North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953–1965

In 2017, during a lecture at the US Library of Congress, historian Andre Schmid implored his audience to consider “Is a history of North Korea without Kim Il Sung possible?” before emphasizing that one could “get beyond a Cold War analytical dead end” by sifting through published materials that North Korean people regularly encountered.1 Now, seven years later, with the publication of his long-awaited monograph North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953–1965, Schmid's answer to his question is apparently “Perhaps not.” Not only is the name of the first North Korean leader a part of the title, Kim Il Sung's political ascent is one of several narrative threads holding Schmid's voluminous work together. Nevertheless, Schmid devotes considerably more attention to those who shaped the “Party-state” discourse in widely read publications, arguing that the personality cult around the DPRK leader “emerged out of the era's gendered social and political-economic challenges, and not the other way around” (20). Kim himself only makes cameo appearances in Schmid's work, which roughly corresponds to the treatment of the leader in official DPRK publications throughout much of the 1950s.True to its title, Schmid's monograph offers the North Korean studies field a constellation of “mundane histories,” (3) highlighting the involvement of Korean men and women in numerous state-sponsored initiatives surrounding the attainment of New Living. By “New Living,” Schmid refers to aspirations to reinvent one's society, community, family, and personal living space in ways that could be framed as innovative yet were ultimately cherished for their contribution to frugality and stability. After the Korean War, which killed 18 percent of North Korea's population and resulted in severe social dislocation (23), one can imagine the appeal of such an objective. As Schmid demonstrates, the discourse of New Living was subject to fluctuation and a plurality of interpretations yet persistently came to represent a “turn to the family,” specifically a nuclear, heteronormative one, which “enabled [the] self-proclaimed socialist regime to consolidate its power” (3).In lieu of a strict chronological narrative, Schmid divides his discussion of New Living into four central questions considered essential to address in the postwar era: how to engage in self-criticism and self-improvement; how to construct apartments and neighborhood facilities efficiently; how to furnish individual homes materially and socially to bolster production; and, finally, how to consume in a way that balances economizing with being cultured. In the self-improvement section, we find a proliferation of advice literature, which purveyed the notion of “cultural levels” that some had attained more than others, thus naturalizing a growing trend of economic and social stratification. The advice literature was primarily geared toward women, stressing suitable and refined ways to dress and talk, even in the workplace, which Schmid attributes to male anxieties regarding women's increasing participation in wage work. Schmid could have easily ended his analysis of gender there, as conventional explanations of gendered stratification in the home as well as the workplace typically rest with male insecurities. However, Schmid goes a step further, presenting a mountain of evidence that the New Living push to reify heteronormative conventions was at least as much tied to grave concerns about masculine unruliness in worker dormitories and the remedy of nuclear family apartment units, where women acting as household managers could tame men while also contributing to the maintenance of their communities.Interspersed between the text's chapters are “Flashes of Criticism,” instances when, however subtly, someone appears to express disapproval about official party policy or discourse. Ironically, perhaps, most of these takes are from an Orthodox Marxist or Maoist perspective, including a translated political cartoon from a Chinese newspaper depicting negative consequences of material incentives for workers at a time when North Korea was embracing them. It is important to recognize that throughout Schmid's text are not simply flashes but cascades of criticism, such as townspeople complaining about shoddy consumer goods and women bemoaning a lack of support from their husbands. However, with rare exceptions, such critiques were intentionally directed downward toward local officials, enterprises, or individuals in need of reform and self-improvement. Given this inversion of any kind of real structural criticism, Schmid contends that New Living discourse effectively depoliticized class and gender in DPRK society.Apart from the text's fresh set of research and thematic considerations regarding gender, class, and power, one of the greatest strengths of North Korea's Mundane Revolution is its identification of traits distinguishing the DPRK from other state-socialist regimes. Unlike China and the Soviet Union, the issue of class did not play such a central role in state policy and mobilization campaigns, and there was hardly any experimentation with alternatives to nuclear family living arrangements. In contrast to Eastern European countries where centralized production of consumer goods resulted in the state losing legitimacy when product quality deteriorated, the DPRK's practice of decentralizing consumer goods production allowed central authorities to save face and shift the blame when issues regarding poor quality arose. Such distinctions that Schmid makes are compelling, but there are times when he takes his comparative assertions too far. For instance, Schmid's claim that bourgeois accusations were nearly absent from party discourse, except when directed at South Korea or the United States (72, 121–22, 185), is undermined by repeated warnings to artists, musicians, and writers during the 1950s and 1960s about bourgeois remnants in DPRK society as well as related purges of notable cultural figures such as the previously well-respected pianist and composer Kim Sun-nam. Such blind spots of the Party-state discourse are likely a result of Schmid's overarching interest in matters pertaining to material conditions, rather than the art and literary world.Still, precisely because of its numerous inferences and insights into material conditions, North Korea's Mundane Revolution should pique the interest of not only cultural historians of North Korea and comparative state-socialist regimes but also economists, political scientists, and a general readership. Rarely does this kind of corrective work in the field contribute so many revolutionary revisions.