Workers' Party of Korea - Political Position

Political Position

The WPK is generally seen as similar to Communist Parties in the industrialized world which occupy a far-left position on the political spectrum. According to conventional wisdom in the West, it is the most hardline and unreformed of the five current ruling Communist/Workers’ parties, and the closest thing to an old-style Stalinist party.

The WPK maintains a leftist image. It sends a delegation to the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties where the WPK receives minor support: Its 2011 resolution “Let us jointly commemorate the Birth Centenary of the Great Leader comrade President Kim Il Sung as a Grand Political Festival of the World’s Humankind” was signed by 30 of the 79 attending parties.

However, professor B. R. Myers argues that there is a stark difference between DPRK’s and WPK’s propaganda to the international audience and domestic propaganda. After analyzing the domestic propaganda, he concluded that the WPK is not a far-left or Communist party, but rather a far-right party. Myers holds that the party has a platform of “race-based, paranoid nationalism that has nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism,” making it more comparable to 1930’s Japan than other Eastern-Bloc communist parties. After the release of Myers’ 2009 book The Cleanest Race, his views gained acceptance. Russian historian Andrei Lankov favorably reviewed it as taking a “fresh approach” on North Korea. Christopher Hitchens called the book and the analysis “electrifying” and “finely argued and brilliantly written”.