Sooner or later...
dered. Pressure "from below", howi, might well combine with tacit supi "from above" to unleash a new wave anti-Muslim violence on the ground.
In December 1992 when the mosque at
Ayodhya was destroyed by the thugs of the BJP. RSS and VHP, India was plunged into the worst communal violence since partition in 1947 - Muslims were killed and their homes destroyed.
The events in Ayodhya, and the riots in
Mumbai (Bombay), provide a flavour of what could well occur in the near future.
Yet it was only these most visible actions of the Hindutva forces that scandalised a middle class that identified with the BJP and financed and supported it. But there has been no such reaction from the middle class to the daily toll that is wreaked by their vicious propaganda and thuggery.
"Innocents can be arrested and victimised for being Bangladeshi immigrants in the eyes of the BJP but this is acceptable as long as it remains confined to the borders of Bihar.
"Hundreds can be arrested under TADA [anti-terrorism legislation] under false cases but this is fine so long as it is confined to the ghettos of Mumbai.
"Villages can be terrorised with able bodied men locked away under the [National Security Act], but who cares so long as this happens in the remote villages of Uttar Pradesh.
"Women can be gang raped in Surat [Gujarat] but this is fun for the middle class which entertains itself with video films of the horrific scenes.
"As for the [BJP's] statements and anti-minority assertions, well that is all part of the game. After all statements do not hurt. They only create an environment that hurts, but then that is beyond middle class comprehension." 6
When combined with the storm clouds gathering over India's economy, another such wave of violence and communalist mobilisation (of the kind that brought down the centre-left V. P. Singh government in 1990) could pave the way for further regime crises and a new round of electoral gains for the BJP. This is the scenario described by an important section of the Hindutva family itself, who see the latest election as just another forward step on the long march to unencumbered BJPHindutva rule. * Notes: 1 The continuities and discontinuities with Congress are examined in Ananya Mukherjee-Reed, "The State as Charade: Political Mobilisation in Today's India", L. Panitch (ed.) Socialist Register 1997 (London: Merlin 1997). 2 Tapan Basu, P. Datta et. al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). 3 Praful Bidwai, H. Mukhia and A. Vanaik (eds.), Religion, Religiosity and Communalism (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996). 4 Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India". P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey (eds.) Subaltern Studies VII (Delhi: OUP, 1992), p. 13. 5 Raghu Krishnan, The Tragedy at Avodhva" International Viewpoint #241 December 21 1992 p. 4. 6 Seema Mustafa, "How long before the mask is off, Mr. Vajpayee?" The Asian Age (Delhi), 21 March 1998, p. 8.
The longer Korea's IMF-imposed "reform process" goes on, the greater the chances of a worker revolt. Terry Lawless During the late 1970s, the economy of South Korea grew rapidly. Particularly in comparison with the G-7 countries, which had been experiencing low rates of growth since the world recession of 1974-75. At about this time, the economies of non-capitalist countries like the Soviet Union, East Germany and North Korea were also beginning to experience long-term
For the first time since the Russian Revolution, it appeared that there was a capitalist alternative to socialist revolution for the people of the so-called Third
American publications like Newsweek and Time began to publish articles lauding the "Miracle on the Han River", extolling the virtues of a non-unionised hard working pro-family people who chose to put up with dictatorship because of their Confucian values, their desire for money over freedom and their strong company spirit. The general tone of the commentary implied that it was the disappearance of similar virtues, rather than the long term tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which had caused the economic slowdown in the West. The terms, "Newly Industrialised Country" and "Asian Tigers" spread rapidly.
"miracle", was in reality the extension of the third wave of technological growth to regions previously unaffected by it. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, Japan, North America and Western Europe had witnessed an unprecedented level of economic expansion: the growth of the service sector; the mass
South Korea * production of cars and electronic goods for the home such as televisions, refrigerators, telephones, washing machines and stereo systems; the appearance of transatlantic and later global air travel; the advent of vast container ships to move commodities rapidly around the world and so on.
With the inevitable slowdown in production attendant upon the realisation of this new infrastructure, large amounts of capital, in the form of money seeking high interest, were suddenly released for use elsewhere. It was this finance capital, whose size and influence in the world economy has since grown exponentially, that was used to fuel the economic growth of selected regions in Southeast Asia that were seen as basically immune to communism. Places like South Korea.
As the long economic boom continued into the 1980s, however, South Korea began to experience problems common to the leading capitalist countries: an increasingly restless student movement; the emergence of worker protest and union organisation, including that of low-waged women workers; the questioning of an authoritarian and inhuman work ethic; and sudden interest of students and in dissident and socialist The "Great Struggle"
During the 1980s, many dissident Korean intellectuals, inspired by revolutionary socialist theory, left their middle class jobs as teachers, professors and journalists in order to enter the main industrial workplaces of the newly industrialised Korea. They were convinced that the working class had to be mobilised if the pressure brought to bear upon the dictatorship by Korea's militant student movement was to
This proved to be a correct assessment of the political situation. An unprecedented wave of worker protest in 1987 was enough to convince even the wavering middle class that the days of bourgeois dictatorship were numbered.
The presence of large numbers of office workers and "salary men" on the streets of Seoul during the course of the 1987 Great Struggle to remove the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, confused many historians into thinking that it was the middle class who were responsible for the change.
But the "Necktie Revolution" actually confirmed Leon Trotsky's observation that, in moments of crisis, the middle classes can follow either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, whichever shows the most courage, intelligence and vision. The "salarymen" could see that the workers and students, rather than the military and the chaebol owners, were the best
* South Korea possibility for Korea's future political development - and so they joined with them.
The dramatic political changes in Korea over the last ten years represent the working out at the political level of the new balance of class forces established during the Great Struggle of 1987. The system of one-party military rule has been replaced by an unstable system of bourgeois election machines, typically centred on a prominent politician, usually drawing their electoral power from one particular region in Korea. Direct presidential elections led first to the election of Chun Doohwan's classmate, Rho Tae-woo, in 1987, and then in 1992 to the compromised bourgeois dissident candidate, Kim
Since the Great Struggle, there has also been a steady and increasingly coherent attempt to organise a labour party based on the unions. Though the movement for a labour party is still a very small force on the Korean political scene. Union membership has stabilised at about 12%, concentrated in heavy and large-scale industry such as ship building, car manufacturing, steel and semiconductor
In 1995, a mass split in the state-sanctioned and Cold War-initiated Korean Federation of Trade Unions (KFTU) led to the formation of the militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). Total membership in the two organisations is about one million workers, just over half organised by the KFTU
The core leadership of the KCTU traces its origins to the beginnings of the
Great Struggle, when dissident middle class intellectuals began to lend workers their support in helping to organise independent union activity. KCTU leader
Kwon Young-gil, a presidential candidate for the People's Victory 21 Party in 199/, is a former journalist and a graduate of the prestigious Seoul National University, who threw in his lot with the workers during the course of the 1980s. Globalisation and its discontents
In 1992, Kim Young-sam became
President; and announced a campaign of "globalisation" which culminated in South
Korea's admission to the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) in December 1996.
Membership in the OECD was deemed necessary in order to help with the financing of the increasingly moneyhungry chaebols, South Korean corporations like Hyundai, Samsung, Daewoo and • Lucky Goldstar (LG), which had grown rapidly over the last twenty-five years.
They had done so by taking huge short- term loans to finance massive investments.
Thanks to the long economic boom across
Southeast Asia, they were able to expand productivity and profitability quickly enough to pay back these loans, and take out ever larger ones. Major banks of
Europe, North America and Japan could not resist.
26 International Viewpoint #299
The limits to this success should have been clear, at least to anyone familiar with Ernest Mandel's theory of long waves of capitalist development. As the region began to reach comparable levels of technological infrastructure with the G-7 countries, the profit margins of the chaebols began to decline signiticantly.
Kim Young-sam's globalisation strategy was a short-term attempt to compensate for a saturated home market and falling profit margins. By opening the economy, he hoped to launch the chaebols on a course of international investment and production where they would be free to take advantage of cheaper labour costs and investment incentives in other countries.
But the problem was that overproduction on a global scale eventually forced down the prices of key commodities. Korea's general crisis of overproduction did not simply endanger, but actually short-circuited the whole economic strategy of the chaebols. Why the Unions fought back...
In the early 1990s, some economists began to argue that major economic restructuring was necessary if Korea was to continue competing for a slice of the global economic pie. They called for the dismantling of large parts of former president Park Chung-hee's Japanese-style
Yushin system - government support to key corporations, fixed exchange rates, market protectionism and lifetime employment. The Yushin system had enabled
Korea's to benefit disproportionately from
Southeast Asia's long economic boom — but it seemed outdated.
Part of the reason for this shift in government opinion was the result of the recruitment of a generation of younger economists educated at US institutes like the neoliberal Harvard Business School in contrast with the immediate post-Korean
War bureaucrats of the military dictatorship, who had received their education in
But the main reason was surely that there are virtually no credible bourgeois voices arguing against the ideology of neoliberalism. The world-view of financial investors and the international corporations completely dominates the boardrooms of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade
Organisation and the annual meetings of the G-7 club - not to mention the mass media and many people's political consciousness.
Despite its new-found enthusiasm for neoliberal solutions to economic questions, the Kim Young-sam regime took a leaf out of the pages of Park Chung-hee's decidedly non-neoliberal book when it decided to pass a whole series of controversial legislation in a secret twelve minute session of the National Assembly in late December 1996.
following day, the unions launched the biggest General Strike in Korean history. Between five hundred thousand and one million workers were involved in the dispute at some point or other. Their primary objective was to prevent the passage of legislation which would allow for mass layoffs, to facilitate corporate restructuring. The strike was the result of the first ever joint strike call of the Korean Federation of Trade Unions and the still-outlawed Korean Confedera-
This General Strike was only partially successful. Though the government of Kim Young-sam permanently shelved its plans for mass lay-offs, the actual strength of the final mobilisation was far less than the union organisations had hoped for. It was this realisation which made the unions return to negotiate with the government.
The unions won some concessions, including the legalisation of the KCTU, effectively bringing Korea into line with the guidelines of the International Labour Organisation and the practices of the G-7
From a bourgeois point of view, this failure to force through the bill for mass layoffs was a disaster. The economic crisis, foreshadowed in the dramatic fall in the price of semiconductors and the global slowdown in steel demand in 1996, was growing more serious from month to month. In January, Hanbo Steel declared bankruptcy; in August, Kia Motors did the same; in November, it was the turn of the Halla Corporation. Each of the failed chaebols went under with absolutely massive amounts of debt, regularly between sixteen and twenty times their net
...but then gave in
The two main trade union organisations had continually threatened a second general strike if the National Assembly tried to re-introduce the lay-off bill. But in
January 1998, both organisations agreed to participate in three-way talks involving the unions, business and government. One of the stated purposes of these talks was to finalise the lay-off bill.
This climb-down reflects the collapse of self-confidence of most ordinary
Koreans. The political situation had been transformed by the traumatising effects of the IMF bailout itself. Before their very eyes, Koreans saw their economic miracle evaporate. Average income was cut in half in a couple of months, as the US$ exchange rate slid from 880 to 2,000 won. In
August 1997, average income was about
US$10,000; by December it was closer to
$5,000 - a level most workers thought had been surpassed, forever, ten years
The presidential election in December
1997 could not have come at a worst time for the working class. Tragically, all of the simmering anger that had been building up against the Kim Young-sam regime was channelled into the defeat of the ruling party. The dissident past of the successful opposition candidate, Kim Dae-jung, gave him much greater credibility than the vacillating incumbent. And support for
Kim Dae-jung was particularly strong in those regions in Korea which had most strenuously carried the banner of democracy against the successive military dictatorships. What better candidate to stabilise the situation?
The poor showing of the KCTU-supported People's Victory 21 candidate, Kwon Young-gil, who took around 1% of the popular vote, was a clear indication of the real level of political class consciousness among Korean workers. Only in Ulsan, South Kyongsang Province, one of the biggest company towns in the world, where the KCTU is very strong, did Kwon Young-gil do even moderately well, taking
Even here, a majority of the workers voted for the ruling party candidate, Lee Hoi-chang. Because of regional prejudices, they preferred the local supporters of the traditional party of military dictatorship over the Cholla-born Kim Dae-jung
In Kwangju, Cholla, an astonishing 97% of the voters gave their support to Kim Dae-jung; and a huge crowd gathered in the streets to celebrate the victory of
A majority of students also voted for Kim Dae-jung. Hanchongryon, the Korean Federation of Students, which is dominated by a pro-North Korean tendency, supported the bourgeois dissident as part of their two-stage theory for socialist revolution in South Korea. National sense of shame
Kim Dae-jung quickly agreed to respect the $57 million IMF loan agreement worked out in early December. This marked the beginnings of a massive campaign for frugality and economic recovery. drawing on the Korean traditions of anti-imperialism and bourgeois nationalism and even the memory of the Seoul Olympics.
This campaign has achieved widespread popularity. There is a genuine sense of national shame in Korea. The sense of pride at national achievement, which had begun to overcome the lack of confidence induced by years of Japanese colonialism, and national division since the Korean war, has been badly damaged. There is even an undertone of fear that what is happening today amounts to the imposition of a new colonialism, orchestrated by the US and Japan.
For now, the Korean bourgeoisie is able to exploit these feelings, by urging self-restraint, hard work and a willingness to follow leaders blindly. These feelings cannot and will not last, but for now they place immense obstacles in the way of independent working class political action.
On February 7 1998, the tripartite negotiations ended with the union representatives supporting the introduction of lay-offs. In return, the unions won a number of concessions. Under the revised agreement, companies can only lay off workers when they face "emergency situations" such as financial trouble or in the event of mergers or acquisitions. The agreement also calls for management to give workers 60 days' notice and notify the Labour Ministry before dismissing workers. Employers are also requested to try to re-hire dismissed workers if business improves. Trade unions will now have the right to engage in political activities. Teachers will be allowed to form unions from July 1999, a concession which gives de facto recognition to the formerly outlawed National Teachers and Educational Workers Union, Chongyojo. Public officials will also be allowed to form a "consultative body" in 1999. And the unemployment insurance fund will be set at 5 billion won, (US$1 = 1,570 won) covering about 23% of the endangered
The panel decided to put off discussions on whether employers should pay the wages of employees employed on union business on a full-time basis. The tripartite panel is to become a permanent body, chaired by the President.
The biggest problem with this agreement, from the point of view of KCTU militants, was not so much the exact terms as the fact that the union leadership had sıgned up without first seeking the guidance of the wider KCTU membership The following day, 67% of the 272 KCTU representatives voted to nullify the confederation's approval. They dissolved the leadership, and replaced it with a special emergency committee, headed b Tan Byong-ho, the leader of the Korean Federation of Metal Workers' Union.
Plans were made for a general strike beginning February 13. Not surprisingly, the IMF issued a warning that labour unrest would undermine investor confidence, leading to another round of currency flight and further bankruptcies. The KCTU then held an extraordinary eight hour meeting, and decided to call off the strike.
The union was not influenced by the threat of severe government reprisals, but rather by the feeling that the strike itself might not be widely supported. KCTU spokesperson, Chong Song-hi, said: "In consideration of the public's concern that the labour action would worsen the financial crisis, we have decided to cancel the strike."
To make matter worse, the KCTU continued to state that it would strike if the bill was actually passed by the National Assembly. But when that happened, on February 16th, the union did nothing.
The unions have suffered a major defeat, in a context in which defeat was always the likelier outcome.
There is certainly the possibility of wild cat strikes, particularly on the part of workers who find themselves contronted by actual lay-offs or by management which fails to live up to the terms of the agreement. Resistance may well be effective, since the government is not so neoliberal as to stand by without intervening as companies go bankrupt. The Labour Ministry has already warned that unjustified mass lay-offs will be punished. The Kia corporation, for example, is now under government protection while a new owner is being sought. Militancy or moderation?
Nevertheless, the prospects for militant action are limited. Until a new mood of resentment and bitterness sets in among the workers and small business people against what is actually happening in Korea, rather than what neoliberal ideologists insist ought to be happening, militant unionists will find only a small audience for their ideas. One outlet, however, will be the chance to run labour candidates in the June 4th municipal and city mayoral elections in labour towns like Ulsan and Taejon.
among Korean workers re-emerges, it will have to confront the typical problems faced by the union movement in the most industrialised countries: a high unemployment rate, particularly among youth and students: the shattering effects of job loss and dislocation, particularly on older workers; and a reduced capacity for long-term fight-back among layers of less class-conscious
But there will also be greater freedom for political action, including, for the first time, among teachers and possibly the lower ranks of government workers.
There has been a further decline in the credibility and power of the Agency for National Security and Planning (the Korean CIA), as revelations about its blatantly antidemocratic practices become more widely diffused among the population.
There is also greater disaffection among youth and students about capitalism and bourgeois progress.
All this even raises the possibility of a split between those progressive Koreans who continue to support Kim Dae-jung and those who break with him.
This could lead to the emergence of a mass-based labour party; and perhaps even the ending of the monopoly of the co-opted Stalinist leadership in the student movement: one manifestation of the political compromise that President Kim
There is a faint chance that labour struggles could erupt in the coming weeks, with the traditional spring negotiation of new contracts. But it is more likely that the re-commencement of class struggle will take place toward the end of the one year grace period requested by President Kim Dae-jung after his election victory