Pen/Insular_Notes

The headline of this week’s edition of the Ta Hamkke newspaper (no 76) reads:

프랑스처럼 하자

Which I would loosely translate as:
Let’s fight like France

The appropriateness of this headline is perhaps lost until you realise the similarity of the situation facing workers and students (ie soon-to-be workers) in France and Korea. In both countries governments are attempting to bring in laws that they say will boost employment and maintain the competitiveness of their country’s economy, but which at the same time throw millions of people (often young) into permanent or semi-permanent states of precarity and flexibilisation.

David Harvey talks quite a bit in A Brief History of Neoliberalism of the ‘uneven geographical development’ of neoliberalism across the world. The other side of this coin is the very real ‘evening’ process of neoliberalism, as states around the world employ the same policies and techniques against workers and often against welfare or the state sector itself (which of course they must do to conform to the requirements of competitive capital accumulation). The constant drive for more and more ‘flexible’ labour (ie the drive to exploit workers harder and extract more surplus value from them), is is certainly one of these ‘evening’ factors, found in both East Asian ‘tigers’ and ‘old’ European states alike.

If there is an evening process in the global neoliberal attack, then there must also be an evening process in the responses of social and labour movements around the world. Not only must workers and movements provide solidarity to one another across all artificial boundaries, they must learn from one another what works and implement it wherever they are.

Of course this is easier said than done and surely the conditions that have created the current struggle in France are very different to those in South Korea. So far in the struggle against the Casual Workers Bill currently being considered by the Korean National Assembly there has been much fighting talk from union leaders but seemingly less in the way of real solidarity or confidence on the ground. Maybe the French students can be an inspiration. That would be my sort of globalisation. Tous Ensemble! 다함께!

Update: Thought I should add some links to places that have been doing a good job of covering the situation in France. Korea-Germany-World blogger CINA has had plenty of good stuff on this, as has Lenin’s Tomb of course here and here and finally something thoughtful from Le Colonel Chabert.