Article No. 11
Visions of
Democracy:
The Communication and Transformation of Revolutionary Ideologies in
South Korea
Rob Prey
Simon Fraser University, Canada
VISIONS OF
DEMOCRACY
...democracy is not a gift or a political regime that one is born
with
but something that must be fought for every inch of the way, in
every
society. In this sense, the Korean struggle has been so enduring
that
there may be no country more deserving of democracy in our time than
the Republic of Korea (Cumings, 1997, p.339).
Introduction
South Korea
has been widely celebrated as a model of successful
democratization. The tremendous role played by students in the
overthrow of military dictatorships in the 1980s has been both
publicly applauded by foreign commentators and respectfully
acknowledged domestically. In 1986 a Korean government official
privately remarked that the nation seemed to be “at the brink of
choosing either a military republic or a student republic" Lee,
2002, p.132). These movements were a continuation of a strong
tradition of student activism in Korea. Anti-Japanese activism was
centered in the universities during Japan’s colonization of Korea
from 1910-1945. As well, the authoritarian government of President
Syngman Rhee was brought to its knees by a student-led uprising in
1960. It has been noted that, “student protests drew upon
wellsprings of Confucianism that demanded or even required the
educated to be moral exemplars, conscientious sentinels of the
nation” (Cumings, 1997, p.339).
However, the dominant ideology propelling the student movements
after 1980 was not one rooted in ‘liberal democracy’. Many
commentators conveniently overlook the fact that the resistance to
military dictatorship was largely driven by anti-imperialist and
revolutionary desires to free the Korean peninsula of US hegemony
and capitalist exploitation. This central fact thoroughly
disproves Samuel Huntington’s (1991) claim that, “in the
1980s…supporters for democracy carried the American flag”(p.286).
Along with citizens in other third world countries, Korean
revolutionaries drew from the wells of Nationalism and from various
schools of Marxist thought. Within the student movement, these two
dominant ideologies, alternated positions of influence like an
ongoing game of king of the hill. As Gi Wook Shin (1995) points
out, the ties between Nationalism and Marxism throughout the Third
World are precisely so intertwined because “Marxism offers a more
coherent intellectual version than nationalism, but derives much of
its political force from its critique of imperialism, a nationalist
theme” (p.516).
Theoretical Framework
This paper will look at the circulation, popularization and
utilization of revolutionary ideologies within the ‘concourse of
communication’
in the South Korean student movement since 1980. Mi Park (2002)
writes, “Ideology is the main medium with which conscious human
beings frame and re-frame their lived experience. Accumulated
memories and experiences of struggle, success and failure in the
past influence one’s choice of ideological frame”(p.22). Among
Korean intellectuals and students of the 1980s, revolutionary
ideologies provided a means to understand their economy, society and
often-tragic history. More specifically these ideologies provided a
way to conceptualize American imperialism, as both a ‘physical
occupier’, and as the driving hegemonic force behind an exploitative
economic and political system.
Popular ideologies are never rigid or fixed in space and time.
Ideas meet reality in a sort of dance where the subordinate class
adopts or rejects a certain ‘derived’ ideology depending on their
experience (Rude, 1980, p.29). The British historian George Rude
(1980) describes the ‘locally-assembled’ nature of any one
particular popular ideology as the fusion of inherent ideas based on
direct experiences with a more structured system of ‘derived’ ideas
transmitted and adapted from outside. Examples of these
‘structured’ ideas could be the Rights of Man, Nationalism or
Marxism-Leninism (p.28).
Although this paper primarily focuses on the student movements, the
complex relations and transfer of ideologies between the students
and both Korean workers and the middle class will also be examined.
The totality of the radical democracy movement was deemed the
minjung (‘common people’ or ‘masses’) movement. This term will
be used hereon in to mean the entire revolutionary movement,
within which the student movement operated as an essential part and
the ‘fountain’ for new ideologies. As Namhee Lee (2002) writes,
Claiming themselves to be a voice of conscience and the true
representation of the minjung (common people), the students
‘presented the issues” to society. All of the major political,
social, economic, and cultural issues confronting Korean society,
from the regime’s political legitimacy, questions of distributive
justice, the
truth of the Kwangju uprising, to reunification have been
persistently articulated and presented by students as public and
legitimate. In other words, students defined the grounds and
conditions of social and political discourse in South Korea in the
1980s (p.132).
Students actively projected the minjung discourse throughout
all stratums of society. Minjung discourse was harnessed to
all kinds of traditional cultural practices to give them new
meaning. This was done so successfully that by the mid-80s, this
word had been transformed from its original abstract or ambiguous
meaning, into its newfound definitive role in conceptualizing unity
and political agency.
I will primarily base my analysis on the transformation of the
dominant ideas that fueled the movement in the years following the
1980 Kwangju Massacre and the changing characteristics and
interrelation of the movement and Korea’s political climate in the
1990s. Certainly it is somewhat artificial to ‘begin’ an in-depth
analysis at one specific point in history, as all events are tainted
by the events that precede it; however this moment is chosen because
it marks a crossroad in the democracy movement. The Kwangju
Massacre broke with previous movement orientations, as it did not
leave much room for reform. “The post-Kwangju social movement was
to be ‘revolutionary’…as opposed to being merely anti-government”
(Lee, 2002, p.132).
The Impact of Kwangju
Prior to the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, the majority of Koreans saw
the US as an ally in their struggle for democracy. Kwangju exposed
the naiveté of this worldview and a “once Western-oriented movement
based largely on middle-class resentment of Park Chung Hee’s
military dictatorship” was transformed into “a nationalist struggle
for independence from foreign intervention, and eventual
unification" Shin, 1995, p.514).
The tragic events that took place in the southwestern city of
Kwangju in May 1980 developed out of the assassination of long-time
dictator Park Chung Hee in 1979. The death of Park, who had ruled
Korea with an iron fist since 1961, opened the political
floodgates. Any hope for civil democratic rule was quickly dashed
however as Major General Chun Doo Hwan soon executed a successful
coup. The Carter administration in the US, despite their
‘human-rights’ centered foreign policy rhetoric, did not protest.
Indeed, worried about political disintegration and the military
threat from North Korea, they decided that it was best to rely on
the Korean military to maintain effective order after Parks death
(Cumings, 1997, p.375).
In April of 1980, General Chun made use of a militant miners strike
in a small eastern town to justify the further entrenchment of his
control. He made himself head of the notorious KCIA while keeping
his post as head of the Defense Security Command. This set off
massive street demonstrations around the country. In response, on
May 17, General Chun declared martial law, closed the universities,
dissolved the legislature, banned all political activity, and
arrested thousands of political leaders and dissidents (Cumings,
1997, p.377). This only served to further enrage the citizenry and
they once again took to the streets around the country, and
especially in Kwangju. There, elite paratroopers viciously attacked
protesting students. The paratroopers then turned on common
citizens who had joined the students in outrage after witnessing
their treatment. Protestors seized weapons in the bloody street
battles that ensued, and by May 21, hundreds of thousands of local
people had succeeded in driving the soldiers from the city.
Citizen’s councils controlled the city for the next five days and
attempted to negotiate a peaceful end to the confrontation by asking
U.S. officials to serve as mediators. The request was turned down,
as U.S. officials cited a commitment to neutrality in the internal
affairs of Korea. The U.S. soon revealed who they were ‘neutral
against’ when the U.S. commander in South Korea gave General Chun
permission to use U.S.-controlled South Korean troops to ‘restore
order’ in Kwangju (Hart-Landsberg, 1989, p.63). On May 27, soldiers
came in shooting and soon secured the city. It may never be known
exactly how many people died over the 9-day uprising in Kwangju, but
some scholars (Hart-Landsberg, 1989; Cumings, 1999) estimate that
over 2000 people lost their lives.
The period immediately following the Kwangju massacre was marked by
severe government repression and a complete intolerance of any
expression of political activism. The military government of
General Chun Doo Hwan wanted to ‘cleanse’ civil society. They
attempted to do this in June 1980 by ordering the arrest of 329
politicians, professors, pastors, journalists, and students on
various charges ranging from corruption to organizing antigovernment
demonstrations. The following month the military regime fired
thousands of public officials “blaming the purging on their
incompetence, corruption, and ideological problems”, and forced
newspaper and broadcasters to expel journalists who were “deficient
in anticommunism” (Kim, 2000, p.78). Furthermore, the military
regime forced the news media to obey by the guidelines of the
Ministry of Information and Culture, which included among other
things, the order to label anti-government protesters as
pro-communist elements (Shin, 1999, p.1). This was nothing new.
Ever since the Korean War, military rulers realized that it was in
their best self-interest, both domestically and internationally, to
paint all of their opponents as communists. Even the paratroopers
who were sent in to brutally repress the citizens of Kwangju
informed their seniors that the city was being “plundered by
communists” (Kim, 2000, p.67).
Emergence and Communication of Revolutionary Ideology
The Kwangju Massacre led social movement activists and critical
intellectuals to search for alternative ideological models that
provided more substantive answers then did reformist liberal
democracy. Scholars argued that previous democratic movements had
failed because they did not arise from careful ‘scientific’ analysis
of Korean political economy and society. Thus began, as one student
leader termed it “the Era of Great Circulation of Texts” (Lee, 2002,
p.142). Marxism became the alternative model that initially rose to
the forefront. Marxist literature was officially banned but this
did not stop bookstores around university campuses from selling a
myriad of radical leftist publications under the counter. The
reading list of student activists included orthodox Marxist-Leninist
textbooks and more modern publications of the New Left,
Euro-communism and Western Marxism. However, Korean revolutionaries
of the early and mid-1980s derived more of their identity from
Lenin’s works, dependency theory and Kim II-Sung’s Juche
ideology then from the writings of the New Left (Park, 2002, p.4).
One of the main reasons for this was that Korean social conditions,
with its anti-communist law (NSL) and authoritarian state structure,
were very different from the conditions the New Left grew out of.
Thus Korean leftists believed that the diffused power struggle
advocated by the New Left was simply not practical in their
country.
Aside from Marxist texts (of which Lenin’s What is To be Done?
and Marx’s Das Kapital were the most popular),
underground newsletters, diaries, and statements of appeal written
by imprisoned students were central to the organization of the
student movement.
Without the luxury of open and public discussion, the circulation of
these materials became the “main medium of communication and the
sustaining force of the movement” (Lee, 2002, p.141).
The State briefly liberalized its enforcement of censored materials
in 1983 and this policy led to a mushrooming of publishing houses.
The publishers were mainly former activists who now devoted their
life to the publishing, editing and translating of ideological
literature on socialism and the nature of world capitalism. By
1987, there were reportedly twenty-four such houses (Lee, 2002,
p.143).
The remarkable circulation of these revolutionary written works, in
their various forms, contributed to an incredibly focused movement
modality. Students memorized and ‘ingested’ the readings with
seemingly feverish urgency, and often taught themselves a foreign
language in order to understand books smuggled in from abroad.
Namhee Lee (2002) writes, “it was as though there was a
correspondence course on the student movement and everyone took it”
(p.142). Once Marxist and historical materialist theoretical
foundations were laid; Korean leftists began analyzing their society
in class terms. The theory, or the structured system of ‘derived’
ideas, was fused with the reality of a growing gulf in income
distribution and social inequality (Lie, 1998, p.135). These
formative conditions, as mentioned earlier through the ideas of
George Rude, created the proper environment for the various debates
and camps that subsequently materialized within the minjung
concourse, and the emergence of a distinctly Korean popular
revolutionary ideology.
The Debates
Two high-profile debates in academia took place in the early to
mid-1980s. They were the C-N-P Debate and later the
Social Formation Debate. The C-N-P debate developed within the
Youth League for Democratization, a semi-legal youth
organization. The debate centered on two primary questions. The
first question being; which class is the driving force of
revolution? The second being; what type of relationship should there
be between revolutionaries and the opposition New Democratic Party
(Park, 2002, p.5)? C-N-P is an acronym for the three distinct
visions of ‘Democratic Revolution’ that emerged – Civil, National
and People’s. The Civil Democratic Revolution camp expected U.S.
support for their vision of a middle-class and intellectual-led
struggle for civic revolution. The CDR argued that this was the
only practical approach due to what they saw as the disorganization
of the working class. Both the National and People’s Democratic
Revolution groups vehemently opposed this ‘elitist’ plan, as they
were certain that only the working class could be trusted to bring
about dramatic social change. These two groups also considered the
overthrow of the imperialist powers (the US and Japan) as essential.
They differed however on the issue of the opposition party. The NDR
considered the New Democratic Party and the middle-class as tactical
allies while the PDR rejected this idea in principle (Park, 2002,
p.5). In essence, The C-N-P debate can be seen as “a first major
effort to articulate more finely the earlier (democracy) movement’s
class basis and to rethink previous strategies that had focused on
moral critiques of economic inequality and conscientious critiques
of oppressive political power made by students, intellectuals and
the progressive underclass” (Shin, 1995, p.515).
The C-N-P debate developed into the highly influential Social
Formation debate. The spark for this exchange was two articles
published in the progressive journal “Creation and Critique” by Yi
Tae Gun and Pak Hyon Chae. Yi analyzed Korean social formation
from a dependency perspective. Dependency theory characterized
South Korea as a peripheral capitalist state whose full development
was limited and stunted because it survived in subservience to the
‘core’ countries of global capitalism. To Marxist scholars such as
Pak however, this paradigm ignored the limited, but nevertheless
evident internal growth of South Korean capitalism. Stressing the
interplay between state and finance capital, Pak branded Korean
political economy as State-Monopoly Capitalism.
In Pak’s eyes, Korean social formation had more in common with
earlier Western industrialization than with what was occurring in
other regions of the Third World. It is important to note that
within this school of thought there were some differences over the
depth of Korea’s dependency on the core economy. Different Marxist
camps included: dependent State-Monopoly Capitalism,
neo-colonial State-Monopoly Capitalism, and international
State-Monopoly Capitalism (Park, 2002, p.5).
National Liberation (NL), National Democracy (ND) and People’s
Democracy (PD).
The theoretical debates described above, set the stage for the
formal organization in the mid-80s of three different political
camps with considerably well-developed revolutionary strategies.
The student movement and the social formation debates within
academia were fundamental to their emergence. These three groups
were National Liberation (NL), National Democracy (ND)
and People’s Democracy (PD). NL was very much carved out of
the nationalist, anti-imperialist ideology of North Korean leader
Kim II Sung’s Juche theory. Defining South Korea as a colony
of the U.S, NL was primarily concerned with achieving national
independence (re-unification being the key component). Eliminating
class divisions was viewed as of secondary importance. Nationalist
struggle during this period drew a growing number of supporters. In
the early 1980s, critiques of imperialism were seen as too abstract
for ordinary people to understand, but these critiques became
popularized when efforts began to reevaluate the significance of
America’s role in the Kwangju Massacre. Within the student circles,
“only a very small fraction of the 1980 student activists shared
anti-American sentiments; but by 1985 it was apparent that most
student activists subscribed to the view that the United States was
primarily responsible for the very existence of the
military-authoritarian regime” (Shin, 1995, p.521-522). As
Bruce Cumings (1997) writes,
Radicals linked Korea’s internal repression to the history of
American imperialism in Korea and elsewhere and thus drew upon deep
wellsprings of nationalism. Kwangju brought all this to a head, but
the soil of anti-Americanism was plowed up first and foremost by
Americans themselves (p.382).
Greater numbers of ordinary Koreans began to see the US (and
Japanese) support for military dictatorship as indicative of both
countries’ desire to maintain the division of the peninsula.
Consequently, “since foreign interests and intervention set limits
on change that was unacceptable to the democratic movement,
activists realized that the struggle for democracy had to be
broadened to a struggle for national liberation” (Hart-Landsberg,
1989, p.63). Dissident intellectuals furthered the
‘emancipation of Korean consciousness’ or the ‘de-colonization of
the Korean self’ by publishing books such as The Korean People’s
History and A History of People’s Movements in Modern Korea,
which attempted to build an effective counter hegemony to
imperialism.
The two other revolutionary camps, ND and PD, both drew their
inspiration from Marxist-Leninism. ND combined certain elements of
dependency theory and the classical Marxist approach while insisting
that Korea needed bourgeois revolution in order to first eradicate
military rule. Only then, it was thought, would proletariat class
struggle be able to develop organically and lead to true socialist
revolution. PD in general was similar to ND in that they too argued
for a clandestine vanguard party. PD however had a larger academic
element to it as it was established by professors and graduate
students who published a journal entitled “Reality and Science”
(Park, 2002, p.8). They also worked to create the National
Political Newspaper, seeing this activity as essential for building
the party. It is important to note however that both ND and PD bent
orthodox Marxism-Leninism to suit the particularities of the Korean
state, namely the imperial presence and the division of the nation.
While activists in the early 1980s had attempted to apply Marxism in
a ‘purist’ manner, these attempts were now abandoned “in the effort
to create an indigenous application of Marxism” (Shin, 1995, p.524).
The central lesson to be taken from the constant modification and
re-alignment of the South Korean student movement, is that
revolutionaries continually posed questions that emerged after
Kwangju and sought ideological frames that could best answer these
questions. By comparing and contrasting their reality to that
experienced by other oppressed people, they “borrowed a great deal
from existing ideological resources and further expanded the
existing ideological stock” (Park, 2002, p.8). This is once again a
prime example of George Rude’s theory that popular ideology is
developed out of the interplay between peoples daily-experiences and
struggles, and the ‘derived’ ideology that seems to represent that
reality best (Rude, 1980, p.28-29).
The Communication of Ideology through Revolutionary Activities
Students became active in a variety of different ways in the 1980s.
First and foremost were the organized circles and seminars, which
became a sort of ‘nursery’ for movement activities. Here, students
would discuss the issues and debates brought up in their readings
and propose strategies of action. The seminars were intense but
exhilarating and many students attended University solely for these
‘extra-curricular’ and usually underground seminars, while skipping
regular classes (Lee, 2002, p.144).
Free night schools began to be organized by students in the late
1970s. Initially they rose up in response to the desires of young
workers for further education but they soon played an important role
in raising workers class-consciousness and they provided an “arena
where workers learned to articulate their daily work experience
using a new political language and where they could develop close
links with student groups” (Kim, 2000, p.70). Many students and
workers were imprisoned for their involvement in these schools.
Nevertheless the schools surged in popularity through the 1980s and
produced many independent trade union leaders.
Student leaders also arranged for the entry of their group members
into factories as temporary workers during school break. Mi Park
(2002) writes, “Revolutionary movement organizations had a ‘factory
activity guideline’ which taught students how to research working
conditions, how to become worker’s friends, how to deal with legal
procedures concerning harassment at a workplace and union
registration, etc” (p.9).
In their final academic year, student revolutionaries were divided
into two groups. The first group would pass on their knowledge in
training to the next cohort of students while the second group
prepared to enter the factory on a full-time basis. Dedicating
oneself to factory work was regarded in high moral esteem, as these
individuals were leaving behind the potential for promising careers
that their education afforded them to devote their life to the
revolution. Some experts estimate that the number of college
students who concealed their academic background to become factory
workers may have reached over three thousand. In one year alone,
1985-86, police arrested 671 of these factory ‘agitators’ (Ogle,
1990, p.99). Imprisonment however, served to even further embed the
anti-government movement as jailed students made connections with
and were further radicalized by older political prisoners.
The ‘Great June Struggle’ of 1987
The fight for democracy reached its boiling point in June 1987. The
minjung movement had often denounced the opposition party
as having too narrow a definition of democracy by equating it only
with direct presidential elections. However, a combination of two
events in the early spring of 1987 served to bring the two sides
together in mass protest. In April 1987, the authoritarian regime
announced that it was suspending ‘wasteful’ debate on constitutional
revision, and then a month later it was publicly disclosed that a
Seoul National University student had been tortured to death during
a police interrogation (Kim, 2000, p.91). These revelations served
to enrage all segments of society and in what has been termed the
‘Great June Struggle’, about one million students and civilians took
to the streets in demonstration.
The mass protests in June of 1987 showed serious signs of
revolutionary potential. The middle class seemed to have finally
lost their tolerance for the regime and they joined the students and
labour radicals in the streets. The U.S. was also clearly fearful
of the potential for a dramatic shift of control in Korean
politics. The Reagan administration, in a highly unusual move,
dispatched a career CIA officer to Seoul to be the American
ambassador. However, the middle class/student alliance was only
temporary and it disintegrated as soon as the government conceded to
the public pressure and agreed to stage direct presidential
elections.
The middle class and its political representatives sought thereafter
to keep their distance from the students. Cardinal Kim of the
Catholic Church pleaded to students that they should shy away from
“left-leaning radical ideology and the cry of revolution” (Park,
2002, p.11).
The student movement also became politically disoriented and after
the brief putting aside of differences, once again divided up into
their various ideological camps. This division was further
accentuated when the two main opposition leaders; Kim Dae Jung and
Kim Young Sam failed to unite and form a single opposition party. In
the subsequent elections, both Kims ran independent campaigns
against the military government. This move proved disastrous for
the left as one faction threw their support behind Kim Dae Jung;
another tried to force one of the Kims to withdraw; and a third
faction supported an independent people’s candidate. Combined, the
two Kims garnered the majority of the popular vote but because it
was a split vote, former general and Chun’s accomplice -Roh Tae Woo-
emerged victorious. The United States rushed to congratulate Roh
and trumpet South Korea’s “march to democracy” (Hart-Landsberg,
1989, p.67).
However, if the outcome of the June struggle had disoriented the
student left, this was certainly not the case with radical labour.
“Without addressing socioeconomic inequality and injustice,
(procedural) democracy sounded rather empty to labor activists”
(Kim, 2000, p.95). Taking advantage of the political space that
briefly opened up after the June protests, workers went on strike to
demand higher wages, better working conditions, and above all, the
guarantee of democratic worker’s rights.
As Bruce Cumings (1999) notes in his book Parallax Visions,
more strikes and labour actions occurred in the following year than
at any other point in Korean history, or most national histories for
that matter (p.114). This explosion of labour militancy caught
student and academic revolutionaries off-guard. While these
revolutionaries had played a pivotal role in raising workers
consciousness about their basic labour rights, “they were not
capable of transforming worker’s illegal industrial action into a
revolutionary uprising” (Park, 2002, p.11). This was because the
student movement was lacking key central and national leadership at
this point. President Roh soon put his foot down, crushing unions
and imprisoning massive numbers of workers under the pretense of the
National Security Law and by claiming that unions were destroying
the country’s exporting comparative advantage by bidding up wages.
A New Era
The early years of the 1990s were marked by gradual changes in the
way that the Korean State dealt with student movements. The State
had learned from the confrontational political culture of the 1980s
that it was far more effective to adapt tactics that combined
coercion with co-optation and ideological persuasion. The Roh
regime resorted to an old technique by attempting to isolate the
student movement from labour and the rest of society and to convince
labour leaders that their best interests lay in making compromises
with the State. Roh had also succeeded in luring the opposition
party into the National Assembly. Carl J. Saxer writes how this
potential risk paid off handsomely by “basically separat(ing) and
isolat(ing) politically the opposition party from both the labor
movement and the students (Saxer, 2002, p.64).
The new political landscape also saw the emergence and
popularization of middle class social movements. Now that
procedural democracy had been achieved, these shimin
(citizens) movements no longer saw the government as illegitimate
and an object to be overthrown. The central organization of these
new movements was a group called ‘CCEJ’ (Citizens’ Coalition
for Economic Justice) which, like other shimin groups, argued
for the primacy of ‘public’ interests over narrow class interests.
CCEJ did not receive direct financial support from the
government but there was no doubt that it had a close working
relationship with the state. Key advisors and members of CCEJ
joined the ruling party or the government sponsored labor committee
(Park, 2002, p.13). Active links were also sought with the media.
As Bronwen Dalton and James Cotton (1996) write;
In
1994 over ninety articles on CCEJ activities appeared in the South
Korean press,
the vast majority of which were sympathetic to the
movement and its
causes. Some of the headlines on these articles read
‘CCEJ leads
fight against rice market liberalization’…. and ‘Financial
real name
accounts: victory for citizens’ movement’ (p.291).
In short, the minjung movement was systemically undermined as
growing middle-class antipathy towards radical student ideologies
and activism was encouraged by “conservative forces in the media”
(Dalton & Cotton, 1996, p.283). The new Civil Society-State
relationship was seen by many as an attempt by the State to
incorporate and ‘statize’ civil society (Kim, 2000, p.131). It is
important to note this because the seemingly inevitability of
capitalism and liberal democracy in Korea and elsewhere should
certainly not be seen as an example of everything falling
into its ‘natural order’. As John Drysek (1996) writes, “when an
ideology vanquishes its opposition and secures political dominance
one should suspect that there are forces at work other than simple
rational judgment by individual persons. Such forces would include
the extrarational dissemination and enforcement of ideas and the
exercise of political power, not just the deployment of reason”
(p.32).
The Jinbo Movement
Aside from the divide-and-rule strategy of the State; the collapse
of the communist bloc and the subsequent euphoria over the apparent
‘triumph of capitalism’ and the ‘end of history’, dramatically
constricted the political space available for the minjung
movement. Student groups found it increasingly difficult to
mobilize large numbers of their peers for protests as the new
generation of students seemed far more interested in their career
prospects then in reading ‘Das Kapital’.
As political antipathy, individualism, and consumerism began to
appeal to more and more young people, the leaders of the student
revolutionary groups realized that they had to reassess their
position and find a new direction.
Thus, revolutionary paradigms of the 1990s were expanded and
diversified. Both the National Democracy and People’s Democracy
wings of the student movement discarded the Leninist model and
instead put forward a progressive theory called the Jinbo
movement (Park, 2002, p.15). This movement sought to examine
changes in Korea’s political and economic landscape and the failure
of the Soviet system through the lenses of the New Left and the
Western Marxist tradition of Marcuse, Habermas, Negri and others.
The Korean New Left of the 1990s began a ‘war of position’; drawing
on Gramsci to argue that what was needed at this particular point in
history, was the ideological transformation and strengthening of
Korean civil society. The Jinbo movement promoted itself as
both an alternative to the ‘orthodoxy’ of the minjung
movement and to the ‘fatalism’ of the shimin movement.
Student leaders of the Jinbo movement felt that the abstract
sloganeering and debates on social formation in the 1980s had
alienated common citizens. The new struggle, they argued, should
grow out of a focus on pragmatic or ‘grounded’ issues in order to
repoliticise the masses. Issues such as ‘minority’ movements
(movements of women, homosexuals, the disabled, and immigrants),
cultural movements, alternative schools, peace movements,
independent movie industry, communes, collective day-care, workers’
co-ops, squatters’ movements, underground music movement, anti-death
penalty, environment, and others were suggested (Park, 2002, p.17).
Although loosely rooted in the western philosophies of the New Left,
the Jinbo movement also had some notable distinctions. They
criticized the diffused leadership and organizational strategies of
the New Left arguing that it was far too ‘romantic’ and
inefficient. They also did not write off the revolutionary
potential of the working class as Marcuse and other intellectuals of
the New Left had. Jinbo theorists felt that the emphasis on
blue-collar workers needed to be updated and expanded to build an
alliance with the rising white-collar labour force. Class was still
a central concern which they felt should not be completely
overlooked in the rush to incorporate ‘cultural’ critiques of
capitalism. As one Jinbo academic wrote, “we should avoid
both class reductionism (the minjung movement) and class
liquidations (the shimin movement)” (Park, 2002, p.19).
There could be no blanket acceptance of New Left ideas because many
of the social conditions present in Korea were still vastly
different then those of the west. South Korea had no legal
communist or socialist electoral party. These parties did exist in
the west and especially in Europe, where they were often criticized
for preserving the status quo. Also Korea was known for its
militant and independent trade unions while trade unions in the west
were often bureaucratic and conservative. The adjustment of New
Left theories to suit the Korean context is yet another prime
example of the ‘sea-change’ described by George Rude (1980) when he
writes that all ‘derived’ ideas in the course of transmission and
adaptation, go through a transformation that depends on the social
or political needs and aims of the classes that are ready to absorb
them (p.36).
Arguably, the group that had to do the most self-reflection after
the international and domestic political changes of the late 1980s
was National Liberation. Their obstinate support of the Kim Jong-Il
regime and its Juche ideology alienated them from both the
mainstream public and most progressive groups who did not see North
Korea as a desirable alternative to liberal capitalism any longer.
NL underwent a fundamental change when in the early 1990s, a
considerable section, including Kim Young-Hwan, the NL leader, split
from the mainstream of the group and declared the Kim Jung-Il regime
as dictatorial and traitorous to true socialism.
The identity crisis suffered by the minjung movement led to
the reorganization of some key pan-Korean student organizations.
The National Council of University Student Representatives which had
been established in 1987, announced its breakup in 1993. Its
successor, the NCUSC (National Coalition of University
Student Councils) declared that it would avoid radical and violent
demonstrations and would “faithfully respond to the concerns of
‘ordinary’ students” (Kim, 2000, p.111). Another one of these
‘revamped’ groups was, NADUK (National Alliance for Democracy
and Unification of Korea). Although it has been far less visible
and influential in Korean politics then many of its predecessors,
NADUK has been highly engaged up to this day with university
students in demanding the repeal of the National Security Law.
The NSL is seen as a fundamental barrier blocking the tolerance of
different political ideologies, ideas, and opinions. Until it is
repealed, these groups feel that Korean democracy “is at best
“pseudo” and highly hypocritical” (Kim, 2000, p.122).
While revolutionary student groups were less influential in
circulating their ideologies throughout the 1990s, there were still
periodic and substantial antigovernment uprisings. Student groups,
in general, continue to be responsible for the most radical
anti-government actions. In August 1996, NCUSC students were
involved in violent confrontations with police at Yonsei University
in Seoul as they attempted to walk to the DMZ to welcome home two
students who were returning from a rally in North Korea. The
students called for reunification and the abolishment of the NSL.
The government saw this as proof that North Korea controlled the
student movement and vowed that it would not tolerate support for
communism by student groups. By the end of August, the government
had raided and closed down numerous left-leaning organizations on
several dozen campuses (Saxer, 2002, p.175). This was just a
prelude to what occurred in late 1996 after the railroading of
several controversial labour-related bills through the National
Assembly. For three months afterwards militant labor strikes were
supported by massive student demonstration. The CCEJ and other
shimin groups were notably absent from this pro-democracy
struggle, which indicates that the shimin movement groups
were, as Sun Hyuk Kim (2000) writes, “primarily concerned with the
establishment and consolidation of a narrower version of democracy
that does not involve any substantive dimension” (p.123).
Limits of Korean Democracy and the ‘Big Picture’
The student led movement that resulted in the overthrow of the
Korean authoritarian regime has been widely cited and celebrated
internationally. However, for the revolutionary student
movements at the forefront of the struggle, the ‘victory’ is
generally seen as a limited one. International observers often act
as if democracy was a household appliance with a lifetime warranty
that, once purchased, would satisfy all needs allowing attention to
be refocused on ‘sexier’ topics. In reality, democratization is a
fluid concept and democracy can “move forward or backward, but it
cannot stand still” (Drysek, 1996, p.5).
The limits of current Korean ‘democracy’ are numerous. There is
still today no political party that has organically grown out of
Korea’s massive working class. Furthermore there is continuing
suppression of the nonviolent left under the National Security Law.
Labor unions themselves were prevented by law from involving
themselves in politics until 1998 (Cumings, 1999, p.115).
Many have welcomed the rise of shimin-style civil society movements
in the 1990s and the corresponding decline in influence of the
revolutionary students movements and the ideologies that informed
them. The new paradigm shift is seen to provide new political
opportunities for individuals whose identities are constructed by a
different sort of logic. Regardless of whether this is true, it
also leaves serious questions unanswered. As Namhee Lee (2002)
writes,
…. the shift
from minjung to shimin displaced the poor and the
marginalized
in the social
and political discourse. The true minjung, who could not
revert
back to their
non-minjung identity in the changed sociopolitical reality of
South Korea
would have to construct their emancipatory narrative on a
different
terrain, that of articulating the issues largely on the basis of
interest
(as a
right-bearing and right-claiming citizen, for example) (p.156).
This issue is especially pertinent following the IMF crisis that hit
Korea in the late 1990s and “the alarming speed with which some of
the social discourses have reverted back to the earlier
developmental stage, emphasizing once again national unity over
differences and quick economic recovery over equitable distribution”
(Lee, 2002, p.157). The IMF crisis and the resulting
hardships also added a new dimension to the debate over the
country’s place within globalized capitalism.
Furthermore, as international pressures on the Korean economic,
political and social fabric have not dissipated, neither has the
popular concern and anger it generates. Revolutionary ideologies
may no longer occupy center stage in student movements but the
recent surprise victory of President Roh Moo Hyun, who campaigned on
a promise to seek a more “equal” relationship with the US;
demonstrates that ‘liberation theory’ (in whatever manifestation it
assumes), still commands a central place in the Korean psyche.
Ironically, President Roh’s widely unpopular decision in March to
send troops to Iraq and one newspaper’s editorial comment that this
is “a measure of how Roh has now had to shape his beliefs to the
realities of geopolitics” (Jung & Lee, 2003), only serves to
strengthen this argument. Hereby it can be noted that “...the more
important that foreign policy and national security become in the
life of the state, then the less likely the state is to prove
susceptible to democratic control” (Drysek, 1996, p.74).
In reality, what political commentators have been celebrating is not
so much the arrival of ‘democracy’ in Korea but rather the arrival
of ‘liberalism’ - what Bruce Cumings (1999) calls the
“Schumpeter-Dahl axis”.
If some degree of stability has been achieved, it is precisely
because this form of governance is so successful in restraining
civil society.
Lessons Learned and Future Implications
The influence that students had on the overthrow of military rule
cannot be overstated. From the late 1940s throughout the General
Park years and particularly in the 1980s through the mediation of
minjung ideology, Korean students took a leading role in
articulating future visions of their society. The ingenuity of the
Korean student movement speaks as a classic example of the blurring
of lines “between demonstration and civil disobedience, between
discussion, festival, and expressive self-presentation,” described
by Habermas (1986, p.234), when he wrote about the student protests
of the 1960s.
The fight for democracy within Korea can also serve to shatter some
pervasive myths about the relationship between capitalism and
democracy. The philosophy of “no bourgeoisie, no democracy” does
not hold water in the case of Korea as it was always the subordinate
classes who fought against the status quo and the upper classes who
resisted change. It is also true when one looks at the role of the
middle class during and after the Great June Struggle of 1987, that
different class interests rarely fight for further extensions of
democracy to other segments of society once their own place has been
secured.
Consequently, what many student groups and social activists are
realizing in the decade or so following the overthrow of military
rule in Korea, is that deeper democratization of the liberal
capitalist state may be impossible. There may be better
possibilities in seeking democratization “against the state
and democratization apart from the state, rather than
democratization of the state.”
Of course, future movements that take this approach should not
expect much international fanfare. As Bruce Cumings (1997) points
out, “it is commonplace for Americans (or the West in general) to
sympathize with those victims of authoritarianism who share their
ideals and to fall silent about those who do not” (p.392).
Progressive activists in Korea have continued their criticism of
procedural, capitalist democracy and do not see the perceived
‘victory’ of their nation’s people as a model that other countries
should follow. In general they subscribe to many of the ideas put
forth so elegantly by C.B. Macpherson in his life work. His central
claim being that political equality is relatively meaningless if
democracy is not used as a tool to redress human equality,
especially economic inequality without which men and women cannot
realize their full potential (Macpherson, 1973, p.78-90). When
assessed from this perspective, it becomes adamantly clear that the
fight for democracy must continue in Korea.
And continue it will. Revolutionary events always prepare the
ground for future events. This is demonstrated by George
Katsiaficas (2002) and what he calls the ‘eros effect’ when he
writes about the role the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871 had on
the participants of the Kwangju Uprising in 1980.
What is universally viewed as episodic, I view as historically
continuous, whether spread by word of mouth, intuition, or
paleosymbolic intergenerational transmission. Thus, the eros effect
postulates that popular movements spontaneously internalize new
levels of activity which previous episodes of revolutionary struggle
already developed, thereby explaining why newly-emergent movements
have continually identified with their predecessors (Katsiaficas,
2000, Online).
Or another way of looking at this is that revolutionary ideology
does not disappear when social conditions are more stable. It
temporarily becomes dormant but re-emerges under new historical
conditions (Rude, 1980, p.27). It remains to be seen as to how
Korean democracy and future visions and articulations of freedom
will develop to transform their society once more.
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ENDNOTES
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