South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
Nature of KCTU
In the absence of any legal mass party of the workers, it is a trade union federation - the KCTU - that has taken on some of the tasks and attributes of a party. The leaders of the KCTU have been steeled in struggle and imprisonment. They are trusted by the members and humble in their approach. The leaders take no more than the average wage of a worker. Many have been victimised and some take far less than they earned on the tools. It is not a bureaucratised leadership during the strike the Central Committee would meet regularly to decide on the plans for the next phase of struggle. At the national conference in February there was admittedly little discussion (the tradition is to argue before and after but agree at the conference itself). But there was no junketing and banquets, only rousing speeches and stirring songs to fire the spirits for the next round of battle.
The constitution of the KCTU, its aims, platform and programme (all available on the internet) show that an organisation "forged" as it says "through struggle and sacrifice", goes a long way in challenging the system. It fights for a whole series of basic democratic rights like free speech, the freedom to organise, freedom of assembly and the press plus a 40-hour week, full employment, equal pay, decent wages, a full welfare system and much more. History, however, has shown that even if capitalism is forced by the workers’ movement to grant such demands, it cannot guarantee all of them and the ‘lust’ for profit will constantly drive it to undermine each one of them.
Some of the KCTU material hints that an alternative to the ‘Chaebol economy’ could be one of a ‘regulated’ market economy. It talks of "protecting the small and medium-sized businesses" and seems to envisage the conglomerates being broken up and the smaller private owners being somehow persuaded to honour a code of moral conduct in favour of their employees. The KCTU’s own statistics and experience show that at present it is precisely the medium and small companies who are the most vicious in denying workers their fundamental rights.
The alternative would be to argue for taking at least the 30 biggest conglomerates and the banks into democratic public ownership, and doing away with the pernicious system of sub-contracting. Then their employees and other workers could be involved in deciding, through regularly elected representatives, what happens within these ‘empires’ and in the economy as a whole. If small employers say they cannot pay decent wages and honour labour codes without help, this should be examined by workers’ representatives. If they are found to be working for the big firms, those firms should be made to pay up. If not, and they are performing a useful service, they should be able to claim some kind of assistance and encouraged to look for efficient, cooperative ways of carrying on their business.
Different views
At the head of the KCTU are leaders with quite varying views. There are those for a socialist transformation as the only solution to workers’ problems and those who are, by their own admission, ‘reformists’. The latter stop far short of launching a struggle to take the giant Chaebol out of private hands and seem content to aim towards ‘the German model’. By this they mean strong trade unions accepting and operating in a capitalist environment, participating in management. Unfortunately, this also means taking responsibility for unpopular profit-motivated decisions about redundancies, wages etc.
The KCTU is keen to learn from workers’ experiences in other countries. It is highly conscious of the importance of international solidarity and anxious to make direct links with workers throughout the world. But on issues like the ‘Social Clause’ in international trade agreements, there are also different points of view. There is a big danger entailed in trusting the direct and indirect representatives of the bosses to improve the lot of workers in any country. Issues like child labour, bonded labour and poverty wages must be fought head-on by the labour movement - nationally and internationally. Apparently magnanimous stipulations in trade agreements can be used as forms of protectionism for firms based in the richer nations.
The complete opening up of South Korea to what would amount to ‘economic invasion’ by US or any other imperialism would cause considerable further hardship for working people and must be opposed. But the KCTU must insist that decisions about controls and subsidies are not made in the interests of protecting inefficient Korean capitalists who can push up prices at workers’ expense. Solutions put forward in the labour movement must be based on the need to fight for control in the economy to be taken into the hands of the working people - the majority in society.
On international links, there is an urgent need to forge direct contacts between organised workers in different countries - working in the same industries or for the same multinational companies. Exchange of information and experience internationally together with solidarity action are essential for the success of the workers’ movement. But the KCTU and other Korean labour movement bodies and projects should harbour no illusions about the aims of organisations like the ICFTU, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation or others who profess a touching concern for their plight. There is a saying, "If you sup with the devil, use a long spoon!" Accept the offers of help in terms of finance and resources by all means but be sure there are no strings attached. Workers must guard against rich benefactors posing as friends of the movement trying to dictate the direction in which the emerging trade union movement of South Korea should go. Trade Union leaders and European Social Democrats are notorious for their devious ways of acting, in reality, as defenders of the exploiting classes.
It was such gentlemen as these who wined and dined the leaders of many a political general strike - against the Franco dictatorship in the Spain of the 1970s, against the South African apartheid regime. They beguiled them with sweet talk about the advantages of the ‘social’ market and the wisdom of co-operating with the bosses - those very bosses who were the power behind the regimes they had been fighting for decades.
Members of the Committee for a Workers’ International also discussed with some of these brave fighters at the height of their struggles, including leaders of the South African mine-workers and COSATU. But rather than fight things to a finish, these once-courageous leaders took the line of least resistance. They not only swallowed the arguments about capitalism, but turned their backs on the struggle for socialism. They betrayed the aspirations of their members. Some of them crossed the class divide completely, giving up the movement to become owners of businesses themselves and line their own pockets as employers of other people’s labour.
This must serve as a warning that even the best-intentioned leaders, like those of the KCTU, if they fail to adopt a programme and method of struggle that challenges capitalism, they will inevitably move to the right. Inherent in reformism is betrayal.
How much further?
But the KCTU, some of its leaders will object, is only a union federation and and not a party. It cannot lead a bid to change society. Others will disagree. Theoretically, as Trotsky explained, in the inter-war period, there is no laid-down prescription for what kind of body could be the instrument for workers taking power. In Russia it was the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, in Germany it could be factory committees, in Britain at one point the trade unions and, in the last century, even parliament. The main precondition for success is that workers are on the move, the ruling class is in crisis, the middle class firmly on the side of the proletariat and a far-sighted leadership, known and trusted because of its past record, is rooted in the working class.
As things stood in South Korea even at the end of January 1997, was it possible for the movement to have been taken further? The ‘heavy battalions’ cannot be kept constantly on a war footing without the perspective of a fairly swift victory. As workers’ leaders in Hyundai Precision Instruments explained a month later:
"We couldn’t have carried on indefinitely. We had already lost a month’s wages. Other sections like telecom workers were not being called into the strike. We had to shoulder the main burden... And then ‘Hanbogate’ broke and the Hwang defection and the killing in strange circumstances in Seoul of a prominent defector from the North. All that detracted from our struggle".
And these distractions were no accident. It is a tried and tested method of South Korean regimes. When in difficulty, engineer a defection and start up a scare campaign. ‘Hanbogate’ itself was probably also "engineered". The company had already been in trouble for more than a year and could surely have been kept going at least for another few months. There is widespread speculation about how this hare was released - some say by members of Kim Young-sam’s own Minju faction to save him from the wrath of the striking working class. Others say by members of the right-wing faction within his party who wanted to see him thoroughly discredited and unable to put the man of his choice in to run for president in the December elections. (This could be particularly important if he wants to avoid the fate of the last two heads of state - imprisonment.)
Either way you could say (and some did) that a skilful leadership of the movement could have used both issues to its advantage and gone onto the offensive. The scare stories about the economy being in danger and about a "communist conspiracy" should not have been able to shake the confidence of the working class in action. There were those amongst the seasoned South Korean activists who felt the strike should not have been scaled down when it was. The government had been weakened possibly irrecoverably and then it was let off the hook.
Socialist Challenge
If a party had been in position - a genuine socialist party with deep roots in the working class and a leadership prepared to push things to a conclusion - how would it have fared? In attacking the Chaebol as the culprits for ruining the economy, the leaders of the KCTU and the campaigning groups around them are pushing at an open door in South Korean society. The official ideology is that no classes exist but the gap between rich and poor is ever widening. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone knows that the Chaebol, the state and the government are in league together to squeeze the maximum they can get out of a hard-working and long-suffering proletariat. An American newspaper quoted Hu In-suk, "a 44 year-old housewife, looking on at a rally in Seoul", as saying: "The labour law only reflects what big business wants... I support the strikers all the way."
Had the president’s ratings not rocketed when he jailed his predecessors for their part in the bloody Kwangju massacre and put on trial some of the richest, most corrupt and powerful heads of the Chaebol? People had grown angry over the failure to investigate and punish notoriously anti-union companies. There was the Korea Automobile Insurance Corporation. It was discovered that Assembly members on the Labour Commission looking into the firm’s activities had been given bribes hidden in fruit baskets. And now, in the Hanbo case, the chairman of the fourteenth largest conglomerate had been caught sending gifts of $460,000 to the chairmen of two of Korea’s largest banks stuffed into instant noodle boxes.
Enough was surely enough! Wasn’t this the time to get rid of the lot of them? Wasn’t this just final proof that the system was rotten to the core and didn’t deserve to survive? A party could have demanded that, instead of the superficial investigations by parliamentarians and lawyers into the scandal, there should be a tribunal of workers’ representatives. There were a quarter of a million jobs at risk at Hanbo and its sub-contractors. The $7 billion of public money that went to bail out the banks would come from workers’ pockets, one way or another. Attempts to use the crisis to bully workers into dropping their action - the need to save the stricken economy from collapse and so on - could have been pre-empted by propaganda that immediately put the blame squarely on the Chaebol for everything that was happening.
A party could have articulated the feelings of millions, and put them like this: "We are tired of labouring to line the pockets of these infamous fraudsters. It is these same Chaebol that are demanding that we pay for their survival. We say ‘no’, we can run society without these parasites. They have created these giant conglomerates and run them like mini-kingdoms. We will fight for them to become public property run on principles of workers’ control and workers’ management. We will set up those people’s committees again and show that we can create a workers’ government. We will organise a plan to be implemented not through terror and coercion by generals and their bankers but drawn up and operated on thoroughly democratic and co-operative principles by elected representatives of all the working people".