Pen/Insular_Notes

My article in ISJ 109 on the origins of North Korea has become the subject of some interesting debate and one or two attacks, first here at Lenin’s Tomb and then subesequently at Louis Proyect’s blog, Unrepentant Marxist. I’m glad this is getting some attention, not (mainly) for egotistical reasons, but because I think that this is an important subject that needs to be discussed by the left outside of Korea as well as within. The main point of contention seems to be whether it is meaningful or correct to describe the Soviet Union as imperialist, particularly in its relations with North Korea. This is a big topic. I would like to say that I think Kim Ha-yong makes a better case for this proposition in her book than I had time to reflect adequately in my article. I might come back to this question in a separate post at some stage.

On a more minor point, Louis accuses me of supporting the statement that “Rhee was a Machiavellian politician who made progress on the political/democratic front and laid some of the foundations for South Korea’s later economic growth” which appeared in this post from a few days ago. I do not agree with that statement at all, as I pointed out in the comments box at his blog, it would be perverse to say that Rhee helped democracy in any way when he put to death even a moderate oppositionist like Cho Pong-am.

Louis also quotes Martin Hart-Landsberg approvingly on the North Korean economy. I don’t really disagree with much that he says, but it seems quite un-analytical. Here is a response I wrote in the comments boxes at Lenin’s Tomb:

Louis Proyect, in his post about Lenin’s post about my article about Kim Ha-yong’s book (is that clear?), quotes some stuff from Martin Hart-Landsberg about the North Korean economy. It brings up some interesting points. I think he is quoting it to make the point about how much aid the North Koreans received from the Soviets in the 1950s. This is fair enough, but I don’t see any major difference here to the way in which the US (and later Japan) poured money into South Korea to build it up. Both superpowers had strategic interests in the region and backed their own buffer states on the peninsula. Of course, by the mid-late 1950s the North Korean ruling class had other ideas and began its game of playing off the Soviets and China against one another.

It is certainly true too that the North was economically in advance of the South until the late 70s on a number of indicators. So state capitalism, up until that point, was very successful at industrialising the country, although obviously at great cost to the workers.

Interestingly, some South Korean socialists argue that the South in the 1950s-70s was also an example of a state capitalist country. I want to do some more reading on this and hopefully translate some stuff to post at my blog. In the meantime there are a couple of short articles I translated last year on the North Korean economy in the 1950s accessible here.

Reading David Harvey’s recent book A Brief History of Neoliberalism has made me think quite a bit about how the ideas of neoliberalism have come to be so widely accepted and gain so much currency at many different levels of society in just about every country in the world. Of course there also exist in the consciousness of huge numbers of people opposing ideas about cooperation and solidarity rather than competition, the moral economy as opposed to the free market and the value of the welfare state rather than the technocratic neoliberal state. Our ‘common sense’ is, as usual, a mixture of these conflicting ideas.

But there is no doubt that much effort has been put into implanting neoliberal ideas into our societies, as Harvey writes:

So how, then was sufficient popular consent generated to legitimize the neoliberal turn? The channels through which this was done were diverse. Powerful ideological influences circulated through the corporations, the media, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society - such as the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations. The ‘long march’ of neoliberal ideas through these institutions that Hayek had envisaged back in 1947, the organisation of think-tanks (with corporate backing and funding), the capture of certain segments of the media, and the conversion of many intellectuals to neoliberal ways of thinking, created a climate of opinion in support of neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom. These movements were later consolidated through the capture of political parties and, ultimately, state power.
(A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005, p40)

So what of an ex-developmental state such as Korea, navigating a path through the world of neoliberal globalisation that appears to represent a continuous compromise between demands for freer trade and the need for controls and state intervention? The consensus in political circles (with the exception of the DLP of course) is for the need for ‘globalisation’ and the free market, hence the plans to negotiate a FTA with the US in the near future. In reality though, Korean politicians seem to be quite pragmatic and Korea is still regularly accused of having ‘one of the most closed markets in the world’.

But the neoliberal evangelicals do, of course, exist in Korea. I don’t usually make a habit of reading Korea Focus, because, to put it bluntly, it’s rather boring. However, it does get sent to me for free and I happened to spy this gem in the last issue, a commentary originally from Maeil Business Newspaper (매일경제) which analyses the results of a survey of Korean school children:

In addition, the students called for the government to more actively intervene in the market in order to improve economic performance. This means that students do not believe in or are ignorant about the autonomous and self-adjusting functions of market mechanisms. Furthermore, in their view, equity is more important to economic development than efficiency, and environmental protection should be considered as more important than economic growth.

However, the most astounding finding was that a majority of students believed that the primary objective of business enterprises was to promote social responsibility rather than to pursue profits. For the most part, these students responded that if they were to become entrepreneurs they would seek to assist their communities and contribute to an enhancement of social welfare rather than attempting to compete in the global market.

One can only wonder how these young students have become so far detached from the principles of a capitalistic market economy. How can they, after having learning about how to earn and spend money, the importance of savings, and prudent consumption practices, still consider economic equity, social welfare, government intervention, and the social responsibility of corporations to be of the utmost importance?

Poor, deluded students, why oh why have they not seen the light? If the young generation is anything to go by it seems the moral economy is alive and well in Korea.

Part two of some thoughts on the new book about Korea’s modern history, crossposted once again from Frog in a Well.

Continuing on the subject of the new, controversial history book 해방 전후사의 재인식 (‘A new understanding of Korea’s liberation’), I wanted to link to this rather helpful article from Joongang Daily which lists the contrasting views of the book and its more leftwing 1979 predecessor (해방 전후사의 인식) on a number of key subjects. And here is my even-more-simplified version of the same list:

1. Responsibility for the division of Korea:
(1979) It was Syngman Rhee’s fault basically.
(2006) Stalin gave the order to establish a government in North Korea in September 1945, so basically it was his fault.

2. Views of the Korean War:
(1979) It is one-sided to claim that North Korea invaded. It was actually a civil war [pace Bruce Cumings] to reunify the peninsula.
(2006) The Korean war was actually an international war, part of the USSR’s strategy of keeping the US in check.

3. Perspectives on Syngman Rhee:
(1979) Rhee was an anti-democratic American lackey
(2006) Rhee was a Machiavellian politician who made progress on the political/democratic front and laid some of the foundations for South Korea’s later economic growth.

4. Evaluation of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung:
(1979) Kim Il Sung got rid of (North) Korea’s colonial semi-feudal past and fostered a new democratic state.
(2006) Kim Il Sung organised North Korea after liberation like one of his guerilla units with mass mobilisation campaigns and the like.

5. Removing remnants of Japanese colonialism:
(1979) North Korea was successful in removing the remnants of Japanese colonialism while South Korea wasn’t due to US reluctance.
(2006) Remnants of Japanese colonialism continued in both North and South after liberation.

I have to say that on most of these issues I think I fall down on the side of the latest, supposedly rightwing, book. Since I am certainly not rightwing in my views of Korean history (or anything else), it does make me wonder again whether the Korean press have really been giving the correct impression of this book. I think part of the problem here is that the left-right debate over history (and other things) is perceived in a certain way in South Korea, for historical reasons.

In the past it has been a confrontation between authoritarian anti-communism and Stalinism. The problem is that both sides in this equation have really been disintegrating over the last decade or more. Hence this attempt to create a new more ‘rational’ right that disassociates itself from the authoritarian past, is not obsessed with ‘reds under the bed’ and accepts the achievements of Korea’s democracy movement. On the other side there are also now many on the left who do not accept the left-nationalist version of Korean history that is basically an application of Stalinist ideas straight out of 1950s Soviet textbooks. I suppose the ironic thing here is that a number of the centrist/liberal politicians who are currently in power with Roh Moo-hyun’s government were closely associated with the 1979 book or the left-nationalist movement of the 1980s and so perhaps have a closer allegiance to the ideas that it contains than do people who are to their left.

For some further reading on the reaction to this book you can have a look at this article from Oh My News, which reports on a recent speech by Sŏ Chung-sŏk, head of the 역사문제연구소, or Institute for Korean Historical Studies (who publish the journal 역사비평). He makes a couple of interesting points. First, he thinks that this book has been published for political reasons and it is strange that they are specifically attacking such an old book since the work of many progressive scholars has since revised a lot of what was said in the original 1979 book. He also claims that many of the people who have written articles for the new book are not specialists annd hence their work is somewhat suspect. This sounds like a bit of a cheap point, but if you look at Sŏ’s own publications list he certainly is in a position to comment on the historiography of the postwar period.

Congratulations for getting past that acronym soup of a title. I just can’t think of ways of making the titles of posts about the Korean labour movement sound witty or interesting…

Anyway, thought I should update briefly on what has happened in the second round of elections for the leadership of the Democratic Labour Party since I covered this in quite a bit of detail before. It seems that the winner of the run-off election for party chair was Mun Sŏng-hyŏn, a member of the left-nationalist faction within the DLP. This means that that faction, rather than the social democrats, have taken the top three positions within the organisation.

The Hankyoreh had quite a good editorial on the outcome of the election, noting sensibly:

The DLP’s platform is an issue on which the success of progressive politics depends. It must not focus entirely on nationalist issues because the “independence faction” has seized power, because promoting the transformation of labor into a political force is one of its major goals. That is why it needs to get to work on behalf of the interests of laborers and particularly irregular workers.

Also from the Hankyoreh’s English editorials section is this piece on the ongoing crisis in the leadership of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (민주노총). Things don’t look good at the moment…

Something I’m crossposting from Frog in a Well:

Another couple of history-related articles from the English-language Korean media that were brought to my attention on the mailing list of the British Association for Korean Studies. They concern another controversial issue, but this time an internal one that reflects the right-left divide in South Korea. A long awaited book has just been published which aims to act as a corrective to what is seen as the prevailing left-nationalist view of Korea’s modern history. The book, 해방 전후사의 재인식 or ‘A new understanding of Korea’s liberation’ is in two parts, one on the colonial period and the other on the period after liberation. A number of current political issues make all this particularly ‘hot’ at the moment: the investigation into Japanese collaborators (headed by veteran left-nationalist historian Kang Man-gil); the government’s policy of rapprochement toward North Korea and the South Korean right’s attempt to repackage itself as a ‘new right’ untainted by former military regimes or corrupt regionalist politics.

This from the Joongang Daily article:

A new history book by a conservative group of scholars was published yesterday, under the title “New Understanding of Post-Liberation History,” in a challenge to the left-leaning classic of the same title, minus “New,” published in 1979. The 1979 publication carried much significance with progressives and left-leaners in society, with its leftist stance on the country’s history after Japanese colonial rule.

This from the Donga Ilbo article:

European history professor Park Chi-hyang [actually she’s a specialist on British history - Owen] and economics professor Lee Young-hoon of Seoul National University, Korean literature professor Kim Chul of Yonsei, and political science professor Kim Il-young from Sung Kyun Kwan University edited the newly released book. The book contains 28 thesis papers from both at home and abroad, and includes conversations among editors on how to overcome the problematic mindset of national supremacism and the belief in the necessity of the people’s revolution portrayed in the previous book on the subject, “Understanding the History Before and After Liberation.”

Having read these articles I’m quite intrigued to read this two-volume collection of articles, if only to find out what it actually does contain. The two newspaper articles seem quite contradictory – they associate the project closely with the South Korean right and particularly the so-called New Right and yet the writers actually seem to be quite broad. It’s hard to tell from this whether the book really is an attempt to give space to good history about some of the most controversial periods of Korea’s modern history or whether it is really designed to push the rightwing view of history and revive some of their favourite figures from the past like Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee.

Reading these articles it should be remembered that both of the newspapers they come from are part of the triumvirate of the rightwing establishment media, often referred to as Cho-Chung-Tong (ie Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo, Donga Ilbo). That, or perhaps the fact that the journalists haven’t read the book, could be behind the slightly confusing impression.

There are also, I think, some problematic assumptions in these articles that need to be picked up on. I wondered in particular about this idea that the authors and their papers have been chosen as “writings that have no political color”. It strikes me rather that when the editors say that wanted to choose history that was not ideological they are limiting their definition of ‘ideological’ to the left nationalists. Then there is the unquestioned assumption in these articles – that South Korea has come to be dominated by a ‘distorted’ left-nationalist view of history. Now I think there is quite an element of truth to this when it comes to the academic establishment, where the left-nationalist view of history (what Noja called the ‘Kang Man-gilian’ version of Korean history a few posts back) has become hegemonic since the 80s. But this is certainly changing and to imply that this view extends throughout South Korean society would, I think, be quite a stretch. Academic discourse perhaps has proportionately more influence on general public discourse in Korea than it does in many other places, but there are also many other competing influences, not to mention a state education system that up until the 1980s, at least, was teaching a rather different version of history.

More on this in part two.

My piece on Kim Ha-yŏng’s ‘new internationalist’ interpretation of North Korean history (North Korea’s Hidden History) is now up on the internet. Shame about some of the funny formatting, but hopefully they’ll sort that out soon.

A few other (history-oriented) highlights from this issue:
Crusade and jihad in the medieval Middle East
Haven’t read this one by Neil Faulkner yet but it certainly sounds interesting.
Shedding new light on the Dark Ages
Chris Harman on Chris Wickham’s new look at the European ‘Dark Ages’ (which apparently includes his repudiation of his former attachment to the idea of the tax/rent dichotomy as one between two different modes of production).
China’s economy and Europe’s crisis
Chris Harman (again) on China.

I had an e-mail a little while ago from journalist Tim Shorrock who in the mid-nineties uncovered important US government documents relating to the Kwangju uprising and massacre. I’ve linked to his work before when discussing Kwangju, but he has now sent me the full text of his February 1996 article on Kwangju for the Journal of Commerce with permission to post it in full here. Apparently he will be writing some more about Korea in the near future and has more interesting information about Kwangju. So without further ado…

Journal of Commerce
February 27, 1996, Tuesday

EX-LEADERS GO ON TRIAL IN SEOUL

BY TIM SHORROCK

WASHINGTON - Two former South Korean presidents charged with treason, mutiny and corruption entered a Seoul courtroom this week to begin what could be the most important political trial in modern Asian history.

Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo stand accused of staging a rolling coup in 1979 and 1980, sending troops into the southwestern city of Kwangju in May 1980 to quell pro-democracy demonstrations in an action that resulted in the massacre of some 240 people and accepting millions of dollars in bribes from Korean corporations in the decade they held power.

At stake, in addition to the fate of the generals, is the solidity of the U.S. relationship with South Korea, which has been a keystone of U.S. foreign and economic policy for four decades. That’s because a major issue in the trial will be the role of the United States in approving the use of elite Korean military units to put down the Kwangju uprising. The United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and, under a joint command structure, has operational control of more than 80 percent of the Korean forces.

Mr. Chun, who has been charged with murder for giving troops the order to open fire in Kwangju, has said that his actions in 1979 and 1980 were explicitly approved by Washington, a claim that the Carter administration adamantly denied. A 1989 White Paper produced by the Bush administration supported those denials.

But new documentation obtained by The Journal of Commerce indicates that the United States. knew far more about Mr. Chun’s plans than has ever been acknowledged.
(more…)

London had its whale.

The Japanese city of Aoi has a giant radish.

I just found out last night that Korean-born video artist Nam June Paik (백남준) died on Sunday at the age of 74. Antti has already commented on this.

I went to see the major exhibition of Paik’s work in Seoul a few years ago and became quite fascinated by the man and his work. I think before that I had just assumed he was a video artist who put together lots of old TV’s into sculptures (which of course he did), but I discovered that he had also been closely involved in a number of interlinked 20th century art movements which I find interesting: Stockhausen’s electronic music, John Cage’s avant garde music of chance and the Fluxus movement.

One thing I remember clearly about the exhibition was how the reality of Nam June Paik’s life as a cosmopolitan 20th century artist jarred so much with some of the commentary dotted around the place by a Korean art critic (I can’t remember who unfortunately). I remember specifically that the critic tried to link Paik’s messy and cluttered style of art to the ‘Korean psyche’ in general and its apparent affection for disorder and earthiness. There had to be, of course, something ‘essentially Korean’ about his art. Hmmm…. I thought it was a bit of a shame really that the critic had to be reduced to finding things in his work that were emblematic of things Korean, and that a man who was so clearly broad in his interests and life experience should need to be narrowed and pinned down. As Antti points out, there is no doubt about the fact that Paik was a Korean, but he was also (to use a bit of clunky phrase) a citizen of the world who had lived and studied in Hong Kong, Japan, Germany and the US.

Here is a nice appreciative opinion piece on Paik from the Korea Times that takes some of his Korean critics to task and an entry in Wikipedia that will hopefully be expanded in the near future. There was also an AP obituary in the Washington Post. Apparently, Paik’s ashes will be buried in a number of countries, including the US, Germany and Korea.

By the way, the pictures are from flickr, more here.