South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
Working class decisive
There are those who say such ideas are ‘old-fashioned’ - what the socialist theoreticians had to say is no longer valid and the industrial working class counts for nothing anymore. Let them look at this strike and what this strike has proved! Every participant and observer comments, as if with one voice, that, as distinct from the movement of ‘87, the industrial working class was the driving force. Those who work in the giant factories of the top Chaebol may be a minority in the workforce, but the power they can wield has been proven for all who have eyes to see.
It is the actions of these layers of workers that have emboldened the many individuals and groups well versed in Marxism, forced until now to operate in conditions of clandestinity and speak only half the truth. Protesters and campaigners have gone further than ever before in lampooning the government, in condemning the Chaebol economy and in demanding the president’s resignation. So what stayed the hands of the strike leaders?
Scaling the strike down towards the end of January to give the government and the Assembly a chance to rescind the laws may in itself not have been a bad tactic especially given that only certain sections were involved in all-out action. They were already beginning to resent having to bear the brunt of the bosses’ revenge and the loss of wages while other sections were still at work. But even though the strike had moved into another gear with the Wednesday and Saturday action, sections of the government and the police were feeling humiliated by the lifting of the arrest warrants and the possibility of a climb-down. Indecision gripped the government.
A ‘classical’ revolutionary situation had not developed but all the elements were there in embryo. It was, to use a racing analogy, the ‘first time out’ for the KCTU in terms of a political general strike. The country had not been paralysed. Big factories were occupied but transport was rarely stopped. (If the leaders had wanted all-out action, they probably would have found, as was the case in the French general strike of 1995, that ‘the public’ would have been overwhelmingly on the side of the workers in spite of inconvenience to their lives). The movement had been strong enough to draw the middle layers of society to its side but not to split the forces of the state. Things did not reach that stage.
While the workers held the moral high-ground in society, there was not a situation of dual power with representative bodies thrown up by workers that vie with existing state organs for control in society. Though badly debilitated, the government was not totally suspended in mid-air. The ruling class had been severely shaken but still held the reins of power. But at least the outlines of a pre-revolutionary situation were taking shape and a powerful desire was developing in the hearts of working people for finishing with the government and throwing the Chaebol giants off their backs.
Different leadership
It is difficult to say whether a different leadership of the movement could have fulfilled these aspirations. Before launching a challenge for power it would have had to probe and test the ground through its own agitation, carefully selecting the slogans of the hour and conducting a dialogue with every section of the working class. The middle class, once it sensed a fight to the finish would overwhelmingly have sided with the workers. The forces of the state, even the hated riot police, could have been neutralised or even persuaded to go into revolt as sections of the Korean army have done more than once before in history.
On the other hand, it might have turned out that even a leadership using such methods and standing openly for socialist change, on weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of the movement, could have judged it necessary to limit the strike to the single aim of annulling the new laws and regard it as a dress rehearsal for future battles. But it is clear that even to guarantee the abolition of these anti-trade union and anti-working class measures, much more was and will be needed.
If there had been a moment when a different leadership, in place before things got to this stage, could possibly have made a bolder challenge, the opportunity was fast slipping away. Once the scale of the bribes-for-loans scandal was being revealed and leading members of the ruling party were being arrested, the headlines had been captured and the desired diversionary effect had been achieved. The leaders of the KCTU made threats about renewing the strike if the Labour law was not annulled but it is doubtful whether they were still in a position to re-mobilise the movement. Industrial action is not like a tap that can be turned off and on at will.
And, as if to make assurance doubly sure, there was the Hwang Jang-yop defection from the North. The announcement was undoubtedly premature - given that he was not yet out of China, let alone in the safety of South Korea - and rushed into, not only to distract attention from the KCTU Congress. It just so happened that the students were due to return to the universities after their long winter break and the much-quoted letter, supposedly written by Hwang, appealed to the students not to be beguiled into joining the protest against the government.
The vast publicity around his statement was no doubt aimed at trying to intimidate the working class with scare stories about 40,000 agents of the North being at work in South Korean society. This figure is exactly the same as that given in a report drawn up for the Public Prosecutor’s Office last October. (It had talked of "10,000 core leftists and 30,000 more lukewarm ‘pinkos’" who had either sent letters to the North or accessed North Korea’s home-page on the internet).
Outcome
But this first attempt at a generalised strike showed that workers and leaders alike lacked experience. The KCTU admitted as much. Having threatened to renew the strike action on a number of occasions before the labour laws were finally agreed, the KCTU leadership decided to concentrate on firming up its position in the factories during the period of wage negotiations and to launch a general offensive from 1st May. The law as amended by no means satisfied their demands. While it made some concessions on the right of the KCTU to negotiate and to call strikes it insisted on the ‘no work, no pay’ principle being applied to strikers and trade union officials alike and gave employers the right to take-on substitute labour during a dispute from among "other non-striking workers in the same business".
In the event, the KCTU’s May offensive was also dropped and energy was invested in preparing to stand a candidate in the presidential elections. Whether it will be a totally independent trade union candidate or a joint candidate with the present opposition parties is not, at the time of going to print, decided. The outcome of this inevitably heated discussion will say a great deal about the leadership of the movement.
Given the state of the economy and with the bosses trying to hold wage rises at the same level as last year, struggles are inevitable. The trade unions are intact but the organised workers did not finish the job. They will want to strengthen their forces at factory level and consolidate industrial unions and federations. Genuine workers’ organisations internationally will follow each struggle with keen interest and with the aim of giving the maximum solidarity. They will back the teachers and the civil servants in their fight for legality. They will loudly condemn all the anti-trade union activities of the bosses and the state and energetically campaign for the release of all political prisoners.
Undoubtedly, Korean workers will build on their confidence in the manner of 1987 - more strikes, more victories, more union organisation. But today their struggles will take place against the background of a fall in growth rates as compared with the dazzling expansion of the late 1980s. Union membership figures show that in the slow-down of 1992 and the concommitant closures and redundancies, the unions suffered a considerable set-back. But today, with the winter general strike under their belt, they would be less prepared to accept arguments about the need to pull together in the interests of the economy. The next general strike will be different; the question will be posed for the most active layers of fighting against the system.
But they need an alternative to fight for. That of the KCTU - protection of medium and small businesses and a campaign against monopolies - is not sufficient. In small and medium workplaces the accident rate is the highest and the wages the lowest. The KCTU will enter into struggle after struggle but they will stop short of an all-out offensive if they accept the capitalist way of doing things and don’t adopt a socialist alternative. That is what the international bourgeois want, including their Social Democratic friends around the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the ICFTU etc.
These people will assist in setting up strong trade unions to operate within the system - negotiate, participate etc. They will put money into human rights organisations, foreign workers’ organisations and even a party. Their aim is to ride the tiger of the combative Korean workers’ movement that is in the process of throwing off organisations like the FKTU and the so-called democratic parties with whom they have done business in the past. They want to tame the movement to stop it setting a bad example to others.
Political Alternative
The January strikes not only posed the question of a political alternative, they actually prepared the ground for its formation. The leaders may hesitate in setting up a party, citing the experiences of 1988, of 1992, even of 1996, when candidates of the left or of the trade union movement had been put forward and received very small electoral support. But all parties start with a small turn-out.
First time round, the British Labour Party in 1906 received no more than 5% of the vote. But in the context of a big strike struggle and a social movement, a workers’ party can develop very rapidly. The Party of Workers (PT ) in Brazil was born out of the massive metalworkers’ strikes of 1978. Properly founded in 1980, it received a modest percent of the vote in elections the first time it fielded any candidates - a total of 650,000. Three years later in ‘89, its candidate for president, Lula, was not far short of victory with 31 million votes in the second round run-off with the traditional right wing candidate who got 35 million. The Greek Socialist Party - PASOK - first stood in elections in 1974 and was in power by 1981 with a 48% share of the vote.
The KCTU is committed in its programme to building "a party which fights for the interests of the working class" and along with many other organisations is in discussion as to how it should be built. The setting up of a workers’ party would be a huge step forward. But it is not a question of creating yet another party just to put people into parliament or local government or even the president’s position just for them to get in and forget all about the people who put them there. How many participants of the 1987 Democracy Struggle have ended up in the present ruling party to continue to hold the working class in chains? The only way to ensure that the "people’s representatives" stay faithful to the people would be through the democratic election within the party of all candidates and their commitment to take no privileges - no wage higher than the average skilled worker and expenses vetted by the movement, plus mechanisms for removing them if they fail to carry out the party’s policies.
Class, party and programme
But if, as one of the KCTU’s documents explains, the working class is the majority in society and has played the leading role in the recent movements against the government, then it requires a party which is prepared to be unashamedly based on the working class. A party is needed which will champion every demand of the trade unions and the movement - all the basic democratic rights, trade union and human rights - and go further. South Korea’s own experiences demonstrate that, for all the professions of the democratic politicians, without a challenge to the rule of capital, these rights remain dispensable.
Only when the rule of capital is ended, only when the assets of the Chaebol and the banks become the property of the majority, can the majority decide how best to use them. With planning based not on bribery, power politics and the enrichment of a few but on control by democratically elected workers’ representatives, both at the factory and the state level, it would be possible to put an end to the abuse and humiliation of centuries. Insisting on the eight-hour day and fully participating in decision-making, working people in Korea would decide how best to organise relations with each other and with the outside world. This is not a dream but a necessity.
Collapse of Stalinism
As everywhere in the world, the doubters and detractors will say "but look at your planned economies, they have collapsed!" In South Korea there were not a few activists who looked in the past to the Soviet Union as a model to which they aspired. They were told it was ‘socialism’ both by those who attacked it and those who unconditionally defended it. Now apparently capitalism had shown itself superior and this was disorientating. They did not have access to all the facts and arguments that give a clear explanation of the objective reasons for the rise as well as the collapse of the Stalinist system and leave the ideas of socialism basically intact.
The bureaucratically-controlled ‘workers’ states’ came about because of the degeneration of the Russian revolution - the isolation, the backwardness, the inexperience of the working class and the usurpation of power by a privileged caste. A planned economy without the oxygen of workers’ democracy, explained Trotsky, will eventually suffocate under the weight of the central bureaucracy that cannot adapt to new techniques or allow individual initiative to be expressed. To save their privileges and their dominance in society, which the planned economies could no longer guarantee, and to fend off a revolt from below, the communist parties of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and, in reality, of China - the parties of the bureaucracies - took the road of the market. The vast majority of the bureaucrats preferred to turn themselves into capitalists than to be thrown off like an old coat by a movement of workers in the direction of socialism.