Crisis of the Left and Labor Movement

Within the past decade, South Korea has seen two presidential impeachments. Hundreds of thousands poured into the streets to protest corruption, protect democratic rights, get decent jobs with less brutal exploitation and fewer injuries, win greater gender equality and more. The ruling elite was in disarray and the masses no longer wanted to be ruled in the same way. Yet in 2017 and again this year, the capitalist ruling class was able to stabilize the situation and the needs of the people were betrayed.

The presidential office goes back and forth between conservative and liberal, but the core problems remain. Why? Because the labor and leftist forces in the protest movements never confronted the main source of the problem: South Korea’s alliance with and subordination to U.S. imperialism. Instead, popular anger against right-wing reaction was channeled into support for the Democratic Party, which is itself wedded to the U.S. alliance. Today, as the labor leadership backs the Lee Jae-myung government, protests have been demobilized. As a result, workers and the oppressed are in a much weaker position to defend themselves in the face of Trump’s ever-growing worldwide rampage.

This first issue of Korean Spartacist provides a Marxist perspective on crucial issues facing the South Korean left and labor movement. Its publication coincides with major changes in the world situation as the U.S. tears apart the previous liberal order to salvage its decaying hegemony and confront China, its chief global rival. Trump is wielding tariffs and trade restrictions as weapons to shore up the U.S.’s position as the pre-eminent global power, making allies and enemies alike pay for America’s debt. As a key frontline state in East Asia, South Korea is expected to bow to Washington’s dictates, both economically and militarily.

The fealty of South Korea’s rulers to the U.S. was on full display during Lee Jae-myung’s late August visit to the White House. Flanked by top chaebol capitalists, the Democratic Party president lauded Trump as a “peacemaker” and backed the “modernization” of the U.S.-South Korea military alliance against China. On the economic side, he pledged to meet Trump’s demand for an astronomical $350 billion in South Korean investment in the U.S. in exchange for a tariff reduction. Such measures would be devastating for South Korean workers, like the IMF-dictated austerity attacks that followed the 1997 financial crisis. The price the working masses will pay to maintain the U.S. alliance is higher costs, greater exploitation, harsher repression and increased military tension.

The Left Must Reorient!

The left in South Korea is fragmented into multiple competing organizations and movements. Typically, they make one (or both) of two serious errors. Either the struggle against U.S. imperialism is simply dismissed or minimized or anti-imperialist rhetoric is combined with support to the liberal wing of South Korean capitalism, via the Democratic Party or smaller “progressive” parties (Justice Party, Progressive Party, etc.). Both perspectives are a dead end. Our statements on the mass protests against Yoon Suk-yeol, issued shortly after the abortive December 2024 coup and just before the June presidential election, address this in more detail.

The urgent task for the South Korean left and labor movement is to reorient politically: to provide a socialist alternative to the subordination to U.S. imperialism, which can only come through a complete break with all wings of the South Korean capitalists. This is the opposite of what happened in the June election, when most of the jucheist national-liberation forces called for votes to Lee Jae-myung. Shamefully, two self-professed Trotskyist groups—Workers Solidarity and the Bolshevik Group—also supported the Democratic Party candidate. This was a flagrant betrayal of Marxism and the interests of the working class.

The top leadership of the KCTU also pushed to support the Democratic Party, but was opposed by others in the union. Now the KCTU is participating in the government’s “social dialogue” alongside representatives of the chaebol bosses, claiming this is necessary to “restore trust between the government and the labor community.” Moreover, it openly expresses its hopes for “the success of the Lee Jae-myung government.”

On the one hand, the union leaders condemn the “deepening” of South Korea’s “subordination to the U.S.”; on the other, they back a government that supports the U.S. alliance. And while the Democratic Party may enact occasional reforms in the workers’ interests, like the yellow envelope law, it will always take the side of Hyundai, Samsung and the other big-business exploiters on fundamental issues. The workers movement cannot take a single step forward in alliance with this capitalist party.

Oppose the U.S. Drive Against China, North Korea!

Two of the larger left-wing groups in South Korea, Workers Solidarity and March to Socialism, do decry Lee Jae-myung’s overt capitulations to Trump and the KCTU’s support to his regime. In the case of Workers Solidarity, opposition to Lee Jae-myung is gross hypocrisy, since they called to elect him! But neither group puts front and center the call to break the U.S. alliance, the precondition for advancing the workers’ interests.

From the start, the purpose of this alliance has been to destroy the workers states in the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea. China was instrumental in defeating the American drive to take over the entire peninsula in the Korean War, during which Workers Solidarity’s precursors refused to take a side against U.S. imperialism. Today, instead of seeking an alliance with the Chinese working class and welcoming China’s economic and military development, March to Socialism and Workers Solidarity equate China with the U.S. as imperialist powers vying for dominance amid the current global turmoil.

Articles elsewhere in this issue explain in depth why this position is false, while laying out a revolutionary perspective against the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats in Beijing. It is not China that has military bases in South Korea and elsewhere in the Pacific region. It is the U.S. that has devastated huge swaths of the world and starves the Global South, using the World Bank, IMF and so on. One has only to look at the facts to see that talk of Chinese imperialism and hegemony can only lead to capitulation to the status quo of U.S. rule, and therefore to the South Korean state which it props up. Such positions disorient the working class and direct it away from its tasks.

While understanding that U.S. imperialism is the main enemy, various jucheist forces in the South claim the Kim Jong-un regime in North Korea points a way forward. Some have been jailed for their activities against the U.S. alliance and U.S. bases. But the bureaucrats who rule in Pyongyang, like their counterparts in Beijing, are not guided by international class struggle. This is painfully obvious when one looks at the genocide in Gaza. Genuinely revolutionary governments in China and North Korea would send weapons to aid Palestinian fighters against the imperialists and Zionists. This would advance the liberation of the oppressed in West Asia and hamper the U.S. drive to strangle the workers states in East Asia.

Instead, North Korea has sent its soldiers to be used by the Russian chauvinist Putin on the killing fields of Ukraine. Pyongyang’s actions are antithetical to building workers’ unity against imperialism. The war is about which country—the U.S. or Russia—will continue to oppress Ukraine, and it will only have a progressive outcome if the soldiers and workers on both sides turn against their rulers.

The U.S. offensive in East Asia can only be blocked by linking arms with the workers of the world, not with capitalist states in the region and beyond. The left must champion the revolutionary reunification of Korea: for the working class to take the lead on both sides of the DMZ, expropriating the South Korean capitalists and kicking out the Stalinist bureaucracy in the North.

A Marxist Road Forward

The purpose of this journal is to help clarify the problems faced by Marxists, in South Korea and beyond. This is not an abstract theoretical exercise. The goal of the International Communist League is to unite fighters for socialism around a revolutionary program so that together we can become a force to be reckoned with in the struggles to come.

In South Korea, that means building a revolutionary pole capable of uniting workers, women, youth, minorities and all the oppressed in struggle against U.S. imperialism and the domestic exploiters. A perfect time to have done this was during the months of mass protests against Yoon Suk-yeol’s coup attempt. But the left and labor leaders squandered the opportunity, thanks to their false perspectives.

Now, there is no time to waste. To withstand the coming shocks, it is necessary to link the struggle to defend jobs to that of organizing the unorganized, fighting for women’s liberation, opposing militarization and conscription. A struggle to mobilize the working masses in a common front against imperialism and the South Korean capitalists would inspire other workers under the U.S. boot, such as in the Philippines, and beyond to Japan and the U.S. itself. The stakes are huge: either a proletarian revolutionary leadership will come to the fore, or U.S. imperialism will continue on its path to destroy the world.