Concurrently [with the elimination of the institution of paying rent to private landlords], Kim [Il-sung]’s government [the Provisional People's Committee of North Korea] introduced an economic plan to convert the economy, which had been tailored to meet the needs of Japanese, to meet the needs of Koreans. In 1965, Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist, visited the DPRK and declared that North Korea was an economic miracle. “There is a complete system of social security for workers and employees,” she wrote. “Pensions are at the level of 50 percent of wages. …The medical service is free.” North Korea, she concluded, is a “nation without poverty.”
Reflecting the reforms Kim’s provisional government introduced in 1946, there existed, Robinson observed, in all enterprises “an eight-hour day, with an hour’s break for lunch; there is a six-hour day for heavy work and for occupations dangerous to health. Workers receive holidays with pay for fifteen days a year (a month for heavy and dangerous work).”
“Women are 51 percent of the population and 49 percent of the labor force,” Robinson continued, “which means that few except the elderly are not employed.” Women could fully participate in the work force because paid maternity leave, day cares, nursery schools, and prepared meals, freed them from the childcare and domestic burdens they alone had once shouldered. Regarding income inequality, Robinson noted that the “spread of income is very narrow, both between town and country and within industry.”
The Soviet zone was a living laboratory whose experiments showed the United States what would happen in their own zone if Koreans of the south were allowed to organize their own affairs. Decisions about public administration would be democratized, driven into the people’s committees, rather than held in the hands of a landlord class answerable to foreign patrons; landlords would be expropriated, and their land distributed to those who worked it; and industry would be nationalized. Since these outcomes would fail to comport with the US vision of a world organized as a hierarchy, with the titans of US finance, industry, and commerce at the top, Korea’s landed elite in the middle, and 98 percent of Koreans at the bottom, the latter group would have to be prevented from ever laying its hands on the levers of power. In order to accomplish this negative goal, the movement for Korean independence in the south would have to be crushed. After it was crushed, it would have to be forever repressed. This would be accomplished by building an anti-communist state, staffed by anti-communist zealots and former Japanese army officers whom Washington would hand pick to operate a police state, as viciously anti-Left as the Nazi’s anti-communist police state.
--- Gowans, Stephen. “The Patriot State.” Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Fight for Freedom. 2018.
