Until recently, scholars of international relations have dominated academic commentary on North Korea, the reason for this disciplinary bias being that it was believed easier to apply esoteric theory to the workings of the DPRK state than it was to conduct empirical research either inside the country or by using DPRK materials. But the tide is turning, and a number of impactful works have recently emerged in the fields of anthropology, culture, and history.
Cheehyung Harrison Kim's Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961 is the newest contribution to the field of historical inquiry on North Korea. Across five chapters, an introduction and a conclusion, Kim looks at the relationship between life, labour and the state in 1950s–60s North Korea. Dense in detail and rich with historical vignettes, Heroes and Toilers interrogates what it meant to work in the newly emergent North Korean state. Specifically, how did the state package and present a work ideology that compelled ordinary citizens to endure long hours and dangerous conditions? To what extent was the state successful in shaping everyday life as a space for production and administration? And how should we understand the tensions that subsequently arose between the state's “work as a glorified nationalist project” and the reality of everyday toil for ordinary citizens in North Korea?
Awarded a doctoral degree from Columbia University, Kim is currently a faculty member in the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai'i. His first book, Heroes and Toilers offers both a revealing account of life in industrializing North Korea, while situating transnationally the country's dramatic economic and social changes within the global industrialism of the time. Kim's research sits thematically alongside Suzy Kim's Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution 1945–1950 (2013) and Andrei Lankov's The Real North Korea (2013). The political changes described in Heroes and Toilers can be further understood through a reading of Adrian Buzo's The Guerilla Dynasty (1999) exposition of North Korea's political economy, while Kim's rendering of the nascent North Korean economy as a transnational project complements Hyun Ok Park's (2015) thesis that “capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form”.
In the first chapter, Kim draws on the thinking of Marx, Smith, and Calvin to explicate historically how labour was understood in the industrializing world. In positioning the relationship of the state to labour, as it was understood in post-war North Korea (1950–53), Kim presents the North Korean state not as an exception to the exploitative relationship of production to labour, but as similar to states in the capitalist world. In an echo of how work was framed in capitalist democracies of the time, the North Korean party–state alliance framed work as an honourable activity that would increase productivity and surplus for industrial growth.
In considering work in various forms, the second chapter complements the first. The author underlines how the Korean War provided the stage for work in North Korea to be reimagined as a “regime of production made up of the state, party, unions, and agencies of propaganda”; a regime that subsequently gave way to the party-dominated Taean Work System.
The third chapter oscillates between the macro political changes of the period, as Kim Il-sung eliminated rivals for the country's leadership, and the everyday efforts of the state to rebuild the DPRK economy. It is in this chapter that the author finds his groove, skilfully articulating how the state used the ideology of repetitive work, mass movements such as the 1959 Chollima Work Team Movement, and the shaping of the relationship between living and working to remake the space of everyday life for ordinary North Koreans.
The next chapter draws on textual and visual materials to illustrate what it might have been like to work in North Korea in the decade following the Korean War. Readers of James Scott's writings on state hegemony and everyday forms of resistance (1985, 1998) will appreciate how Kim reinscribes agency to citizens of North Korea, showing that North Korea's workers were not (and indeed, are not) brainwashed automatons.
From the demands of state-led modernization projects and the responses of ordinary North Koreans Kim hones in on one particular case study – North Korea's Vinalon factory. While parts of this chapter are painfully detailed (see the explanation of how North Korea's national fibre is made, pp. 180–3), chapter 5 offers a fine example of how the Vinalon factory, a national emblem of DPRK independence and ingenuity, became localized as part of everyday ideology.
In the conclusion, Kim moves to de-exoticize North Korea's modernization experiences by highlighting that “Work as a mode of hegemony” has been unique neither to state socialist countries, nor to capitalist countries. The concluding chapter is as much an effort to avoid orientalizing North Korea, as it is a return to the core tenets of the text. To paraphrase Kim, as bad as North Korea's problems are, they are universal problems, and while we should be critical of the North Korean state, we cannot be naïve about the ubiquity or the causes of these challenges (pp. 205–6).
Cheehyung Harrison Kim's Heroes and Toilers presents a counter-argument to the claims that North Korea is an unknowable black box in the form of a cogent, balanced and rigorously researched narrative that will resonate with historians, social scientists, and scholars of Korean studies.
