South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
Fighters and collaborators
The origins of both the KCTU and the FKTU can be traced back at least to the revolutionary period at the end of the second world war when capitalism in Korea was fighting for survival.
According to the KCTU’s own account, when the independent ‘Korea National Council of Trade Unions’ was formed in November 1945, it "supported revolutionary socialists" and put forward the demand to the American military administration that "complete control be allowed by the workers’ factory committees over enterprises formerly owned by the Japanese and pro-Japanese Koreans". It played an important role in the great September strike of 1946, followed by the March strike of 1947, and the one-day general strikes of February and May 1948.
The Korean Labour Federation for Independence, on the other hand, a forerunner of the FKTU was set up in 1946 with the aim not of liberating but of controlling the working class - a tool of the bosses. It loudly declared its total hostility to socialism and actively promoted co-operation between labour and management. In this it had the full backing of the government, the bosses and the American military up to and during the Korean war of 1950-53. Everything was done in this period to stem the tide of popular uprising and a take-over of society by the Korean working class.
Such was the force of the movement from below that this devastating war would never have been inflicted on the people of Korea if they had been left to decide their own fate. Bruce Cummings and Jon Halliday in their book Korea: The Unknown War maintain that without US intervention, there would have been a "revolutionary transformation of society". Large elements of workers’ direct democracy had no doubt been established throughout the South, often before the Northern army arrived. Whether the "communists" of North Korea, the USSR or China would have succeeded in imposing their bureaucratic model is another question. But the intervention of US imperialism and, during the Korean War, soldiers from 16 other capitalist countries under the flag of the United Nations, caused the atrocious carnage that has left a legacy of hatred against imperialism.
During the Korean War, there were heroic strikes by textile workers, miners and dock-workers. The latter attempted to boycott the transport of military supplies. The struggle for free and democratic trade unions continued unabated throughout the long harsh years of the Syngman Rhee regime. In 1956, two million votes were given to a candidate standing for socialist democracy and a planned economy - Cho Pong-am. Two years later, Rhee had him executed for "collaboration with North Korea". Then, on the pretext of imminent invasion, he moved to push 22 bills through parliament including revision of the National Security law. He had all opposition parliamentarians removed from the Assembly by police trained in the martial arts. When in 1960 he was seen to use ballot rigging and sheer terror tactics to prevent the re-election of an opposition vice-president Chang Myon, students poured onto the streets in protest. The police turned on them with live ammunition, killing over 100. This only drove them to more protest action and brought others into the movement. When martial law was declared, the Korean army refused to fire on the students, many of whom demonstrated under the slogan "Democracy in Politics and Equality in the Economy".
The "April (students’) Revolution" of 1960 gave enormous impetus to the struggle for fighting workplace organisations. In the ten months after Rhee was forced into exile there were around 2,000 street demonstrations involving a million people. Cho Pong-am’s Progressive Party became the Socialist Mass Party and joined forces with student, trade union and other organisations to demand the establishment of ties with the North and elections to re-unify the country. Early in 1961, the students again took the lead and mobilised support for a conference of delegates from North and South. Just four days before it was due to take place, a group of army officers under Major General Park Chung-hee, with the blessing of Washington, carried through a coup d’etat, and the labour movement was once again crushed.
The Korea Labour and Society Institute (KLSI) in a history of the trade union movement explains how, after being disbanded along with all political parties and socialist groups, the unions went through a process of "dissolution, reorganisation and expansion" in the 1960s and 1970s. They were re-established from the top only by orders of the military in 1961 through its Union Reorganisation Committee. The FKTU was the result and was paid for by the American CIA.
Thus formed, in the words of the KLSI, it "fell down completely" in its obligations to the working class of Korea. It openly collaborated with the repression carried out by Park and the military. It has never been forgiven. Bitter feelings towards what was known in the movement as this "yellow dog" union federation persist today and have been sustained by the ‘lesser’ crimes of the more recent period. In 1987, its leaders swore a loyalty oath to the military dictatorship. It regularly receives financial assistance from the government of Kim Young-sam (of up to $7 billion per annum). When South Korea was accepted into the OECD, it participated in a government delegation to the ILO, white-washing the state’s use of the military against (KCTU) strikers.
The whole period of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s was characterised by an unending round of struggle and repression - more struggle meant more repression, more repression meant more struggle. Compressed into three decades were processes which had developed over three centuries in the world’s first industrialised nation - Britain. As in all countries in the early days of capitalism, industrialisation was producing an ever-growing army of wage-slaves. Their cruel treatment at the hands of the factory-owners would push them into ‘combining’ together for protection. Every attempt would be persecuted, driven underground into ‘secret societies’ and labelled as ‘conspiracies’ against the state itself.
The first unions would have difficulty getting beyond the factory level before they were crushed. But the harshness of conditions would send workers again and again down the path of organising until, at last, powerful regional and national bodies could be formed. As soon as the pace of industrialisation quickened, the labour disputes multiplied. There were just 95 in 1959 and by the very next year, 227. In October of 1961, 100,000 workers were organised into trade unions. Ten years later, half a million and by 1979, the year of Park’s assasination, more than one million.
Kwangju
In 1980 came the most horrific event of recent South Korean history - the drowning in blood of a popular uprising in Cholla Province. In revolt against the imposition of yet another dictatorship - that of General Chun Doo-hwan - and its brutal treatment of protesting students, the people of Kwangju rose up and took control of their city. They were disciplined, peaceful but armed. Local miners supplied dynamite from the pits as an extra defence against the paratroopers who had gone in and run amok. For days the "Commune" held out against the forces of the state. Then, on May 27th, with the total collusion of US ‘advisers’, acting in consultation with Washington, Chun Doo-hwan ordered in the 20th Division of the army that proceeded to inflict the most horrible terror and carnage. In total, well over 2,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in the crushing of the ‘Commune’ and 15,000 more maimed - some mutilated in the most barbarous fashion.
The atrocity would never be forgotten or forgiven. In its aftermath, the military moved in a pre-emptive strike against the labour movement. The leaders of both trade union federations were removed by edict from their posts. Thousands of local union branches were dissolved and union officers sacked, arrested and sent to military-run "education camps". From then on no federations or industrial unions were permitted by law; only workplace or company unions were allowed and then only one on any site.
Once more, however, the workers of South Korea showed they would not be cowed. Within a matter of years - by 1984 - an economic slow-down had given way to a new upturn in the economy. There was a corresponding upturn in the workers’ movement. New struggles arose - for wage increases, improvements in working conditions, the establishment of independent unions and for the democratisation of the government/company unions. But, constantly harassed and persecuted by the state, it would still be more than ten years before the founding of the present-day KCTU.
The Korean workers have fought, been crushed, regrouped and fought again. They have demonstrated with particular courage and tenacity that iron law of capitalist society - that workers will not cease their struggle to throw off the yoke of capitalist exploitation. They have their pioneers and martyrs like the worker-hero Chun Tae-il and the women of Dong-il Textiles who fought long and hard against a ruthless employer, the forces of the state and the leaders of their own FKTU union. The movement will have its ebbs and flows. There will be defeats, pauses and victories all contributing to the emergence of powerful workers’ organisations.
The students, too, had their pioneers and martyrs: Kim Sang-jin in the 1970s and Cho Sung-man, Park Jong-chol and Lee Han-yol in the 1980s - all of whom paid with their lives in a struggle to rid society of dictators and imperialist domination. Coming from the more privileged sections of society, students were nevertheless deeply affected by what they saw around them. That and their own experiences at the hands of the state machine convinced them of the ideas of class struggle and socialism. They would go to the countryside or into the workshops to share the life of the factory worker or the village labourer in the manner of the Narodniks in Russia at the end of the last century. They would agitate, educate, and organise and end up in jail. There, their understanding of Marxism was deepened. As so often happens, the prisons of the dictators become the universities of socialism.
Some of the most poignant and best-loved ‘struggle songs’ were written by the widely known composer Kim Ho-chul. He had first hand experience of how the regime treated its ‘dissident elements’ in the 1980s:
"We were constantly being arrested and kept for months without anyone being informed of where we were. And always the torture. It comes back to you. At night you remember.
"One time I was tied up like a chicken with leather belts and suspended from the ceiling. They would pour hot peppery sauce down your nose. You could only retch. You thought it would never stop and you would not survive...
"When you came out you looked for your friends. Some turned up, some have still not turned up and some will never turn up".
The Great Struggle
But then came 1987 and "The Great Struggle" that welled up from below. It started first among the students, angered by the death of yet another of their comrades at the hands of the hated secret police. It spread like wildfire. Every layer of society thronged onto the demonstrations in their millions, demanding democracy and an end to dictatorship. South Korea’s fabulous economic growth had not only been produced on the backs of the working class. The middle layers in society had felt little of the gains and resented the lack of basic freedoms. Even the stock-brokers joined the demonstrations.
For weeks the whole nation seemed to be on the streets. There were battles and injuries, mass arrests and even another death at the hands of the ‘Security’ police, but the regime was now fighting for its life. In some instances young soldiers came over to the side of the movement, sick of the way they were treated in Chun’s army. After 40 years of military rule, with hardly a moment’s respite, it seemed as if a whole era was coming to an end.
Day after day, the students were on the demonstrations, often joined by workers and sometimes actually over-powering the hated riot police. The movement was essentially aimed at ending dictatorship and establishing the basic democratic rights that all bourgeois revolutions have inscribed on their banner - freedom of speech, assembly, press and organisation. Not only were the days of the dictators numbered but the longer the battle continued, the more attractive became the idea of doing away with the very system they protected. It was clear that in the hot-house conditions of the Great Struggle the ideas of socialism were coming to the fore.
General Chun Doo-hwan was forced to accept standing down in favour of civilian rule. From the point of view of the bourgeois, democracy is anyway preferable and cheaper. Chun’s successor, Roh Tae Woo - unlike the joint leaders of the opposition party, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae Jung - had no democratic ‘credentials’. He had in fact been an accomplice of Chun Doo-hwan’s in the bloody suppression of the "Kwangju Commune". Nevertheless, circumstances obliged him to come out with elaborate promises to change the old order - direct elections, freedom of the press, the release of all political prisoners, the restoration of civil liberties, an attack on corruption and the reform of education and local government. As before, faced with revolution, the ruling class preferred reform.
Impetus to workers’ movement
The forces of the state had been humiliated but the rule of capital survived. Without its complete eradication, these basic rights could not be guaranteed. Illusions would persist in the power of democracy to solve the myriad problems in society but many would now see socialism as the only alternative. The Marxists of the Committee for a Workers’ International predicted in the summer of 1987, in the Militant International Review, that the Korean workers would rapidly ‘enter the fray’ and make use of this period, striving once again to create powerful weapons for their own battles - democratic fighting unions and parties to represent their class interests.
The enormous access of confidence is reflected in the figures. The number of company level unions increased by three times from 1987 to 1993 reaching a total of 7,147 with a membership of nearly two million. The number of organised workers rose in the first half of 1987 by 2.5% but by December was up by 49.6% and again in 1988 by 50.2%. The number of strikes rose from 276 in 1986 to 3,749 in 1987. In the two years after the Great Struggle they were at the level of 1,878 and 1,616. Nominal wages grew by 25% in 1989.
The success of the struggles on pay, hours, holidays etc, in the context of a still booming South Korean economy, helped forge a broader movement. Disregarding the strictures of the labour law, worker-militants formed regional, industrial and national trade union bodies. These developments were matched on the political plane with intense activity in the underground - much of it based on socialist teachings - and in attempts to overcome the numerous obstacles to standing candidates of the working class in elections and building a workers’ party.
In the presidential elections of 1988 and again in 1992, a revered veteran of the Labour movement, Paek Ki-wan, stood as the candidate of a "Progressive Party". He was known as a socialist, but did not use the term in his campaigns for legal reasons. (After the collapse of the planned economies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, like many other activists in the movement, he questioned the viability of socialism). Perhaps as a reaction against dogmatism, Paek Ki-wan’s party was a broad coalition of diverse elements that put forward a 100 point programme. Politically limited, excluded from the media and generally hampered by the state, it failed to gather even the 3% of the popular vote needed by law to stay in existence after the elections and was dissolved.
In Assembly elections last year, the KCTU found ways of ensuring there were some independent candidates standing although they had no right by law to be involved in politics. They faced the very real obstacles of blatant official discrimination, lack of resources and outright fear on the part of the electorate of the consequences of voting ‘left’. The 1996-97 strike has dispelled much of this fear and cut across the deeply ingrained regionalism that has bedevilled Korean politics. The new situation could give quite different results. But a great deal depends on programme and on being seen as the best fighters and as those who have an answer for every problem confronted by workers at home as well as at the workplace.
The programme of a workers’ candidate should obviously take up the demands for an 8-hour working day, a living wage and jobs for all. It would link them to the need to take over the Chaebol and run industry and the banks according to the wishes of the population expressed through elected representatives at all levels. Elections in other countries show that candidates pledging to live on a workers’ wage and to have all their expenses controlled by representatives of the movement are extremely popular. If they have led mass struggles and scored major victories, they stand an even better chance of getting a respectable vote. There is no point in standing candidates just for the sake of getting some individuals into parliament but the elections and the assembly debates themselves can provide a forum in which the voice of the worker can be heard.