June 2001  

The following article is based on a March 21 report from Korea. In recent weeks, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions announced it is resuming the struggle against Daewoo. A KCTU representative is currently in the United States protesting General Motors’ planned takeover of the Korean auto manufacturer.

On June 12 the KCTU called a general strike for higher pay and protesting the government’s economic “restructuring” program. Approximately 50,000 unionists at 125 plants participated in the strike, among them factory, airline and hospital workers. Railing against “illegal and violent strikes,” South Korea’s liberal president Kim Dae-jung warned: “If we cannot restore social order, foreign investors will stop investing in Korea.”

SEOUL – In August 2000, the Daewoo empire went on receivership row. By November, the banks, which had been strong-armed into providing 200 million dollars for the auto division every month, cut off subsidies. In February, Daewoo executives announced the first steps in eliminating a third of the workforce, almost 1,800 workers. Management spokesmen added that a quarter of Daewoo workers in Poland would be axed as well. The closure of the Pupyong plant was initially presented as a “temporary shutdown” to thin the stocks of surplus autos. But to the workers about to be inducted into South Korea’s one-million-strong army of the unemployed, it looked about as temporary as a beheading.

Naturally, the government didn’t go after Kim Wu-chung, the founder of the Daewoo empire. After fiddling the books to convince the government that he was worth $18 billion more than his actual value, he wangled billions of dollars in government-guaranteed loans, pocketed $2.4 billion for himself, and absconded. Although this must count as one of the largest embezzlements in history, the Korean government was loath to pursue its former protégé. It was only after Daewoo workers and outraged citizenry formed a “Rob the Rich to Feed the Poor” brigade and followed him to Europe that the Korean government contacted Interpol.

Instead, the executors decided that other heads would roll at Pupyong. The entire non-union work force was “persuaded” to resign. On February 17, pink slips were readied for 1,785 unionists. The layoffs would produce 111 billion won (almost US$100 million) toward the 999 billion estimated necessary to save Daewoo. The press declared that the struggle at Daewoo was tapering off and that any attempt to call out workers in Keunsan and Changwon was bound to fail, since they were being offered generous voluntary retirement plans. 

Riot cops and burning police bus outside Pupyong plant, February 20. (Photo: AP)

The Pupyong workers were not putting their heads on the block, though. Three hundred fifty workers and their families occupied the Pupyong plant, putting a few of the surplus cars to very good use as barricades. On the morning of February 20, when other protesters tried to brave the 4,000-strong police lines and join the plant occupation, fighting broke out. Dozens were injured and 80 workers were arrested. Two police buses were burned. That was just the beginning. Hundreds of workers and students came to the defense of Pupyong and fighting has continued off and on ever since. The crowd outside Pupyong has swollen to several thousand. Contrary to press predictions that this would be a local affair, big street protests occurred in Pusan, Inchon and other major cities.

As the struggle intensified, slogans escalated from calls on the strikers’ red headbands for “job security” to chants of “Down with the Kim Dae-jung government, destroyer of jobs!” On his way back from meeting U.S. president Bush in Washington, Kim Dae-jung held a quick supper in Chicago with Jack Smith, president of General Motors, the would-be “savior” of Daewoo. But the sight of Korean cops doing the “molotov hotfoot” as their buses go up in flame has given GM cold feet, and the site of the negotiations with GM is being kept secret. Kim Dae-jung declared, “The government will not tolerate any illegal activities by radical unions.… We see reform as a matter of survival, not choice.” 

But the Kim Dae-jung government has chosen. In the continuing economic crisis unleashed by the imperialist bankers and their cartel, the International Monetary Fund, it has chosen to give the “sacrifices” to the working class while allowing the chaebol monopolists like Kim Wu-chung to continue enjoying the banks’ largesse. It has “chosen” to give Korean workers the highest accident rate, the longest hours and the lowest minimum wage among industrialized countries, and it is extending these “choices” to workers in the public sector through a huge privatization program. Kim Dae-jung figures he can get away with this, confident that workers will still consider him a “lesser evil” compared to the opposition, with its ties to the former dictatorship. But for workers at Pupyong – and at Daewoo plants in Poland and Uzbekistan – these layoffs are a death sentence.

This working class, which brought South Korean military dictatorships to their knees twice in half a century, will not lie down and die. But labor militancy, even when carried out with molotov cocktails, is not enough. Hard lessons need to be learned. It is not just the government that is the destroyer of jobs and livelihoods; every bourgeois political party in the country is responsible, from the “Greens” with their protectionist calls, to the “People’s Campaign for Participatory Democracy” with its “blacklist” of opposition candidates (backhanded support to Kim Dae-jung). The KCTU front “party,” the Democratic Labor Party, has entered a coalition with these bourgeois groups, binding the workers to their class enemy. 

The KCTU leaders have a long history of politically blocking with Kim Dae-jung , with roots going back to his days as a leading bourgeois dissident under the military regime. In the December 1997 presidential elections which brought “DJ” to power, the KCTU backed a pro forma campaign of the popular-frontist “People’s Victory 21” coalition which ran a long-time leader of the labor federation as an “independent” candidate. That their policy was one of scarcely veiled backing for Kim Dae-jung was underlined by their effusive greeting of and cooperation with the new government.* People’s Victory  congratulated the new president “on the change of regime he achieved after 40 years’ political hardships and efforts.”  Shortly after Kim was elected, the KCTU tops were instrumental in helping him prepare mass firings, one of the IMF’s conditions for a $55 billion “rescue” package.  Calling to "share the pain," they joined the government and employers in a tripartite commission to work out a new layoff law; then,  after angry protests from the ranks, KCTU leaders scuttled plans for mass strikes against it. Today the KCTU is part of a “left” bloc with bourgeois figures criticizing Kim while seeking to pressure him to be more responsive to “the people.”

But the struggle against layoffs poses in the sharpest manner the need to break with all the bourgeois parties and coalitions and to forge a revolutionary workers party. South Korea has been the scene of some of the sharpest labor battles in recent years, with an almost unbroken series of struggles since the January 1997 general strike (see “Nationwide Strike Shakes South Korea,” The Internationalist No. 1, January-February 1997). Yet despite this economic militancy, a reflection of the severity of the capitalist crisis, the South Korean working class has yet to achieve political independence from the bourgeoisie. Following the collapse of the Stalinist-ruled, bureaucratically degenerated and deformed workers states in the Soviet Union and East Europe, reformist leftists are abandoning even the forms of a workers party. Militant unionism has become the new “minimum program” of these erstwhile “socialists.” 

And that program in no way challenges the capitalist order. For example, there is the widespread denunciation of “the regime’s neoliberal ‘reforms’,” and calls to “nationalize Daewoo Motors.” This comes from a group called Power of the Working Class (Preparatory Committee), but it could have been any number of left groups. But the economic crisis is not a result of a “neoliberal” recipe in Seoul which could be replaced by another policy, but of the dictates of international finance capital. And nationalizing one debt-ridden monopoly is not a step toward socialism but can be a means for the bourgeoisie to socialize its losses, thus preventing a major bankruptcy from bringing down the interconnected chaebols (South Korea's big industrial-financial trusts) like a house of cards. In fact, nationalization of Daewoo is only an incremental step from the government’s previous policy of subsidizing it (and other conglomerates) through massive bank loans.

This call is similar to the appeals to nationalize Chrysler in 1979 when the No. 3 U.S. auto company was on the brink of collapse, which would have been a way of keeping the American auto industry afloat as it faced the oil price shock and heavy Japanese competition. A good example of how nationalization can be a pro-capitalist measure was the 1982 state takeover of Mexico’s banks, which prevented a wholesale collapse of the financial industry in the wake of the “debt bomb.” Rather than the social-democratic “ashcan socialism” of nationalizing bankrupt firms, revolutionary Trotskyists insist that what is needed is the expropriation, without compensation, of all the chaebols, and point out that this can only be carried out by a revolutionary workers government. 

At the same time, class-struggle unionists should seize the books of the conglomerates to open them to workers inspection. Facing mounting unemployment, they should fight for a sliding scale of wages and hours, to provide jobs for all. They must also take up directly political issues. With almost 40,000 U.S. troops in the southern half of the Korean peninsula, revolutionary workers must demand the removal of all U.S. bases and troops, troops which the North Korean Stalinists now say they accept. Korean workers do not accept them! They will not have the likes of Corporal Christopher McCarthy, who murdered a Korean “bar girl” a year ago and whose outrageously lenient six-year sentence was confirmed by the Korean Supreme Court on the day the Daewoo struggle erupted. 

A key question facing the Korean working class today is that of unification of the country. But not a reunification that leads to South Korean exploitation of cheap North Korean labor and drives down living and working conditions throughout the peninsula. What is needed is revolutionary reunification, through a social revolution against capitalism in the South and a political revolution to throw out the peculiarly dynastic Stalinist bureaucracy in the north which is now opening the door to capitalist restoration. But that requires the leadership of a genuinely communist party, a Trotskyist party forged on the program of international socialist revolution and in struggle against all varieties of nationalism. 

For workers across the Korean peninsula, from the hunger-stricken North to the layoff-riddled factories of the South, building that party is the central task. n

*As originally published in The Internationalist No. 10 (June 2001), this article stated that Kim Dae-jung had been “elected with the support of the KCTU.”