South Korean revolutionary students

Don't know of any written accounts in English but when the state offered direct elections in response to the Great Strike of 1987, it kind of took the wind out of the students' sails. One of the more liberal demands had been for "democracy," and once they got it in the form of direct elections for the presidency in 1988 the "Two Kims" (Young-sam and Dae-jung) split the opposition vote and Roh Tae-roh, who had been part of the coup d'état in 1979 and was very close to military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, won and carried on the traditions of Chun's dictatorship and their mutual military background.

All this killed the student movement, which had the final nails in the coffin in the mid-1990s. Students had been clamoring for Roh and Chun to be prosecuted for the coup, the Kwangju Massacre, and their corruption when Kim Young-sam finally got elected in 1993. Students got their wish and the two were arrested and charged with mutiny and treason, with Chun sentenced to death and Roh to 22 1/2 years in prison in 1996. A year later, president Kim Young-sam pardoned them both.

But perhaps all that's misleading, because by the start of the 1990s Korean workers' wages had risen significantly and factory production was already being outsourced to cheaper labor markets in Southeast Asian, Central Asian (for a while, Uzbekistan was being called "Dawooistan" because of all the factories that now-defunct chaebol built there), and China.

Goldner and I know some of the same hakchul veterans (including my partner, who dropped out of university to work in factories in the mid-1980s and spent a few months in prison during the Great Strike), but I've been less convinced of their significance since my time in South Korea (during the mid- to late-1990s). Mostly because I've subsequently learned that although a few students may have led major strikes, the big difference was that it was they who wrote about the strikes and left the historical record. But they weren't the ones displaced from agricultural land, forced onto industrial estates at the fringes of cities, and thrust into sweated working conditions. Although students left their rather cushy and carefree lives at university to toil in factories for relatively short periods of time, after the movement died they often returned and finished their degrees and went on to graduate school, corporate jobs, or to run non-profits/NGOs. They weren't around to help when Korea started to deindustrialize and workers faced displacement again, for some the second time in their lives. The connection between the 1980s hakchul "turn to the working class" and class struggle today is zero. Sadly, they didn't leave any legacy, even a self-critical one.

But Goldner pretty much correctly details the hakchul process with the Minjung Movement; if I had to critique the account of a Western outsider on the history of Korea, it would be George Katsiaficas' fantasies about the 1980 Kwangju Uprising being parallel to the Paris Commune. I mostly got the same idea myself, having carefully read George Ogle's South Korea: Dissent Within the Economic Miracle, and would eagerly ask my newly-met Korean comrades about the "commune" in Kwangju. And I would universally get corrected, told that it was a cross-class "popular resistance" that began and ended with a massacre, and to stop reading my own cultural biases into events elsewhere in the world. But Katsiaficas doesn't see capitalism through a class lens and this is where his problem lies; he never met an anti-imperialist he didn't want to romanticize and celebrate.

vicent

Cheers hiero for the thoughtful account! Granted all their shortcomings, would you say they had a significant impact; similar to groups like STO, P.Operaio at the time?

I think from his post above it seems like he is saying no…

In terms of Potere Operaio being "similar", I haven't heard about them ever saying anything like students should get jobs in factories. Is that the case?

There's a section specifically on this alliance in Hagen Koo's book Culture and Politics of Class Formation
(mentioned by Hieronymous in another thread). It also contains two detailed profiles of student-turned-workers.

https://libcom.org/history/workers-students-hagen-koo