Pen/Insular_Notes

The rather popular and interesting Cambridge economist, Ha-joon Chang, whom I’ve written about here before has apparently been banned by the South Korean Air Force. The Korean translation of Chang’s recent book, Bad Samaritans, which is a Keynesian attack on neo-liberalism and free trade, has been categorised as a subversive book liable to corrupt the minds of those brave Koreans defending the homeland:

In the instructions, the Air Force states that “seditious books” can hinder soldiers’ concentration and suggested a list of 23 books to be banned in three categories: pro-Pyongyang, anti-government and anti-U.S., and anti-capitalism.

So I guess that Chang’s Keynesianism must fall under the category of ‘anti-capitalism’. The ironies in this are just too many to point out, but we could perhaps start with the fact that South Korea’s military probably wouldn’t exist at all without a long history of the sort of protectionist and interventionist economic policies that Chang is advocating. The biggest irony though, must surely be that far from being anti-capitalist these same Keynesian/statist policies probably did the most to save capitalism from self-destruction during the 20th century.

Fascinating also that being ‘anti-government’ and ‘anti-US’ are considered to be part of the same category of sedition here…

It is interesting - but perhaps already a cliche - to note how over the last decade or so the barricades have been reversed and police forces around the world have become experts in stacking shipping containers to protect places of power and privilege in the same way that the Parisian working class became experts in a similar art during the course of the 19th century.

Paris, June 1848

Seoul, June 2008 (source: OhMyNews)

Of course, one of the consequences of putting all your energy into protecting a centre of power (on this occasion protecting the presidential palace Chongwadae from an anti-government march hundreds of thousands strong) in such a way is that you effectively give up the rest of the city to the protesters. As a police force you also cause yourself other problems such as a lack of mobility. I experienced some of this when I took part in the first of the big beef protest marches on Thursday 29 May. Since the police had decided to take up a position ‘protecting’ the Kwanghwamun junction and other approaches to Chongwadae from the march using their buses, they had blocked themselves in and could go nowhere else. This gave the march the freedom of the city and we wandered apparently aimlessly for a couple of hours, taking over the central streets and no doubt causing traffic chaos. And as I write this, the sea of candle bearing protesters some 500,000 strong has begun to march away from the police barricades, refusing, for the time being to confront directly the metal wall thrown up hastily by the powers that be to protect themselves.

Another consequence is that protesters are able to use the barricades themselves for expressions of protest and humour:

Seoul, June 2008 (source: OhMyNews)

Palestine, 2005 (www.banksy.co.uk)

So it seems that the grateful people of the Democratic Chaebol Republic of Korea will soon have a new Dear Leader, a strong and decisive man, committed to pouring as much concrete over Korea as he can and bulldozing anything that gets in his way. In fact, I think we can safely say that Korea is about to enter the great era of victorious “Construction-First Politics” (先建政治).

But then, when your main opponent is trying to compete with his own concrete-lovin projects, you know you must be doing something right.

Of course, at the risk of upsetting the national pride of Korean rightwingers and their soon-to-be Dear Leader, I feel obliged to point out that this is just another of those wonderful innovations that Korea has imported from its favourite neighbour, a place where politics, pork barrels and the construction lobby have a long tangled history of close relations.

There is an excellent analysis article on North Korea in this week’s Socialist Worker. Written by Kim Ha-young and translated (slightly woodenly I must admit) by yours truly. Here she is on North Korea’s embryonic neoliberal tendencies:

Food shortages and infant malnutrition continue. Young South Koreans are as much as 15 centimetres taller than their counterparts in the North. The lives of ordinary people have got even worse since the North Korean government “reformed the state economy according to profit-making criteria” in July 2002.

Services formerly supplied free of charge now have to be paid for, subsidies for education and childcare have been abolished, and piece rates have been introduced in all workplaces.

While wages increased to between eight and 20 times their former level, workers have suffered greatly, particularly in the cities, as soaring inflation has seen rice prices increase to more than 500 times their former level.

Although it is often claimed that North Korea has refused to open up, this is not true. The North has wanted to pursue friendly relations with the US and Japan. It has also been keen to join the World Trade Organisation and the Asian Development Bank.

It was reported that Kim Il Sung’s son and successor Kim Jong-il told Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi in 2002 that he wanted “to sing and dance with Bush until I go hoarse”. North Korea has even said that it would not object to US soldiers remaining on the Korean peninsula.

I seem to have been on one of my unplanned blogging holidays for the last month. Actually I’m in Korea now trying to accustom myself to the humidity, but enjoying the heat after the miserable British summer weather this year.

While I’ve been busy with other things, my new pals at No Ordinary Sun have been keeping the flag flying with a brief report on this year’s Marxism conference and some excellent recent articles in Socialist Worker on East Asian matters - one on Abe’s recent crushing defeat in the Japanese upper house elections and another by activists from Ta Hamkke on the Korean hostages kidnapped in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, on the labour front, Jamie at Two Koreas and Judy at Otherwise have been providing some good coverage of the E-Land/New Core disputes involving casualised (women) workers. The second major occupation of a supermarket owned by E-Land was broken up by riot police a couple of days ago and apparently along with unionists a large number of Ta Hamkke members were also arrested. Fortunately, they have been released this morning. There’s more on the dispute here in English.

Yes, I’ve been in hiding again. Actually I was in France, but maybe that amounts to the same thing, except with more cheese and wine.

Anyhow, readers may be interested to know that my translations of three interesting pieces by Kim Ha-yong and Han Kyu-han on North Korean history are available at the ISJ website in newly revamped form with fancy footnotes and stuff. I’m also working on translating another piece by Kim Ha-yong giving a Marxist/state capitalist analysis of North Korean economy and society since the Korean War which was originally published in The Radical Review (진보평론) a while back. Obviously I’ll link here when it’s done.

North Korea seems to be a little conflicted in its attitude to the Korea-US FTA.

Editorial from North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun (February 2007):

The FTA in question is a catastrophic document which would intensify the U.S. domination and economic subjugation of south Korea and worsen the economic crisis, thus bringing unemployment, poverty and social confusion and driving people’s living to the bottom of misery.

The United States has imposed unbearable misfortunes and sufferings upon the people while occupying south Korea for over 60 years. Now it is going to rob south Korea of everything and its people of their elementary right to live by binding it to such unequal and shackling yoke as the FTA.

Still more intolerable is that the pro-U.S. conservative forces in south Korea including the Grand National Party of south Korea captive to flunkeyism toward the U.S. are trying to abuse the struggle of the people against the FTA for grabbing power, crying over “people’s living” and “economy.”

The south Korean people cannot get rid of misfortunes and pain by leaving alone the U.S. which is tightening the noose of looting around the neck of south Korea, regarding it as a chunk of fat.

The south Korean authorities should stop the FTA negotiations without delay as demanded by the people.

Yonhap News, April 2:

North Korea has welcomed the just-signed free trade agreement between the South and the United States on Monday, seeing its possible role of promoting an inter-Korean industrial complex in its territory, Pyongyang’s management body of the complex said.

In the trade pact, the two sides agreed to hold further negotiations on goods produced in the Kaesong industrial complex, which Seoul wants to be treated as made in South Korea.

Pyongyang sounded upbeat that the pact has left room for the inclusion of Kaesong goods in the trade deal.

“We welcome sincerely (the fact) that the South Korea-U.S. FTA agreement has prepared the foundation for the goods from the Kaesong industrial complex to be treated as made in South Korea,” the Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee, which oversees the joint project between South and North Korea.

Of course, it is worth remembering that the North Koreans have been trying to attract serious foreign investment since at least the mid-eighties, it’s just that Kaesong is the first time it’s actually worked - and that’s largely due to the favourable political situation in the South since the late nineties.

More FTA stuff: Andy at the Marmot’s Hole looks at how the various presidential candidates line up on the FTA question, Jamie at Two Koreas continues his in-depth coverage of the deal and Hankyoreh provides an overview of what’s in the deal.

Predictably enough, considering that it had to be agreed for George Bush’s convenience by April Fool’s Day, the Korea-US Free Trade Area Agreement was, er… agreed by April 1 in the face of popular and even mainstream political opposition. Of course it could still be stymied at the ratification stage, but somehow that seems unlikely.

I wonder if this agreement will have the same miraculous effects that NAFTA achieved for the Mexican economy? The prognosis can’t be great considering that the US is desperate to find any way it can to combat China’s competitive advantage and increasing economic influence while South Korea’s economy seems to be suffering a prolonged crisis of accumulation that the FT last week misidentified in its usual style as a largely political and ‘cultural’ problem.

I’ve already completely ignored my new year’s resolution to post often and briefly and this post will continue the tradition of posting irregularly and verbosely. Anyway, back to the post. This is something that I wrote mainly for Lenin’s Tomb, but I thought I’d cross post it here for good measure.

Korea’s favourite Neo-Keynesian economist/Cambridge professor Ha-joon Chang spoke at SOAS a couple of days ago and while I had problems with a lot of what he said, I must admit that he is a very entertaining speaker. The subject of his talk was ‘Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans - does culture matter for economic development?’, and was apparently based on a chapter in his forthcoming book, the title of which I can’t remember. Actually, the first part of his talk was the best - he put up on the OHP a battery of quotations from British travel writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries going on about how terribly lazy, untrustworthy, unproductive, irrational, emotional and bad at timekeeping the Germans and Japanese were. His point was to (quite rightly) rubbish the currently resurgent ideas in mainstream economics about the importance of ‘culture’ to development. He didn’t deny the possible importance of ‘culture’ but tried to show that the ideas that cultures were fixed or that certain cultures were inferior to others were wrong. He made rather a good, lighthearted comparison of Confucianism and Islam to show, conclusively, that Islam provided a far better culture for development, in fact, quite definitely the best culture possible for capitalist development (I think his argument rested largely on the fact that the Prophet was a merchant).
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I thought I’d post this piece I just wrote over at Frog in a Well as some readers here might be interested:

“Selling yourself” - one of those phrases we use in a somewhat metaphorical sense, but which nonetheless has a more literal meaning than we probably give it credit. In modern capitalist society, where pretty much anything can be commodified, we regularly sell our labour to others. To put this another way, we alienate part of ourselves in order to get the cash that we need to sustain ourselves. But in precapitalist societies such as Chosŏn, it was possible not just to sell part of oneself on a temporary basis but to sell oneself whole, to alienate one’s own body in perpetuity.

I recently came across some information about the Chosŏn practice of ’self sale’ (chamae 自賣) in volume 3 of the brilliant Chosŏn sidae saenghwalsa (History of everyday life in the Chosŏn dynasty) series, in the section on ‘famine foods’ (구황식품, 굶주림을 해결하라, pp. 196-217):
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