Socialism

6579 readers

124 users here now

Rules TBD.

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

dessalines@lemmy.ml

Defying sanctions, advancing socialism: The DPRK’s 9th Party Congress begins : Peoples Dispatch (peoplesdispatch.org)

submitted 1 day ago by Salamence@mander.xyz to c/socialism@lemmy.ml

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7772697

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30756

The 9th Party Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea is now underway. Held every five years, the Congress can be regarded as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) most significant political event. A total of 5,000 delegates and 2,000 observers elected by party organizations from across the country are now gathered in Pyongyang for the event.

As preparations for the Congress took place across the country in recent weeks, they were accompanied by celebrations of the successes of the last Five Year Plan, adopted at the 8th Party Congress in 2021. In the past month, completion ceremonies have been held for 21 local projects across the DPRK’s rural communities, ranging from the massive Sinuiju Greenhouse Farm to new factories and hospitals.

Major milestones in housing construction have also been met, and in some cases surpassed. 113,000 housing units were built in 1,860 rural villages and more than 500 farms since 2022. More than 50,000 apartment units have also been built in Pyongyang’s new Hwasong District, exceeding the goals for five-year construction set at the 8th Party Congress. In accordance with DPRK law, these homes were built to fulfill the state’s obligations to provide housing to the people without cost.

These achievements would be impressive in any country, but the DPRK’s special status as one of the world’s most sanctioned countries, and a perennial target of US military threats, makes its recent successes in socialist construction particularly noteworthy. While international media has long maligned the country as backwards, stagnant, and mired in poverty, these recent developments offer a fresh perspective of the DPRK as a dynamic and evolving socialist project that is steadily overcoming the challenges posed to its system and people from without.

Construction efforts in Pyongyang’s new Hwasong District have entered the fifth phase. Photo: Korea Risk

Comprehensive socialist development

The Five Year Plan set forth by the 8th Party Congress was developed with the intent to overcome the significant challenges of tightening US and UN sanctions, along with the global economic downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The DPRK has been a target of economic warfare since the founding of its state in 1948. For decades, the US pursued this end through legislation such as the Trading with the Enemy Act. Following Pyongyang’s first successful nuclear weapons test in 2006, the US introduced UN Security Council sanctions to its arsenal, alongside an expanding list of unilateral US coercive measures. Over time, these sanctions became increasingly draconian, and their intention to impose collective punishment increasingly undeniable. In 2017, a new suite of comprehensive sanctions were imposed on the DPRK.

The economic effects were devastating: fuel imports were drastically reduced, all major export industries were banned from international trade, and the DPRK’s already-limited access to international capital and dollar-based trade was throttled. Available figures on export revenues, while incomplete, demonstrate the extreme effects of these sanctions, as revenues crashed from USD 2.72 billion in 2016 to just USD 316 million in 2018. At the 8th Party Congress in 2021, the WPK noted that economic performance had “fallen short in almost every category.”

Sinujiu Greenhouse Farm. Photo: Korea Risk

Beyond the immediate economic damage to major industries, agriculture, healthcare, and construction all suffered from a lack of available inputs. One study from 2019 estimated that shortages and delays to UN health programs caused by these sanctions in 2018 alone may have killed as many as 3,968 people, of which more than 80% were estimated to be children under the age of five.

These measures, while devastating for any nation, were particularly difficult for the DPRK given its recent history. In 1995, devastating floods swept through the country. The available figures from the aftermath of this disaster paint a picture of biblical catastrophe: 5.4 million displaced, 330,000 hectares of agricultural land destroyed, 1.9 million tons of grain lost, and USD 15 billion in damages. The destruction wrought by flooding was compounded by international and local factors: the recent fall of the Soviet Union had left the DPRK economically and diplomatically isolated, ongoing US sanctions restricted its access to global markets to seek relief, and its own aggressive program of agricultural industrialization had, ironically, left this sector vulnerable to disruptions in electrical infrastructure and the loss of fuel inputs. Images of famine flooded the world, and became the indelible impression of the country in the minds of many.

In response to comprehensive sanctions and collective punishment, the 8th Party Congress answered with a plan for “comprehensive socialist development.” The plan sought to drastically raise quality of life in the country and achieve a new level of strategic economic resilience through all-encompassing development of agriculture, consumer goods, military technology, and industry.

Swimming pool at a newly built leisure complex in the DPRK. Photo: Korea Risk

To achieve the goals of the 8th Party Congress, the DPRK relied on its existing strengths and on recent innovations to its socialist system. The country’s historic emphasis on an independent industrial base and military self-sufficiency made many of its recent achievements possible. Besides mobilizing the civilian workforce and volunteer teams, worker-soldiers of the Korean People’s Army were also deployed to supplement construction efforts around the country.

Besides its existing developmental strengths, the DPRK also leveraged newer economic reforms that were refined throughout the 2010s. A new system known as the Socialist Enterprise Responsibility Management System or SERMS, has reformed management to give state enterprises and cooperatives greater control over production, prices, and profits, while remaining beholden to centrally planned goals. Similar reforms have reshaped the agrarian sector, with new individual incentive systems and cooperative models of farming implemented.

The 20×10 Rural Development Plan

Many of the hallmark construction achievements now being unveiled in the lead-up to the 9th Party Congress are also part of a new initiative being undertaken across the country: the 20×10 Rural Development Plan.

Inaugurated in 2024, the 20×10 Rural Development Plan seeks to raise the level of rural development through a decade-long initiative to build new economic enterprises, healthcare facilities, and cultural and scientific facilities in 20 rural counties each year. The plan has successfully met its goals in its first two years, and is expected to continue to be a pillar of the country’s development strategy.

Construction ceremony in Riwon County, South Hamgyong province in the DPRK’s northeast. Photo: Korea Risk

Some recent examples of major results from the 20×10 Rural Development Plan include the Sinuiju Greenhouse Farm, a sprawling agricultural complex built on Wihwa Island which was unveiled in January. The Samgwang Livestock Farm, which opened this February, is also now the country’s largest dairy production facility, and will be used to provide dairy products to children across the country. In 2024, the country’s first offshore fish farm opened in Sinpo, marking a new milestone in DPRK aquaculture.

Beyond new agricultural enterprises, light industry and intermediate production facilities are also being built in the countryside, with the goal of increasing the economic output and resilience of rural areas. A major focus of the first year of the 20×10 Rural Development Plan was the construction of facilities to produce backpacks for schoolchildren. This initiative integrated economic development needs with a human-centered approach, targeting the education needs of children to advance rural development.

Aside from economic concerns, the 20×10 Rural Development Plan, in keeping with the themes of comprehensive socialist development, is also striving to raise the overall quality of life in rural areas as well. Towards this end, Kim Jong Un identified “three essential projects” for the 20×10 Plan to integrate in December 2024: rural hospitals, grain management facilities, and “sci-tech dissemination centers.” Three new county hospitals were built in 2025.

While uneven development between the capital and the countryside most certainly persists, the 20×10 Plan has made significant progress towards addressing this in a very short period of time. As the 9th Party Congress approaches, it is likely that the next Five Year Plan will seek to build upon recent successes and accelerate the DPRK’s drive towards comprehensive socialist development.

The post Defying sanctions, advancing socialism: The DPRK’s 9th Party Congress begins appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 hours ago

NK is the capital of some of the worst human rights abuses,

Such as?

torture,

Elaborate?

lack of transparency

To you, or to their people?

and free press in the world.

They have publicly owned and operated press, why is that a bad thing?

It’s an authoritarian regime that controls its populace through fear and capital punishment.

No? It has a comprehensive system of approval-based voting, and provides strong social guarantees. From Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance:

The DPRK’s electoral democracy relates primarily to the people’s assemblies, along with local state organs, assemblies, and committees. Every eligible citizen may stand for election, so much so that independent candidates are regularly elected to the people’s assemblies and may even be elected to be the speaker or chair. The history of the DPRK has many such examples. I think here of Ryu Mi Yong (1921–2016), who moved from south to north in 1986 so as to take up her role as chair of the Chondoist Chongu Party (The Party of the Young Friends of the Heavenly Way, formed in 1946). She was elected to the Supreme People’s Assembly and became a member of the Standing Committee (then called the Presidium). Other examples include Gang Ryang Uk, a Presbyterian minister who was a leader of the Korean Christian Federation (a Protestant organisation) and served as vice president of the DPRK from 1972 until his death in 1982, as well as Kim Chang Jun, who was an ordained Methodist minister and became vice-chair of the Supreme People’s Assembly (Ryu 2006, 673). Both Gang and Kim were buried at the Patriots’ Cemetery.

How do elections to all of the various bodies of governance work? Elections are universal and use secret ballots, and are—notably—direct. To my knowledge, the DPRK is the only socialist country that has implemented direct elections at all levels. Neither the Soviet Union (in its time) nor China have embraced a complete system of direct elections, preferring—and here I speak of China—to have direct elections at the lower levels of the people’s congresses, and indirect elections to the higher levels. As for candidates, it may initially seem as though the DPRK follows the Soviet Union’s approach in having a single candidate for each elected position. This is indeed the case for the final process of voting, but there is also a distinct difference: candidates are selected through a robust process in the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland. As mentioned earlier, the struggle against Japanese imperialism and liberation of the whole peninsula drew together many organisations, and it is these that came to form the later Democratic Front. The Front was formed on 25 July, 1949 (Kim Il Sung 1949), and today includes the three political parties, and a range of mass organisations from the unions, youth, women, children, agricultural workers, journalism, literature and arts, and Koreans in Japan (Chongryon). Notably, it also includes representation from the Korean Christian Federation (Protestant), Korean Catholic Federation, and the Korean Buddhist Federation. All of these mass organisations make up the Democratic Front, and it is this organisation that proposes candidates. In many respects, this is where the multi-candidate dimension of elections comes to the fore. Here candidates are nominated for consideration from all of the mass organisations represented. Their suitability and merit for the potential nomination is debated and discussed at many mass meetings, and only then is the final candidate nominated for elections to the SPA. Now we can see why candidates from the Chondoist movement, as well as from the Christian churches, have been and can be elected to the SPA and indeed the local assemblies.

To sum up the electoral process, we may see it in terms of a dialectical both-and: multi-candidate elections take place in the Democratic Front, which engages in extensive consideration of suitable candidates; single candidate elections take place for the people’s assemblies. It goes without saying that in a non-antagonistic system of class and group interaction, the criterion for election is merit and political suitability

As for the bodies of governance, there is a similar continuity and discontinuity compared with other socialist countries. Unlike the Soviet Union, there is a unicameral Supreme People’s Assembly, which is the highest authority in terms of laws, regulations, the constitution, and all leadership roles. The SPA is also responsible for the national economic plan, the country’s budget, and foreign policy directions (Han 2016, 47–48). At the same time, the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland has an analogous function to a second organ of governance. This is a uniquely Korean approach to the question of a second organ of governance. While not an organ of governance as such, it plays a direct role in electoral democracy (see above), as well as the all-important manifestation of consultative democracy (see below). A further reason for this unique role of the Democratic Front may be adduced: while the Soviet Union and China see the second body or organ as representative of all minority nationalities and relevant groups, the absence of minority nationalities in a much smaller Korea means that such a form of representation is not needed.

I highly recommend the book, it helps shed light on some often misunderstood mechanisms in socialist democracy, including the directly addressed fact that the DPRK's voting process includes single candidate approval voting. Without the context of the candidate selection process, this is spun as entirely anti-democratic.