BY IGGY KIM
SEOUL — At its sixth congress on March 24-25, South Korea's Power of the Working Class continued its advance towards creating a revolutionary working-class party. While it will continue as a preparatory group until its seventh congress in September, the PWC will now take the necessary steps to proceed to the next stage.
This is of historic importance, being the first effort, since the 1945-53 revolution was defeat in South Korea by the US invasion, to have come this far in the process of creating such a party.
At its founding in August 1999, the PWC decided to embark on a three-stage process of regrouping South Korea's Marxists into a revolutionary party. This decision was due to the origins of the organisation.
When the Marxist movement was reborn in South Korea in the 1980s, it took the form of a plethora of local propaganda circles. Following the upsurge of 1987, these circles began coming together to form national political organisations. However, this was cut short by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many revolutionaries subsequently retreated into mass and sectoral organisations, maintaining only an informal network with each other.
This changed with the winter 1996-7 general strike against the counter-reform of labour laws by the first civilian president in more than 30 years. The network of revolutionaries played an important role in guiding and organising the powerful rank-and-file dynamic that drove the first general strike since the revolution. But the lack of a party assured that the reformist leadership of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions would gain the upper hand in the working-class movement.
In light of this contradictory balance-sheet, the possibility and urgency of an all-South Korean working-class party was once again brought into focus. Thus, the founding of the PWC recommenced what was aborted back in the early 1990s, but in the absence of the impetus of a mass upsurge.
In these circumstances, the PWC must continue to deal with an immensely varied background of circle activity, differentiated by a spectrum of perspectives and theoretical standpoints on almost all the major questions facing the movement, ranging from the character of South Korean capitalism and organisational methods, through to revolutionary strategy and attitudes toward the Stalinist regime in North Korea.
In addition, the PWC's members must deal with the years of retreat in the mass and sectoral organisations, as well as a liberal bourgeois current within the labour movement that is now organised — the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), formed in early 1998.
Faced with such circumstances, the PWC decided at the outset to function as a "preparatory group" for one year. In that time, it aimed to develop from a loose regroupment network into a single, centrally coordinated organisation. To aid this, a congress of all members was to be convened every three months.
However, at the fifth congress last September, members assessed that there had been insufficient progress to move to the next stage. Essentially, the PWC was still not functioning as a single organisation. After intense debate, a second preparatory period of organisational consolidation and expansion was decided, measures were adopted to strengthen the PWC's leadership structures, and a new leadership elected.
At the sixth congress, after two months of pre-congress discussion and consultation between the basic units and the PWC central executive committee, an interim assessment of the second preparatory period was made. It was concluded that, while problems remained, there had been marked progress in the PWC's activities, information flows, the functioning of the basic units, the organisational leadership of the CEC, and the development of the newspaper. This was especially brought to light in the PWC's central role in the Daewoo Motors workers' struggle.
Programmatic agreement was also taken forward in the last six months with the first ever internal debates on the women's question and a new level of debate on relations between the two Korean states.
An aspect of the PWC's ongoing advance is the "closing in" of the periphery, as many Marxists who initially held back from joining have now begun to move closer to the organisation. At the congress, 22 applicants for membership — all activists from a variety of sectoral organisations — were accepted into the PWC.
Reflecting this progress, the congress voted almost unanimously to take steps toward the next stage of the organisation, the "advancement committee", which will then be formally adopted at the seventh congress in September. This is the final step to becoming a party.
The political level and scope of the sixth congress was also higher and wider than previously. The internal debates on the women's and inter-Korean questions were continued at the congress in the form of non-binding and non-decision making reports and discussions. As well as continuing the trail blazing on the women's question, new angles and positions were explored on the question of inter-Korean relations and US imperialism's role in Korea.
Historically, the latter question has been dominated by the pro-Pyongyang nationalist current in the South Korean left. The Marxists have had little experience in intervening in the national unification movement. But with these new discussions, the PWC has now begun exploring the tactics and positions with which to actively intervene in the national liberation struggle from a working-class standpoint. This is a significant step forward.