After World War II, Korea plunged into the process of reconstruction and a second phase of industrialisation in a way that appeared to suit international demands in a climate of Cox’s alleged American hegemony.
The form of state in charge of Korean development during this time period can certainly be seen as a developmentalist state. Corporatism is a classic component of developmentalism, and again, the relationship between chaebols and the public sector provided a basis for much of South Korean economic development and has retained a high level of influence even in present day circumstances. Corporatism comes about when a ruler seeks to incorporate a wider range of voices into development plans, i.e.
civil society and business, but the state is typically not as concerned with labour or the employed as it is with management. The developmental state model places the state in complete command of labour relations and often involves intimate business/political relationships of support.
Internationally, there appear to have been two powerful forms of state during the world order of Pax Americana, the mixed economic state, and the neomercantilist developmental state. This phenomenon did not bypass South Korea, which can be named within the latter category. The neo- mercantilist state is similar to pre-war Italian fascism in that capitalist development is enacted via passive revolution. The Korean state controlled labour relations and after 1947 with the ban of the NTUC, this was made official by the AMG who governed alongside Rhee until 1949.
Trade unions were associated with Communist principles and in the Cold War climate were not looked upon favourably. President Rhee was a staunch anti-Communist and did not hide his prejudices. Despite ideological consensus evident in the elite echelons, I can argue that South Korea was not integrated into the supposedly hegemonic Pax Americana due to the throttling of workers’ representation by way of independent unions in this era of state-led economic development.
War, Korean government and business elites aimed to attract investment and reconstruction aid from the international community of speculators and critics with a promise of rapid industrialisation. I argue that in the process, those in command of reconstruction and later economic develop- ment, completely overlooked the voice of workers and led Korea through another period of passive revolution using tactics of trasformismo.
At the time of the 1953 armistice with the North, President Rhee led Korea into a second round of modernisation. During his presidency (1948–60), Rhee strove to match his nation’s global status with Japan and the West. Once again, with American funding and through considerable worker oppression, Rhee was able to autocratically apply an import- substitute strategy for this new round of industrialisation.
Post-war Restructuring: President Rhee’s Form of State
But who was this powerful ‘Oriental bargainer’ with such strong ties to the West? The American CIA composed the first personality study of its kind about a non-American leader to reveal the psyche and character of President Rhee. The study states: ‘the danger exists that Rhee’s inflated ego may lead him into action disastrous or at least highly embarrassing to the new Korean government and to the interests of the USA’ (CIA 1948).
Rhee’s government was in fact a template of Choson dynasty politics during which time the state and society were in almost constant conflict.
The ‘king’ and ‘legislature’ of this first President’s Republic behaved in a manner reminiscent of landed nobles who avoided accountability and a welfare role toward labour. Rhee would do whatever it took to create a
‘full-blown, self-reliant industrial base with steel, chemicals, machine tools and the electric energy to run them’ (Cumings 1997: 305), even if it took a complete oversight to the needs of workers. Nonetheless, Rhee was competitive, sharp, and high spirited, ideal attitudes for the cut-throat nature of capitalism.
After 1953, Korean economic policy was predominantly focussed on restructuring a war-torn, deteriorated infrastructure. President Rhee led the country through this initial period of restructure with considerable American and UN assistance. The UN Korea Reconstruction Agency encouraged Rhee to apply a rationalised program of import substitution and infrastructural development, and in order to achieve this, he would need to stabilise the exchange rate. This did not happen, and Rhee was ousted from office after it was discovered he had rigged the elections that kept him in office for 12 total years and had conducted various acts of
fraud and corruption. Huge demonstrations erupted in the streets of Seoul when this was revealed. Students and workers formed alliances in antagonism to the government, demanding impeachment. After a wide- spread arraignment and his ousting, in 1960 a popular election brought Mr Chang, Myeon to presidency. This fleeting attempt for complete democratisation of the Korean government was unsuccessful however, as one year after the election a military coup led by General Park, Chung Hee dismissed Chang, and the General appointed himself President. Thus began the next era of authoritarian developmentalism of South Korea.
Second Developmental Dictator: President Park
General Park ‘was a Japanese’ (Moon and Nishino 2002: 6); indeed, at his death, the Ambassador Okazaki postulated that Park was ‘the last soldier of Imperial Japan’ (Okazaki 1984: 116). Park’s name had been Takagi Masao during occupation and he had trained at the Japanese Imperial Military Academy. Perhaps as a result, his development plans intricately reflected Japanese industrial policy and Moon and Nishino (2002: 7) state that Park’s:
… leadership style … [was] greatly affected by his exposure to Japan, Japanese imperial education … his preoccupation with com- mand and obedience, emphasis on details, accuracy and precision, decisiveness, and overall militaristic mentality were such products of such pattern of political socialisation.
Thus the ‘Japanese’ man took power and began to organise his country’s development, which would turn into a solid eighteen years of rapid, state- led development. President Park’s military government has been called a developmental state, and the ‘miracle on the Han’ is often attributed to the state’s control of the economy.
While President Rhee had been an autocratic ruler, Park started his period of rule with a revolutionary debut, and installed a Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) to seek to uproot what he called, with American inspiration, ‘corruption’. Park rearranged all former President Rhee’s leftover legal and political institutions and effectively centralised all power for economic decision-making to a powerful new Economic Planning Board (EPB). This regime soon became an icon of develop- mental authoritarianism led by a military government which thoroughly reflected his predecessor’s era.
Park proceeded to censor the press and completely banned political parties, political organisations and unions, but despite these clearly repressive acts, he was not wholly unpopular and in 1963 announced he would hold a national referendum for continued military rule. His
‘Democratic Republican Party’ was narrowly successful. President Park thus began a series of industrialisation strategies at the advice of the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), in the form of four Five-Year Economic Development Plans scheduled for 1962–6, 1967–71, 1972–6, and 1977–81.
During Park’s first Development Plan, only unions that worked in cooperation with Park’s strategies were allowed to operate. Park’s government closely monitored and regulated the USA-created ‘yellow’
union, the FKTU, and in 1961 revised the Labour Dispute Conciliation Law, Labour Committee Law and the Trade Union Act to restrict political activities of multiple unions. The Labour Management Council was formed to promote unions’ co-operation with the state.
In the 1960s and early 70s, Korea experienced both accelerated economic growth and a rapid process of political realignment. In 1972, President Park’s government wrote the yusin (revitalization) constitution, and simultaneously overthrew his own Party, which he had founded in 1963. The yusin constitution was ratified under martial law, and effectively increased presidential power. The government was thus entitled to use martial law or garrison decree to respond to political unrest. From 1961 and 1979, martial law was affected eight times. For example on October 15, 1971 student protests sparked garrison decree and nearly 2,000 students were arrested. On October 17, 1972, nearly exactly one year later, Park proclaimed martial law. He also shut down the National Assembly, and arrested several opposition leaders (FAS 1999).
Koo (2001: 44–5) writes that the identity and class-consciousness of workers developed most prominently throughout the 1960s as a result of rapid industrial transformation and the impact this had on their day to day lives. The haste of transformation was ‘remarkable’ and at the expense of rural sectors forced farmers to become industrial wage workers and to move to city areas in droves. Manufacturing, however, was condensed to a few cities and the majority of workers were hired by large businesses such as the chaebol rather than in small and medium size businesses. The identity of the working emerged from a relatively homogeneous set of people who shared social background, demographic status, and skill level. Many workers were young women from rural families. Workers with a minimal
amount of skill and with common levels of education and training were a classic feature of the Fordist mode of production. Until the 1980s, when
‘industrial upgrading’ of the economy began to differentiate labour, the working class shared a strikingly similar set of personal characteristics, work environments and conditions. Thus it is appropriate to discuss worker consciousness in relation to workers’ role in production.
Park’s most profitable industrialisation scheme was the Heavy- Chemical Industry (HCI) Promotion Plan. The early 1970s was marked by
‘remarkable economic performance’ (Moon 1999: 4), a result of govern- ment emphasis on export, aggressive industrialisation, and an improved balance of payments. Korea’s ‘catch-up’ style of industrialisation was led by a developmental state, meaning that the state was intimately involved in adjusting both the market and the infrastructure of the country’s economy (Amsden 1992). The HCI began in 1973 and during the 1970s the Park government supported the investment of private companies in develop- ment of factories and facilities for heavy industries. The government borrowed heavily from foreign sources in order to provide capital for its development initiatives.
During the 1970s the chaebol expanded rapidly at the direction and subsidisation of the government. Industrial ‘priorities’ were heavy machinery, non-ferrous materials, petrochemicals, steel, electronics, and shipbuilding. A corporatist government/business relations in South Korea prevailed, a relationship that excluded the voice of labour. The global historical bloc of Neoliberalism began, meaning that the hegemony of Pax Americana was in decline. The Park government however continued to direct a passive revolution.
In the 1970s, workers experienced unequal income distribution, few rewards for dirty and dangerous work, and a feeling of deprivation despite working for the fastest growing economy of the region. Union members began to fight with Union leaders and speak out against various new policies, discussed below. This occurred not only in the national and industrial peak organisations but also at the enterprise level. In Korea, income share in the lowest percentile decreased from 18.9 per cent at the beginning of the decade to 15.3 per cent in 1980. In the higher levels of income, on the other hand, income substantially increased. Whilst this figure rested at 43 per cent in the early part of the 1970s the top 20 per cent of incomes raised to 46.9 per cent by 1980.
The Special Act for National Security of 1971 allowed the KCIA and police liberty to oppress any labour uprising and to contain independent
trade unions. But perhaps the most extreme reaction to these oppressions was the suicide of Chun, Taeil in the same year. The textile worker lit himself on fire in front of one of the well-known sweatshops in the centre of Seoul, in protest to the dire working conditions and the government’s violation of the Labour Standards Act.
So during Pax Americana and into the era of Neoliberalism, a series of developmental regimes fashioned Korea’s semi-peripheral status in the global economy. Korea’s economy flourished very quickly and awed international speculators for several years. Despite constant labour protest, strikes, worker suicides and student uprisings, oppressed groups were not able to stop the daily atrocities that forced industrialisation accrued. So the first condition for passive revolution was maintained.
Trasformismo during Developmental Dictatorships
To keep workers from gaining power, which could have slowed the pace of development, elites resorted to trasformismo through building a managed solidarity between workers via an appeal to nationalist sentiment. From 1948–79, as has been discussed, two military bureaucratic presidents of Rhee, Syngman and Park, Chung Hee facilitated and directed modernis- ation under a regime of developmental paternalism, a form of state that is based on the idea that governments have a moral responsibility to the public. Both presidents appealed to workers’ common sense regarding hard work and sacrifice for national prosperity and post-war recon- struction. Nationalism can reduce the risk of political dissent; it has the capacity to join opposing forces and proselytises a development ideology.
This is a form of trasformismo, because it aids in ‘revolution-restoration’;
similar to what Gramsci noted in the formation of the Italian State as parties became closely aligned due to molecular changes of ideologies (Gramsci, Risorgimento: 157 in PN: 58).
But the appeal to common sense was not the only form of trasformismo evident during this time. President Rhee relied on UN assistance and US aid for reconstruction, and the USA took a paternal role as well over Korean education, making it look as though it would extend aid not in just financial terms but also in terms of public welfare. During Rhee’s term of presidency, the United States took over the Education Bureau and formed an Educational Council. The ‘beautiful imperialis[ts]’ (Shambaugh 1993) reached out to Korea and helped the government appeal to the larger masses. Pro-modernisation commentators welcomed the ‘beautiful’ anti- Communist imperialists from the USA whose rhetoric claimed to have
rescued Korea from the Japanese and saved South Korea from the Communism of the North, and US-led education reflected these convictions. ‘Doing good for others’ was the appeal to common sense that could support American and later IMF-directed construction of the Republic of Korea (KRIVET 1999: 114). Education institutions promoted the ideologically loaded slogans ‘doing it for yourself’, and ‘working industriously’. A single-form system of education was introduced at this time, which was intended to provide an alternative to the Japanese totalitarian system. In the single-form system, vocationally trained students were not meant to be differentiated socially from students in the humanities, in the formal education system. An attempt to bring vocational training to the social status level of formal education is a form of trasformismo because it blurs social divisions and superficially empowers workers socially. In fact, vocationally trained individuals were not attributed the same level of social esteem as was associated with those educated in a formal institution. Later, during Park’s era of leadership, within every vocational school and training centre the phrase ‘skilled workers are the standard bearer of the modernisation of our country’ was posted for trainees to read. Again, this is an appeal to workers’ common sense regarding modernisation, ideas portrayed as though modernisation and convergence were to be the only options for their country’s survival in times of global hegemonic struggle.
President Park envisioned four 5-year Economic Development Plans to accompany his accumulation strategy of export-led industrialisation.
The first 5-year Plan encouraged guided capitalism, and actually stated that this ‘economic system will be a form of “guided capitalism” … in which the government will either directly participate in or indirectly render guidance to the basic industries and other important fields’ (49). The government thus committed itself to guiding the material restructuring of production, with high rates of cooperation from chaebols, whose growth from small business status to large-scale conglomerates between the 1940s and 1970s enabled Park’s industrialisation strategies.
During Park’s first Plan (1962–66), more than 80 per cent of exports were of forestry and fishery products, agricultural products, and raw ores.
36 per cent of investment went toward infrastructure, and labour intensive industries of footwear and textiles were promoted and sustained by cheap labour, which was, and is still one of Korea’s most fruitful resources. Ten of the largest chaebols were diversified toward the Park government’s policies and were led to manufacture light industries such as electronic
appliances for domestic use and garments. The government extended its range of control by the promotion of training, according to a plan to train 8,000 workers, a number which quickly expanded to 9,000, then 10,000 individuals who would receive training over 18 months’ time (KRIVET 1999: 119). In 1964, a vocational training bill was passed by the Ministry of Labour (MOL) that stressed the following points:
… the securing of labour power (skill, talent) in terms of quality and quantity is the one and only economic policy … the authorisation and management of the results of vocational training by the state is appropriate in terms of skill management and will aid in the improvement of worker awareness … the objective is to plan job improvement at the same time as economic development through the nurturing of skilled workers necessary for industry and other businesses by integrating the former job stability law and the skill acquisition system of a workers standard law.
These guidelines indicate the governments’ direct leadership over the accumulation of industrial and manufacturing labour power. Amsden (1989: 63, 64) suggests that:
The wheeling and dealing, horsetrading, and trafficking that characterised this process were reminiscent of the reciprocity that characterised relations between the state and the privileged classes under dynastic rule … the state used its power to discipline not just workers but the owners and managers of capital as well.
During the second Plan, light industries remained key to export strategies, but heavy and chemical industries were introduced, leading to the restructuring of some chaebols toward this strategy. New types of skills in the workplace were needed to accommodate changes, so the government restructured VET ‘in order to supply the manpower necessary’ for Park’s Plans (KRIVET/NCVER 2001: 57). In 1967, at the beginning of Park’s second economic plan (1967–71), the face of VET changed when the government formed a publicly funded Central Vocational Training Centre, with financial and supervisory aid from the UNDP and the ILO. Changes to VET were widespread, and most formal vocational education was soon provided directly within the state curriculum and was systematised and standardised in the 1960s. This change was the beginning of the
government’s project to internationalise worker VET programmes, and within the conditions of passive revolution was complimentary to, and not transformative of its overall political and economic development strategies.
A license-training process was implemented at this time and a basic law for vocational training in 1976 required large companies in ‘certain industries’ to provide in-plant training (KRIVET 1999: 131). In 1974, academic high schools with specialised vocational training programs were introduced for students who aimed to enter the labour force after graduation. Vocational high schools also provided students training that almost guaranteed work after completing the chosen course. These unique high schools were ‘strategically established and supported by the central government as part of the plan to build a strong industrial state’
(KRIVET/NCVER 2000: 9). Harbison (1961) encouraged NICs in the 1960s to develop a workforce capable of dealing with rapid modernisation and accelerated growth, despite the hazards that modernisation could pose to economies such as a labour surplus of unskilled workers or on the other hand, a surplus of unemployed intellectuals. To avoid these problems in human resources, Harbison recommended an emphasis on training of manpower, creation of incentives, and the provision of rational education. Incentives:
… encourage men and women to prepare for and engage in the kinds of productive activity which are needed for accelerated growth. To accomplish this, the compensation of an individual should be related to the importance of his job in the modernising society.
[italics included by present author] (1961: 24) Harbison advocated higher remuneration for jobs most needed to further the programme of modernisation. Experts like Harbison indicate that the formation of organic intellectuals around a development programme is not a new phenomenon of industrialisation, but is a prescription for success according to the measures of capitalist integration.
In terms of expectations placed on workers, Park’s economic system required ‘brutally long working hours, high rates of savings and investment, and a hierarchical, authoritarian system that rewarded those who succeeded and punished those who did not co-operate’ (45). One of his dramatic speeches encouraged workers to take on the strenuous responsibility of fighting for a historic goal: ‘We must work. One cannot