Capitalists Must Starve | London Korean Links

Author: Park Seolyeon
Translated by: Anton Hur
Publisher: Tilted Axis, 2025
Original title: 체공녀 강주룡, 2018
Link to online store *

Winner of the 2018 Hankyoreh Literature Award

This work is a fictional account of real-life labour activist, Kang Juryong, who led a strike at the Pyongwon rubber factory in 1930s Pyongyang to protest working conditions. Set against the backdrop of Japanese-occupied Korea, Capitalists Must Starve follows a sharp-tongued, big-hearted heroine who dares to love, rebel, and carve out space for working-class women in a world determined to silence them. Echoing the unflinching narratives of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and the sweeping historical vision of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, this feminist historical novel balances raw grit with unexpected tenderness and a defiant streak of dark humour.

A stirring portrait of resistance from below: fierce, funny, and full of fight.

LKL says:

Don’t be put off by the title, which might suggest some sort of communist tract. This is a plausible and dramatic reconstruction of the life of feisty labour activist Kang Juryong. The title comes from a protest chant of the Pyongyang union members, which responds to a banner put up by factory owners to intimidate striking workers: Anyone who doesn’t work can go home.

Factory owners capitulate!
Victory through worker’s unity!
If those who do not work must starve
Then capitalists must starve!

Well worth a read, for its recreation of colonial era rural life in Gando, Manchuria, the life in the armed resistance against the Japanese in the area, and of course for the life of factory girls in early 1930s Pyongyang.

LKL rating:

External links:

Review by Paul Fulcher (PF rating: ).
Entry on Goodreads.com.

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