In search of national unity and state control in the decade following the Korean War, North Korea turned to labor. Mandating rapid industrial growth, the government stressed order and consistency in everyday life at both work and home. In Heroes and Toilers, Cheehyung Harrison Kim offers an unprecedented account of life and labor in postwar North Korea that brings together the roles of governance and resistance.

Kim traces the state’s pursuit of progress through industrialism and examines how ordinary people challenged it every step of the way. Even more than coercion or violence, he argues, work was crucial to state control. Industrial labor was both mode of production and mode of governance, characterized by repetitive work, mass mobilization, labor heroes, and the insistence on convergence between living and working. At the same time, workers challenged and reconfigured state power to accommodate their circumstances—coming late to work, switching jobs, fighting with bosses, and profiting from the black market, as well as following approved paths to secure their livelihood, resolve conflict, and find happiness. Heroes and Toilers is a groundbreaking analysis of postwar North Korea that avoids the pitfalls of exoticism and exceptionalism to offer a new answer to the fundamental question of North Korea’s historical development.

"An outstanding study." - Choice

"Heroes and Toilers is the first academic monograph in English devoted specifically to the formation of North Korea's industrial labor force and the living conditions of workers, rather than describing the process of industrialization from the perspective of an economist. As such, it is an important contribution to scholarship." - Cross-Currents

"By employing the concepts of work and everyday life as his theoretical and analytical focus, Kim successfully demonstrates how dominance and resistance in everyday life translated into the dual outcomes of socialist industrial transformation and the consolidation of state hegemony in early North Korea. . . . Kim’s book provides insightful understanding for students and scholars of North Korean studies, socialism, and labor history." - Journal of Asian Studies

"Kim makes skillful use of a variety of materials to argue that state power and planning were incomplete and, indeed, relied on individual spontaneity and efforts to function at all." - Journal of Korean Studies

"Heroes and Toilers presents a counterargument to the claims that North Korea is an unknowable black box in the form of a cogent, balanced, and rigorously researched narrative that will resonate with historians, social scientists, and scholars of Korean studies." - Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies