For the 60th anniversary of the Korean war, the Hankyoreh has published some recently discovered photographs by Lim In-sik. You can view them here and here. I'm not normally one to publish much on this period, since Matt does such a good job at it and my interests are more contemporary. But the picture above, of the floating bridge across the Han really struck me, so I'd thought I'd share.
The legacy of the Korean war, especially the afterlife of cold war anti-communism and its chilling effects on domestic politics is something I've been writing about a little more these days (more on that later). Particularly, the way that a Chimera of communism has been used to condone crimes against South Koreans. On that note, there is a moving piece also in the Hankyoreh about Kim Gwang-Ho, president of the National Korean War Surviving Family Members' Association. Kim's father and grandfather were victims of state violence. His grandfather, a nationalist from the March 1st movement, executed by rightist youth during the Korean war; his father, a wealthy citizen who, in 1960, reburied victims of rightist massacres during the war, only to incur decades of torture and harassment.
Grim reading. Part of the rhetoric of the story reminds one of the red baiting rhetoric employed by members of the conservative government:
When Kim’s father asked the prosecutor, “What crime is it to bury my father’s remains?” the prosecutor reportedly replied, “It is a crime to bury Reds.” In January 1962, Kim’s father was sentenced to seven years in prison by the revolutionary court, and he was released two years and seven months later.
After that, Kim’s family began to collapse. The released father, perhaps because of the aftereffects of torture, was unable to do difficult work. Kim and most of his seven brothers and sisters were unable to attend high school. One older sister was divorced for being from a “Red family.” The pain continued for another decade afterwards. Whenever any espionage incident took place, large or small, Kim’s father was dragged off and returned half-dead.
“We get a call from some place at the market merchants’ association where we worked,” Kim recalled. “They say, ‘He’s out.’ So the whole family takes a taxi from Busan’s Oncheonjang to Nampo-dong and races over. We find our father sprawled out somewhere in the harbor, wrapped in a straw mat. We went through that more than twenty times.”
Though times have changed, the survival of this kind of political discourse is still a great problem. I think it is, however, largely ineffective these days, but it still does damage. Politicized prosecutions, national security law investigations against dissidents, and a general fear mongering in politics are how it is manifested. And yet, this doesn't seem to win elections and only seems to placate that frenzied fragment of the old right that valorize the Park Chung Hee regime. Though, it should be mentioned that the new right tries to label the economic policies of the liberal left and even shareholder value reformers (neoliberal corporate governance reformers, in other words) as 'red' or 'leftist' policy in a similar attempt to obscure and make a monster out of public criticism. And, in my mind, this is a more serious afterlife of a statist nationalism antagonistic toward civil society. Even more saddening when you hear comments like "which country are you from?" from the supposedly moderate prime minister, in response to doubts raised about the recent Cheonan sinking.
This is not to say that one cannot criticize NGOs like any other interest groups according to the logic of their claims, but to make their exercise of speech itself the problem, and to stigmatize and threaten them with the national security law, returns civil society to a politics of voluntary subordination to the national state, a silencing of dissent, and an erasure of civil rights. It also overstates rational risks to national security by attempting to create, since none of this has been successful at a popular level, an inflated sense of internal and external risk. Unfortunately, even though it doesn't seem to sway public opinion -- who, let's face it, care more about the World Cup at the moment than North Korea -- this kind of politics perpetuates political and economic structures badly in need of further democratic reform. Especially at the level of the prosecution, corporate governance, labour relations, urban development, and inter-Korean engagement.
I've finally gotten around to updating, well, really just fixing, the links on the left side of this blog. There were a lot of sites that had expired in the years since I began the blog. So, an update was overdue. I've also inserted a few more links that really needed to be included. However, there are still a number of blogs, organizations, and whatnot that would complement the site. So if you have any suggestions, please comment!
As I get back to posting on a more regular basis, I'm going to make a few large summaries of issues that I haven't followed for a while. So, starting with contemporary labour issues, here is a string of links:
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) has dismissed 134 public school teachers for being indicted, along with other civil servants, by prosecutors on charges that included membership in the minor opposition Democratic Labor Party (DLP). Korean teachers cannot join political parties. South Korea has not ratified ILO Convention 87, on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise, or ILO Convention 98, on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining. This has led to calls by the ILO for Korea to improve labour standards.
The government is expanding its crackdown on undocumented migrant workers in advance of November's G20 summit. You can read more on the recent history of the migrant movement here.
Samsung has come under a lot of criticism lately not only for possible collusion with government prosecutors but also because of the high incidence of cancer among its workers. Activists protesting the death of another young Samsung worker were recently arrested. Stop Samsung has more on the high rate of blood cancer among young Samsung workers.
One out of 10 Korean workers was found to be paid less than the legal minimum wage, according to a recent survey. South Korea's gender wage gap was also found to be the highest in the OECD, as was the number of industrial accidents (though there may be some issues of reporting standards here).
The KWWA has been protesting the low wages that 'interns' receive, as has a newly formed Youth Union based on the Japanese Freeter movement (picture). That's all for now.
Yet more Korean social thought. The Politics of Minority (English summary) was the first of Suyu Noma's Bookzines and contains some interesting articles. It is from 2007/2008 and has elements of a postdevelopment critique of Korean progressive thought. Remember that this was the time when Sonjinhwa (joining the advanced countries) ideology was gaining popularity, and Roh's regime had deepened its neoliberal turn. The editors attack what they see as a stage-ist theory of democracy and development that subordinates human and other forms of life to market and state forces, highlighting the struggles of migrant workers, disabled citizens, and the diverse ecology of Saemangum, among other 'minorities.' They have published a few other issues since then, and I'm curious if they've yet to expand their notions of alter-revolution and commune-ism to forms of economic practice. It seems to be one of the loopholes of their broader oeuvre: while they have reimagined political democracy, I've not seen much from them on economic democracy. I think they would embrace a position similar to JK Gibson-Graham, judging from some of their political commitments and the structure of their commune or 'research machine' as they call it.
I noticed via Wallflower that there is a new book out called, roughly, 20 years of financial (portfolio development) rage in Korea. I think the title of WF's post, 20대 꼬붕론 , means 20-year bender, but I'm not sure (translation anyone?). It would be interesting to find out what the perspective of the book is, i.e. how critical of the process of financialization it is.
On a related topic, I got a book a last year called, Korean Society and Strategies for Rebuilding the Left (also a rough translation), which features interviews with Ha Joon Chang and essays on finance by a number of the intellectuals associated with Tae-an Yeondae (the Alternatives Network), some of whom have joined some of the sessions I've organized in the past on financialization, neoliberalism and (formerly) developmental states.
Some other recent writing on finance would also include Jeong Seong Jin's essay: The Korean Developmental State: From Dirigisme to Neoliberalism. I make similar arguments but with a bit of different, perhaps more relational, perspective, in my dissertation. I have a few chapters there about financial policy and debates about financial restructuring among the Korean liberal left. I'm interested in updating this material so it is always interesting to see new material coming out.
While updating some of my links and writing the last post, I noticed that Jo Jeong Hwan has a new book out called The Common City (you can buy it here). Jo Jeong Hwan's thought is similar to autonomia, and this book seems to be about popular events in urban space such as the Kwangju Uprising and more recently the Candlelight Protests of 2008. This book is probably of particular interest to critical geography and urban studies; however, it is interesting to note that those disciplines themselves, in Korea at least, do not produce texts like these. It seems that it is the more independent writers, with only very loose academic affiliations (in various informal 'institutes' or 연구소) that seem to write this stuff.
While reading blogs by Korean academics recently -- I'm trying to find how certain debates on development, modernity, and civil society have played out in recent years -- I stumbled across Lee Taek Kwang's blog. He seems to write about the history of critical social thought, and, as an addition to my earlier entry on Korean poststructuralism, I'll repost a CFP he has written for a special issue on Deleuze and the non-West.
CFP Special Issue of Deleuze Studies
Deleuze and the Non-West edited by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
Is Deleuze a Western philosopher? This question seems to raise a problem that Deleuze studies should properly deal with. If Deleuzian thought belongs to the tradition of western philosophy, in what sense does the non-West regard Deleuze as a philosopher? Philosophy is always related to knowledge which does not privilege understanding. Philosophy is equal anywhere on earth. Since Descartes’ “discovery” that the non-West could think, western philosophy could no longer ignore the presence of the non-West, a philosophical otherness in reality. If philosophy argues the idea of truth, what it needs is to persuade its other. Deleuze recognized the problem of the non-West and suggested a solution with the concept of “geophilosophy.” In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze , along with Guattari, uses this term for a philosophy of the earth. For Deleuze, thinking is not a matter of the dialectic between subject and object, but rather “the relationship of territory and the earth.” The territory-earth relationship creates the absolute plane of immanence, and Deleuze argues that Greeks invented the plane of immanence for Western philosophy. In this way, we can “speak of Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, or Islamic ‘philosophy’ … to the extent that thinking takes place on a plane of immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by concepts.” According to Deleuze, the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical, in the sense that “it becomes philosophical only through the effect of the concept.” The philosophical is always related to the non-philosophical. This means that philosophy has no internal necessity – Western philosophy is a miracle because it had accidentally encountered the territory of Greece. Therefore, it is not unusual to relate Deleuze with the non-West or place Deleuze in the non-West; rather the very Deleuzian way to speak of Deleuzian philosophy is in relation to the non-Deleuzian. With the above perspective, the special edition of Deleuze Studies seeks papers on Deleuze and the non-West.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
-. The non-Western plane of immanence -. The non-Western reception of Deleuze -. Globalisation and Deleuzian Politics in Asia -. Deleuze as a philosopher of non-Western ethics -. The translation of Deleuze into non-Western languages -. Geophilosophical studies of Deleuze -. Deleuzian concepts and non-Western philosophy
If you would like to contribute to this special issue of Deleuze Studies please contact the issue editor Alex Taek-Gwang The deadline for all submissions is March 2011.
Back when I was doing this blog more frequently I got into a habit of reposting news stories. Since I don't have time to get into that kind of blogging any more what I've done is put up an rss feed from my delicious account for anything that I categorize as Korea. It is on the right hand sidebar. Though I let my blogging slag over the last year, I've kept my delicious account up to date, so there are lots of resources there for people who are looking. In addition, there is the labourstart Korea feed just below the delicious one, so that will continue to be of interest to those reading up on Korean labour issues.
The following is the text of a short 20 minute presentation I had read for me at the recent American Association of Geographers conference during a session entitled Postcolonial Korea: Conjunctures and Critical Geographies. I will turn it into something longer and more substantive eventually. In the meantime, enjoy.
A Korean Thermidor?
To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.
Alain Badiou, The Courage of the Present, Le Monde, 13 February 2010.
I.
The purpose of this paper is to understand the significance of the current neoconservative regime of Lee Myung Bak in relation to the political sequence of democratic reform undertaken by the Korean democracy movement over the last 20 years. In other words, what does the return of conservative rule mean for Korea’s liberal-left (or reform bloc as I prefer to call it) and their efforts to introduce greater transparency, participation, liberty, and equality into the Korean society and political economy?Using Alain Badiou’s notion of Thermidorean politics, I am interested in a reading of the current moment as a corruption; a corruption that seeks to make the political sequence of democratic reform illegible.[i] For Badiou, “a Thermidorean is essentially politically corrupt – in other words, he exploits the precariousness of political convictions” (130). The Thermidorean revises and re-interprets events, changes their meaning, enlists them to the service of another political project: a political project that is, essentially, the ending of the sequence begun by previous events. It is a containment exercise in which political subjectivity, Badiou remarks, “is referred back to order, rather than to the possibility about that which is latent in a situation, under some maxim or other. This counter-revolutionary swing could be called the statification of political consciousness (132).” For Badiou, statification means a “termination of a politics,” and a coupling between the State and established interests, and this coupling certifies that emancipatory political prescriptions are absent from now on (133).
II.
Since the election of Lee Myung Bak there has been a severing of the institutional nexus between the Korean state and reform-oriented civil society that was established by the Korean democracy movement.The effect here is to limit political space in which criticism of the regime is made and democratic demands articulated. I use the term political space here in two senses: to denote a nexus between state and civil society,and a space of representation in which the exclusions of the regime are voiced.[ii]It is these spaces and the sequences that made them legible that the current regime is focused on making illegible.
To give a short taste of this reaction as it currently stands:the Ministry of Gender Equality, which expanded under the reform period, has lost most of its budget and mandate; the National Human Rights Commission has been restructured and its powers decreased; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission defunded. Parachute appointments and political dismissals have taken place across arts and culture (from the Korean National University for the Arts and independent media organizations (Media Act and Indie Space) to state broadcasters and communications commissions). These changes have occurred even in relatively obscure state institutions like the Korean Institute of Finance and Korea Labour Institute, where even moderate Keynesians have been flushed out. The National Security Law has been used to investigate social movements for reunification and social equality.
History textbooks have been ordered rewritten to clear up “inaccuracies” about the past, especially those that conceptualize modern Korean history as a struggle for national independence. The New Right, who are a curious assemblage of former left-nationalists-cum-statist-politicians-and-economic-libertarians, regards this interpretation as an excessive demand of the “pro-North Left.” They argue that it is wrong to criticize Japan and the US because, in their opinion, without the colonial and post-colonial interventions of these countries Korea would have never developed. The New Right even advocate for an alternative dating of the foundation of the republic, to distance the foundation of the current South Korean state from the peninsula-wide demands of the independence movement. While criticizing the excesses of the left’s ignorance of “the achievements of South Korea in their insistence of first achieving peaceful coexistence,” the New Right praises dictator Park Chung Hee for his contributions to democracy.
Beyond the state apparatus, the majority of state funding for NGOs has dried up and funding has been denied to any NGO supporting “illegal” public demonstrations. Using this criteria, the police have included 1842 social and civic organizations in the latter category, from Women’s help lines to economic policy NGOs, most of whom participated in the candlelight demonstrations against Lee Myung Bak’s conservative policies during the summer of 2008. Meanwhile funding has been diverted to conservative civil society groups belonging to rightist movements (such as anti-communist veterans organizations) which have in the past attacked liberal opposition, and destroyed the alter set up to honour former President Roh Moo Hyun following his death last summer.[iii] These conservative forces paint even the neoliberal policies of the reform governments, such as equity rules and limits on family control within the Chaebol, as “leftist” policy.
What is interesting about this reaction is that it is aimed as painting the whole sequence of democratic struggle from the 1970s and 1980s onward to the liberal-democratic reform governments from 1997-2007 as ‘pro-North leftist.’ This serves to obscure the full set of political relations within this sequence of democratic politics, including the steps taken by reform governments to re-segment social space and to slow the sequence of reform through their own economic policies. Thus, even the neoliberalism of the Kim and Roh governments are mislabeled as policies “imprisoned by old ideology and populism to incite the masses.”[iv] This has the consequence of obscuring the reform period and identifying the periods where more progressive demands were not met by the reform bloc, and where alternative arrangements were possible. In other words, it obscures political difference and makes all democratic demands of the reform period out to be a form of excess.
III.
I want to make the argument that the point of making the sequence of democratic reform illegible is not simply political opportunism but to obscure the rupturing of social space inherent in democratic events and democratic struggles. It is this sense of rupture, foundational to any proper politics (construed as a sense of contesting the problems of existing social structures), that is being made illegible here and is the fear of conservative politicians, even, quite often, those on the liberal left.
To better understand the sense of rupture associated with the democracy struggle it is important to scrutinize the effects of particular events on the democratic transition. I date the political sequence of democratic reform roughly from the events of the June Democratic Uprising and Great Workers’ Struggles of the 1987. These events effected the transition towards representative democracy. However, the roots of these mobilizations extend further back and have their origins in the social movements against the dictatorships of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980-1987).[v] The events of 1987 were not isolated, but, rather, they were dense points within a constellation of many different events.[vi] Not the least of these was the democratic trade union movement of the 1970s and the Kwangju uprising of the 1980 -- these events were a part of the larger build-up to 1987. During this period, the urban space of the city, the space of the export factory, and the peninsula as a whole became a site of social protest. The fleeting moments of change experienced in the events of 1987, and other protests both before and after, are still retained in the memory of many of the participants, and the potentiality for social change that exists here is what, in many ways, continues to threaten the established order.
In the events, the borders of social space, of exportist industrialization, Cold War anticommunism, and militarized masculinity were temporarily broken. At the theoretical level, this feeling of rupture is perhaps best captured by Kristen Ross who has dealt at length with the effects of events such as mass uprisings on social space.[vii] She describes how events such as uprisings and general strikes allow, “if only for an instant, the exploration of other possible lives, a vast unexplored area of possibility.”
In her understanding of democratic events, Ross also touches on the impossibility of tolerating the present moment, the return of status quo politics, after experiencing revolutionary ferment. “When life has been lived differently, and when it seems as though it just might continue to be lived differently, when all this is fading and existence threatens to lapse once again into the dreary routine… how can this possibly be tolerated?” (141), she asks. When a sequence, a moment, is obscured or ‘taken back’ by the forces of order, it is lost, perhaps irretrievably. Ross argues that this is a process that is spatial as much as it is social as “What is lost is not simply the physical space of the occupation but also the act of the momentary taking (prise) of power, the taking of speech, the taking of conscience (141).
The reason why the demands of the democracy movement for egalitarian democracy (and not simply national unification) are dangerous to the conservative order and must be obscured is that the past shows the “people” or the “minjung” (the Korean word for the ‘people’ or the ‘masses’) coming into existence in the actuality of their refusal of the status quo. By making the past illegible, “it is this version of the people that is difficult now to locate.” Thus in conservative discourse the ‘minjung’ is replaced with ‘somin’ (common people), a subject with less agency. But nonetheless, notions of ‘the people’ or the minjung do resurface, in current social struggles, that “unsettle the present, to disturb its forgetfulness,” in opposition to the narratives of both the right and centre-left that seek to confine popular agency to the past. (142) Recent disruptions such as the 2008 ‘made cow’ protests and the mass mourning of Roh Moo Hyun last summer show a return ofpopular agency of masses, and yet, the interpretation of these events has been to consider them as hysterical moments, and thus defer any question about the demands and potentialities produced in them. During the reform governments, liberal-left reformers were complicit in this process as they also attempted to restore conservative social space through cracking down on labour protests, discouraging industrial unionism, and rolling out neoliberal financial strategies. They too participated in a politics that deferred participation in the name of economic inevitability of market forces, creating empty time in which social struggles were required to wait, patiently and let the economy run its course.
IV.
Here we have, in the terminology of Jacques Rancierre, a process of politics as a police operation.[viii] A politics that ignores popular agency by closing off areas of government policy from popular participation and saying “there is nothing here that is happening, move on keep going.” This is the sense of politics as dispersal, and it comes up against politics as an active process of bringing up exclusions and exposing lacunae in the established socio-political order.Thermidorean politics reserves politics for only those that are deemed to have ‘interest,’ such as property developers and the conglomerates, and popular agency is dispersed. Again, the police say, “it is only we who have interest, all you others, go back to your daily lives, there is nothing here.”
The most troubling part of the Korean thermidor is that the politicians active in the reaction to this sequence are not simply those politicians of the right. They are also many former left activists, often of the National Liberation variety, such as Kim Young Hwan, but also from various other factions, such as former Peoples Democracy activist Shin Ji Ho. In France, Badiou notes, the actual thermidoreans of 1794 were not foreign aristocrats, or even Girondins, but were part of the Robespierrist majority in the Convention. So too, the Korean thermidor involves a mismatch of interests, including many former democracy movement activists and various politicians of the liberal-left and the right (Badiou 135).One might say that thermidorean politics shares a lot the sense of righteousness that accompanied earlier factional disputes of the 1980s movement -- and perhaps that is why many of the former ideologues of these debates are now part of the reaction -- but it shares nothing of the sense of possibility of the earlier events.
V.
I want to conclude by suggesting that the Korean thermidor is a particular kind of forgetting, one in which social memories are associated with a chimera of the ultra left. This fiction only serves to keep politics as a police operation where no one asks questions and politics is dispersed, left only to private property and established interest. This obscures thinking about what possible alternatives might have been, and how best to organize an economic that is participatory, egalitarian and democratic. It also prevents us from understanding how democratic demands shape space, obscuring the impasses of past periods and making it difficult to extract lessons that might help us understand the current moment.
[i]Alain Badiou. (2006) Metapolitics. London: Verso
[ii]As Kim Dong Choon has argued civil society (simin sahoe) in Korea is largely concerned with societal transformation and thus the priorities of the democracy movement still continue to inform it.It is not merely a passive sphere of interest group mediation. See Kim, Dong-Choon. (2006) “Growth and Crisis of the Korean Citizen’s Movement.” Korea Journal. Summer 2006, pp. 99-128. See also, Lee, Nam-Hee (2007) The Making of the Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lee, Nam-hee. (2007) ‘The South Korean student movement: Undongkwon as a
counterpublic sphere’ in Charles Armstrong ed. Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State. Second Edition. London: Routledge 95-121. Unless otherwise stated, all Korean names cited here begin with the surname followed by first name of the author.
[iii]See, for example,Hankyoreh, 20 May 2009. “President of KUNA announces resignation due to a “political
audit.” http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/355848.html [Accessed 20 May 2009].
Hankyoreh, 21 April 2009. “Subsidies cut to civic groups who participated in candlelight
[iv]See the New Right Founding Declaration. http://www.486.or.kr/english/sub1c.php
[v]One could also argue that this sequence goes back much further to anti-imperialist period, or the suppression of socialist and even social democratic movements in Korea in the interwar years between liberation and the Korean War.
[vi]Though only momentarily, Lee Myung Bak was also part of the early democracy movement. He was arrested and served four months in prison for leading demonstrations against the normalization of diplomatic ties with Japan in 1964.See Hankyoreh “Who is Lee Myung-bak? A profile of the man of myth and his bid to lead the nation.” 22 September 2007, http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/230316.html Accessed 19 March 2010.
[vii]See Kristin Ross. (2002) May ’68 and its afterlives. University of Chicago Press.
[viii] See Jacques Rancierre. (2001) Ten Theses on Politics. Theory and Event. Vol. 5 Issue 3.
[Note: this is an older post that I've migrated from my other blog]
After the 1980s in South Korea in general and after the democratic uprising of 1987 and the fall of the Soviet Union in particular, the Korean Left underwent radical changes. One consequence of this transition is that a number of theorists from both the 80s movements and early 90s student movement began to move towards different heretical, anti-authoritarian traditions of social thought. Some embraced more Deleuzian/Foucauldian/Lacanian trajectories while others sketched out a more Autonomia-style form of thought. Of course, there are theorists of many other stripes as well, from Athussarians to Trotskyists, but I'd like to focus on two of these currents here and highlight some of their publications in English.
The Suyu + Trans Research Machine is an intellectual commune led by a number of poststructural thinkers. It is a pretty amazing place. They have managed to run a collective cafe, restaurant, seminar schedule and research institute through membership fees and individual donations. They are also involved in general anti-neoliberal activism emphasizing support for environment and peace campaigns, and support for irregular and migrant workers. They have also translated a lot of poststructuralist thought into Korean and written quite an amount on their own. Here is a article about the establishment of the commune after the political sequence of the 1980s movements began to transform: What do Commune-ists think? Unfortunately you'll need a library proxy to access it, I think.
The Twilight of Empire was a manifesto put out by the Suyu folks around the time of the negotiation of the Korea-US free trade agreement and has political mix of tones from Agamben, Negri, and Deleuze to it. There is criticism of the sovereign exception used in Neoliberalism, and it endorses a political project of mobilizing the multitude, and of minorities widely construed, instead of left nationalism (the dominant left position in South Korea).
Another problem with interpellating nation as the subject of struggle is that it may conceal the disastrous effects of the FTA that is “yet to come,” effects which diverse minority groups in our society are “already” experiencing. The U.S.-South Korea FTA, which seems to have taken us by surprise, has been tailing the young, the disabled, women, migrant workers, non-regular workers, and all the creatures of the tidal flats for a much longer time, under the guise of GDP, market competition, neo-liberalism, and the calculation of economic profits. We must realize that our society has encouraged or neglected the exploitation of these minorities. The unimaginable scale and intensity of disaster that the U.S.-South Korea FTA entails will be the messenger that will inform us that the pain of those minorities that we have overlooked can become our own. Hence, the struggle against the FTA should start not from the nation, but from the minorities, the masses, and the multitude.
Outside of Suyu, Joe Jeong Hwan and the multitude network center seem to embrace a more classical autonomist perspective and focus on issues of class composition. Joe Jeong-Hwan's article Class Composition in South Korea Since the Neoliberal Economic Crisis (the 1997 one, not the current crisis) was published a few years back in Multitudes Journal, which is open access. Here is an excerpt:
Significantly, the citizen’s movement is having difficulty to define the concept of a ’citizen’. Recently the main current tends to define the citizen as a non-class subject. In contrast, I propose that the ’citizen’ needs to be defined in the context of recomposition of working class accomplished by the industrial restructuring of capital since the 1980s. The industrial restructuration centered upon high-tech and informational industries since the 1980s have figured a different form of labor power. This different form of labor power has acquired a more scientific-technological character and, as a result of it, the school, home, and society have all been transformed into factories of reproduction. We should consider the weakening of the traditional labor movement as the effect of this process. The relative ratio of industrial laborers has been reduced as a result of the diversification of the working class. Therefore, ’citizen’ is but an old label to which have been attached new labor subjects composed of plural and heterogeneous multitudes.
Joe J-H also has a blog in Korean, with some English and Esperanto posts (yes, Esperanto). He has translated a number of Negri's books and has a new book of his own, Literature of Kairos, out now. Too bad these aren't translated into English.
Anyways, if you are curious about different non-nationalist left trajectories of Korean thought, this post should get you started. I might also post in the future about art collectives in South Korea that use situationist or autonomia style tactics, which is a topic I'm planning to write more about some day. Perhaps through a review of the book that came out of this exhibition.
Well, it has nearly been a year since I've posted anything. Let's just say that I've been very busy over the last year writing longer stuff and finishing my PhD (yes, it is finito!). In case you are interested, I have a number of things out/coming out. My dissertation, The Postdevelopmental State: The Reconfiguration of Political Space and the Politics of Economic Reform in South Korea, is an exploration developmental state theory, the liberal left, and the restructuring of Korean political economy, and available here. I also have a piece -- The Terminal Crisis of the Participatory Government and the Election of Lee Myung Bak -- in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on the internal problems of reform politics in Korea (email me through the blog if you'd like a pdf copy). I also have a review of Kevin Grays Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalization in the same issue. More recently, there is also this article I've written with Rob Prey for Japan Focus -- Between Migrant and Minjung: The Changing Face of Migrant Cultural Activism in South Korea -- about the migrant movement and recent deportations of key activists. So, although I haven't been posting much here, dear readers, I have been busy and writing on topic.
A year or two ago I started another blog, Imperfect Composition. The idea here was to have blog where I could write some random, and I mean random, stuff. Thought-experiments if you'd like. The thing is, I haven't really used it too much. There is one post on a Korea-related topic there, so I will move that over to here. I will also post the text from a short talk I recently gave above, as it may be of interest to some readers. There is also some other stuff coming out in a few months I will put up later.
With a busier schedule, this blog had become mostly defunct. I might try to post here a bit more frequently now that I have more time. No promises, however. There has been just too much stuff to report on: the Yongsan tragedy, ongoing canal development, irregular workers movement, the ridiculous New Right movement, the investigation into Roh, Youtube's appropriate response to the real name system, the Minerva witch-hunt, and so on...
On top of all that there is the recent phemenon of breaking up press conferences and calling them protests. Tragicomic, all of it. From the Hankyoreh,
Civic and social groups actively contest curtailment of rights
Civic and social groups have begun launching an active response to police suppression that has been citing press conferences as illegal gatherings and rounding participants for arrest.
Several human rights groups joined in solidarity to present a petition on the police suppression of press conferences to the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) on Wednesday. Before presenting the petition, they held a press conference...
Park Ju-min, a lawyer and member of MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society, said, “We have even been hearing that there is an internal directive to regard all press conferences where slogans are chanted and banners hung as illegal gatherings.” Park added, “It is only possible to become a nation that promotes human rights when freedoms of assembly and expression are observed.”
Participants in the press conference made references to both the arrest of six civic group members who were in front of the National Police Agency building Monday protesting the arrest of people attending events commemorating the first anniversary of the candlelight vigil demonstrations, and the arrest of 49 university students who were holding a press conference and head-shaving ceremony on April 10.
Police have been ramping up their interventions of press conferences recently by broadcasting warnings and measuring noise levels. In reference to this, Jinbo Corea spokesperson Jang Man-seok said the police have “established a position to shut off all expressions of political ideas, including press conferences.”
Observers are criticizing the police’s approach of treating press conferences as illegal gatherings as an exploitation of loopholes in the law. “There are no stipulations on assemblies in the Law on Assemblies and Demonstrations, and the stipulations on protests are vague. The police are exploiting this, and are arbitrarily designating press conferences as assemblies,” said Park Ju-min.
Been slow posting these days, because, well, work and life are too busy. However, with the global financial crisis and LMB's continuing show, I feel like there is a mountain of things to post on. Alas, hopefully, there shall be time for that later. For the moment, however, this photo, from the Hankyoreh, is very interesting and mimics that famous moment from the 1989 protests in Tienanmen square.
Disarming appearance
As tanks roll down Tehran Street in the Gangnam district during a parade commemorating Army Day on October 1, Kang Ui-seok, 22, a law student at Seoul National University, goes nude to urge the government to dissolve the army.
Kang appeared suddenly at 4:20 p.m and commenced with a short role play in which he brandished a fake gun he had made out of snack food, putting a stop to the parade for about 30 seconds. Kang was arrested immediately.
Police said that prior to the parade, Kang hid for 12 hours in a trench he had dug himself.
According to police, Kang said that If Korea were to dissolve its army, it could help underdeveloped countries by saving the lives of starving children. In explaining his demonstration, Kang said that he had appeared in the nude to symbolize the condition of being unarmed and was meant to evoke peace and nonviolence.
The police booked him on charges of obscenity later that day.
Hye Jin Kim from Global Voices Online has a good overview of the motivating factors behind the continuing protests by buddhists here, including some of the reactions from netizens like the one below:
On the date when 200,000 Buddhists started the protest, the government announced a beautiful spy scandal like Mata Hari. What did the National Intelligence Service do for 10 years? I knew someday soon North Korean spies would be arrested once the government changed. And a beautiful spy who has sex as her weapon was sensationally caught on the same date when those Buddhists gathered. As history has proved so far, the moment of the public announcement is perfect this time again. The story is so similar with those you can see in Sunday Seoul or Sunday Newspaper. I read what she has done. In the technological period of the 21st century, what she did was to find information that we ordinary people can even simply find through searching on google, and using gps and the internet. Wow… she is such a stupid spy. I really don’t understand what North Korea tried to do with her.[…] Restoration of Baek-gol-dan and female North Korean spy… It seems that we return to 20 years back. Maybe, Samchung Revival Camp and control of hair and skirt lengths will start again.[…]
Buddhists protest perceived bias in Lee administration 200,000 protesters demand apology from President Lee and resignation of National Police Agency Chief Eo
In what was the first event of its kind, approximately 200,000 Buddhists belonging to 27 Buddhist denominations protested in downtown Seoul on August 27 against what they called religious discrimination on the part of President Lee Myung-bak’s administration.
The Ven. Wonhak, head of the organizing committee for what was called the “All Buddhists’ Assembly for Denouncing the Lee Myung-bak Administration’s Constitution-Destroying Religious Discrimination,” said that Korean Buddhism is in the most “distressful” state it has been in “since it came to Korea 1,700 years ago.”
“Buddhism has been kicked out into the street by thoughtless fanatics who dream of a Christian republic,” he said.
Monks and regular believers filled the streets in front of Seoul City Hall, from Taepyeongno and Deoksu Palace to the corner of the Hanwha Building.
Kim Kwang-jun, an Anglican priest who is head of the National Council of Churches of Korea’s Committee on Interfaith Dialogue, issued a statement of solidarity.
“As a Christian I apologize for cases of religious discrimination, like when Rev. Jang Gyeong-dong caused controversy for insulting Buddhism,” said Kim. “The Lee administration has discarded the principle of separation of church and state and even the principles of democracy, all in the name of pragmatism.”
Protesters issued a resolution demanding an open apology from President Lee, the resignation of National Police Agency Chief Eo Cheong-soo, the legislation of a prohibition on religious discrimination, and “favorable consideration” by the authorities for people wanted for involvement in the candlelight protests.
Organizers said they will be operating a “Religious Discrimination Monitoring Group” to determine whether President Lee takes action in good faith on their demands, and that they will organize similar protests across the country if he does not.
In the afternoon, protesters marched to Jogye Temple, going from the Sejongno intersection to Jonggak and on to Ujeonggugno. The police mobilized approximately 7,000 police officers from 85 riot police units.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government says it will fine the organizers for “using” Seoul City Hall Plaza without a permit.
Police arrested a renowned economist for speaking out against capitalism, which is in violation of the National Security Law. Civic groups and academics are criticizing the government for suppressing so-called progressive scholars over false information.
Some are worrying whether these new moves will bring back the ``public security'' era when police used excessive force against people under the name of ``keeping the peace'' in the authoritarian era of the 1970s and 1980s.
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said Wednesday it had arrested Oh Se-cheol, honorary professor at Yonsei University, and seven other Socialist Workers League of Korea members on Tuesday. The eight are now being questioned in Ogin-dong, central Seoul, over whether they have criticized capitalism and praised socialism as well as other acts considered benefiting the enemy ― the North Korea.
The police spokesman said Oh, chairman of the league, and others have released leaflets and other materials denouncing liberal capitalism. The group's flags were seen at the candlelit protests against U.S. beef imports, he added.
The investigative body also said Oh openly sought the establishment of a revolutionary socialist group saying, ``We are the revolutionary forces that declare the world proletarian revolution publicly and express the determination to struggle with the proletariat of the world including Korea in the history of the workers' movement and communist movement in Korea after 1945,'' on the group's Web site.
However, academia and others are criticizing the police's moves since Oh is well known for denouncing North Korea. Roh Hoe-chan of the minor New Progressive Party said, ``Oh and his groups constantly said the North has been polluted with other ideas in socialism, which all socialists should `refrain from following'. Shouldn't the group be defined as anti-North Korean?''
About 10 civic groups held protests in front of the investigation room saying, ``Why should they be punished for talking about what they believe in, which is obviously not praising the enemy?''
``Oh criticized capitalism even under the military junta in the 1970s but was never prosecuted for violating the law. I do not understand the government's ethics on the issue,'' Prof. Han Sang-hee of Konkuk University said calling for the government's respect on a variety of social ideas.
Some speculate the investigation will see a revival of the debate about whether the National Security Law should be abolished. The law bans all kinds of praise, promotion or sympathy toward the enemy. In this case, the enemy is North Korea, experts say.
Since a reconciliation mood swept the Han peninsula in 2000, there were only two other cases of such groups being involved in violation of the law. During the Roh Moo-hyun administration, the law was submitted for abolishment at the National Assembly.
Meanwhile, Suwon District Public Prosecutors' Office said it caught a female North Korean spy disguised as a defector. According to the office, 34-year-old Won Jeong-hwa disguised herself as a defector in China, married a South Korean man and came to the South in 2001. Then she contacted several military officers and handed over confidential information to the North.
The office has also arrested a military captain who handed over information and another man for delivering such stuff to the North.
Gap between regular and irregular workers has grown Widening difference in salaries and income growth between the two groups since irregular worker protection law was implemented
A survey has revealed that since July of last year, right around the time a law to protect irregular workers went into effect, the income gap between regular and irregular workers in their 20s and 30s grew.
The company Incruit took a look at the 2006 and 2008 first-half wages (based on fixed salaries) of about 30,000 of its own website members between the ages 20 and 39. The data, released Monday, shows that the salary gap between the regular and irregular workers grew by almost 100,000 won in the two-year period. In the first half of 2008, the average monthly salary of regular workers at the company was 2.282 million won, while that of irregular workers was 74 percent of that at 1.689 million won, producing a gap of 593,000 won. The gap had grown from two years earlier. In 2006, the average monthly salary of regular workers was 2.154 million won, while that of irregular workers was 77.1% of that at 1.661 million won, producing a difference of 493,000 won.
There was also a difference in income growth -- this year, regular workers made 5.9 percent more than they did two years ago, while irregular workers only made 1.7 percent more.
This trend can be confirmed in a March survey by the Korea National Statistical Office. In 2007, the salary of irregular workers was 64.1 percent of that of regular workers.; this year, it had fallen to 60.5 percent.
Song Min-jung, a researcher at the Samsung Economic Research Institute, believes that the quality of employment for irregular workers fell after the protection law went into effect, with many irregular workers switching to by-the-hour work or dispatch work with poor working conditions.
Two worrying stories for Korean civil society from today's Hankyoreh below. Some more conservative readers might assert that the government is just asserting law and order in this case. But without laws governing protest that conform in practice and operation to basic freedoms of assembly or association, results like this are bound to happen as it becomes very easy to pin a demonstration on a particular organization or have stuff removed from the internet by decree rather than principled investigation. Anyways, it should be clear that these two stories are simply signs of reaction, which in the end seem certain to alienate people from the current government as they undermine basic normative principles of civil society.
Police began tracking down three leaders of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions on July 24 after a court issued a warrant to arrest them on charges of playing a leading role in organizing large-scale strikes and candlelight demonstrations against U.S. beef imports. The KCTU, one of the nation’s two largest labor umbrella organizations, strongly protested the move, saying they had been “targeted by police.”
Immediately after the court issued the warrant to arrest the three KCTU leaders, Chairman Lee Seok-haeng, Deputy Chairman Jin Young-ok and Secretary-General Lee Yong-sik, the Seoul Yeongdeungpo Police Station dispatched hundreds of police officers, some of them plain-clothed, and cordoned off the KCTU office in an aggressive move demonstrating its will to arrest them.
“Chairman Lee and others played a leading role in massive strikes held by the KCTU to demand renegotiations of beef deal,” a police officer said. “Last year, they also refused to be summoned on charges of masterminding a strike and occupying E-Land stores, in spite of several calls for them to appear. We plan to combine all pending charges to date and conduct an investigation into the KCTU leadership.”
Saying that strikes led by the KCTU on July 2 illegal, prosecution and police ordered 37 senior leaders of the KCTU, including Chairman Lee, to appear for questioning. Arrest warrants were issued for nine of the 37 leaders, including Chairman Lee and Yoon Hae-mo, the chief of Hyundai Motor Co.’s labor union.
In a press conference held at the KCTU office later in the day, Chairman Lee said, “The police action is unfair political suppression of a fair exercise of the right to defend the health of people and laborers. The government of President Lee Myung-bak must immediately stop its suppression.”
Controversy is flaring after an Internet crime investigation unit of the National Police Agency was found to have ordered Google Inc.’s YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing Web site, to remove footage from a South Korean TV report about allegations that a company in which a brother of NPA Chief Eo Cheong-soo invested was involved in prostitution. The NPA also ordered domestic Internet portals such as Naver and Daum to delete the video footage, which was originally televised by Munhwa Broadcasting Corp.’s Busan branch. Under South Korean laws governing the Internet, a person can ask an Internet portal to remove information from its Web site if the information defames the person in question. The NPA has been accused of taking unlawful and excessive action towards Internet portals, where freedom of expression and communications should be guaranteed, to defend the reputation of the NPA chief’s family.
On July 24, an official at Google’s Korea unit said, “We received an official statement on May 27 from the NPA’s cyber terrorism countermeasure team demanding that we delete video footage about a brother of NPA Commissioner General Eo Cheong-soo, citing defamation. That evening, we temporarily deleted two pieces of video footage. The Internet Protocol addresses for both pieces of video footage are blocked so users in South Korea can’t access them,” the official said. The NPA was found to have sent the same official statement to other local Internet portals such as Naver and Daum as well as video-sharing Web sites.
The original footage, aired by MBC’s Busan branch on April 23, reported that the brother of NPA Commissioner General Eo had allegedly managed a hotel that allowed prostitution. The report was credited with the “This Month’s Journalist” award from the Journalist Association of Korea in June. Yang Guen-won, the head of the NPA’s Internet crime investigation unit, said police had “sent an official letter, according to legal procedure, after judging that the controversial report broadcast by Busan MBC is related to the reputation of the entire police organization, not just Commissioner General Eo Cheong-soo himself.”
However, critics blamed the NPA for taking excessive action because, under the current laws, it has no right to ask Internet portals to delete the video footage and it has not taken any legal action, such as filing a complaint with the Press Arbitration Commission.
Kim Gap-bae, an attorney, said, “The Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection permits a person to ask an Internet portal to remove posted material if the person feels they have been defamed. For defamation cases involving public officials, in particular, an individual, not a state organization, should file the complaint.”
Unlike domestic Internet portals, Google’s Korean unit strictly bans it from editing materials posted on its Web site. Google’s Korean unit asked a legal department at its U.S. headquarters to sort out whether the video footage could cause defamation, and Google’s U.S. headquarters replied that it could not be constituted as such. In spite of the reply, Google’s Korean unit had still blocked the footage for 56 days, or until July 23, when The Hankyoreh began investigating the issue.
This means that South Koreans cannot watch the video footage on the Korean-language version of the YouTube Web site, but the footage is still available at other YouTube sites based in the United States and other nations.
Internet users have criticized the police and Google’s Korean unit, saying, “Police are curbing freedom of expression on the Internet unconditionally, making the country a state in which censorship still exists.”
I haven't updated links for a long time on this blog and I was just getting started and realized that the Korean Women's Workers Association have a new site and an excellent, frequently updated blog in English. I've updated the link on the right to go to their new site. The picture above is from a recent rally for a 1 million won (US 1000 a month) minimum wage.
Very interesting development in terms of foreign workers these days. Workers will now be able to work for 5 years and can change workplaces. These were both demands made by the Equality Trade Union -- Migrant Branch (predecessor of the MTU) back when the EPS was being negotiated. How to regard this development? What does it mean for the migrant rights movement?
I guess it is a partial victory. The 5 year concession was something there was more support for from the small business federation back in the day, the change of workplace procedure probably came from a number of sources inside the ministry, civil society, employers etc. Both aspects of the policy are obviously designed to prevent workers from becoming undocumented as after 3 years most workers haven't paid back the illegal brokerage fees that they have paid, if they had to pay them, which I believe they do in a majority of cases, and when faced with exploitation in the workplace many workers change workplaces but become undocumented in the process, so this change in the law should improve conditions generally in terms of the number of people without status.
What it does not address, however, is the claim for justice on behalf of those migrant that have been in Korea the longest and who were excluded from the EPS as an act of punishment. Unfortunately, I think it will have the effect of diminishing solidarity for them as the problems in the EPS used to continuously force people into undocumented status who then feel more solidarity with longer term migrants. I think it is these migrants that an amnesty and some sort of designation allowing them to apply for residency is needed, so they can go about their lives as they have been trying to for years in the midst of continually changes permit systems and perpetual crackdown. This is an important question of distributive justice. Those migrants with families and long term roots should be considered first, but the 'right hand' of the state (Justice, and Interior ministries) do not recognize the social suffering of these people, they even cause much of it, and therein the problem exists.
Foreigners Can Work for Up to 5 YearsBy Bae Ji-sook Staff Reporter
From July 28, foreign nationals will be able to work for up to five straight years without having to make the obligatory one-month sojourn outside Korea to extend their job contracts, the Ministry of Labor said Tuesday.
According to the revised Foreign Workers Employment Law, those currently allowed to work for up to three years will be able to extend their contracts for another two years. Currently, they have to leave the country for one month before renewal.
``Foreign workers complained over the cost involved in the one-month trip and management said their absence damaged business,'' Kim Yeon-shik, a ministry official, said.
Employment procedures will also change for management to hire more eligible persons. Under the current system, employers have to pick workers from those passing a Korean language test without screening their individual details.
But a new list will show each jobseeker's qualifications and career record. Employers will also be able to recruit directly via interviews overseas.
Workers will also get additional support. The government will provide job information to ethnic Korean Chinese people to help them settle in Korea more easily after signing work contracts.
In order to prevent workplace exploitation, conditions will be specified that allow workers to transfer to other companies. Workers can apply for transfers when wages are delayed and if their employer violates the Korean Labor Law.
``Under the new system, employers will be able to secure manpower from overseas and workers can easily adjust to Korean society,'' the official said.
The current employment permit system (EPS) allows a maximum three-year contract and renewal of up to two years, while the transfer of workplaces is limited to factory closures or worksite abuse.
In April, 377,032 foreigners were working under the EPS and 75.4 percent of them were working at companies with less than 30 on their payroll.
