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The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945저자: Vladimir Tikhonov
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THE RED DECADES: COMMUNISM AS MOVEMENT AND CULTURE IN KOREA, 1919–1945
Vladimir Tikhonov
Published: October 2023
Paperback: $28.00
University of Hawaii Press
420 pages |
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Introduction: The Red Age Worldwide and Colonial Korea, 1919 to Late 1930s
1
PART I THE ORGANIZATION
Chapter 1
Actors of the Korean Communist Movement
33
Chapter 2
Factions and the Meanings of the Factional Struggle
75
Chapter 3
The Communist Programs
102
PART II THE REALM OF NEW KNOWLEDGE
Chapter 4
The Marxist Philosophy of Pak Chiu
131
Chapter 5
The Socialist Concepts of Nation and History
157
Chapter 6
Kim Saryang's Observations of Liberated
China, 1945
185
Chapter 7
The Red Capital of Moscow in the Eyes of Korean Travelers
207
Postscript: The Afterlife of Socialism in the Two Koreas
232
Conclusion: A Balance Sheet of Korea's Red Age
255
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Focusing on previously neglected cultural expressions of colonial-period Korean socialism such as Marxist philosophy, Marxist historiography, and travelogues by socialist writers, The Red Decades reveals Marxian socialism as a cultural phenomenon of colonial-age Korea. Providing an account of the social composition of the Communist milieu in 1920s and 1930s Korea and outlining the aims of the colonial-period Communist movement as formulated in programmic documents, this text offers a rich, nuanced description of the microcosm of Korean Communism—a setting of factional alignments, pilgrimages to Moscow, extended stays of the Korean revolutionaries as exiles in China and the Soviet Union, and a polylingual environment with Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian being equally important as the idioms of socialist propagation and international networking. Placing the endeavors of colonial-age Communists within a global historical context allows for dissections of how Korean socialists' ideals interacted with the realities of the conservative turn taking place in the Soviet Union since the late 1920s, as well as considering the implication of Stalinism for Korean revolutionary culture. Yet this analysis also focuses on the individuals involved, especially on their persistent issue of factionalism in the Korean Communist movement and on the role of underground radicalism in shaping the subaltern subjectivities of the participants.
The Red Decades discusses the world-historical place of “alternative modernity” that colonial-age socialists of Korea were pursuing. Based on a wealth of Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese primary sources, including the Korea-related parts of the archives of Comintern, an under-utilized resource in Anglophone scholarship. The research also accommodates the achievements of the last decades, from South Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Anglophone and Russophone academic worlds. The breadth of this study situates the philosophical, historiographical, and political practices of Marxism of colonial Korea in the global historical perspective and simultaneously explores the long-lasting influences of the Communist movement in post-1945 North and South Korea.
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Introduction
The Red Age Worldwide and Colonial Korea,
1919 to Late 1930s
WHAT IS SOCIALISM?
"Socialism" is a word with many meanings. In the contemporary par-lance, it may refer to any attempt to socialize economy and make societies more equalitarian via redistributive mechanisms. In her recent brilliant treatment of the colonial-era Korean leftist literature, Sunyoung Park defined socialism as "any political theory that joins a critique of modern capitalist society to an egalitarian and communitarian vision." This definition is inclusive enough to encompass diverse and often highly dissimilar versions of socialist theory and practice. Modest welfarism is a part of the semantical field of the term, just like the radical attempts to restructure the society-often in decisively violent ways-on the other edge of the spectrum. Known in English since the early nineteenth century, the word was quite literally translated into Japanese as shakai-shugi ("society-ism"). The first usages of this term are recorded in the 1870s and 1880s. As early as in 1881, Kozaki Hiromichi (1856-1938), one of the most prominent early Protestant ministers in Meiji Japan, published an article dealing with Marxian teachings and used terms like "so-cialist party" (shakaito) and "socialism" there.?
Very soon, both the term and general idea about what socialism was supposed to be found their way to Korea as well. Yi Horyong, a contemporary South Korean anarchism researcher, made painstaking efforts to trace how the term "socialism" eventually found its place in the conceptual paradigm of Korean modernity. As he found out, the French
1
and German socialists (sahoedang, Korean rendering of Japanese shakaito), alongside Russia's nihilists (hömudang, the Korean version of Japanese kyomuto), were first mentioned by Korea's earliest modern newspaper, Hansong Sunbo, in 1883-1884. The articles in question, mostly citing Japanese and Chinese sources, mentioned both European socialists' quest for economic and social equality and often violent governmental suppression they were exposed to. Furthermore, similarly to China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Kötoku Shusui's
(1871-1911) writings on socialism, including his famous 1902 essay col-lection, Chöközetsu (Long Discourses), made their impact onto these few Korean intellectuals who could access them in Japanese.* However, before Korea's 1910 colonization by Japan and in the first colonial years, this impact was still close to negligible.
The First World War, the very symbol of the capitalist crisis of the first half of the twentieth century, was the game changer. After 1914, we find the first Korean intellectuals who start to identify different varieties of socialism as a solution to the painfully visible problems of the global capitalist system. Some of the Korean intellectuals who later earned fame for their socialist radicalism, both of political and a more artistic kind, already came into contact with the world of socialist thought during the First World War. For example, Hwang Sög'u (1895-
1959), later known as a symbolist poet in whose works natural tropes often stood for the creative potential of the exploited and downtrod-den, was arrested by Japanese police as early as in 1916 when he, then a Waseda University student, attempted to distribute in Korea a journal he published in Tokyo, some articles of which were devoted to socialist ideas. Similarly to China's case— the first Chinese anarchist organizations dated back to 1906-1907 and predated the introduction of Marxism by more than a decade-the first known Korean socialists of the mid-1910s were anarchist converts among Tokyo-based students. One of them was Na Kyongsok (1890-1959), later known as a radical polemist and the first person to introduce Einstein's relativity theory to Korea in 19227
While in the beginning both anarchism and Marxian socialism were seen as two interrelated varieties of a similar ideological current, they became more divorced from each other after the first Communist groups coalesced around 1921 (see Chapter 1). Still, a degree of interpenetration
between Communist and anarchist thought was relatively high until circa
1922. Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), a Russian-born anarchist thinker who exerted the strongest influence on the whole East Asian anarchist milieu of the early twentieth century, remained for some time an inspiration for a number of Communist converts-some of whom were indeed originally anarchists and only gradually internalized the tenets of dialectical and historical materialism à la Marx.8 The first translations of Yamakawa Hitoshi's (1880-1958) and Kawakami Hajime's (1879-1946) popularized introductions to Marxism appeared in Korean only in the last half of 1922, accelerating the great divide between Marxian socialism and anarchism, mostly complete by late 1922 or early 1923? A 1923 article on Japanese intellectual life by Hwang Sög'u deals with Communism and anarchism as two mutually different, competing intellectual trends; the former, according to Hwang, stood significantly stronger.!°
The exploration of Korean anarchist history is not the objective of this book. I chose to focus on the Marxian Communist thought and cul-ture, primarily on account of them being greatly under-researched in the Anglophone academia. These who are interested in Korean anarchist tradition should turn to the superb monographic works and articles on the issue published recently, as interest in Korean anarchism has been steadily growing." It is important to mention that in certain respects, anarchists resembled their Communist rivals. Korean anarchism too represented a cross-class alliance of sorts (see Chapter 1 on the use of this concept), with better educated, multilingual leaders (often scions of privileged families) presiding over organizations with significant grassroots participation, both in Korea proper and in the Korean communities on Chinese territory and in Japan.12 Some of the militant trade unions, organizing both migrant Korean workers in Japan and Korea's domestic laborers, were anarchist-led. Exiled Korean anarchists in China, not unlike Communist émigrés, networked widely with their Chinese comrades and often built joint organizations with them. It was only logical since, similarly to Communists, they wanted to build an alternative modern society rather than simply an independent Korean nation-state, and understood their project as universally valid.'4
Anarchists' aversion towards any centralized authority, prominently including its Soviet variety, was the biggest difference between the two and the main background for the heated rivalry between these
two socialist tendencies-the rivalry which sometimes could result in violent physical confrontations.5 In Manchuria, where anarchists tended to ally themselves with nationalists (paralleling the incorporation of some Chinese anarchist groups and personalities into nationalist Guomin-dang in the mid- and late 1920s), the confrontation vis-à-vis Communists could take especially violent forms in the prevalent atmosphere of general lawlessness.16 Kim Chwajin (1889-1930), a nationalist military leader (of aristocratic yangban background) known for his exploits in the armed anti-Japanese struggle, tilted towards anarchism in the late 1920s and was eventually assassinated by a young Communist militant." Their common roots and many other commonalities notwithstanding, Communists and anarchists were thoroughly inimical to each other since the mid-1920s, divided, among many other things, by blood already shed in the course of intense confrontation. Anarchists' visceral anti-Communism actually helped some of the movement's survivors to adjust and remain rather prominent in virulently anti-Communist South Korean mainstream society after the 1950-1953 Korean War-despite their advocacy of nonauthoritarian, autonomous forms of modernization so contrasting with police state regimes in South Korea under its pre-1990s dictatorial presidents.18
As was noted earlier, some anarchists eventually converted into Marxian socialism in the early 1920s. Korea's more moderate socialists, in their turn, were mostly former Communists who decided at some point that Koreans had to first concentrate on creating a viable democratic state able and willing to proceed with social reforms. Yõ Unhyong
(1886-1947; see more on him below and in Chapter 1), initially one of the leaders in the Shanghai-based Korean Communist milieu and the first translator of the Communist Manifesto into Korean, came to espouse much more moderate beliefs later in the 1930s. By that point, it was a "progressive" national statehood he chose to focus on.!° While this agenda would appear broadly social democratic to us today, the term was eschewed in the Korean socialist milieus of the interwar era, partly on account of the Comintern's hostility towards social democracy and partly due to the established association between social democracy and parliamentarism, absent in Japan's Korean colony. To the colony's anti-imperialist radicals of any sort, the social democrats of Europe or Japan, with their visible participation in imperial parliaments and governments
that did not hurry up to hasten the liberation of the colonies, looked distant and hostile. For example, Kim Myongsik (1891-1943), one of Korea's pioneering Marxian socialists (see more on him in Chapter 1), fiercely criticized Britain's Labour government of 1929-1931 for its allegedly
"pro-capitalist" spending cuts, for its supposed "deception of Gandhi" and its reluctance to initiate the dismantling of the British Empire, and for its alleged anti-Soviet policies. Yet another point of his critique was the Labour government's harsh attitude towards defeated Germany.2 That even Kim, who did not participate in the Communist Party reestablish-ment movement of the early 1930s (on this movement and its implications, see the Conclusion), was so scathingly critical about British Labourism (and its continental cousins as well) was hardly surprising. Korean social-ism, after all, was born out of the popular rebellion's crucible. It was the pan-national pro-independence demonstrations on March 1, 1919, and throughout that month that catalyzed the birth of socialism in Korea.
1919: A YEAR OF GLOBAL REBELLION
There has hardly been a single year that changed the trajectory of Korea's modern history as much as 1919. Momentous pro-independence demonstrations engulfed the whole of Korea for several weeks beginning on March 1 of that year. The demonstrations claimed perhaps as many as several thousand lives (the exact figures are disputed), involving hundreds of thousands of active participants and ushering Korea into a qualitatively new age. "Modernity" is an ambiguous term with multiple meanings. However, if we regard the birth of mass participatory politics as the hallmark of the beginning of the modern body politic, then 1919 is doubtless the year when modern society took a definite shape in the country.?! True, the Independence Club (Tongnip Hyphoe) had been experimenting with the mass politics of street meetings already in 1896-1898, but then, participation was mainly limited to the male residents of the Korean capital (today's Seoul), and predominantly the literate mid-dle- and upper-classes.2 By contrast, the pan-national demonstration crowds of 1919 prominently featured women, adolescents, former outcasts still subject to discrimination -butchers (paekchong) and pretty much everybody else— excluding a relatively tiny elite stratum bound by
the established patterns of collaboration with the colonizers. The "people," the quintessential actor of mass politics, were born, and "nation" and
"nationalism" were transformed from elements of intellectual discourse into the lived reality of millions.23
Why did this happen in 1919? At that moment, the development of internal events overlapped with a gigantic global flow. Korea, a colonial backwater of the dynamically developing Japanese Empire, was, its relative obscurity notwithstanding, already a part of the globally synchronized events on the worldwide scene. Domestically, discontent had been accumulating since the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910. It brought together otherwise rather heterogeneous elements, a diverse array of social and religious groups. While the peasants had all the reasons to dislike the relative worsening of land tenancy conditions, even some landlords and richer merchants, interested in diversifying into industrial investments, were appalled by colonial restrictions on local commercial initiative.24 Fledgling urban middle classes were desperate over the tangible lack of progressive modern developments, Protestant Christians resented the restrictions on religious teaching at the private missionary schools, and the adepts of native Ch'öndogyo faith wanted their denomination to be recognized as a proper religion (something that the colonial authorities had been persistently refusing so far).25 In addition, everybody classified as "Korean" by the colonial administration had good grounds to resent the discrimination such a classification implied. Colonial discrimination was superbly instrumental in making a "people" into a self-conscious subject of history.26
On the other hand, globally 1919 was a year of global rebellion. It was even more so than 1968, when "rebellions" in the centers of the capitalist world-system symbolically attacked the logic of for-profit pro-duction, capital accumulation, and mass consumption in the public space but hardly threatened the existence of the capitalist system in earnest.27 In 1919, after the sacrifices of the Great War and subsequent Spanish flu pandemic, and amid the postwar economic depression, there was indeed a tangible, palpable feeling that the whole system was just a step away from final implosion. It imploded in Russia, the war-ravaged "weak-est link" (Lenin) of world capitalism's global chain, a country with great power ambitions and a peripheral, largely dependent, and underdeveloped industrial economy. The waves of radicalization, however, were
engulfing even some core regions of the capitalist world-system in hitherto unprecedented ways. In defeated Germany-the state that had been emerging as the industrial powerhouse of Europe before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914-Saxony, Bremen, and, famously, Bavaria (Munich) saw attempts to create socialist (or workers' councils-ruled) republics. Even after the radical outbreaks of 1918 and 1919 were crushed, workers' uprisings continued in the most industrially developed parts of Germany, such as in the Ruhr region and Hamburg (1923).28 The radical wave in Germany was strong enough to make the German Communist Party the largest in 1920s Europe, with some degree of independence from increasingly Stalinist Soviet Union until the very end of the 1920s, and with vastly different organizational culture.29
Similar events were simultaneously taking place on Europe's still predominantly agricultural periphery, from Limerick in Ireland to Budapest in Hungary.30 Both places witnessed attempts to establish Soviet republics, and the latter ended in large-scale violence that subsequently defined much of Hungary's pre-Second World War history.31 Concur-rently, hitherto unprecedented simultaneous turbulence appeared throughout the colonial and semi-colonial peripheries of the European capitalist oikumene. The year 1919 saw revolutionary events shattering the British dominance in Egypt, challenging British colonial rule in In-dia, and awakening popular anti-imperialist nationalism in China (e.g., the May 4 movement).32 It was the latter wave of postwar anticolonial risings that the seminal events of March 1919 in Korea may be justifiably considered a part of.33
THE 1919-1923 "RED WAVE":
THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
If we attempt to go beyond the conventional and insufficiently analytical, stereotypical definitions of "socialist/communist risings" or "anticolonial struggle," what were the main essential features of the post-First World War global Red Wave? First, the struggles were mostly led by coalitions of radical intelligentsia with what one can term the most advanced layers of the broader plebeian "masses. For the societies with at least a rudimentary level of industrialization it usually meant urban, literate, organized,
—
and not necessarily abjectly poor skilled factory workers. Typically for Europe's predominantly agrarian periphery-the category into which Russia too could be included —the 1919 Hungarian Revolution had its center in Budapest's giant factories: 50 percent of whatever industry Hungary had was concentrated there, and 37.7 percent of the total workforce was to be found in the large plants with more than five hundred workers. By contrast, the countryside remained mostly either neutral or even hostile towards the revolutionary events.34 In Austria, the relative radicalism of industrial "Red Vienna, governed by a social democratic city council, contrasted with the staunch conservatism of much of the countryside.35 In Korea's case, the most active participants in March 1919 events on the ground were Protestant layfolk. They were predominantly literate, well organized, and often better aware about the international events. Of the 7,835 Koreans detained by the Japanese police as major
"sedition" suspects during the turbulent events of March through June 1919, 22 percent were Protestants, although at that point, Protestant believers constituted only about 1.3 percent of Korea's population.36 Second, the events were supposed to herald both a shift of the elites in control and a shift in the mode of the industrial economy's organization.
"Proletarian dictatorship" and other slogans of similar kind in postwar Europe usually signified the shift of power from the entrenched, aristo-cratic, or/and patrician upper-middle class elites to the radical intellectuals as well as the cadres of labor militants, often with experience of political party or union organizational work. While the "proletariat" was hardly in a position to assume the "hegemonic" position that the radicals tended to assign to it, the relative "plebeization" of political power undoubtedly had a democratizing effect. It brought in its wake a huge wave of upward social mobility in such societies as postrevolutionary Russia, where the radicals managed to cling to power.
Russian radicals were claiming their intention to build a socialist so-ciety. Socialism (or communism), as understood by Karl Marx (1818-
1883), was a postcapitalist society of communal production in which the law of commodities' value (wertgesetz der Waren) would cease to func-tion: the sole criterion for the production would be use-needs, that is, the needs of the freely associated producers-cum-consumers whose labor would no longer be bought and sold.37 Political realists as they were, neither Russian radicals nor their foreign allies believed that the hoped-for
nonalienated society of associated producers would emerge overnight after a successful revolution. On the eve of the October 1917 revolution, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), its leader, postulated that a special period of "proletarian dictatorship"-mentioned above-would be needed after a successful revolution and before the state per se would completely wither away, morphing into a truly socialist-or communist—association of free producers. The dictatorship was primarily needed to "smash" the former ruling classes and prepare the ground for a qualitatively new, fully egalitarian society.38 While this stated final aim could look desirable also to anarchists in Korea and elsewhere, "proletarian dictatorship" was what decisively divorced them from Leninism. Of course, this working scheme had to be constantly corrected on the way, following the contingencies of the revolutionary process. Having peaked in 1919, the revolutionary wave in Europe entered its downward phase, and Lenin's own Soviet Russia had to switch to the "New Economic Policy" of de facto state-controlled capitalism in 1921. Lenin himself, always a realist, termed this new society "state capitalism. However, he saw it as a transitional stage on the way towards the eventual socialist, or communist, goals.39
Even at the supposed transitional stage, the realm of the political was to take precedence over the realm of the economical. The revolutionaries aspired to take over much of the industrial economy and finance. This move looked natural and logical given the experience of state control over the economies of First World War belligerents in 1914-1918 (on the German case of wartime economic mobilization, for example, see Feldman 1976; see direct references to the German wartime experiences in Lenin 1965 [1921]). As a politically controlled, bureaucratically administrated economy was already a lived experience, the plebeian radicals wanted the shift to be completed, with ownership rights taken away from the industrialists despised for their recent war profiteering, labor de-commodified, and surplus value redistributed. The redistribution was supposed to happen in ways that would enable the factory "hands" to achieve the levels of cultural capital or health previously associated mostly with middle-class professionals. If implemented following the lines of the Russian revolution, the measures desired by the radicals of the Red Wave would have amounted to a major "class uplift" for previously underprivileged groups. They would also mean an essential recalibration of the industrial economy from competitive profit maximization
to fulfillment of the political objectives dictated by the mass movement from below.40 In short, mass politics were to triumph over mar-kets. On the colonized periphery, in Korea and elsewhere, the recovery of national sovereignty was the main demand. At the same time, it is important to remember that, unlike many independence movement groups of the 1910s that aimed for the restoration of the Korean monarchy (for example, the China-based New Korean Revolutionary League [Sinhan Hyongmyongdan], established in 1915; see Kang, Kim, and Chong 2008, 44-59), the Shanghai Provisional Government, organized in the wake of the March 1 movement in exile, proclaimed Korea a democratic republic.^ On the world-systemic periphery too, democratization was one of the most central demands of the Red Wave.
Third, and very important, was the combined, complex nature of the democratization demands presented by the post-First World War Red Wave. Economic democratization, with mass-based politics conquering the corridors of power and taking over industrial production, was cen-tral. However, it was only a part of a huge stream of emancipatory demands from below. Women, who took a very active part in overthrowing Tsarist authorities in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in February 1917, were an object of special attention for the Bolshevik propagandists even before the October 1917 revolution and were given voting rights by the Bolshevik government. In the March 1919 events in Korea, women played a very visible part, breaking away from centuries-old patriarchal norms.43 In Seoul (Kyongsong), not only several hundred girl students but also around eight hundred female entertainers (kisang)-traditionally treated as little more than eroticized playthings of upper-class males-went out demonstrating.*
The downtrodden, the minorities of all sorts were empowered, and not only ethnic minorities. In March 1919 Korea, the butchers (paekchöng), previously a hereditary low-status group and still discriminated even under the supposedly "modernizing" colonial rule, were actively participating in the demonstrations and launched a liberation movement of their own soon thereafter.45 Conservative sexual norms were shaken to the ground, as the Bolsheviks decriminalized homosexuality and even allowed some of the first-ever gay marriages in Europe's modern history.1 Early Soviet schools not only prohibited all forms of physical punishment but also introduced elements of self-rule for the pupils and
eschewed evaluation through grades as inherently authoritarian and fostering competition instead of collaboration.^ Early Soviet education-coeducation of both genders, attempts at organizing schoolchildren's self-rule, promotion of labor education, and attention paid to the issue of molding an altruistic personality— was a hot topic in 1920s Korean newspapers.48 The Soviet educational theories and practices, as well as the work done by the European theorists of emancipatory Communist education, such as Edwin Hoernle (1883-1952), constituted an important inspiration for the activists of proletarian youth culture in 1920s-1930s Japan.19 They, in turn, influenced radical anti-authoritarian authors in Korea, typified by such classics of children's literature as Yi Chuhong
(1906-1987) and Yi Tonggyu (1911-1952).50 One can say that, in a global historical context, the Red Wave signaled the advent of the second wave of democratization-the first wave being represented by the democratic revolutions and liberal movements in late eighteenth-early nineteenth-century Europe and North America.
THE "RED AGE," 1923 TO THE LATE 1930S:
THE ESSENTIAL TRAITS
By around 1923-1924— when groups of radicals, mostly former nation-alists, were attempting to prepare what was necessary for establishing a proper underground Communist Party in Korea—the peak of worldwide rage was decidedly over. On the surface, global capitalism and the global inter-state system had stabilized, and the Red Wave transformed itself into the legendary Roaring Twenties. In Germany, the hoped-for potential "locomotive" of the European revolution and the country with the largest Communist Party in Europe, both ultra-right-wing putsch and Communist uprising attempts failed in 1923, ushering the Weimar Republic into a short period of relative calm afterwards.51 In India, the world's most populous colony, the Non-cooperation Movement was suspended in 1922 following violent clashes (an "incident") in Chauri Chaura: the anticolonial onslaught of the early 1920s was now over. 52 China, the largest formally independent state of the world periphery, saw its nascent industrial economy booming amid political decentralization ("warlordism"). Industrial growth was helped both by wartime demands
in 1914-1918 and by boycotts of foreign goods following the anti-imperialist upsurge of 1919 (the aforementioned May 4 movement).53 Already by 1919, China had an estimated one-and-a-half-million industrial workers whose radicalism throughout the 1920s provided inspiration to neighboring Korea's radicals.54 There was a feeling by the 1920s that the world managed to return to a semblance of pre-1914 prosper-ity. Indeed, in the core of the world system a noticeable progress was pal-pable. By 1929 France, for example, boasted per capita income a fifth higher than in 1914, and around a 50 percent increase in exports compared to the last prewar year.55
The stability, however, was highly deceptive. Neither the 1919 Versailles Peace nor postwar policies of major states did anything to solve the root causes of the 1919-1923 Red Wave. Except for a few cases, mostly in Europe (Iceland in 1918, Ireland in 1922, and a number of former possessions of Russia and the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire), colonies mostly remained colonies. Korea, for example, was allowed some space for economic and cultural development as well as social organization (the colonial administration's "cultural policy"), but nothing more than that.56 The inter-state system remained strictly hierarchical even outside of the colonized parts of the world. The states on the losing side of the First World War, principally Germany, suffered from the burden of reparations, while China and some other peripheral states were still struggling for the removal of humiliating "unequal trea-ties. Universal suffrage including even the most destitute categories of the workers (but still excluding women in many countries, notably France and Japan) was increasingly becoming an accepted international norm.
However, even if the workers gained political citizenship in democratic or semi-democratic states, their social citizenship remained yet an elusive dream. Social housing programs in postwar Europe ("council houses" in Great Britain and similar programs in Germany or the Austrian capital of Vienna, then nicknamed Red Vienna) and unemployment insurance were making their first steps. Welfare-state development, however, was still at a rudimentary stage even in the core areas of the world system, not to mention the periphery or colonies, including Korea. With no significant steps towards any essential amelioration of national and social tensions, it was hardly possible to expect that the 1919-1923 Red Wave would disappear into thin air. Indeed, it rather transmogrified into a "Red Age, which
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