As we are still picking up steam with this blog, I thought I would take some time to introduce people loosly affliated with the larger intellectual circle around the Institute, Sungkonghoe University, and the larger Korean academic left in general. Sounds like a project that might be a little to big to chew, but slowly, I’d like to accumulate access to a large quantity of such texts that may be found in English or other languages.
To start, here is the link to an interesting article, albeit a few years old now, from Joe Jeong Hwan, which appeared at Multitudes Web, a European Journal. The essay tackles the difficult question of economic crises and class composition/decomposition in South Korea, tracing a long arch of crisis originating both from effective working class militancy and the demands of newer citizen movements on the one hand, and from integration into transnational financial networks and economic forms of regulation on the other. Joe argues against viewing these crises strictly from the perspective of the national economy, which, Joe asserts, would run the risk of reduction.
The Korean Government wants, of course, to insist that South Korean society changed from a bad state to a good state. In order to make this argument, however, the Government has, we must notice, reduced South Korean society into a unified organism completely identical with a single national economy.
Rather, Joe argues that such changes must be seen from a "responsible perspective that sees how the struggles of labor and the proletariat, i.e., struggles from the bottom-up, are the main motors of social change."
To that end, I shall employ the concept of class composition to refer the self-organization process of this central force-that is, the ceaseless self-organizational process of the constituent power of the proletariat. Through this concept, we will see a reduction in the leadership of state power, asserted by government, to the subordinate and passive variables in the process of class composition. In addition, this perspective also provides a vantage point from which it may be possible to define the actual limits of the major left-wing currents in South Korea, which have largely argued that the economic crisis in Korea could have been superseded by compromise with capital. In this argument, which takes the form of social-corporatism, they consider the crisis as a product of the co mpetitive movement of individual capital ; hence, the working class struggle, in their analysis, was considered irrelevant to economic crisis.
The article, written in 2003, brings us roughly up to date with issues important at that time. For a quick look to see how the arch of crisis, liberalization, and resistance has continued please see Cho Hee-Yeon’s article posted seperatly below; here are some links to some more recent articles by myself and by Martin Hart-Landsberg that roughly track some of the social issues raised in Joe’s article up to date.
