Pen/Insular_Notes

I’m not going to too spend much time picking over the carcass of the recent Korean presidential elections, but I will make a few inexpert comments and point toward some reading matter for those who are interested. Then we can move on…

Lee’s victory
Obviously no surprises here, but the question is raised of why it was so comprehensive a victory. Clearly the very strong (can I use the word palpable when I’m 9000 miles away?) sense of betrayal felt by Roh’s erstwhile supporters and much of the rest of the progressive-leaning Korean population had a profound effect. No doubt there were many who voted for Lee and somehow believe that he is a ’safe pair of hands’, but I have little doubt there were more who voted against Roh out of bitter disappointment, and even spite.

There are echoes here of the French elections in 2007 in which an electorate that still broadly considers itself ‘progressive’ (according to opinion polls) ends up voting in a rightwing leader. This sort of so-called ‘masochistic politics’ even has echoes of the US situation, where some commentators have puzzled over why the working class would repeatedly vote for a candidate (George W) who acted explicitly against their own interests. Personally I don’t think these political phenomena are so difficult to understand in the context of ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ political parties that appear different on a superficial and rhetorical level but then implement exactly the same neoliberal and pro-imperialist policies as one another. This is something the British electorate has been faced with ever since Blair came to power over ten years ago and which has now reached bizarre proportions with the Conservative party regularly positioning itself to the left of Labour. My feeling is that voters know very well that they’re not really being offered a choice any more, even the limited choice between traditional conservatism and watered-down social democracy. Thus voting criteria move more toward the US model in which personalities and a sense of who will be the most able technocrat to run the state for the next 4-5 years become most important among those who actually bother to vote at all.

What of Lee himself? So far only one interesting thing has come to my attention about his plans for the Korean economy (forgetting for a moment his ‘Chonggyech’on on steroids’ canal plan). Despite all the nonstop free market rhetoric it looks suspiciously as though Lee will be taking a somewhat more statist (or perhaps ‘chaebolist’) approach to the economy than his two ‘liberal’ predecessors. On the one hand, massive civil construction projects like the ‘Grand Canal‘ can be seen as somewhat Keynesian in nature, but more strikingly, as Ch’oe Il-bung has pointed out, Lee’s plans for reviving the economy more generally have something of a smell of the old developmental dictatorship about them (there are strong hints at a return to centralised economic planning). I haven’t read it myself yet, but here is Prof. Jeong Seong-jin’s analysis of Lee Myung-bak’s planned economic policies.

The situation in the DLP
The most obviously disappointing outcome of the elections is that virtually none of Roh’s disappointed former supporters went to the left and the Democratic Labour Party did rather badly (although perhaps not as badly as some think, since it retained its support base in some key areas). This seems perplexing considering the considerable strength of the movements against the Korea-US FTA, the continued use of South Korean troops in Iraq and the mass casualisation of the Korean workforce under Roh. For answers to this question you might want to look at the various intelligent analyses in the Counterfire newspaper (in Korean). One important factor to bear in mind is that the misfortunes, defeats and scandals that have beset the KCTU (main left union federation) in recent years have obviously had an impact on the credibility of the DLP since it basically originated as the political wing of the federation and is still very close to it.

Whatever the reasons for the DLP’s poor showing (and they are undoubtedly multiple), it has been the trigger for an internal crisis that is threatening to split the party. It would be a mistake however, to think that these divisions within the DLP are something new - it has always been an amalgam of very different factions. And the tensions between the two main factions came to the surface very clearly before in late 2006 when the Roh administration sought to use a supposed ’spy ring’ within the party as a scapegoat in the febrile atmosphere after North Korea’s nuclear weapon test.

I’m sure I would be accused of being overly simplistic if I described the current split as being along the lines of the old ‘NL’ (National Liberation) and ‘PD’ (People’s Democracy) factions of the 80s and 90s, although there is some truth in this. Basically, as far as I can make out, the more moderate factions (i.e. more rightwing and more social democratic factions) in the party along with some sectarian radical left elements, under the general banner of the ‘Equality Faction’ (평등파/P’yongdungp’a - including many former PD people) are attempting to get rid of the more old fashioned left-nationalist ‘Independence Faction’ (자주파/Chajup’a - basically NL), or split the party if they cannot achieve this. The P’yongdungp’a accuse the Chajup’a of being in thrall to North Korea (종북주의) and exercising undue dominance over the party. Many big hitters both within the DLP as well as some on the outside are now openly calling for the founding of a new party, presumably purged of those power-hungry pro-North elements.

As the analysis in Counterfire by Kim Ha-young points out, this faction fight is not really about the supposed pro-North leanings of the dominant Chajup’a faction (they weren’t considered a problem before, so why now?), but has more to do with a simple power struggle within the party as well as a desire, among some at least, to move the party in a rightward direction. The basic fact is that the coming South Korean government, like all those before it, will use the accusation of being pro-North whenever it wants to physically suppress the left or simply smear its image. And this will happen whether or not the DLP purges its (rather mildly) pro-North Chajup’a elements.

Clearly both sides in this battle for the DLP are not without their political problems, but the Korean working class and the left in general will be immensely stronger in the tough months and years ahead if it has a single, united left party to articulate its interests in the political arena. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as though this will be the case.

If you want more on this in English, Jamie at Two Koreas points out that there are some articles up at the new NewsCham English website.

For readers of Korean, there are a couple of excellent articles in the recent issue of the Matpul [Counterfire] socialist newspaper, both of which deal with the topic of my last post (the idea of an anti-Grand National Party electoral front) in a way that is much clearer and better informed than my attempt. One by Kim Insik (Ta Hamkke’s candidate last year for the position of policy DLP chief) and another by Kim Ha-young.

I know I really shouldn’t feel this way, but sometimes there’s a sort of schadenfreude to be derived from seeing scared liberals on the run. The panic definitely seems to have set in amongst Korea’s once-radical, now soft social-liberal intellectuals (Paek Nak-chung, Ko Un, Hwang Sok-yong etc). With both rival conservative candidates (Lee Myung-bak and Lee Hoi-chang) for the presidency polling better than any of the liberal or left candidates and less than a month to go before election day on December 19, the ddong is definitely hitting the sonp’unggi. The response from a group of concerned intellectual types is to call for all the various so-called progressive candidates to merge their campaigns and find a single candidate. This is clearly unlikely to happen and if it did I think it would be a travesty, taking away the last real choice from Korean voters - the choice to vote for a really left, really different presidential candidate (I’m talking about Kwon Young-ghil of the Democratic Labour Party).

What disturbs me about the liberal call for unity is that this panic that the world is about to end and the dark days of conservatism are about to return is really devoid of politics or sensible political analysis. Worst of all it leads to very much the sort of moral blackmail that the unions and liberal commentators have used to sustain the New Labour government here in the UK through all its abominable neoliberal and pro-war follies of the last 10 years. It goes something along the lines of “we know this lot of neoliberal shysters aren’t much good, but think how much worse things would be under the Tories/GNP. So you’d better vote for the shysters you know or you’ll be sorry!”

This question really comes down to where you perceive the main political divide in Korean politics as lying. Is it, as the liberals would have us believe, between the dark authoritarian forces of conservatism (dark though they undoubtedly are) and the forces of liberalism and democratisation? Or is it between the forces of neoliberalism and the pro-US troop-dispatchers in both the conservative and liberal camps on the one hand and the anti-war crowds demonstrating to bring the troops back from Iraq, the anti-FTA protesters fighting neoliberalism and the DLP, standing for worker’s rights and egalitarian development on the other? Well I think you can probably guess where I think the real divide lies. The current liberal panic may be truly felt by many intellectuals and others who see themselves as ‘progressive’ in some sense, but at heart it is smokescreen, clouding the real issues at stake in South Korea’s polarised and neoliberalised society. Perhaps it’s also a smokescreen hiding the guilt of all those liberals who know in their hearts that the last two administrations have betrayed the hopes of many ordinary Koreans. One can only hope.

15/9 UPDATE:
Kwon won the nomination for the DLP today, so no great surprise there, although it was quite close (perhaps closer than people expected?) with Shim getting 47.26 % of the vote.
Article on the DLP website (in Korean).

Lost among all the kerfuffle surrounding the selection of Lee Myung-bak as the GNP candidate for the upcoming presidential elections; the disintegration-reintegration, ‘let’s make up a new party on the spot’ drama being played out in the ‘liberal camp’; and now the uninspiring mess of the UNDP primaries, the primary elections for the Democratic Labour Party have been going on this week (as Andy has already pointed out elsewhere).

When I was in Korea last month I managed to see all three of the DLP prospective candidates (Kwon Young-ghil, No Hoech’an and Shim Sang-jeong) speak at an antiwar rally and I was impressed with them generally. In the first round earlier this week no candidate managed to get more than 50 percent, although Kwon Young-ghil was well ahead of the other two, and No Hoech’an in third place was eliminated. The second round of voting, between Kwon and Shim is now underway and scheduled to finish tomorrow. It looks pretty certain that Kwon will win and become the party’s presidential candidate for what I think is the third time. Quite a few people think that this would be something of a shame and it would be a good time to have a new face heading the DLP’s challenge. Especially since this is an election where popular opposition to the Korea-US FTA and the general disarray of the liberal forces that have run the government for the last few years means that the party has a chance of getting a decent share of the vote and setting itself up well for next year’s parliamentary elections. On the other hand, Kwon is probably the only widely recognised figure in the DLP and he also has a sterling record in the Korean labour movement.

Apparently (as this article in Korean explains) Kwon has the support of the most powerful faction of the party, the ‘Chamint’ong’ (basically left nationalists descended from the NL tradition - their name stands for ‘Independence-Democracy-Unification’) while Shim is being backed by the ‘Central’ faction of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions which is another powerful force within the DLP. However, the Chamint’ong are the strongest faction in the party, holding most of the top positions, including party chair, after last year’s elections.

Whoever wins the election tomorrow, it seems that earlier hopes of some sort of pan-left-liberal candidate are fading, although it would be interesting to know where some of those people on the left wing of the former Uri Party (like Im Jong-in) are going now, since the new post-Uri United New Democratic Party (catchy name!) seems to be firmly on the right of the liberal spectrum. In any case, at the risk of repeating myself, it seems that the DLP has a chance to do well in the coming presidential election, since all the mainstream candidates look likely to be pro-neoliberal and pro-war/US, offering voters a choice only in style of rhetoric, choice of cronies and favoured type of corruption.

Very big kudos to Hankyoreh, who have not only covered the story of the expelled Korea University students (I’ve mentioned some of the events there before: here and here), but translated the article into English. In brief, the seven students were expelled without credit last spring for a protest about the democratic representation of students that led to a number of professors being trapped in a building for some time. Since their expulsion they have held a sit-in tent protest outside the campus in Seoul (408 days in all).

As the article points out, most of the seven students are members of DLP left faction All Together (다함께), and it always seemed likely that the university wanted to use the incident of the ‘confined professors’ to get rid of the organisation from the campus. The article provides some confirmation of this suspicion from one of the expelled students who is not a member of All Together:

Five of the seven expelled students played leading roles in that 2005 demonstration, and were members of a student activist group, ‘All Together’ (Da Hamkke). One of the other seven expelled, Cho Jeong-sik, 25, was not a member of ‘All Together,’ but he said that university authorities questioned him after the 2006 building lockdown, “Are you a member of ‘All Together’?” Instead of saying, “No,” Cho replied, “Why do you ask such a question?”

The university still refuses to negotiate with the students, some of whom are now suffering various physical ailments due to their prolonged outdoor lifestyle.

News is somewhat better for a friend of mine involved in another similar case, Jo Myeong-hun:

A similar situation is occurring at Hankook University of Foreign Studies. Jo Myeong-hun, 27, who is majoring in English at the university, was given an indefinite suspension from school in August last year after posting a leaflet accusing several professors of beating and sexually harassing striking university workers at a labor-management protest.

On May 10, the Seoul Northern District Court ruled in favor of Jo, saying the punishment was an abuse of the university’s disciplinary rights. However, Jo is still not back at school, as the university has appealed against the ruling.

Asked why it appealed the court’s ruling, a university official said, “We cannot let our institution be defamed.”

Meanwhile, Jo says he needs only five more credits to graduate.

There’s more about Jo’s expulsion here, and if anyone is around Kodae and wants to show the students their support, I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

It’s as I suspected: all the mainstream presidential hopefuls are conservatives and the Hankyoreh newspaper has the statistics to prove it… They commissioned (an admittedly rather silly) survey that gives the hopefuls a score, with anything over 5.5 indicating a general conservative leaning:

Of potential candidates from the non-GNP party circle, Rep. Chung Dong-young, the former head of the Uri Party, is most conservative in economic policy with a score of 6.8 in the field, and the independent lawmaker Chun Jung-bae is most conservative in social policy in this group with a 5.7 in that area. Sohn Hak-kyu, the former Gyeonggi Provincial Governor, earned a 7.4 in economic policy and had an overall score of 7.1, making him the most conservative among current non-GNP members.

Particularly interesting to note that Sohn Hak-kyu (favoured by some on the left as the only way to stave off a disastrous return to the bad old conservative days of the past) gets the same score for economic conservatism (7.4) as Lee Myung-bak - the guy he’s supposed to be saving Korea from. I would like to have seen what the survey made of Im Chong-in, but unfortunately he wasn’t included - presumably he hasn’t officially declared an interest in standing.

Of course this irrefutable proof won’t actually stop certain other Korean newspapers describing people like Chun Jung-bae (Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae) or other wannabe Roh Moo-hyun replacements as ‘leftwing’.

By the way, whatever the ‘Markov chain Monte Carlo method’ is, it sounds like the coolest thing ever to hit the world of political science. I wonder if it’s served with a martini?

In this second post on the possibility of a progressive unity candidate in this year’s Korean presidential elections I’m going to look at the position of DLP left faction All Together [다함께]. Unlike some other radical left groups, they have recently argued in favour of a united progressive presidential candidate and the possibility of bringing left-leaning former Uri Party members in to the DLP, or even considering having them stand as a candidate.

However, in a recent leaflet (pdf) on the issue, All Together has put forward three basic prerequisites that such a unity candidate (and potential new members) must fulfill, which exclude the two most talked about possible leftward Uri Party defectors - Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae and Kim Kŭnt’ae. I’ll quote the important part of this leaflet below:

First, they must be opposed to neoliberalism. This excludes both Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae, who has argued that “we should accept the positive aspects of neoliberalism,” and Kim Kŭnt’ae, who has called the Korea-US FTA “positive” and argued only that “it should be finalised by the next government”.

In addition, both Ch’ŏn as floor leader of the Uri Party and Kim as Minister of Justice supported a reform of the labour laws that expanded the number of non-regular workers and promoted neoliberal restructuring. The Uri Party’s 386 ‘Reform Faction’ (개혁파) are exactly the same. They have supported the core neoliberal policies [of the Roh government], so their criticism of neoliberalism does not hold water.

Second, they must be opposed to war and support peace on the Korean peninsula. Just expressing support for the ‘Sunshine Policy’ - as a section of the rightwing Grand National Party do - is not enough. They must also be against US pressure on North Korea and above all they must be against the deployment of Korean troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. DLP national assembly member No Hoech’an has also put forward opposition to the deployment of troops in Iraq as a core requirement for any potential unity candidate.

As a result Kim Kŭnt’ae and Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae are once again excluded, as they voted for the deployment of troops to Iraq in 2004. While claiming that they personally opposed the Iraq war, they indirectly supported the passing of the bill to send Korean troops to Iraq by attending the National Assembly to make up the required numbers for a quorum. The same goes for the Uri Party ‘Reform Faction’ who have praised the decision to send Korean troops to Lebanon under the guise of ‘UN Peacekeeping Forces’. Talking about peace and opposition to war while supporting Bush’s wars that have turned places all over the world into horrific battlefields amounts to shocking hypocrisy reminiscent of the Grand National Party’s slogan of ‘nuclear-free peace’ [in relation to the North Korean nuclear issue].

The only establishment politician who passes the two criteria outlined above is [independent, former Uri Party] assembly member Im Chong-in. Therefore, the third criterion is that they cannot be a part of the mainstream political forces, whether it’s the GNP, Uri Party or one of their mutations. These are the very people who have based themselves on powerful vested interests and promoted neoliberal and pro-war policies.

The real progressive camp - progressive NGOs, the Democratic Labour Party, labour and civic groups and a section of the individual [activists] - should unite together on the basis of these criteria.

By the way, Andy’s South Korean Politics blog provides a useful aggregation of all the latest news on er… South Korean politics from the websites of the main English language newspapers in Korea.

It seems that a debate is beginning to open up within the ‘progressive camp’ (진보진영) in South Korea on the best way to approach the upcoming presidential elections set for December. I want to try to cover this debate a bit here as it develops, so, time allowing, this will be the first of a series of posts on what the South Korean left is doing in the run up to the elections.

Although I am not a natural optimist, one thing that I have realised about South Korean politics is that things can change very rapidly in a way that is just not possible in the UK or US. When I was in Seoul last autumn and mentioned to Korean friends that is seemed as though rightwing Grand National Party hopeful Lee Myung-bak was sure to be the next president they were much more optimistic about things changing and stressed that a year is a very, very long time indeed in Korean politics.

All the talk at the moment is of the possibility of fielding some sort of left unity candidate, whose politics I assume might lie somewhere between those of the Democratic Labour Party (민노당) and Roh Moo-hyun’s now semi-defunct Uri Party (열린우리당 - which to my mind seemed to be an attempt at a sort of ’social liberal’ party). If it does manage to achieve this the South Korean left would be able to teach the French radical left a thing or two. There, the non-liberal left consistently scores around 10 percent but is fragmented across three or four parties (as it was in the recent first round of presidential elections). But of course, the really big question is, what sort of unity candidate and who will actually get on board when it comes to the crunch? This thorny problem has already caused a rather interesting disagreement between too well-known left intellectuals in Korea*: Hwang Sok-yong and Pak Noja.

On the one hand, Hwang sees the current Korean conjuncture as being a crossroads between the possibility of becoming an (democratically) ‘advanced society’ or remaining stuck within the framework of the Cold War. His key observation is thus:

Even a child knows that both the Grand National Party and the Uri Party are conservative parties, but we are not yet in the era of a [truly] progressive/reformist party (혁신정당).

And this leads him to advocate some sort of pan-progressive candidate that would unite the Uri Party (or remnants of it) and the Democratic Labour Party - basically a sort of old-fashioned popular front between the ‘progressive’ sector of the South Korean bourgeoisie and the (reformist) representatives of the workers in the form of the DLP. Hwang has even mentioned former Kyonggi Province governor Sohn Hak-kyu, who recently defected from the rightwing Grand National Party as a possible unity candidate.

Pak Noja is distinctly unimpressed by this idea, leading him to wonder what Hwang’s criteria are for something being ‘progressive’. He also points out that if the main criterion is the attitude of politicians toward reconciliation with the North then there are considerable numbers of rightwing GNP politicians who are perfectly happy to continue the current sunshine policies since they dream of turning the North into a ‘happy hunting ground’ for South Korean capital in need of cheap labour. He goes on to note the other failings of the liberals/centrists who might form the right side of any such ‘progressive’ unity coalition: their failure to get rid of the National Security Law; their jailing of trade unionists; their reliance on Chaebol money and their support for the ‘war on terror’ and more specifically Bush’s disaster in Iraq. Finally, Pak writes:

If you put your faith in ‘progress’ while ignoring class, I fear you will be disappointed once again.

* Actually both of them have spent much of their time outside of Korea in the last few years.

A bit behind the times I know, but I thought I’d post some more stuff from other blogs on the alleged Democratic Labour Party spy scandal. Pak Noja has a couple of related pieces (in Korean). The first one asks the question, what exactly is a spy? While the second looks at the reasons why the NL (left nationalist/pro-North faction) has been able to maintain its popularity and suggests that allowing people free access to North Korean propaganda would soon lead to the end of the NL.

Meanwhile, Antti has written something about how this situation has rekindled factional strife within the party, focusing particularly on the recent public disagreement between two minority groups: Autonomy and Solidarity (자율연대 - basically moderate social democrats) and All Together (다함께). Although this may be interesting, this is certainly not the main split in the party, since as Antti points out, both of these groups are non-NL and highly critical of North Korea. The underlying faultline is still between the left nationalists (ie NL) and the mainstream social democrats (parts of the former PD faction).

Even with all the hoohah, a delegation from the DLP headed off to P’yongyang as planned, despite much whining from the rightwing press and the National Intelligence Service, but seemingly with the tacit encouragement of the Unification Ministry.

Somewhat tangential, but nonetheless related, is this opinion piece from the Hankyoreh newspaper that I read on the plane back from Chejudo a week ago. It provided a nice antidote to the rabid red-baiting of the Joongang Ilbo editorial I read on the way there… (see my last post).

It seems that the return to the ‘good old days’ has begun well before the Roh Moo-hyun government leaves office next year. The conservative forces in the security and legal apparatus of South Korea have made their move and decided to start a major witchhunt against the country’s (moderate) left party the Democratic Labour Party. Either that or in a rather strange tactical move Roh Moo-hyun himself has decided to prove his toughness credentials after the North Korean nuclear test by attacking those to the left of him. In any case, it turns out that the earlier attempts to take down Prof. Kang Jeong-koo were just a dress rehearsal for the real attempt to revive the National Security Law. So two senior members of the DLP have been arrested and accused, along with a Korean-American businessman of being part of a North Korean spy-ring.

I’m in no position to know what the truth is about these people, but one thing is clear: the timing of this is dodgy and the motivations are almost certainly political (as in so many cases where there is the supposed ‘uncovering’ of a terrorist or espionage cell that has clearly been kept on ice for sometime by the security services). There are some more details in English at the Marmot’s Hole, including the interesting facts that the accused are apparently thought to have engaged in such heinous crimes as compiling dossiers to keep track of trends in South Korean society or promoting environmental issues to involve civic groups in the anti-American struggle, and… wait for it, reporting on the activities of the DLP branch in Seoul. It strikes me that even if all this stuff were to turn out to be true then basically what they are being accused of is gathering materials on South Korean social movements and left for passing on to North Korea. So they were spying on themselves and their comrades.

If you need more reading matter (in Korean), here is a statement from All Together (다함께) and an in-depth article in Pressian.

Finally, to get some idea of just how desperately excited the Korean right are by all this and how keen they are to return to the good old cold war days of red baiting and ppalgaengi bashing, you must read this translated editorial from the Joongang Ilbo. I picked up a copy of the paper’s English edition for the first time in years when I was catching the plane down to Chejudo a few days ago and this made me almost fall out of my seat. A sample:

The recent incident has revealed that former and current officials of the Democratic Labor Party are involved in this case. This is an issue that could become a death sentence for the Democratic Labor Party. The party itself has staged protests in front of the National Intelligence Service arguing that the case is fabricated. Protesters also argued for the abolishment of the National Security Law. How can one argue that the incident was fabricated under an administration such as the current one?

No political party can exist outside national security. The Democratic Labor Party has to reflect upon itself, find the internal “red” part and apologize to the people.