Prof. Dr. An Myong Ok, Faculty of Philosophy, Kim Il Sung University
2025.10.7.
The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un said:
"Comrade Kim Il Sung ensured that the Workers' Party of Korea was built into a mass-based party with workers, farmers and intellectuals as its component elements, that it oriented all its activities to defending and realizing the demands and interests of the masses, and that it thus struck root deep among them and formed an integral whole with them."
President Kim Il Sung always went among the people throughout his entire career of leading the revolution. He advanced the revolution based on the people's opinions and directed everything he did toward fully realizing their demands and interests. This is how he built our Party into a genuine party of the people which is deeply rooted in and forms a harmonious whole with the popular masses.
Every page of the history of our Party's founding and development is engraved with the immortal exploits of President Kim Il Sung, who built the Workers' Party of Korea into a party of the popular masses, cherishing the noble view of devoting himself to the people's happiness. There is a touching story about how he advanced and brilliantly realized the idea of building our Party into the one deeply rooted in the masses at the very beginning of founding the Party.
It happened at the time when President Kim Il Sung had moved the base of his revolutionary activities from Huadian to Jilin after organizing the Down-with-Imperialism Union (DIU), which became the starting point of the struggle to found a Juche-type revolutionary Party. At the time, President Kim Il Sung entrusted Comrade Cha Kwang Su with the task of conducting revolutionary activities in a small farm village. It was one of the small number of bases for the political movement among the Korean settlements in Manchuria. If the village was made revolutionary, it could provide initial access to the peasant masses. Many who posed themselves as revolutionaries were going about in Tokyo and Shanghai, thinking that revolutionary movements can only be conducted in big cities. That is why Comrade Cha Kwang Su was so surprised at President Kim Il Sung's instructions and wondered what he could do in such a small country village.
After thinking for a while, President Kim Il Sung replied: It is wrong to think that only when one is ensconced in a big city can one make the revolution. We should not draw distinctions between the city and the countryside if there are people there. Without going among the peasants it is impossible to enlist the people in the cause of national liberation or to think about the victory of the communist movement in our country. Those who are now allegedly engaged in the movement all move up. What if those who are allegedly making the revolution for the proletarian masses continuously move up, leaving the masses behind? Let us go down. Let us go down among the workers and peasants.
His teachings were like a beacon illuminating the way forward for Comrade Cha Kwang Su, who was still shackled by the old accepted ideas. They pulsated with the precious truth that the working masses are the most omnipotent beings and that we can guarantee the victorious advance of the revolution when we go among them and fully enlist their unfathomable strength. Every word of his deeply touched Comrade Cha Kwang Su and made him clearly realize which path of struggle the Korean revolutionaries should follow to achieve victory.
Indeed, it is owing to the sagacious leadership of President Kim Il Sung, who, at the early stages of founding the Party, proposed the original idea of relying on the people in all work, and always adhered to this idea throughout his revolutionary struggle, that our Party has been built into a party for the people – one that regards the people-first policy as its ideal and mode of politics and opens up a grand new era of fully realizing the people's dreams and ideals.
