Dangerous Ideas and Leftist Deviation: Anarchism and North Korean Political Culture

On 6 June 2019, the President of the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea), Moon Jae-in, gave a Memorial Day speech in which he mentioned several Korean resistance fighters from the Japanese colonial period who helped to establish the South Korean military. Among the names of several independence fighters, Moon mentioned Kim Wŏnbong, a controversial anarchist from the colonial era who defected to North Korea from South Korea in April 1948.¹ In his speech, Moon said that Kwangbokkun [Restoration Army] "had anarchist forces of the Korean youth underground operation battery, which was later joined by the Korean Volunteer Corps led by Kim Wŏnbong, finally assembling the independence movement capacity of the nation." Moon added, "The combined Kwangbokkun members' indomitable will to resist and the capabilities . . . have become the root of the establishment of the military of the Republic of Korea, and further the foundation of the ROK–U.S. alliance."² To most South Koreans, Kim's anti-Japanese activities seemingly verged on being considered acts of heroism.³

However, after the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule, Kim Wŏnbong defected to North Korea in 1948 in order to help found the communist government. This defection has deeply clouded South Korea's historical memory of Kim Wŏnbong. In the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea), Kim Wŏnbong became the Vice Chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly and helped North Korean leader Kim Il Sung invade South Korea in 1950. After the Korean War, Kim Il Sung awarded Kim Wŏnbong the "Medal of Effort"; at the time, this was the highest recognition of military service for a North Korean citizen. Moon's acknowledgment of Kim Wŏnbong's anticolonial activities irked conservatives in South Korea who viewed Kim as a traitor and a North Korean invader.⁴ However, Kim Wŏnbong's North Korea connections were not totally unique at the time. As I discuss in this article, several prominent Koreans with anarchist ideas, such as a belief in a mutual aid system and a peasant-led revolution, went to North Korea after the colonial period and helped to form the DPRK's political culture. Most of these exiled Korean radicals returned to a divided motherland that was a byproduct of Cold War politics and the global ideological conflict between Soviet communism and U.S capitalism. Anarchism did not fit neatly into the ideological visions of the ROK or the DPRK.

In this article, I argue that the Korean anarchists who chose to go to North Korea after liberation were ultimately purged from the Korean Workers' Party or adjusted to the DPRK's political culture and became part of the regime's cultural apparatus. North Korean ideologues debated the ideas of anarchism but labeled the ideology as "leftist deviation." Despite Korea's rich history of colonial-era anarchism, North Korean propagandists depicted anarchism in official government publications as a reactionary and counterrevolutionary theory. In this article, I borrow historian Chang-tai Hung's framework where political culture includes "shared values, collective visions, common attitudes, and public expectations created by high politics" and is a negotiated process between the political leadership and the populace.⁵ From the late 1940s to the 1960s, North Korea's political culture often featured expressions of solidarity with the Soviet Union and, most importantly, the glorification of Kim Il Sung's revolutionary exploits, especially his days as an anti-Japanese partisan. It also emphasized national unity and an ideological commitment to Marxism–Leninism. After the implementation of the Monolithic Ideological System in 1967, the political culture of the DPRK increased its nationalistic tone and Kimist sycophancy.⁶

During the colonial period, a diverse group of leftist intellectuals with anarchist, socialist, and communist leanings debated and formed revolutionary discourses regarding the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. As British socialist John Crump once argued, Korean anarchists were unique, as they were anarchists fighting for avowedly nationalist goals. Crump called Korean anarchists "something of a shock" and "atypical."⁷ Some of these Korean independence fighters felt...