Characteristics of WPK Founding

The solid mass foundation, that is, the ardent support and trust of the working masses is the greatest political asset of the Workers’ Party of Korea. This asset difficult to gain is ascribable to the fact that the WPK was founded in a different way from the parties of many countries.
The WPK was founded on October 10, 1945, less than two months after the liberation of Korea (August 15, 1945) from the Japanese imperialists’ military occupation. However, it can be said that the preparation for its founding started nearly 20 years before. No communist party or workers’ party of any country was founded after such a long period of preparation.
The WPK is different from other parties in terms of not only the mode of the founding but also the class foundation.
On October 17, 1926, Comrade Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) formed the Down-with-Imperialism Union (DIU), the first genuine communist revolutionary organization in Korea. The DIU broke with flunkeyism and dogmatism which had remained deep-rooted in Korea and paved a new road of revolution on the principle of independence for the first time in history. Since then, the work for founding a Juche-type revolutionary party was launched in Korea.
In his early years Kim Il Sung put forward a policy of founding a party by forming its basic organizations first and then expanding and strengthening them, not by founding its central committee first and then forming its basic organizations, and led the struggle to form party organizations among the broad working masses. Under his guidance, the Korean revolutionaries awakened and rallied the masses and steadily expanded and strengthened the basic party organizations. The pioneers who were fighting against the Japanese imperialists and for building a new society in which the working people are well-off became the members of the basic party organizations. This mode of party building was the first of its kind in the world.
After the country’s liberation, Kim Il Sung, above anything else, dispatched staunch revolutionaries who took part in the anti-Japanese armed struggle to various parts of the country on a mission to form basic party organizations. The Korean revolutionaries organized party cells by rallying hard-core members in factories, farming and fishing villages and, on this basis, formed regional party organizations.
The organizational and political lines of the WPK are also unique.
Kim Il Sung set forth a policy of founding the Party with communists tempered in the anti-Japanese armed struggle as its core and embracing all the communists involved in the anti-Japanese struggle at home. He also saw to it that a hammer and a sickle symbolizing workers and farmers, as well as a writing-brush representing intellectuals were inscribed in the Party’s emblem, thus making the WPK a mass-based Party of the working people. In this way, the WPK could become a powerful political organization which was firmly based on the broad masses from the first days of its founding.
The Party’s political line of carrying out the tasks of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal democratic revolution and founding a democratic people’s republic was also a line which fully accorded with the interests of the masses. On the basis of this line, the WPK carried out the tasks of the agrarian reform, nationalization of major industries and sex equality in a short span of time, commanding the hearty support of the people. As it carries forward and develops these traditions, the WPK is demonstrating its might as a dignified and powerful political organization.

General Secretary Kim Jong Un and Party Building in New Era

In the first half of this year Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, visited many units for personal guidance. Among them he went to a place four times. It was the WPK Central Cadres Training School.
What made him show such special concern about the school?
Over the past decade the WPK has passed through the stages of historic change of succession and development. In the course of this it confirmed its guiding ideology and ultimate fighting programme and set up a new leadership body capable of confidently leading the efforts to realize them. It has also developed its work as a whole in a sustainable and innovative way according to its amended Rules and on the basis of the functions and role of its readjusted and reorganized central organizations. 
But the gigantic tasks it faced and the subjective and objective situation as well as the law-governed course of socialist construction demanded steady development in Party building. Thus, the General Secretary clarified the line of Party building in the new era and set forth the tasks for bringing about a fundamental improvement in the political, organizational, ideological, disciplinary and work-style building at the Sixth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth WPK Central Committee. Since then he has pushed the effort to fulfil the tasks in every way. 
In this effort he attached special importance to training talented Party officials who are to play a leading role in Party building in the new era. He believes that talented Party cadres capable of leading the development of all fields of politics, military, the economy and culture and of all regions constitute the most valuable and decisive resources, and their role grows more important with the progress of the cause of the socialist construction.
From this point of view Kim Jong Un ensured that the school was admirably built as the best university and delivered a congratulatory address at its opening ceremony. At that event he said it is a very significant course in strengthening the whole Party that all the officials, especially the members of the leadership body of the Party Central Committee, steadily train and develop themselves politically and ideologically and constantly improve their work method and style through regular retraining at the Party school, a furnace for the training in the Party spirit and the revolutionary spirit.
The opening of the school heralded the start of a new era in the building of the WPK and a heyday of its strengthening.
The WPK has been constantly promoting its building, availing itself of several occasions including the 10th Plenary Meeting of its 8th Central Committee which underlined the need to improve the working methods and styles of its officials. In July when disastrous floods hit the northern part of the DPRK Kim Jong Un took all possible measures for the victims, as part of his effort to ensure that the WPK plays its mission as a party for the people.
The vigorous promotion of the cause of Party building in the new era under his energetic guidance suggests that the WPK will wage a ceaseless and determined struggle to realize its dream and ideal of building a socialist power by steadily enhancing its leadership function and role in the future, too.  

Key Policies of WPK

In recent years the Workers’ Party of Korea has made public some important policies and directed efforts to their thorough implementation, which attracted the attention of the international community.

Shaping Future on Strength of Affection for Rising Generation

In June 2021 the WPK announced a new childcare policy whose gist is supplying all the children across the country with dairy products and other nutritive foodstuffs at state expense.
As regards the enforcement of that policy, General Secretary Kim Jong Un said as follows:
It is the most important policy and supreme desire of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the state to provide more improved conditions for bringing up children even at the cost of huge sums of money. It should be the mode of advance and development of the Korean revolution to devote more sincerity to children even if the conditions become worse and to advance more vigorously towards the future of communism on the strength of that love. When the rising generations eat well and grow healthily in good environment from their childhood, our society will be full of that much vigour and vitality after 20 and 30 years and the national power of the DPRK will grow stronger.

Providing People with More Civilized Life

Nowadays, housing construction goes ahead on an extensive scale in the DPRK.
For the last three years more than 10 000 flats have been built in Pyongyang alone every year. Simultaneously, lots of farmhouses have been built in different parts of the country to suit the regional features. Still now, local media cover house moving events almost every day.
Such reality is attributable to the WPK’s policy of building 50 000 flats in the capital city and farmhouses in rural regions. 
It should not be overlooked that all these achievements have been made thanks mainly to the intention of Kim Jong Un to basically transform the living environment for the whole population within 20 or 30 years.
A New Avenue for Regional Prosperity Opened Up

In January the WPK advanced the Regional Development 20×10 Policy which indicated the new blueprint for regional-industry development, true to the far-reaching plan of Kim Jong Un. Now it is pushing the project in good earnest.
The new policy is aimed at building modern regional-industry factories in 20 counties every year so as to upgrade the basic material and cultural living standards of the people across the country within 10 years.
In August the WPK set forth a new policy of accelerating the implementation of the historic cause of regional rejuvenation by pushing the construction of public health facilities, sci-tech learning spaces and grain management stations, in parallel with the ongoing construction of regional-industry factories.
Given that the country still faces a lot of shortages, it would not be easy to implement the policy. However, the Korean people are determined to carry it out and are sure of its feasibility.
The WPK and the Korean people believe that the implementation of the policy would help towards markedly reducing the regional lop-sidedness in the people’s living standards, promote the characteristic development of regional industries and in turn foster a simultaneous, comprehensive and balanced development of the whole nation that conforms to the era of overall development of socialism.