Chapter II: Revolutionary Science

Chapter two follows the genre of post-liberation popular science writing as it migrated north. By the late 1940s, Pyongyang had become the center of science writing on the peninsula. There, an emphasis on purposefully politicized science, the non-elite scientist, and state directed research coalesced around the revolutionary vistas of atomic technology. These dimensions of research were part of a broader attempt to conceptualize a form of science specific to socialism. Guided by a body of Marxist theory that self-identified with the scientific method, science under socialism was to transcend research and systemic alternatives alike. Although readily supported by occupational forces, these depictions of liberated research were not a Soviet import. In this chapter the roots of a Marxist critique of market-driven research is traced back into 1930s Korea. Similarly, the section stresses how many of the central features of socialist science circulated first in Seoul before being expressed in the science press of Pyongyang. In several instances, lines of analysis first broached in the southern capital were returned to in the North. This is illustrated through the south-north migration of scientists in the years leading to the Korean War.

The significance of this migration is rooted in the status of these intellectuals, which hints to at some of the challenges of forming socialist science at this time. While science publications widely advocated for a democratized science, the elite stature of the researcher was still needed for the reconstruction of a severely disrupted economy. State planning, in turn, was contingent on the measured intervention of the expert. Popular science organizations and publications became important modes by which to preserve the status of the researcher. The chapter focuses on how technocratic authority helped valourize the state’s authority which, in turn, assured the progressive nature of the socialist system. This was illustrated in a number of domains; but with atomic technology, writers in the North found an ideal example for how planned science would overtake the systems driven by the quest for profit.