By Gim Joong-gen
In the aftermath of counter-revolution and the 1950-53 war, southern Korea was subjected to massive anticommunist scare campaigns, fervent indoctrination of citizens from childhood and a distorted official history to shore up the Republic of Korea (ROK).
[Conclusion of a two-part article.]
This was backed up with physical repression by a large US-trained and commanded security apparatus. Anyone suspected of being a "red" was immediately set upon, interrogated and possibly tortured and blacklisted. The security forces were greatly aided by Rhee's union federation, which politically policed the labour movement.
The counter-revolution also further hardened the northern bureaucracy. Kim Il-sung's Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) became one of the most policed and insular bureaucratic socialist states, kept on edge by the US war machine in the south, which later brought in nuclear weapons.
In such a hostile climate, the political leadership of workers and students in the south eventually shifted to liberal democrats whose program was limited to demands for democratic reform.
But there was an intractable grievance that was the outcome of the counter-revolution: the US-enforced division of the country. This was popularly felt and continued to hold the seeds of revolutionary resurgence.
However, without a socialist movement, the powerful yearning for national reunification became gradually distorted by imperialism's ideological offensive and the liberal opposition. People in the south came to fear the north as the predatory barrier to democratic reunification and, consequently, believed in the need for an anticommunist south supported by the US.
Today, the ROK suffers the humiliation of being the only foreign military under direct US command.
After a mass political revolution toppled the Rhee regime in April 1960, unofficial moves were made to open negotiations with the DPRK. However, these were crushed by Park Chung-hee's military coup in May 1961.
Kwangju
The US's real role in Korea was exposed in the aftermath of the May 1980 Kwangju massacre, when at least 500 pro-democracy protesters — including children, the elderly and pregnant women — died at the hands of the US-commanded ROK military.
After the assassination of President Park Chung-hee on October 26, 1979, a student-led mass upsurge had threatened stability in a country crucial to president-elect Ronald Reagan's plans to step up the Cold War. General Chun Doo-hwan carried out a coup on May 17 with a US mandate to restabilise southern Korea.
When the students of Kwangju protested the next day, troops attacked with bayonets and killed many. Horrified, the workers of Kwangju demonstrated in their thousands. Again, the military attacked, this time killing hundreds.
Undeterred, some 10,000 determined workers mobilised on May 20. By May 21, they had seized arms from police stations and army barracks, commandeered vehicles and driven the military from the city. For five days, Kwangju was liberated from Chun's regime.
At that point, Chun consulted with the US. The commander of US forces in Korea released front-line ROK troops for deployment in Kwangju. On May 27, they reclaimed the city, slaughtering yet more people. Reagan received General Chun as his first foreign visitor immediately after the massacre.
Over the next decade, the role of the US in the tragedy surfaced in detail. Stunned, democratic-minded southern Koreans shed their illusions and began to question the US presence. The result was a mass renewal of anti-imperialist consciousness. Reunification was, once again, seen in the context of ridding the peninsula of US troops.
Reorganising
The industrial growth of southern Korea continued to arm the working class with greater strategic power and self-confidence. Inevitably, the workers' democratic and social expectations were also heightened.
At the same time, the student movement swelled in numbers, militancy and anti-capitalist consciousness. Some years earlier, students who had begun to rediscover a class analysis had entered the factories and agitated among workers. With the new radicalisation, these interventions rose dramatically.
In April 1985, radical students, together with veteran activists released from prison the year before, formed the Struggle Committee for the Liberation of the Masses, Attainment of Democracy and Unification of the Nation, or Sammintu.
The program of this organisation was heavily influenced by dependency theory, identifying "dependent industrialisation" dominated by the US as the fundamental cause of southern Korea's social and political problems.
After the disbanding of Sammintu by the state in 1986, socialist students split into two tendencies.
The more numerous and influential Jamintu (Self-oriented Struggle for Democracy, more popularly known as "national liberation") identified three key goals: democracy with socialism, anti-US reunification and north-south student talks. It strongly sympathised with the DPRK and looked to its official ideology of Juche ("self-reliance" — a version of Stalin's "socialism in one country") as a model of anti-imperialist struggle.
Minmintu (People's Struggle for Democracy, more popularly known as "people's democracy"), did not have such illusions in the DPRK and advocated a separate form of socialist transformation.
These two tendencies came together for a mass demonstration in October 1986 in Seoul that resulted in 1275 arrests.
In June 1988, Jamintu formed Jondaehyop (National Association of University Student Councils) which, in that year, staged more than two dozen raids on US diplomatic and military facilities. They also conducted a similar number of attacks against offices of the government and ruling party and the suburban Seoul residence of former president Chun.
In the spring of 1989, there were numerous attacks against Hyundai automobile showrooms as Jondaehyop mobilised member organisations to support a strike by Hyundai shipyard workers.
This student consciousness and the expansion of the working class reignited a mass political explosion, culminating in the great struggles of 1987 for political reform, national unification, greater workers' rights, democratisation of unions and better pay and conditions. Between 1986 and 1987, the number of strikes jumped from 278 to 3749.
The new upheaval led to the rebirth of the democratic trade union movement. Traditionally non-unionised sectors began to organise. The number of company-level unions increased from 2742 in June 1987 to 7147 in 1993, and the membership grew from 1.05 million to 1.67 million.
Regime-imposed company unionism broke down, increasingly replaced by industrial unionism. Political reform, justice for Kwangju, anti-imperialism, national unification and women's rights were among the most burning political issues championed by the democratic union movement.
The newly established unions formed their own regional councils. In January 1990, these councils took part in creating the Korea Trade Union Congress (KTUC, Jonnohyup).
The democratic union movement then went through several stages before forming the Korea Council of Trade Unions (KCTU), the illegal but tolerated union federation that currently organises the strategically located workers in the car and ship-building industries. The KCTU led the recent general strike.
Prospects
The determined struggle of the southern workers and students forced direct presidential elections in December 1987 and the promise of democratic reform from the regime's candidate, Roh Tae-woo. After a split between the opposition candidates, Roh won and granted some concessions, including a relaxation of political censorship and acknowledgment of the injustice at Kwangju.
In January 1988, the National Assembly passed a two-tiered minimum wage law and the Equality Law of Male and Female Employees. Independently of this, the workers won unprecedented rises in wages: 10.1% in 1987, 15.5% in 1988 and 18.8% in 1989.
The 1980s also produced a shift in the southern Korean left. For the first time since partition, a socialist current emerged. Students debated about socialism, published new books and translated Marxist classics and western Marxist literature from a variety of tendencies.
But the socialist movement remains in an early stage of reorganisation, a difficult task as ROK citizens are still politically, ideologically and militarily mobilised in everyday life, from classroom indoctrination to air-raid drills and the conscription of all adult males.
Combined with Roh's concessions, the steady rise in wages since 1987 has imbued many worker activists with social democratic illusions. They see southern Korea's industrial growth leading it into the First World and a stable pluralistic democracy. Last year's entry of the south into the OECD has reinforced this view in some quarters.
But despite its industrial growth, southern Korea still remains hugely dependent on the US and Japan for expensive technology, and has a low level of labour productivity that subjects it to massively unequal terms of trade with those imperialist countries.
The top 30 chaebols took a 78% dive in net profits in the first half of 1996 while their sales grew 20%; last year's $20 billion trade deficit was double 1995's; and in the decade to 1991, the deficit with Japan quadrupled.
The dependent ROK is now going backwards and will be without the material means to entrench a labour bureaucracy that contains workers' unrest. This is bound to intensify antagonism from a working class whose expectations have been massively raised.
At the same time, the partial democratisation is now under threat from Kim Young-sam himself.
The mass yearning that reawakened in the 1980s for anti-imperialist reunification has raised the struggle to a higher level. This issue represents a fundamental weakness for capitalism in the south: the ruling class can not open free relations with the north without threatening the ROK's legitimacy.
Such relations have the potential to unleash a popular struggle of ideologies and social systems, and to move the southern socialist movement beyond an idealisation of the DPRK's sad parody of socialism.
The question of reunification remains strategically central in the workers' and student movements, one that can not be solved within the present confines of the ROK and without a massive reorganisation of society in both north and south.
In short, this struggle boils down to the struggle to finish the Korean revolution begun over half a century ago.