South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
Fight to the finish
Those who participated in this winter’s great protest feel a huge sense of pride and achievement in making the "first-ever political general strike". They have shown their strength and tested their powers of organisation. The unions and their fighting capacity remained more or less in tact and everyone was aware of the enormous damage inflicted on the government, reeling possibly beyond redemption. But now, although Hanbo has shown up the rottenness of the system they are fighting and Hwang’s defection has sparked a debate that will clarify many things in their minds, they feel deprived of a fight to the finish.
The KCTU leadership not only did not bring forward the next round of strikes, but, in the event, postponed it on the pretext of giving the parliamentarians more time. But the decision was probably based on a feeling that it was no longer possible to achieve all-out action. More forceful and fuller action earlier on would have achieved greater results, regardless of whether the National Assembly had been convened or not.
Parliament was only reopened on 17th February. A week after its congress, the KCTU was no longer demanding the complete repeal of the law but announced a list of ten "conditions" that had to be met by changes to the law. Hundreds of teachers’ union members moved in and occupied the headquarters of opposition parties to persuade them to take up their case. (In 1989, 1,500 teachers had been sacked and permanently black-listed for organising the Teachers’ Union and Kim Young-sam himself had once demonstrated for their reinstatement and the legalisation of the KTU. They are still waiting.)
Public indignation was mounting at the rapidly concluded and insufficient investigations into the $6 billion Hanbo loan scandal. Top bankers and ruling party politicians were being arrested and sent to jail along with the Chaebol’s owner. One of them seemed to be aiming his remarks at the very top when he claimed as he went down that he was "only a feather" in the affair. The question on everyone’s lips (and in many a cartoonist’s picture) was "Where is the body (of the bird)?" - is it the president’s son or the president himself?
In the last few days of February, the KCTU organised daily sit-down protests by about 1,000 individual and federation union leaders from 2pm-6pm in front of the parliament building. When broader action was eventually called - for Friday 28th February, it amounted to half-day or four-hour strikes and city and workplace demonstrations. In some of Ulsan’s giant factories, for example, the action took the form of a ‘rolling’ strike - each department at a time and then only for an hour. The following week, no action was planned or taken.
The strike which had broken with such explosive force had, at least temporarily, lost its momentum. Whether it could be regained - in March or in May, remained to be seen. For now, many activists felt the important thing was to concentrate on building up the unions’ strength in the workplaces through the collective bargaining process and move towards setting up some kind of party that could carry the struggle on in the political arena.
In the longer run, and with a skilful leadership, these South Korean workers will show the world that no diversion will be allowed to stand in the way of an all out struggle to transform society. The mighty conflict between the classes was by no means over; it did not start only in December 1996 and too much lay behind it for half-measures to be sufficient to bring it to an end. At different times it has been and will be conducted by different means - industrial struggles, political struggles, uprisings. But why do feelings run so deep? Why have so many working people been prepared to risk so much in a trial of strength with their rulers - government and Chaebol? Can socialist ideas find an echo, develop a physical force?
Combined and uneven
Its ‘tiger leap’ into the modern world has made South Korea a country of enormous contrasts and contradictions. It has produced some of the most graphic examples of "combined and uneven development" - a phrase used by Leon Trotsky in his "Theory of Permanent Revolution". He was describing a feature of countries like Russia at the turn of the century - ‘backward’ but with some of the most up-to-date factories in the world. To complete the process of developing the economy and society, he argued, it would be necessary to clear out not only feudal but capitalist and imperialist relations by ‘going over’ to state ownership and planning. The South Korean economy can no longer be called ‘backward’, but the speed of its industrialisation has meant many remnants of the old society from which it has emerged have not yet been shed.
As recently as 1960, two-thirds of South Korea’s population was engaged in agriculture and just 9% in industry. By 1980, one-third worked on the land and today less than 15%. In 1960 less than one-quarter of its people lived in cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants. Today well over three-quarters live in cities of more than 500,000. Only eight countries in the world are more urbanised than South Korea.
Seoul is one of the three largest cities in Asia, alongside Shanghai and Tokyo. Crammed between mountains (which have served as a defence for centuries against the Manchurian invader from the west and the Japanese to the east), these days it is permanently shrouded in a cloud of pollution. Big black cars clog up the "expressways" while the pedlar trundles his wares around in a hand-cart or on the back of a battered motorbike using an upright frame designed in the middle ages. In the centre of the city, ultra-modern skyscrapers tower above wooden shacks and hovels. Prestigious air-conditioned department stores display $1,000 fur coats and French perfumes while teeming bazaars in the narrow streets nearby are full of shoddy goods and pungent smells.
The luxury apartment blocks of Akpujong and other ‘new rich’ districts contrast starkly with the shanty towns of the urban poor like Nangok or Shihung. Crowded into the cracks and valleys of the hill-sides are whole communities of temporary dwellings - the ‘favellahs’ or shanty towns that some people say no longer exist. Rows of bright blue ‘portaloos’ are the only amenities provided by the authorities. Water must be carried from taps nearby. Over the past three decades, millions have been forced to exchange a life of debt and misery in the countryside for some kind of squalid existence in Seoul or the other major cities.
On the coast, vast industrial complexes have almost literally risen from the sea in impressive feats of civil engineering and construction while inland the rice-farmer is endeavouring to scrape a living from his tiny parcel of land using the tools and techniques of his ancestors. Throughout the south of the Korean peninsula, a sophisticated urban middle class, which takes for granted the video and the CD player, the microwave and the mobile telephone, continues to conduct the family and religious rituals of its not-too-distant peasant past. In town or country, women will carry their children strapped to their backs in the traditional manner and can still be seen balancing huge loads on their heads.
Now, economically one of the most advanced countries in the world, South Korea is one of the most backward in terms of human rights. In fact, the brutality of the repression is one of the major contributing factors to its very economic progress! The rulers who have brought South Korea into the 20th century have used the terror methods of the emperors (with a few modern additions) to hold the population in subjection. But docility and compliance have not been the characteristics of the working people of South Korea. On the contrary, they have a proud history of revolt against the cruel impositions of Japanese and US imperialism, military dictatorship and of the giant Korean conglomerates.
This strike has conclusively demonstrated the capacity of the working class to play a leading role in changing society or, as Marx and Engels put it, that of "grave-digger" of the very system that has forced it into being. And the class it confronts seems to have been created ready-made with power and wealth ostentatiously and corruptly concentrated in the hands of a few monopoly-owning ‘dynasties’ - the founders of the Chaebol and their immediate family.
"Chaebol Economy"
Thirty giant conglomerates dominate the South Korean economy. Their turnover, according to research publicised in an April 1997 Le Monde Diplomatique, is equal to 4/5ths of the country’s Gross National Product or GNP. They own more than 40% of all the country’s assets in industry, agriculture, commerce and the service sector. Ten of them account for 50% of all exports.
The extent of the concentration of power in the economy is indicated by the fact that just four "Super Chaebol" - Daewoo, Samsung, Hyundai and Lucky Gold Star - have combined sales equal to half of GNP. Daewoo’s turnover is now over $52 billion a year (greater than that of other world giants - Unilever and Nestlé). Samsung has 48 principal affiliates, making anything from semi-conductors to loaves of bread and aeroplanes to shirts. It runs insurance and advertising firms and has just gone into car-making. It even has its own chain of cinemas.
Hyundai virtually ‘owns’ the city of Ulsan - a city with ‘metropolitan’ status equivalent to that of a province. The company dominates the lives of the more than 700,000 citizens from the cradle to the grave. One-third of all adults work in its ship-building, heavy- and precision-engineering or car factories. Most of what they get in their pay packets will go straight back to Hyundai. It owns the schools, colleges, shops, department stores and hospitals. It builds the apartments and runs the cultural centres and of course has a monopoly of the vehicles on the road. One of its founder’s sons - Chung Mong-jun - ‘represents’ Ulsan in the National Assembly.
The grandiose library that overlooks the city was graciously "donated" by Hyundai. Way below, on the shore-line of the East Sea, beyond the ugly blocks of workers’ flats, stands "Goliath" - the giant gantry crane, known and loved throughout Korea as a symbol of workers’ resistance. In the great shipyard strike of 1989 it was occupied for more than 100 days until a full-scale military operation was mounted from land, sea and air to end the strike .
Out of nothing in no time
Thirty years ago this great industrial city was no more than a fishing village. Indeed, there was no shipbuilding industry in the whole of Korea at that time, no car factories, no micro electronics and no steel industry. Even the Chaebol hardly existed. In 1974 all of them together accounted for no more than 15% of sales. So where did they come from and how did they create their vast empires? They and their achievements were by no means a product of the unfettered working of the capitalist market system. If that were the case, how is it that countries on a par with Korea in 1960 have trailed so far behind and others in the ‘Third World’ have failed totally to emulate its spectacular achievements?
From building no ships in 1973, Hyundai became the world’s biggest ship builder. With no knowledge of the industry in 1968, Posco Iron & Steel became the sixth largest steel maker in the world. South Korea has been the fifth largest car-producing country for some time and Daewoo is now aiming to produce two million cars a year world-wide.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, industry and manufacturing in South Korea was growing twice as fast as in comparable "middle-income oil importing economies" (World Development Report 1982). Between 1960 and 1970 exports grew at 34% a year. At the beginning of that decade fuels, minerals and metals accounted for 30% of exports; in 1979, one per cent. At the beginning of that period, no machinery or transport equipment was exported; by 1979 they constituted 20% of all exports. By then, other manufactures and clothing accounted for 69%.
Designated as a "low income" country by the World Bank in 1960, South Korea had a per capita income of $82. By 1994 it was more than a hundred times that figure and last year GDP per head was $11,910. Even though the mass of the population has not received anything like an equal share of the benefits, the average male in his ‘20s in South Korea is now a full five inches taller than he would have been in 1962.
Unrepeatable
The very favourable treatment of Korean capitalism by the US and later by Japan is an important factor in its success but one which is also fast turning into its opposite. The combination of circumstances that lies behind the special status given to South Korea cannot be repeated to order in any other country. The balance of forces in world relations has dramatically changed now that nearly all the workers’ states based on Stalinist distortions of socialist ideas have collapsed. Even though the ‘rogue’ regime in Northern Korea remains the ‘odd one out’ in that it does not seem, up to now, to have been taking the same capitalist road as its neighbours, it is no longer linked to a chain of regimes based on a system that is totally antagonistic to capitalism. Its economy could very rapidly simply implode and be laid open to all sorts of predators.
The regime of Kim Jong-il, son of Kim Il-sung, is reckoned to spend a huge amount of its budget on defence including its nuclear weaponry and regularly threatens military action. But in its severely weakened state it would have difficulty carrying anything out. Southern governments hold regular civil defence drills, with mock air raids etc. probably more as propaganda exercises than out of serious concern for the safety of the population. The threat of invasion is as good an excuse as any for putting patrols of armed soldiers on the streets, organising road blocks and doing identity card checks.
These days, the dire economic situation in the North makes state ownership and planning look much less attractive to workers in the South than it did in the period just after World War ll. Then, it meant a rapid development of the considerable natural resources of the area while the capitalist South was floundering.
At that time things were quite different in many respects. While not socialist, Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - one-party dictatorships resting on state ownership and planning - had been strengthened. China was ‘lost’ to imperialism as private ownership of land and industry had been eliminated. A whole number of countries in South East Asia, including Korea, were threatening to follow suit like ‘dominoes’. It was undoubtedly in the strategic interests of world capitalism to create a bulwark against the spread of ‘communism’ in the whole region and to hold the revolutionary working class of Korea in check.
At one stage, the US was pouring in technical and financial aid to the South at the rate of $2.2 billion a year. It kept tens of thousands of troops in the country after the Korean War (and up to the present day). It was party to the establishment of the murderous Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan military dictatorships in 1961 and 1980 respectively - both of them notorious for crushing in blood uprisings, demonstrations and strikes.