| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Hagen Koo, Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2001)

MODERN SOUTH KOREAN society is marked by two simultaneous processes. While one is its unprecedented economic success celebrated in academic literature on the developmental state, the other is its rapid proletarianization and the subsequent labour militancy to which little attention has been paid. Given that critical accounts of capitalist modernity in northeast Asia have been overshadowed by economic success stories, this book, threaded along the line of workers' lived experiences and culture, makes an important contribution by providing an alternative narrative of the political economy of modern South Korea.

Koo's central question in this book is: How can we explain the radical transformation of the politically quiescent Korean workers of the 1960s and the 1970s into an organized militant labour force in the 1980s? According to Koo, the existing reductionist-structuralist approach has treated this historical phenomenon as culturally given or natural. This then easily leads to the conclusion that the transition from unorganized to organized labour was discontinuous. He correctly points out the fallacy of what is called "psychological reductionism," a methodological tendency to retroactively infer the consciousness of individual workers from macro structural patterns. His narrative, constructed from the viewpoint of the workers, helps avoid this theoretical shortcoming.

In addressing his central question, Koo adopts two useful strategies, one methodological, and the other theoretical. From a comparative perspective, Koo attempts to find out the historical-cultural conditions that enabled the distinctive formation of Korean working-class politics. Three levels of comparison are utilized in chronological order. First, Korean workers in the 1960s and the 1970s are contrasted to the workers of 19th-century Europe. Historically, unlike the European working-classes, Korean workers lacked a legacy of artisanship, the traditional Confucian culture having hindered its development. Secondly, while East Asian labour has historically been disciplined and passive, Korean workers' unique departure from this trend from the 1980s onwards can be found in the urban nature of the industrial transformation, which was also highly conducive to the formation of militant working-class politics. Third, Koo diagnoses that Korean workers in the 1990s and beyond are at the crossroads between a political movement and a narrow trade unionism. Compared to the social-movement unionism of Brazil and South Africa, South Korea's new unionism since 1987 has failed to articulate with larger social forces, due to various economic, political, and social factors.

Drawing on the social-constructivist approach to class formation, which can be traced to the work of E.P. Thompson, Koo highlights the contingent nature of class formation, the role of human agency, and the role of discursive conditions in the making of working-class politics in South Korea. Although Koo does not explicitly mention it, this book indeed can be regarded as a study that exemplifies Ira Katznelson's integrative model for studying class formation. At the level of "structure," Koo delineates the distinctive features of peripheral Fordism in South Korea led by the state and chaebols. This export-oriented and urban-based industrialization ultimately conditioned certain "ways of life" for workers, who were culturally homogeneous female workers in the 1970s in light industries and male workers in the 1980s in heavy industries. Workers' homogeneity and the collective experiences of humiliation and bitterness produced particular "class dispositions," including a strong sense of justice, rather than just a sense of economic deprivation. Finally, their class dispositions burst into "collective action," primarily in the form of demands for "humane treatment."

To be sure, as Koo strongly argues, structural conditions do not automatically determine the formation of working-class politics. While it is a truism that human agency and culture are always working to make class formation an indeterminate phenomenon, Koo extends this insight in an original way. His central argument is that Korean working-class formation has always been closely associated with broader socio-political processes, particularly with a democratic social movement led by intellectuals and college students. In the 1970s, female workers' resentment developed into a trade-unionist movement in coordination with church organizations. In the 1980s, the minjung culture and, in particular, Marxism provided the ideological maps through which workers understood their situation and expressed their resentment via political action. In addition, Koo implies that only by locating these two seemingly discontinuous labour-led movements in broader political and cultural processes, are we able to understand that they were in fact interconnected. Although the female workers' struggles bore no directly visible fruits, it is important to recognize that the movements were eventually externalized and politicized beyond isolated union activities, which provided the cultural and organizational grounds for the militant labour politics of the next decade. Koo's argument therefore vindicates the thesis in labour history that class formation occurs in a contingent way, and simultaneously demonstrates the distinctive trajectory of Korean working-class formation.

I would make two points that might go beyond Koo's theoretical interests but that are not incompatible with his arguments. First, this book alludes to a radical disparity between structural conditions and identity formations, and focuses on the way work-based experiences are articulated with hegemonic discourses. The labour rhetoric in the 1970's was humanitarian in orientation due to workers' connections with church organizations. By the same token, as Koo shows, despite extremely patriarchal control of their labour, gender issues were never seriously raised by female workers because they had no interpretive framework to recognize them as such. Even so, institutional political exclusion of labour co-existed with some ideological inclusion of labour. Various nationalist languages purported to interpellate workers, such as "industrial worriers," were constitutive of workers' identities, which leads me to conclude that the developmentalist regimes until the 1980s were not entirely despotic.

Second, even though working-class formation in South Korea took a unique path, why are the outcomes — ideologies and strategies — getting similar to their predecessors in western Europe? As Koo argues, the formation of class identity may or may not occur. But if it occurs outside western Europe, is it supposed to follow the Western model to its final destination? If there is no universal and teleological path to class-identity formation, we may find the answer in the active role of culture, more specifically knowledge constitutive of social reality and class formation. As Koo clearly shows, the main discursive resources since the 1980s were minjung culture and socialist ideologies widely shared by intellectuals and students. Here we see again the hegemonic articulation, specifically through the "theory effect" or "concept-dependency" of social action.

Overall, this book is highly recommended. It is the overdue, first serious, comprehensive, and well-researched study on South Korean working-class formation available to English readers. For those who are interested in Korean political economy, I believe that this book will provide a story that is overlooked by the developmental state literature. For those who are interested in labour studies and industrial sociology, this book shows how theories on class formation can be wonderfully combined to illustrate a particular case.


Ou-Byung Chae University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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