First time round, the British Labour Party in 1906 received no more than 5% of the vote. But in the context of a big strike struggle and a social movement, a workers' party can develop very rapidly. The Party of Workers (PT) in Brazil was born out of the massive metalworkers' strikes of 1978. Properly founded in 1980, it received a modest percent of the vote in elections the first time it fielded any candidates - a total of 650,000. Three years later in '89, its candidate for president, Lula, was not far short of victory with 31 million votes in the second round run-off with the traditional right wing candidate who got 35 million. The Greek Socialist Party - PASOK - first stood in elections in 1974 and was in power by 1981 with a 48% share of the vote.

The KCTU is committed in its program to building "a party which fights for the interests of the working class" and along with many other organizations is in discussion as to how it should be built. The setting up of a workers' party would be a huge step forward. But it is not a question of creating yet another party just to put people into parliament or local government or even the president's position just for them to get in and forget all about the people who put them there. How many participants of the 1987 Democracy Struggle have ended up in the present ruling party to continue to hold the working class in chains? The only way to ensure that the "people's representatives" stay faithful to the people would be through the democratic election within the party of all candidates and their commitment to take no privileges - no wage higher than the average skilled worker and expenses vetted by the movement, plus mechanisms for removing them if they fail to carry out the party's policies.

Only when the rule of capital is ended, only when the assets of the Chaebol and the banks become the property of the majority, can the majority decide how best to use them. With planning based not on bribery, power politics and the enrichment of a few but on control by democratically elected workers' representatives, both at the factory and the state level, it would be possible to put an end to the abuse and humiliation of centuries. Insisting on the eight-hour day and fully participating in decision-making, working people in Korea would decide how best to organize relations with each other and with the outside world. This is not a dream but a necessity.

The bureaucratically controlled 'workers' states' came about because of the degeneration of the Russian revolution - the isolation, the backwardness, the inexperience of the working class and the usurpation of power by a privileged caste. A planned economy without the oxygen of workers' democracy, explained Trotsky, will eventually suffocate under the weight of the central bureaucracy that cannot adapt to new techniques or allow individual initiative to be expressed. To save their privileges and their dominance in society, which the planned economies could no longer guarantee, and to fend off a revolt from below, the communist parties of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and, in reality, of China - the parties of the bureaucracies - took the road of the market. The vast majority of the bureaucrats preferred to turn themselves into capitalists than to be thrown off like an old coat by a movement of workers in the direction of socialism.

There are those activists in the South who, willing things to be otherwise, argue that descriptions of life in North Korea are merely propaganda churned out by the paranoiacally anti-Communist government and its imperialist backers. They adopt the attitude of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and envy what they see as a simple, moral and Chaebol-free land. But that is not sufficient.

It is true that the economy of the North grew faster than that of the South in the period after the war, demonstrating the advantage of state-ownership and planning. But the attempt to build a planned economy on the basis of autarchic rule and isolated in one small country proved to be a failure even before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now the country is literally a disaster area with eight to nine million of a 25 million population already on the danger list and dying through starvation. The 'Far Eastern Economic Review' talks of women cooking wild grass and tree bark for food. People are keeping the bodies of their dead for a few days before burial in order not to risk them being dug up and used as food by the desperately hungry people around them!

North Korea has an army one million strong and the defector Hwang Jang-yop says his mission in leaving the country (where he was general secretary of the ruling Workers' Party) was to prevent a frightened and desperate North Korea from going to war with the South. But soldiers must not only be fed (and there are stories that rice aid from abroad is going only to them) they must have a will to fight. Who can help? Even China, going over to capitalism, now has fewer links with the North than it has with the Chaebol-dominated economy. South Korea is one of Beijing's biggest trading partners and the fourth largest investor in China. Two-way trade has rocketed from nothing to nearly $20 billion. That between China and North Korea is dwindling - last year $566 million. The Chinese president meets South Korea's president Kim Young-sam every year but has never met North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il.

As more and more harrowing stories about life in the North reach Seoul, used as always by the regime as "proof" of the evils of "communism", there is a widespread urge amongst ordinary people to give physical assistance. But, having fostered the idea itself in mid-April, the Kim Young-sam government tried to stop street collections. The organizers - the church and various 'left' groups - were overwhelmed with the response and were blamed for fomenting criticism of the government's policy towards the North. Kim Young-sam cannot be too confident on this score as he has changed his unification minister five times.

If the North Korean regime, facing famine at home and cold shoulders all around it, virtually collapses into South Korea it will cost the economy of the Chaebol far more than the reunification of Germany cost capitalist West Germany. The United States would be forced to put in large sums of money to shore up a united capitalist Korea. The population of the North is half that of the South, compared with East Germany's being one-quarter that of West Germany. It has a per capita income of at most one-tenth that of South Korea. Most of the population is now receiving less than 200 grams of food a day, far less than the United Nations prescribes for refugees in Africa. 90% of the country's livestock has gone - traded or slaughtered. While South Korea is the eleventh largest economy in the world, North Korea "would not make it into the top 500 centrally managed economic units in the world" (Economist - 'The World in 1997').

No socialist could be against Korean reunification if it is carried out in the interests of the people. Many hundreds of thousands of families are still cruelly separated by the line that cuts the body of their country in two. World imperialism with the collusion of the Soviet bureaucracy, imposed this artificial arrangement solely in the interest of maintaining their own sphere of influence in the region - literally dividing a nation and ruling as much of it as possible.

No socialist, however critical of the bureaucracy and the elite in the North, would welcome a delayed victory of imperialism in the form of a 'surrender' of state ownership and planning. While the people of the North are desperately in need of food and working people in the South are prepared to make sacrifices to help, aid programs organized by the United Nations or other organizations of capitalism are bound to have strings attached. Socialists vigorously oppose the privatization of industry and land.

They would argue for full democratic rights and give full backing for workers to establish control in their workplaces and manage the economy and society through genuinely elected representatives. While thus pressing for the overthrow of the ruling elite, they would have to argue for North Korea, at least initially, to maintain its own identity, probably in a federation of the two states with the freedom of all Koreans to travel. The right of self-determination must be upheld and a united movement of the Korean working class built with the aim of organizing the voluntary re-unification of Korea on a socialist basis. The decision must be that of the people of North and South, arrived at in a totally democratic manner.

The present Southern regime wants unification on its own terms, that is with the imposition of capitalist market relations. Socialists must oppose this. They must fight for democratic rights in the North and the South and for unification without the rule of the Chaebol. The fight for re-unification must be linked precisely to the fight for socialism - the elimination of rule by a handful of capitalist families in the South and by a small bureaucratic 'dynasty' in the North.

It sometimes seems as if the bourgeois South prefers to keep things as they are. A separate capitalist North Korea is unlikely to develop, but if it did, in itself it would not represent a powerful rival to the South. It is most likely to be 'absorbed'. But not only would this cause big problems for the South Korean economy. If the planned economy was dismantled, the rather useful "bogey" over the border would be gone. What conspiracy theories could be used then against the workers' and students' movements to try and deter them from the ideas of socialism and communism?

Although this excuse for intimidation has allowed regimes in the South literally to get away with murder, in some cases, the fact that the South Korean regime so ruthlessly punishes "pro-North activities", tends to attract some of the most rebellious youth towards those very activities. There is also a well-grounded and deep-seated hostility to imperialism amongst wide layers of the population. But some activists feel that the lives of many valiant young fighters have been wrecked unnecessarily as a result of incorrect tactics that have laid the movement open to state provocation.

National Liberation (NL), the organization behind last summer's confrontation at Yonsei University, has been against linking up the struggle of the students and the fight for the expulsion of imperialism from the peninsula with the workers' movement for an end to the Chaebol economy in the South. The NL leadership, in its blind drive for unification on Pyongyang's terms and following its false Juché doctrine, abandons the class struggle and, in effect, also excuses the monstrous rule of the ruling clique in the North. It argues for a struggle of all Koreans, in the North and South and abroad - i.e. Koreans of all classes - against foreign domination.

This is the Stalinist theory of two stages - first the national liberation struggle against imperialism, then the class struggle against the bosses and for socialism. It was this treacherous policy that delivered the leaders of the Chinese working class into the murderous hands of the Chiang Kai Shek nationalists in 1927 and was responsible for the slaughter of up to two million members of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965.

The other tendency in student politics was PD or 'People's Democracy' which, while arguing for "broad coalitions" of forces, recognizes the main enemy as the Chaebol and the main force for change as the proletariat. These, the two best-known trends in student politics, have long fed the debates in every corner of the movement - particularly in the underground and semi-legal organizations that abound in the conditions of political persecution.

When, as happens quite frequently, he is accused in the yellow press of association with the regime in the North he does not use the opportunity to condemn his accusers. He says nothing of the right to free speech, free association, let alone the right to advocate an alternative system. He is well known for singing the praises not of North Korea but of capitalist Germany.

The Korean people can no longer put their trust in any of the "Kims". Kim Jong-pil, leader of the smaller ULD, is no "friend of the people" either. Few will forget his role in the police butchery under the Chun Doo-whan regime as founder of the Korean CIA.

Two great classes are ranged against each other. Intermediary classes and friends of the movement will align themselves with the strongest force. If they see the workers moving to transform society along lines which give them the truest freedom of action and best opportunity to develop their own talents, they will back them. Small farmers and shopkeepers would find life under the rule of democratically elected workers' representatives far preferable to today's struggle for existence, when debts are always going up and incomes going down.

A government that had taken over the giant Chaebol and the banks would be in a position to extend cheap credit to these layers. Its "envoys" would agitate amongst them for the most co-operative, safe and efficient use of equipment, of land and of buildings for the production, storing and distribution of food and other essential consumer goods. Decisions would be made according to what ordinary people needed in order to live a comfortable existence and not for the profit of a few in order for them to live in luxury.

The much-demanded reform of the banking system has been predicted to be about to put a third of all bank workers out of a job through mergers and acquisitions ('Economic Report'). Some economists predict a leap in the general level of unemployment from 2-6% within a very short space of time. The Korean bourgeoisie have already participated in the globalization process themselves. An explosion of overseas direct investment is taking place. Hyundai is responsible for the building in Oregan of the largest memory chip factory in the world. Daewoo is spending $6 billion to establish production outside Korea over the three years until the end of the century. Six South Korean firms are now among the 200 largest in the world.

According to the Samsung Economic Research Institute, at least 200,000 jobs producing for the home market, have been lost to areas of cheaper labor in South East Asia. A shoe factory employing 20,000 workers in Pusan, the largest in the world in the 1980s, is now closed and the work transferred. Multinationals like Nike and Reebok have moved on to places like the Philippines, Vietnam, China and Indonesia.

Even here they have found resistance to their super-exploitation strategies. Towards the end of April this year, half the 10,000 workers employed by a Nike sub-contractor in Tangerang, Indonesia were involved in mass protests at the factory - burning cars, smashing windows, doors and furniture at the firm's refusal to pay even the agreed $2.50 a day minimum wage.

'Reform' of the South Korean financial system - increasing the cost of borrowing in an attempt to reduce the over-indebtedness of Korean firms - it is feared would itself lead to recession. At present, direct foreign investment in Korea is still low. The entry of foreign capital would mean further problems for the Korean bourgeois. Lifting subsidies and protection would lead to many more collapses. Continuing them would leave Korean capitalism inefficient. Without the state protection of the past - in the form of tax wavers, over-generous credit arrangements and other more dubious methods - many more jobs would go.

If capitalist commentators now say that the state is an encumbrance pointing to 11,000 different bureaucratic regulations, they at least recognize its dominant role. They admit the absence of their beloved "free play of market forces". The state involvement was all right when it was fuelling growth but now, with the dramatic collapse of exports, it is the over-involvement of the state that is to blame. The South Korean economy is described as so top-heavy that it resembles "Schwarzenegger's body on the legs of Woody Allen"!

As the general strike, with all its phases subsided, attention was turned to the annual wage battles and, particularly amongst the activists and trade union leaders, to the question of taking political initiatives. The 'great strike' was followed by the 'great debate' over putting forward a candidate for the presidential elections on 18th December and over the creation of a party. Illusions still persist that the best chance of workers interests being pursued would be through joining forces with the existing opposition parties. But the KCTU's own press statements during the strike movement condemned the parliamentary opposition for dragging its feet and for "looking over their shoulders for the wishes of the big business".

An independent class position would be much more consistent with all the KCTU propaganda that puts the blame for workers' problems squarely at the feet of the Chaebol. If, for example, the known and respected leader of the strike, Kwon Yong-kil was put forward as a presidential candidate, he could get a big response. A bold campaign could be taken into every working class area and industrial estate, championing the demands of the movement and explaining the 'dictatorship' of big business.

Any party arising from the winter strike movement and created by its participants will represent a giant step forward. Whether it is based on clearly socialist principles depends on how far its founders can be persuaded to go. But it would seem that, in the context of a struggle that has embraced many diverse groupings within its sweep, convinced socialists would have a place in such a party. Provided they prove their worth in any and every struggle of the working class, they will find great scope for arguing the position of genuine Marxism.

There are some similarities to the situation in Russia as the 20th century began; but there are huge differences. On the verge of a new millennium, the Korean working class starts from a far higher industrial and cultural plane. Its weight in society and experience at organization is far greater. The literacy rate is higher now than that of the USA. What could be done if all of Korea's modern technology was harnessed to need and not to profit?

The Korean working class has a proud history. In the 'Great Political General Strike' they have once again proved their mettle. The workers of Korea have brought to the attention of the world how far there is to go before their country becomes the paradise that many made it out to be. Only through transforming society along socialist lines as argued in this pamphlet can the long years of sacrifice be rewarded.

Not a moment should be lost in struggling to create a leadership that is capable and worthy of that task. Only the program of socialism embodies the aspirations of the movement and safeguards its traditions. In the spirit of its message to the KCTU in January, the CWI pledges its fullest support to all engaged in this endeavor and applauds the courage and tenacity of Korea's class fighters. They remain an inspiration to all those who struggle against injustice and oppression and towards the final goal of a socialist world. Solidarity!