In 1953 the U.S. imperialists were forced by the heroic resistance
of the Korean people to sign an armistice agreement. It divided
Korea into north and south parts but did not end the state of war.
The U.S. imperialists organized a puppet government to serve their
interests in the south. For the most part the south Korean
government has been a wholly military affair with an integrated
command with the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK). In the late eighties the
struggle of the Korean people for reunification with the north and
for democratic rights forced the imperialists to set up a
pseudo-civilian regime which is now led by a former student
anti-government activist Kim Young-sam. The basic repressive nature
of the government which has spilled the blood of thousands of
Koreans was not changed, leaving intact all the state instruments
of repression such as the infamous south Korean Gestapo, the Agency
for National Security Planning (ANSP), the National Security Law
and the ubiquitous USFK.
The victory of the U.S. imperialists over Japanese militarism
in 1945 did not become an occasion for the independence of those
nations that had been occupied by Japan, such as Korea. The U.S.
integrated the south Korean economy within the overall needs of
international finance capital. This dependent economy has supplied
the U.S. imperialists and others with cheap labor and raw
materials, and a lucrative area to invest their capital. It
utilized various attractive features of south Korea to set up an
economy that imports components and then assembles them for export.
The economy was organized in such a manner that the more it
exports, such as cars made by Hyundai, the more it is forced to
import the components that go into the assembling of the cars.
Since the collapse of the bipolar division of the world, other
more attractive areas of investment have become available to the
imperialists leaving south Korea twisting in the wind with more
than a $27 billion annual trade deficit. The economic law of the
falling rate of profit assaulting their highly mechanized assembly
plants was compensated for a time by high monopoly prices. These
prices have begun to fall as other competitors have emerged,
especially since 1990, reflecting the uneven development of
capitalism internationally and the ravages of the law of value. The
south Korean monopolies and their allies have apparently lost the
battle to keep the market price of their commodities higher than
their actual value.
The large import bill, together with the enormous cost of its
military and repressive police apparatus have left the south Korean
monopolies with relatively little capital. In the face of huge
losses, their response is to rationalize production through further
automation and by lowering the cost of labor. This necessitated
two measures by the puppet state: First, a government decree
legitimizing mass layoffs, unleashing an overall assault on the
existing standard of living; and secondly, a decree giving more
funding and arbitrary power to the ANSP to deal with the escalating
resistance from the masses. At a secret parliamentary session last
Thursday to which even the opposition parties were excluded,
the fascist government passed the two decrees. Mass opposition
strikes began immediately as the working class expresses its anger
and determination to fight.
Shawgi Tell
University at Buffalo
Graduate School of Education
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
