, is a another matter, and if it was coerced or bogus, it should be stated explicitly.

• I don't know much about the history of the KWP. However, I do know that in other cases (Poland and East Germany) there was a genuine merger in which two or three smaller leftist parties did merge to form a Stalinist uber-party. (In the case of East Germany, it was a merger between the KPD and the SPD. In the case of Poland, it was the PWP and PSP). While the new Stalinist uber-party was your standard communist dictatorship, it was a real merger in the sense that members of the former parties did share power more or less equally in the merged party. I also know of cases (China, Vietnam, and Czechslovakia) where the dominant party effectively took over the smaller ones.

Now do you know enough about the history of the KWP to know which of the two it was? Also do you know enough about the KWP to know what they officially try to portray it as?

Roadrunner 05:23, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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Roadrunner:

• The use of quotes to imply scepticism or irony in the use of a word or expression is widely accepted and extremely common. If you don't like the practice you are free not to use it in your own writing. But you have no right to go through other people's writing reversing it, any more than I have the right to impose my personal orthographic preferences on your writing. In any case if you are going to reverse it throughout Wikipedia you will be very busy for some years.

• If you are going to edit articles, try to pay some attention to the consequences of your edits. By inserting your text about mergers, you created a paragraph that did not flow logically from the previous one, which I have had to fix.

• The merger between the KPD and an element of the eastern SPD led by Grotewohl was not coerced, but then it only involved a minority faction of the SPD. It was repudiated by the great majority of the SPD even in the east. The so-called merger of the Polish CP and the PSP was completely bogus - it only involved Cyrankiewicz and a handful of other careerists. Most of the PSP (not much of which had survived the war anyway) emigrated or went underground.

• I have seen the names of the groups that the Korean CP merged with to form the KWP but I don't recall them and didn't consider it important enough to name them in the text. They were very small groups anyway - the "merger" was done to provide a figleaf of united frontedness for CP rule.

Adam 07:43, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Adam: Skepticism and irony are opinion. They make the article POV and thus remove its encyclopedic value. Implying skepticism and irony is even worse, because it introduces concealed opinion into the article and essentially turns it into propaganda. If there's reason to distrust the official line, it's better to simply say why. -- Sekicho 17:20, Mar 6, 2004 (UTC)

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is the Korea Workers party active in the south???

The old Korean Communist Party was suppressed in the south during and after the Korean War. The DPRK presumably has agents in the south but I have never heard of communism having any domestic support there. There are plenty of radical students who like throwing rocks at police but they all become Daewoo executives when they graduate. Adam 05:26, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The KWP isn't active in the South, but pro-DPRK groupings in the ROK and Japan established the National Democratic Front of South Korea, which supports the KWP line in the South. Here's their website if anyone wants a good laugh. http://ndfsk.dyndns.org/kuguk8/pym/0000/index.htm 172 11:53, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The old Communist Party had a degree of support in the South but was virtually non-existent in the north. When the Soviets occupied the northern part of Korea they bascially created a party from scratch using Soviet Koreans (who had were ethnic Koreans born in the USSR) and guerillas such as Kim Il Sung who had spent time in the USSR (Kim was actually a Captain in the Red Army). Initially the North Korean Communists were nominally under the authority of the Communist Party based in Seoul and the southern CP actually was relatively successful in destablising South Korea and running a low-impact guerilla campaign. This was supressed by the Americans who put Syngman Rhee in charge. Under increased repression most of the southern Korean Communists fled to the North. Ultimately, it was decided that the DPKK would be set up not as a North Korean soviet state but as a state based in North Korea that claimed the entire peninsula (Seoul was the official capital of the DPKK until 1972). The Rhee regime in the South similarly claimed jurisdiction over the entire peninnsula. AndyL 19:08, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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Are we to assume that Alexei Ivanovich Hagai and A I Hagai are the same person? If so, why is he wikified under both versions of his name? Is "Hegia" also the same person? If so, this needs to be fixed. It also needs to be explained whether he was a Russian (and if he was, how a Russian came to be a leader of the Korean Communist Party), or a Korean with a Russian pseudonym. Adam 08:43, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

He was a "Soviet Korean" ie a Korean born in Russia where there is a significant Korean minority. That is explained in the paragraph on the Soviet Korean faction: 'The Soviet Koreans, led first by Alexei Ivanovich Hagai and then by Pak Chang-ok were made up of waves of ethnic Koreans who were born or raised in Russia after their families moved there starting in the 1870s.' AndyL 15:53, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] classical stalinism?

I reacted to the describtion of KWP as "classical Stalinist". What is a classical stalinist (as opposed to what, a modern stalinist?)? I find that the semireligious Juche ideology and monarchical behaviour of KWP has rather little to do with classical marxism-leninism. In many ways the Korean WP is one of the least orthodox CPs as far as diverting from the original ideology is concerned. The fact that the regime in DPRK is totalitarian does not alone make it stalinist per se.

Also, isn't the official English translation of the party name Workers' Party of Korea and not KWP? --Soman 15:16, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I suppose that "classical Stalinism" was meant to distinguish it from the ruling parties of the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Vietnam or Laos which some may regard as Stalinist (in that they are "bureaucratiised" Communist parties in the mold of the CPSU after Stalin took power) and also refers to the presence of a personality cult which is largely absent from Cuba (where you can hardly find a poster with Castro's image), Vietnam or Laos. However, I agree that ideologically the KWP cannot be described as "classical" or "orthodox" Stalinist or Maoist (indeed, Stalin would probably regard North Korea as "Titoite" for having developed its only "national Communist" variant rather than slavishly follow the Stalinist model - in any case I don't think North Korea ever refers to Stalin in its propaganda and I don't even think Stalin's works are widely available in North Korea (or Lenin's for that matter)). Perhaps it would be better to describe North Korea as the closest thing still existing to a Stalinist state? The party might also be considered Stalinist in that it is anti-revisionist and rejected the reforms of Khrushchev and his successors.

AndyL 05:12, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I agree with most of Andy's comments. I used the phrase "classical Stalinism" to distinguish the KWP from the Chinese or Vietnamese parties, which maintain a veneer of Leninist orthodoxy while largely abandoning Leninist practice. The DPRK and Cuba are the last states which take Communism seriously. But I agree that the term has problems and the current formulation is better. I have however said that the DPRK claims to have a new ideology called Juche rather than stating it as a fact. What is the ideological content of Juche? It seems to me just a slogan to rationalise the hereditary rule of the Kims and economic isolationism. Adam 12:46, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)