An Eye Witness Account of Capitalist South Korea

I met relatives for the first time at Incheon Airport, South Korea. As we travelled towards Seoul, I looked out the car window. Out there were signs of highly urbanised life: tall, twenty storey buildings clumped together in the distance and we hadn’t even reached Seoul, the capital city, just yet. I remember being eager to see every aspect of South Korea, especially the ‘development’ of an ‘Asian Tiger Economy’ under capitalism. In the following article I will share my experiences of and some of my discoveries about South Korea: conversations with the people, a rally for workers’ rights that I attended and my thoughts on the situation in general of socialists and left-wing activists in South Korea.

The Journey to Korea

In the first place, I have to mention that it has been a painful and long journey for our family to finally return to South Korean soil again after many years of living in Australia. As a child I remember the threat of repression from the immigration authorities and the fear of deportation from Australia despite having actually been being born and raised in Australia, myself. Here in Australia I witnessed the denial of equal rights that in its turn gave way to exploitation at the hands of greedy bosses. My parents often worked as subcontractors for supermarket cleaning companies, pushed trollies and worked in the textile industry. The pay was meagre, $500 a week for full time work. Today, our working class situation is one of many where migrants and all working class people endure exploitation at the hands of the Australian capitalist system.

The Plight of the Elderly in South Korea

I was catching a taxi to the nearest bus station to travel to Daegu, a city of industry and technology. The taxi driver was a middle aged man and he was curious about my accent so I told him I was from Australia and he responded by telling me that Australia was a “good country.” I was wondering what he thought was that “good” about the imperialist nature and colonial origins of wealth in Australia but he then started to talk about the plight of the elderly in South Korea, something he was obviously very worried about. He said that a big problem in South Korea was the high rate of suicide amongst the elderly in the country. He was very aware that Australia was a so-called social democratic ‘welfare state’ that has some sort of welfare system and assistance for the elderly in place in contrast to the right-wing South Korean system where traditional Confucianist family principles dominate and there is very limited social welfare. I expressed my sympathy with him about the fact that there needs to be lots changed in South Korea towards providing assistance for the elderly. But without much time left, I quickly explained how Australia won a social welfare state and basic free health care as a result of workers’ struggles, also mentioning how Australia likewise has lots of changing to do especially around the issue of xenophobia and attitudes to migrant workers. If I had more time, I would have explained that Australia is an imperialist country where racism is a big problem. That the system and media scapegoat migrant workers so much that it often leads to racist attacks on migrants. That a system that has been founded on a white supremacist agenda of colonialism has always been racist towards the Aboriginal people. That the socio-economic disadvantages suffered by Aboriginal people stems from the historical and ongoing bloody theft of their property and that even to this day Aboriginal people die in state custody at a terrifying rate due to the brutality of the capitalist police. That Australian-owned businesses super-exploit the toilers of Australia’s Asia-Pacific neighbours and that some of the crumbs of this looting finds its way into funding social services within Australia and that, nevertheless, despite this hundreds of thousands of people in Australia live in abject poverty and are forced to skip meals and skip prescription medication just to get by on welfare.

Whilst I was in South Korea, everywhere I went the plight of the most disadvantaged elderly was visible. I encountered many elderly people salvaging recyclable paper, cans and plastics. Even in the morning at 2am and up to the midday rush hour you could witness the sight of fragile elderly people pulling large carts of recyclables. One of my relatives would enthusiastically tell me how one kilo of cardboard would get you about thirty cents and sixty cents for quality paper (which in fact was about 10 Won or $0.009 USD per kilo for paper, and a hard day’s earnings would typically be $1.50 – $2.00 USD) [1]. He thought it was a normal part of society and a legitimate way for the elderly to make a living if they cannot be supported by family or find employment.

A huge amount of elderly people in South Korea are self-employed due to the discrimination they face in a country where youth unemployment is also quite high. The elderly often sell petty goods as street vendors: sunglasses, hats, vegetables. My grandmother’s brother lives to this day in a storage facility where chillies are stored, dried and powdered. It was saddening seeing that his residence is a small office converted into a tiny, though nevertheless still comfy, little residence.

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Compare the impoverished elderly in South Korea to their North Korean counterparts where under the ruling Workers Party of Korea there are adequate pensions and most importantly housing is collectivised by the workers’ state effectively eradicating homelessness. Once, I read in a social policy study, itself quite conservative and loyal to capitalism, how South Korea has a very low aged pension because it is a developing economy compared to Japan and Europe and so it couldn’t possibly spare the resources to adequately help the aged. But South Korea, with huge monopolies like Hyundai, LG, and Samsung is fabulously rich in comparison to North Korea which suffers under the weight of severe economic sanctions. Surely, South Korea is a nation of much wealth and can share this with the aged regardless or not if it is as advanced as Japan or Europe. But it is inherently a socialist system that can help the aged and capitalism which, as always, resists working class justice will need to be swept away with a socialist revolution.

Seoul and homelessness

I travelled by high speed train from Daegu to Seoul Station and, yes, South Korea has a decent transport system compared to Australia, largely in part because Korea is a highly urbanised society. When I arrived at Seoul Train Station it was breathtaking. It was huge and modern, there were restaurants, stores and several supermarkets incorporated inside the train station. When I walked outside onto the streets of Seoul, the city night sky was illuminated with neon lights, shiny and towering sky scrapers, it resembled a modern capitalist capital city. I then walked into the underground train station of an undoubtedly busy and crowded city where there were queues of people as they left the station and entered it.

But with all the supposed glories of capitalism for the capitalists in South Korea as so often shown in the TV dramas and the K-pop music sensations, the sight of inequality was very evident as well. The capital city’s train station was also full of people without a home to return to. There were many people begging and with blankets on the ground at the train station. It seemed many were too ashamed to beg, they didn’t bother begging at all, and if they did, they hung their head in shame and wouldn’t dare look around. One section of the Seoul subway had over thirty people sleeping and resting in one stretch of the station. I took a picture of this and showed my young cousin. He gasped and went silent, he was so shocked by this picture.

But strangely, even my non-communist parents acknowledge the glory days of the 1960s in North Korea, the same time my parents talk about unspeakable poverty in South Korea during their upbringing and when sexism towards women was so rife that even my grandparents were ashamed to have too many daughters. It was then that the capitalists feared the popularity of the socialistic DPRK amongst the South Korean masses for they knew that the DPRK had advanced far ahead of South Korea in both social welfare and economic development and so the U.S. imperialists – and later their Japanese counterparts – poured a truly massive amount of aid into the South Korean economy. Furthermore, worried that further immiseration of the South Korean masses could see the country go communist, the Western and Japanese imperialists decided not to exploit South Korea in the same way they did other ex-colonies. This allowed South Korea to industrialise in a way that is atypical for a capitalist ex-colonial country.

But today’s homelessness in South Korea is in stark contrast to the system in the pro-working class North Korea where the landlords were expropriated of their land and industry, taken away from them to be collectivised under a socialistic system where the organised and cooperative socialist ways brought about rapid increases in production and standards of living for the working class. North Korea to this day has jobs guaranteed and housing as a right, all whilst it is being terribly squeezed by massive imperialist military and economic pressure. It is exactly because of North Korea’s socialistic ways that the imperialists and capitalists have stationed around 30,000 US military forces and numerous military bases in South Korea and Japan.

It is a shame such a rich, advanced country like South Korea with companies like Samsung and Hyundai run by billionaires cannot adequately house its homeless nor provide adequate pensions for its working class people. What an utter shame and it is the workers’ movement and the future workers’ party which will be the antidote for the failure of a capitalist system in meeting people’s needs.

Protest for Workers’ Rights

When I was in South Korea I learnt many of my relatives worked unusually long hours. I was surprised that two of my relatives that work in childcare worked ten hours a day. Today, workers in South Korea are known to work the most hours in the world and this is the case because of the culture of the authoritarian capitalist government of the past and what to this day is a draconian capitalist regime that cracks down on workers’ rights.

Even though the monopolies are very large in South Korea, they only employ a very small section of the workforce. There is a lot of informal employment, contracted employment and self-employment. Youth unemployment is said to be 8% – double the rate of unemployment – but if you add people who have given up looking for work or are studying it amounts to 22% of youth without work.

My first experience with protesters in South Korea came from a Ssangyong workers’ rally. The rally was part of a Ssangyong workers’ rights public space occupation very similar to the Occupy movement in strategy and political nature. This movement came about from the Ssangyong workers having waged a major heroic battle in 2009 to fight job losses where they occupied a Ssangyong factory and battled ruthless state forces and corporate mercenary thugs that attacked the picket and strike. These activists, although part of the workers’ movement, were really small ‘l’ liberal activists with beliefs very similar to those of the occupy movement’s not-left-not-right anti-ideology as well as the anarcho-pacifists here. The rally went for a long time and people were seated, there was a stage where people sung songs and danced, balloons were sent into the sky, progressive parliamentarians and a liberation theologist gave speeches, all whilst riot police surrounded the square making sure the activists were “orderly” (South Korean riot police are known for their violent clashes with protesters.) While there I also met followers of Tony Cliff, the founder of the International Socialist Tendency, members of the group ‘Da Hamgae’ or ‘All Together’, their co-thinkers in Australia being Socialist Alternative and Solidarity. Cliffism emerged during the Korean War where opportunist socialists refused to oppose their own imperialists and refused to defend and support the North Korean workers state, resorting to labelling North Korea as state capitalist.

Overall, South Korean activism seemed all too similar to the Australian movement plagued with shallow, degenerated opportunist socialist groups, petty-bourgeois social democrats and liberals but South Korean activism is more aligned to the workers’ unions whereas in Australia liberals often fail to understand the role of exploited workers. In addition, in South Korea one group stood out: a small group whose members were very knowledgeable and not related to the Cliffite, social democratic and liberalist tendencies. These activists identified themselves as Leninist Trotskyist Socialists with major disagreements with one of the largest Union coalitions, the reformist-led KFTU (Korean Federation of Trade Unions.) They claimed to be a revolutionary workers’ party in the making.

South Korea: a revolution in waiting

Today, South Korea is a capitalist country bordering a country – socialistic North Korea -technically still at war with the capitalist powers of the imperialist west and its allies. The capitalist rule in South Korea is notable for the brutal crackdown on workers’ struggles, allegiance to imperialism and ignorance of working class conditions. South Korea is a country subservient to the western imperialist warmongers with 30,000 permanent US military forces and numerous military bases stationed to threaten Socialistic China and North Korea as well as its own historically militant working class. South Korea: a country that has grown industrially off the back of the exploited South Korean working class, a country that is ruled by the capitalist monopolies of the ultra-rich capitalists like Samsung and Hyundai. These are not the monopolies of the proletarian masses but of greedy ultra-rich individuals. When the struggle against the capitalists strengthens in South Korea in defiance of the increasing anti-communist sentiment against North Korea and China it will be our duty as international proletarians to resist all the capitalists and especially our own Australian capitalists, to join the socialistic North Korean and Chinese workers’ states and the South Korean exploited workers in solidarity against their capitalist-imperialist exploiters.

[1] External link about junk collectors being driven out, and stories elderly citizens doing it tough: http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/ENGISSUE/97/598670.html