Kim Song Ju (Kim Il Sung) puts factionalists to shame - historic line struggle amongst Korean Communists

 "Our nation had staged demonstrations against the colonial rule by the Japanese imperialists, conducted strikes, waged a Righteous Volunteers struggle and conducted the Independence Army movement against them. But all these struggles had failed. Why did all this bloodshed and all these struggles end in failure?

Factions had appeared in the anti-Japanese struggle and had done tremendous harm to the national liberation struggle. The Righteous Volunteers, which was the first to raise the torchlight of resistance to the Japanese and fought all across the country, had lacked unity of command. 

The commanders, who came from Confucian aristocratic backgrounds, had wished to restore the royal government, whereas the men, who came from among the populace, had demanded the reform of the outmoded system.

The conflict and contradiction between them had seriously affected their fighting efficiency. Some of the die-hard Volunteers commanders who advocated the restoration of the old system had even organized battles simply to win fame in the hope of receiving official appointments from the government. Such practices had broken the unity of the army. 

The Volunteers commanders who came from among the ordinary people had refused to cooperate with those of aristocratic origin. This tendency had weakened the army.

The situation with the Independence Army had been much the same. Its organization itself lacked unity and order. Even after the various independence movement organizations operating in Manchuria had merged to form the three major organizations, factional strife among them had continued. 

Although the merger of the three organizations resulted in the establishment of Kukmin-bu, the top level of the Independence Army had been divided into the pro-Kukmin-bu faction and the anti-Kukmin-bu faction, and their tug of war had never ceased.

These nationalist factions were given to useless argument, each looking up to a major power. Some of the leaders of the independence movement had wished to win Korea’s independence with the backing of China, some of them had tried to defeat Japan with the help of the Soviet Union, and others had hoped that the United States would bring them Korea’s independence on a plate.

The nationalists worshipped the major powers because they did not believe in the strength of the popular masses. Their movement had remained an aristocratic movement which was divorced from the popular masses. 

Therefore, it had neither a strong foundation nor support from the people. The practice of some high level people of wasting time on an empty talk and scramble for power instead of rousing the masses to the revolutionary struggle had also been in evidence among some self-styled communists. This was a serious weakness.

The communists at the incipient stage of the struggle had given no thought to mixing with the popular masses, educating them, organizing them and mobilizing them in the struggle. They had been divorced from the masses, engaged in an empty talk and scramble for hegemony. 

The factions that appeared in the early years of the communist movement had not been eliminated. The  factionalists in our country were intellectuals who came from the nationalist line of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie or from the feudal aristocracy.

Swimming with the tide in the years after the October Socialist Revolution when the labour movement was mounting rapidly and Marxism-Leninism was winning enthusiastic support from the masses, these intellectuals had plunged into the revolution in the name of Marxism. 

But, forming factions from the start, they had been engrossed in a tug of war to gain hegemony. They had employed every manner of fraud and trickery, and had even resorted to a free fight by forming terrorist squads.

Due to their factional strife, the Communist Party of Korea had been unable to ensure its unity and withstand the repression by the Japanese imperialists. 

Steeped in flunkeyism towards the major powers, the communists in the early years of the struggle had given no thought to organizing a party and fighting for the revolution by their own efforts; each faction claimed that it was the orthodox party and travelled about in order to gain recognition from the Comintern, carrying even seals engraved in potatoes with it." - Kim Il Sung, With the Century, Chapter 10 Book 1.