One for all and all for one

In the Democratic People's Republic of Korea there is now prevalent the collective way of life whereby all work devotedly for the country and the people while helping and leading one another forward under the slogan "One for all and all for one!" that is suggestive of the collective principle and way of life.

At the close of 1956 the Korean people were tasked with carrying out a five-year plan in 1957-1961 to lay foundations of socialism. The state, however, lacked in materials and money, the country was backward in terms of technology and the people were not well off. Besides, the US imperialists who occupied south Korea and their south Korean puppets were straining the situation to the extreme by making large-scale moves intended to march north for the purpose of starting another war. How to advance the revolution and construction while tiding over the complicated situation was a serious issue. Some people, vacillating in face of the vast task and difficulties, were half-hearted in advancing the revolution and construction at high speed.

Determined to brave through the difficulties and ordeals by believing in the working masses and relying on their strength, President Kim Il Sung went to the Kangson Steel Plant (the predecessor of the present Chollima Steel Complex) in late December 1956, and called upon the workers there to wage a more vigorous collective innovation campaign to inspire all other workers across the country to the endeavours to effect an upsurge in the socialist construction. His call made the workers of the plant burn with patriotic enthusiasm. They then turned out as one and wrought a miracle of rolling 120 000 tons of steel billets in 1957 using a blooming mill with only a 60 000-ton annual capacity. Their collective innovation campaign sparked the flames of an upsurge whereby their colleagues across the country created a new standard and a new record while shattering conservatism, passivism and mysticism about technology. The workers of the Kim Chaek Iron Works (the predecessor of the present Kim Chaek Iron and Steel Complex), for example, produced 270 000 tons of pig iron in a year with the equipment of only a 190 000-ton annual capacity. The year 1957 saw the overfulfillment of the plan for industrial production by 27 per cent. Both urban and rural areas changed for the better by the day and the people's living standard improved rapidly. The great upsurge in socialist construction gave rise to the Chollima movement.

With a view to effecting a greater upsurge in socialist construction by further spurring the Chollima movement, Kim Il Sung visited the Kangson Steel Plant again in February 1959 and instructed the workers there to bring about collective innovations in production, all helping and leading one another forward. Then he saw to it that all other workers across the country followed the example of the Kangson workers, who took the lead in the Chollima movement, so as to develop their workteams into collectives whose members all would work and learn while helping and leading one another forward. It was at the time that he put forward the slogan "One for all and all for one!"

Under the slogan the Chollima workteam movement was vigorously conducted across the country, effecting collective innovations in production and bringing about a fundamental change in the working people's ideological and moral qualities. In August 1960 Kim Il Sung convened the 1^st National Meeting of Vanguards of the Chollima Workteam Movement in which he highly praised Chollima riders as heroes of the age and instructed that the movement should be expanded to workshops and factories beyond workteams and widely conducted in all other fields such as agriculture, construction, transport, science, education, public health and literature and the arts. In May 1968 he convened the 2^nd National Meeting of Vanguards of the Chollima Workteam Movement in which he set it as the main task of the movement to make the ideological, technical and cultural revolutions properly and instructed that workteams should effect collective upswings in production by doing good work with people and dealing with equipment and materials properly and that books should be made good use of to improve all the working people in knowledge and technical qualification.

Under his leadership the Chollima workteam movement developed and expanded into a mass drive involving all working people of the country in terms of ideological, technical and cultural fields, giving great impetus to socialist construction. Involved in the mass drive all working people worked devotedly for the society and collective, while the society and collective valued and cared for each of their members. As a result the whole country was replete with the collective way of work and life whereby all helped and led one another forward.

The tradition of the collective innovation movement conducted under the slogan "One for all and all for one!" is now being emulated in the endeavour to effect a new revolutionary upsurge for the building of a prosperous and powerful nation under the guidance of the leader Kim Jong Il.

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