Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Monopoly

Name and factional distinctions

The Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Monopoly People's Democratic (Revolution) was the program and shorthand of the anti-monopoly PD current within the People's Democracy (PD) faction. Within the same PD faction, the anti-fascist current used 'anti-imperialist, anti-fascist people's democracy', while the National Liberation (NL) faction used its own separate name, the National Liberation People's Democratic Revolution (NLPDR). The People's Democratic Revolution thesis (PDR) split into the anti-monopoly PD and the anti-fascist PD; the former took the working class as its main force and the urban poor and poor peasants as allies, seeking to overthrow imperialism, monopoly capital and the existing government at once, establish a people's democratic republic and then socialize by a 'continuous one-stage, two-process' course.

The two branches also had different roots. The anti-monopoly PD derived from NLPDR (the NDR lineage), whereas the anti-fascist PD was a minority current inside the CPA/CA lineage that stressed the class contradiction, upheld the 'neo-colonial fascist system thesis', and expressed strong opposition to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The anti-monopoly PD was one branch of the NLPDR lineage, and 'People's Democracy' commonly refers to it.

Formation and theory

The group that analyzed South Korea as a neo-colonial state monopoly capitalist society and advocated people's democratic revolution as the immediate revolution existed from 1984, but the name 'People's Democracy faction' first appeared in the movement from early 1988. The theoretical core of the anti-monopoly PD current was the neo-colonial state monopoly capitalism thesis, which defined South Korea as a 'neo-colonial society' unlike the Japanese colonial period. The thesis's germ is found in the C.N.P (civic democratic transformation-national democratic transformation-people's democratic transformation) debate inside the Korean Youth League for Democracy in the 1980s, and Park Hyun-chae's paper in the 1985 issue 57 of Changjak kwa Bipyeong is assessed as the starting point of the state monopoly capitalism thesis. A neo-colonial society was seen as producing capitalist development grounded in 'deepened subordination' and reaching the monopoly capitalist stage already in the 1980s, while the national contradiction still remained.

The NLPDR lineage's revolutionary theory defined South Korea as a 'colonial fascist system of US imperialism', treated the constitutional amendment struggle as part of the anti-fascist struggle, was presented and established as the transformation theory of the student and social movements from late 1985 through the first half of 1986, became the mainstream of the 1986 student movement, and led the amendment struggle in the first half of 1987 by advocating a direct presidential election. Its intellectual summation drew on colonial and semi-colonial revolutionary experience going back to the 1940s: Eastern Europe's 'people's democratic revolution', North Korea's 'anti-imperialist anti-feudal democratic revolution' and China's 'new democratic revolution'.

One organizational origin of the People's Democracy faction lies in the students who in 1985 joined the Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Fascist National Democratic Struggle Committee (Minminthu), demanded the convening of a constituent assembly (CA) or the People's Constituent Congress (CPC), and among them held to the orthodox Marxist-Leninist line; the People's Democracy faction is distinct from the constituent assembly (CA) current.

Divergence of the two camps

The NL-PD split proceeded as disillusionment with the US attitude to the Gwangju Uprising of May 18 brought a vogue for Marxist currents, a view of Korea as a US colony, and the social formation debate. PD challenged the domination and monopoly of large corporations from a class and labor movement standpoint, while NL argued in a left-nationalist vein for resistance to US imperialism. The People's Democracy side analyzed South Korea as a state economically and militarily subordinated to the United States but politically enjoying considerable autonomy, one in which the direct agent of repression against the people was the South Korean government rather than the United States, and whose capitalist economy had developed to a high level in the form of state monopoly capitalism. This contrasts with the colonial semi-feudal thesis, which viewed South Korea as a colonial semi-feudal society, and formed one axis of the social formation debate.

In the history of the social formation debate, the anti-monopoly PD was one axis of the third debate (1988-1990) against NL within NLPDR, was in the minority, and the Seoul Institute of Social Sciences was its organization at the time. Strictly speaking the anti-monopoly PD theory belonged to a subcategory of NLPDR, but it also had some influence on activists of currents outside NLPDR.

Debate and assessment

Some scholarly accounts assess that in this revolutionary theory anti-imperialism was presented as the solution to the national contradiction wrought by US and Japanese imperialism, anti-monopoly as the solution to the class contradiction aimed at transforming the chaebol's exploitative economic structure, and its core as ending the military-fascist system and restoring genuine democracy. This, however, is an interpretive assessment by the labor-movement commentator Yun Hyo-won rather than neutral factual description.

Lineage and present

The PD current thought from the standpoint of class struggle centered on the labor movement and held that the working class must hold the leadership of a South Korean revolution, which put it at odds with the national liberation camp. It later formed the majority of the Korean Socialist Party and part of the Democratic Labor Party; the equality faction of the anti-fascist PD current in the Democratic Labor Party left in 2008 to found the New Progressive Party, which was dissolved in 2012, and its members split between the Justice Party, social-democratic in orientation, and the Labor Party, which retained the anti-fascist PD character. This lineage concerns PD as a whole and the anti-fascist PD, not the anti-monopoly PD.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the anti-monopoly PD theory formed part of the Institute for Labor and Social Sciences, the Progressive Party and the People's Democracy Party. From the late 1990s the vocabulary of the social formation debate fell out of use, yet the line continued to be upheld by a minority of left-wing parties and organizations and its tasks are described as ongoing, so no closing year can be fixed.