On Wed Mar 18 18:57:27 PDT 2009 MH-L posted:
>*KCTU Statement Opposing the Grand Agreement to Overcome the Economic
>Crisis*
Hey Marty, thanks for posting this. All hail the S Korean independent labor
movement,
still militant, alive, and kicking.
What interests me though are the KCTU's simultaneous attempts to move beyond
economism and their ongoing capture by it. By economism I do not mean Lenin's
sense
of the term, i.e. posing narrow wage and benefit demands on behalf of the labor
aristocracy. The KCTU has never been in that camp and we see continuing
evidence of that here in its list of demands (employment quotas for the youth,
social insurance for all, etc). No, what I mean by economism is the KCTU's
continuing embrace of the growth paradigm and its lack of a cultural and
environmental critique, despite its laudable support here for a S Korean
variety of green Keynesianism (however much belief in such a program requires
suspending thermodynamic disbelief).
But let's face it... S Korea is a largely unhappy society. Suicide rates and
divorce rates
are through the roof (although the latter of course is not a unidimensionally
bad thing).
I think it's safe to say that consumerist preoccupations with which the
population feels
(semi-conciously) ill at ease run rampant. Find me an urban street corner on
which an
electronic billboard is not hawking a soft drink, a luxury sedan, a prestigious
high-rise
complex, or an insidious government public service announcement and you'll win
a bet.
As long as the KCTU speaks the rigid language of battling over the distribution
of
spoils (so modernizationist and so 20th Century) it will never speak to the
itch that S
Koreans can't scratch, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, since you are the resident expert on matters Korean, I'd be interested
in your
thoughts on this.
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