John Minns
The title of this chapter brings to mind E.P. Thompson’s pathbreaking 1963 work “The Making of the English Working Class”. Recalling that immense contribution in the title means that, for the purposes of modesty, as well as clarity, it is necessary to make clear what this chapter is and is not.
It is not an attempt, even briefly, to sketch a history of the South Korean working class. Thompson’s work itself is not a comprehensive history of the early English working class. It is a history of the growth of their class consciousness; an attempt to trace workers’ concept of themselves as a distinct class and of other classes in relation to them. In doing so, Thompson is keenly aware that consciousness is never a simple reflection of class interest. Rather it develops in a complex process by which material interest interacts with ideas, institutions and values; in one sense of the word, with culture.
The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men [sic] are born – or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms.1
The English factory operative, craftsman or miner of the late eighteenth century had few traditions, values or institutions which were distinctly the creation of the working class. No sizeable working class had existed before him or her which might have created them. So inevitably, many of the first “cultural terms” which are used to handle these new class “experiences” were derived from the preindustrial society in which they grew up and were socialized.
The same is the case with all “new” working classes. Yet while there are many studies of working class consciousness in developed capitalist societies, much less attention has been paid to class consciousness in Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) where the transformation of farmers into workers has been spectacularly rapid in the last three or four decades. It is easy to forget that England, in the period of the “making” of its working class, was a NIC. Indeed, it was the first.
This chapter is not an attempt to draw close parallels between the development of different working classes across different centuries and continents – the English in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the Korean in the last few decades. On the contrary, much of the point of Thompson’s work was to deny that there was a single, predictable and triumphal march of a newly formed proletariat to a “high” level of class consciousness. Unexpected ideas occupy the minds of these workers. Some are drawn from peasant struggles against oppression, some from real or imagined national history, others from religious dogma. They mingle with the emerging realization of workers that their ways of life, the foes they face and the weapons they have to hand are different from those of their forebears. The notion that they are being dealt with unfairly and the possibilities inherent in the great potential power of their position is filtered through these ideas.
Class consciousness, in Thompson’s history, veers this way and that and sometimes even turns back the way it had come. Rather than a highly structured, almost inevitable process, Thompson emphasizes agency – the activity of the workers themselves – and the continuity of, often pre-capitalist, national and regional ideologies and popular traditions which precede the physical formation of the working class itself.
Such local traditions, by their nature, differ greatly from one another. Regional differences are, if anything, more important in pre-industrial societies because the regional cultures of such societies are more varied than those of industrialized societies with their ubiquitous and highly standardized systems of communications, production and consumption. That being so, comparisons, especially between working classes in the early stages of their “making”, can be as misleading as they are useful.
However, Thompson’s insights about the English working class may alert us to a number of matters in the development of class consciousness of which it is useful to take note in dealing with the development of other working classes. Three such are: the continuity or discontinuity of labouring traditions; pre-industrial, possibly folkloric, customs, traditions and ideas which help to shape early working class consciousness; and the role of religious institutions and ideas.
For at least one part of the 1980s, and through some of the 1990s as well, the South Korean working class was perhaps the most militant in the world. Mostly under conditions of severe repression it conducted, between 1987 and 1990, the most widespread campaign of industrial militancy anywhere in the previous quarter of a century. Furthermore, this activity and militancy had enormous political ramifications. To the extent that there has been an important democratic transformation of South Korea it was the working class and, significantly, students and intellectuals politically oriented towards the working class, who played a huge part in it.
Thompson’s working class was, by and large, new. But industrial capitalism in England was preceded by a long period of small-scale manufacture. Thus the growing working class of the late eighteenth century had at least some traditions of a labouring class on which to draw. It had, to an extent, absorbed the experience of the artisan, journeyman, apprentice and cottage worker (the outworker of the eighteenth century).2 Thus one can find a woolcombers’ union ticket of 1838 which recalls similar tickets produced by woolcombers as early as 1700.3 Early English unionism owes much to this tradition of a labouring poor engaged in small-scale manufacture.
Korea also has a tradition of working class organization and activism which stretches back before the Second World War. However, these organizations, along with their legacy of ideas and even individual activists, were destroyed in the post-war period.
As in many countries which had been occupied by defeated powers, the end of the Second World War left a power vacuum in Korea. The ruling elites had mostly been compromised by the occupation and they and the police were widely regarded as collaborators. Resistance to the Japanese had been dominated by the left.
With the Japanese surrender, a People’s Republic of Korea was established with the Communist Party (CPKI) as its backbone and with its capital in Seoul.4 The situation remained complex and unstable through 1945 and much of 1946. Then in autumn 1946 there began a peasant and working class upsurge known as the Autumn Harvest Risings. Over 250,000 workers took part, calling for economic improvements and also making a revolutionary demand – the transfer of power to the People’s Committees.5 More than 200 policemen – considered to be collaborators and servants of the landlord class – were killed.6 Workers occupied factories throughout the country, in some cases taking them over and contracting out managerial positions to those with the necessary expertise.7 But the risings were defeated. The left was the big loser. With the unions crushed, membership fell from 553,408 to just 2,465 in a few years.8 The smashing of the risings meant that peasants and workers effectively lost the organizations which had defended their interests.
Even such a calamity might have left behind a tradition, at least in the underground. But the Korean War of 1950–3 completed the task of the destruction of this impressive working class movement. Physically, the working class was most damaged by the devastation of the industrial and capital base of the country.9 In Seoul over 80 per cent of industry, public utilities and transport facilities and over half the dwellings were destroyed. Nationwide 68 per cent of factories lay in ruins and industrial production dropped 52 per cent between 1949 and 1951 alone.10
Troops of the Republic of Korea routinely executed suspected leftists and northern sympathizers before they were forced to retreat southward and later when retaking areas occupied by the north. Tens of thousands were murdered; one report suggests 29,000 in Seoul alone.11 The war forced most radicals who survived to flee to the north to escape from the terror initiatedby the government of Syngman Rhee.12
through kidnapping, murder, and defection during North Korean occupation, the war served to destroy the final remnants of the moderate and Left-leaning leadership that had opposed Rhee before independence. It also delivered the final blow to the Left in South Korea.13
A student revolution against Rhee in 1960 gave workers a brief chance to assert themselves independently of the government – but this changed dramatically after the military coup of 16 May 1961 which brought General Park Chung-Hee to power. A union federation – the FKTU – was allowed to work openly. But it was effectively government controlled, its officials bought and paid for. In addition a battery of anti-union legislation introduced by Park between 1961 and his assassination in 1979 made industrial action illegal. The Korean CIA infiltrated hundreds of agents into factories to identify militants and to play a role in FKTU elections. To win office at the national level without KCIA support was practically impossible.14
Thus when rapid industrialization from about the mid-1960s began to create a large working class, it had few traditions or memories of the post-war militancy – even fewer than were left to the English working class of the eighteenth century.
Proletarianization was much faster in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas, in England, until at least the 1830s, factory workers were a minority of the workforce, even in “leading-edge” industries such as weaving, in South Korea, factories and large firms became the core of industry within half a decade. The industrial workforce alone rose from 10 per cent of the labour force in 1965 to 23 per cent in 1983. The service workforce increased from 31 to 47 per cent in the same period. Farm labour fell from 65 per cent in the early 1960s to 38 per cent in early 1980s.15
Moreover, it was, at first, a workforce of very young, often female, rural migrants, to whom the militant tradition of Chun Pyung was completely unknown. About 30 per cent of the employed workforce in the 1960s were young women, typically aged 14–24 and employed in textiles and related industries and other light manufacturing.16 Even if some older activists had survived the purges of the 1940s and 1950s, the level of repression under the Park regime made impossible any dissemination of the Chun Pyung tradition to this new group of workers.
Lacking the ways of thinking about society which develop in working classes over time, new working classes commonly reach back to pre-industrial traditions and ideas with which to understand their situation.17
In the English context, notions such as the “Freeborn Englishman” were important; the idea that at some point English people had been free and were entitled to liberty as their right of birth. It is a belief which long predates the English working class and is not necessarily even the product of subaltern classes at all. Yet it took on real importance as a way for workers to interpret the situation in which they found themselves. Thompson writes:
In the contest between 1792 and 1836 the artisans and workers made this tradition [of the “freeborn Englishman”] peculiarly their own, adding to the claim for free speech and thought their own claim for the untrammeled propagation, in the cheapest possible form, of the products of this thought.18
Such traditions are not simply historical hangovers, stubbornly outliving the circumstances from which they sprang. Rather they are a result of a process of selection and reinvention. Some remnants of the pre-capitalist past are discarded, others come to greater prominence. In some cases old ideas are retained, but are given new content as a result of the lived class experience of workers. In others an “invention of tradition” takes place.
In Korea, old notions of popular democracy and nationalist egalitarianism, summed up by the word minjung, come to play a similar and crucial role in the workers’ movement of the 1970s and 1980s – precisely at the key point in the formation of the independent labour movement.
Minjung literally means “people”, but it has connotations of the popular will and of an oppressed community; much as the word “pueblo” is sometimes used in Spanish-speaking Latin America. As the term came to be used in the 1970s it suggested that the minjung are:
Koreans, predominantly workers in agriculture and urban industries, who retained the values and sentiments of the Korean masses in the face of militaristic rule and cultural and economic systems imposed directly or otherwise by foreign governments or interests, along with those among intellectuals, writers, politicians or professionals who have supported their aspirations.19
The idea of minjung is especially connected to the Tonghak, or Eastern Learning, a “nativistic” movement which began in the early 1860s in response to the growth of Western influence in Korean politics and culture. By 1894, Tonghak peasant rebels in the south-west were in open revolt. They were finally defeated by the Korean government and Japanese troops.20
The rebellion was simultaneously nationalist and populist – linking the struggle against foreign incursion to the demand for improvements in the people’s welfare.21 Resistance to Japanese colonial control over Korea from 1910 was considered a battle by the suffering minjung, as is resistance to the division of Korea, and to great power (especially US and Japanese) involvement in the country.
Minjung finds an echo in Thompson’s work in ideas such as the “Norman Yoke”. Common amongst working people in Thompson’s period was the belief that there had been a period of “English freedom before the time of the ‘Norman bastard [William the Conqueror] and his armed banditti’”22. According to the myth, a foreign aristocracy imposed itself on ordinary English people in 1066, usurping their ancient liberties and impoverishing them materially.
This form of working class radicalism looks back to an idealized past, as well as forward to a just future. It is aimed at rallying workers but it reveres the poor, including the small proprietor (with his own field or his own loom), as a whole. It is nationalist – but not only nationalist. Moreover it casts the contemporary class struggle in cultural terms; as a struggle for “old English times, old English fare, old English holidays” as well as “abundance”. It is a struggle against oppression partly expressed in cultural terms.
Thus, as Thompson points out, it is possible to have a rebellious traditional culture.23 Whether that culture is truly representative of what happened in the past, or is distorted or invented for the political ends of later times is not the point. The point is that new working class movements, lacking clear traditions from their own class, made these other traditions peculiarly their own. Minjung ideology played a similar role in newly industrializing Korea.
Students and intellectuals were commonly considered part of the minjung. This reflects the fact that, especially under the increased repression after the imposition of the authoritarian Yushin constitution in 1972, many opponents of the regime, including students, writers, journalists and church leaders, sought to reach out to and mobilize workers and peasants.24 As in eighteenth century England, the most prominent champions of the working class, such as the proprietors of the “unstamped press”, were not workers themselves at all but small business people, preachers or independent craftsmen.
In the hands of intellectuals, minjung forms of sociology, literature, theology and art were developed.25 On university campuses in the 1980s it was common to see students performing revived peasant music, dance and drama.26 Shamanist rituals – considered the native “folk” religion of the Korean masses – were often performed at demonstrations.
The mask-dance drama, which had originally evolved from harvest ceremonies, has always been an important form of cultural expression in Korea. In the 1980s it was taken over by the proponents of minjung. Minjung activists felt “a sense of mission – to revive the lost art of the people and return it to them”.27 This idea of going back to the people, in the Korean context, often meant the use of cultural forms derived from peasant life, combined with a practical orientation to the industrial working class. In the 1970s and 1980s, an estimated 3,000 or more students took jobs in industry with the explicit aim of helping to organize independent unions.28 In one year alone, 1985–6, the police claimed to have unmasked 671 such agitators.29
Intellectuals influenced by minjung ideas increasingly oriented their work towards the labour movement and risked a great deal in doing so. But the nationalist element of minjung could also be appropriated by the regime. And folk culture was not necessarily the preserve of opponents of the government–chaebol alliance. They could be used by the right for its own purposes. Eric Hobsbawm warns that the culture of exploited classes is never developed by them alone.
The world of the poor, however, elaborate, self-contained, and separate, is a subaltern and therefore in some sense incomplete world, for it normally takes for granted the existence of the general framework of those who have hegemony, or at any rate its inability for most of the time to do much about it. It accepts their hegemony, even when it challenges some of its implications because largely it has to.30
The nationalist element in minjung ideas was particularly prone to incorporation by the government. The military or ex-military men, who formed the core of governments between 1961 and 1992 also styled themselves nationalists – determined to develop the country to prevent dependency. “National” culture was contested. Government funds were poured into the discovery, preservation and dissemination of popular (folk) culture throughout the worst periods of dictatorship.31
Similarly, at the time of the “making” of the English working class, popular notions of the Englishman’s “birthright” could inspire right-wing, “Church and King” mobs to attack radicals, although the same ideas were held by the radicals themselves.
In any case, minjung appealed to workers with no working class tradition, with little history as workers and with strong collective memories of the countryside. By the middle 1980s, large sections of the working class had considerable experience of their own in battles against employers and the state. Cultural methods of transmitting a political message, however, continued. But they became more explicitly steeped in the experience of the working class. A working class literature had developed, often encouraged by student activists who help set up small publishing houses for the purpose.
By the mid-1980s, there were some well-known worker writers, including poets such as Pak No Hae – whose verse dwells on workers’ alienation and the injustice by which great wealth is concentrated in the hands of the chaebol.
Like a snake shedding skin the Korean workers had begun to outgrow minjung. Eventually its influence became very much weaker. However, working class cultural activities – newspapers, magazines, evening schools, dance groups and writing contests – remained an important part of the labour movement. Many unions sponsor cultural activities: mask dances, plays, music. In 1988 a National Council of Workers’ Cultural Movement Organizations was formed to coordinate their activities.32
Religion and religious institutions played an important part – although a transitory one – in both Korean and English working class movements in their early stages. Methodism and various forms of Dissent provided many English workers with a belief system within which they might feel justified in objecting to their condition and which might sustain their faith in a better future. If the oppressors were ungodly then rebellion was justified by scripture. In Korea also, Christianity, or sections of it, played a similar role.33
That workers could find solace, and even a rallying point in religion, should be less surprising to Marxists than may be obvious. Marx’s oft repeated maxim – that religion “is the opium of the people” – is usually quoted without the rest of the paragraph of which it is a part. That reads:
Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.34
In Korea by the 1970s, as in early industrial England, there was plenty of real suffering and soulless conditions. Minjung thought provided a point of intersection between political action and the beliefs of Korean Christians. Two organizations in particular, the Catholic group, Young Christian Workers (JOC) and the Protestant Urban Industrial Mission (UIM), began to involve themselves in the welfare of the factory worker during the 1960s. Lessons in labour law and union organizing were combined with classes in scripture. Some clergy even took factory jobs as part of their mission.35
At first they offered legal courses, with the support of the labour department of the government, in how to run a union within the FKTU official structure. But they rapidly became associated with some of the most important disputes of the 1970s. About 20 per cent of new unions formed in that decade were assisted by the UIM.36
Thompson’s discussion of English Methodism makes it clear that the relationship between religious ideas of deliverance and the worldly success or failure of a labour movement is complex. He argues that: “it is possible that religious revivalism took over just at the point where ‘political’ or temporal aspirations met with defeat.”37 In other words, workers turned to religion as a replacement for the victories which eluded them in daily life. The spread of religion could be symptomatic of a movement in retreat. But in Korea, the sequence was different. There Christianity played its greatest role in the workers’ movement in the early stages of its formation – especially in the late 1960s and the 1970s. But, in those stages the movement was young and small, state repression intense and therefore victories were rare. As independent unionism developed, organized nationally and, eventually exploded in the great burst of militancy between 1987 and 1990, Christianity played a less significant role. Its influence in the labour movement waned greatly.
There were several more temporal and obvious ways in which the Christian churches became attractive to worker activists in the 1960s and 1970s. One was that they provided social bonds for people who had been removed from a network of family and friends by the process of industrialization. Young rural migrants, working long hours in factories far from their homes, experienced extreme isolation. Many found themselves housed in factory dormitories, closely supervised by management. Workers were frequently shifted between dorms in order to prevent the growth of solidarity or networks of resistance. These isolated, uprooted workers were searching for companionship and solidarity and shelter from a brutal and intrusive management as much as they were looking for a religious belief system.38
Although the factory system did not develop in the same way in England, Thompson discovered that the dislocation of people from their old communities made an open, relatively democratic church a social, as well as political, haven.
Methodism, with its open chapel doors, did offer to the uprooted and abandoned people of the Industrial Revolution some kind of community to replace the older community-patterns which were being displaced.... Indeed, for many people in these years the Methodist “ticket” of church-membership acquired a fetishistic importance; for the migrant worker it could be the ticket of entry into a new community when he moved from town to town.39
Finally, the church provided those who wanted to organize a union with some resources and with a degree of “cover” – a site to organize which, for a time at least, remained just on the safe side of the law and its enforcers. This legal “window” was vital in the early period. Under church influence, about 40,000 workers were organized into unions at about 100 enterprises during the late 1960s.40 Many of the activists who went on to help found the large independent unions of the 1980s and unite them in the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in the 1990s got their original experience here.
Yet, during the 1980s, church influence on the labour movement declined. Several explanations for this decline seem to fit the circumstances. First, just as its attraction in an early period was to a recently dislocated workforce, so when workers became more settled, they could form social bonds in their own community without the church. Second, the growth of the labour movement began to create a different sense of community – a community of activists. Finally, increasing confrontation – on broad political as well as economic questions – between the new unions and the state radicalized unionists further.41 Activists shifting leftward, some influenced by Marxism, often found the church too mild.42
One of E.P. Thompson’s important contributions to Marxist thought was to draw attention to the apparently irregular ways in which class consciousness develops or, in many cases, fails to do so. It is necessary now to remember that he was writing in circumstances where most Marxist discussion was still dominated by those who had only friendly criticism for the Soviet Union – if they had any at all. For that tradition, the working class was, as often as not, a category to be manipulated in practice as well as in theory. A stage army, it was to be brought into play at the appropriate moment, expected to think the thoughts and take the action it was supposed to in response to the objective development of industry or economic crisis. Thompson shows that the growth of working class consciousness, especially in “new” working classes cannot be predicted before the fact. The attempt to do so contains considerable political as well as theoretical dangers in which predictive certainty becomes authoritarian practice.
There is a cultural superstructure through which this recognition [of class] dawns in inefficient ways. These cultural “lags” and distortions are a nuisance, so that it becomes easy to pass from this to some theory of substitution: the party, sect or theorist, who disclose class consciousness, not as it is, but as it ought to be.43
In the lives of ordinary people, proletarianization is an enormous transformation. Such a transformation is still occurring throughout the world and affecting the lives of millions. That fact alone makes the study of how workers come to understand and react to it important. In Korea, as in early England, workers did, in fact, develop something that deserves to be called “class consciousness”. What’s more they did so under conditions where repressive forces of various kinds sought to frustrate its development.
Repression may set the limits allowed by rulers. But try as it will, it cannot always intrude on the furtive rebellious conversation in the factory dormitory, the secret evening meeting, the church service or evening class. In those arenas, ways of thinking, speaking, joking and even praying begin to develop that is common to this new class. In ways in which they think about society, proletarians begin to resemble each other culturally more than they resemble those of their parents or siblings who remained to till the soil.
2 Thompson (1963, p. 913) writes:
The slow, piecemeal accretions of capital accumulation had meant that the preliminaries to the Industrial Revolution stretched backwards for hundreds of years. From Tudor times onwards this artisan culture had grown more complex with each phase of technical and social change. Delaney, Dekker and Nashe: Winstanley and Lilburne: Bunyan and Defoe all had at times addressed themselves to it.
3 Thompson (1991, pp. 60–61). Both tickets include the patron saint of woolcombers – Bishop Blaize. They are reproduced on Plates 1 and 3.
4 Chiu (1992, p. 130).
5 Jones and Sakong (1980, pp. 352–354).
6 Ibid., p. 379.
7 Ibid., p. 77.
8 Bello and Rosenfeld (1992, p. 30).
9 Kimet al. (1995, p. 183).
10 In all nearly one million civilians and over 300,000 troops from South Korea alone (whose population was only around 22 million) were killed in the war. About 25 per cent of population became refugees. For the extent of destruction due to the war see Chiu (1992, p. 113); Whelan (1990, p. 373); Cole and Lyman (1971, p. 22); MacDonald (1986, p. 258); Rees (1964, p. 441); Haggard et al. (1997, p. 872).
11 Cumings (1990, pp. 699–702).
12 Chiu (1992, p. 137).
13 Cole and Lyman (1971, p. 27).
14 Bello and Rosenfeld (1992, p. 33).
15 Ibid., p. 23.
16 Ogle (1990, p. 20).
17 Many theorists have argued that the key cultural aspect of Korean society which must be taken into account is Confucianism. Some have argued that the Confucian value system is the key to understanding economic success in East Asia. See for example, Pye (1985). There are many objections to this line of argument – not the least that it is an ethnocentric misunderstanding of the varied cultures of the region and that it fails to explain the often turbulent histories of working class and peasant militancy. In addition, in the case of Korea, it is possible to argue that Confucianism has been the culture of the elite, not the masses. See, for example, Wells (1995, p. 6) and Chung (1995, p. 62).
18 Thompson (1963, p. 805).
19 Wells (1995, p. 2). For critical discussion of recent minjung theorists see Kim (1995). Also see Dalton and Cotton (1996, p. 279); and Koo (1993, p. 143).
20 Chung (1995, p. 69).
21 Irwan (1987, p. 389).
22 Thompson (1963, p. 254).
23 Thompson (1991, p. 9).
25 Ibid., p. 144.
26 Clark (1995, p. 95).
27 Choi (1995, p. 111).
29 Ogle (1990, p. 99). The penalty for being discovered was severe. In 1986, Kwon In Sook, a woman student was discovered working in a factory. She was arrested, sexually assaulted and tortured with electric shock. She attempted suicide. Finally she was sentenced to a year-and-a-half in jail for lying on her employment application. Close links were built between radical students and the developing workers’ movement – some of which remain today. In my own experience, some of the student and former student activists I have met spent some time in industry for the purpose of organizing. And some workers who had been victimized were using the limited cover of the university to continue organizing. So it was that I met the former (victimized) president of a local Hyundai car workers’ union in a little office in a university in Seoul.
30 Hobsbawm (1978, p. 20).
31 Choi (1995, p. 111).
33 It is important here to note that not all Christians in Korea were sympathetic to the workers’ movement. Indeed large sections of both Protestant and Catholic hierarchies denounced those of their colleagues who looked to the workers’ movement and preached resistance. Methodism in England was similarly divided – vertically between the high Toryism of its founder, John Wesley, on one side and many itinerant preachers and worker activists in its ranks.
34 Marx (1975, p. 244).
35 About 25 clergy went to factories in this way; Ogle (1990, p. 87).
37 Thompson (1963, p. 428).
38 Dormitory inspectors and matrons were commonly used as overseers of workers outside production in order to break social ties. Lee (1988, p. 141).
39 Thompson (1963, pp. 416–417).
41 A discussion of these conflicts and the most recent struggles of the Korean labour movement is beyond the scope of this chapter. Readable accounts in English for various periods can be found in the Asia Monitor Resource Center (1987), McNally (1988) and in Moody (1997).
43 Thompson (1991, p. 9).
Asia Monitor Resource Center. 1987. Min-Ju, No-Jo, South Korea’s New Trade Unions, HongKong:AMRC.
Bello, W. and Rosenfeld, S. 1992. Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis,London:Penguin,London.
Chiu, Stephen Wing-Kai. 1992. “The State and the Financing of Industrialisation in East Asia: Historical Origins of Comparative Divergences”, PhD thesis, Princeton University.
Choi, Chungmoo. 1995. “The Minjung Culture Movement and the Construction of Popular Culture in Korea”, in South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. Ed. Kenneth Wells. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Chung, Chai-sik, 1995. “Confucian Tradition and Nationalist Ideology in Korea”, in South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. Ed. Kenneth Wells. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Clark, David. 1995. “Growth and Limitations of Minjung Christianity in South Korea”, in South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. Ed. Kenneth Wells. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Cole, David C. and Lyman, Princeton N. 1971. Korean Development, the Interplay of Politics and Economics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cumings, Bruce. 1981. The Origins of the Korean War, Vol 1, Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cumings, Bruce. 1990. The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dalton, Bronwen and Cotton, James. 1996. “New Social Movements and the Changing Nature of Political Opposition in South Korea”, in Political Oppositions in Industrialising Asia. Ed. Garry Rodan. London: Routledge.
Haggard, Stephan, Kang, David and Moon, Chung-In. 1997. “Japanese Colonialism and Korean Development: A Critique”. World Development, 25(6): 867–881.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1978. “Religion and the Rise of Socialism”. Marxist Perspectives 1: 20.
Irwan, Alexander. 1987. “Real Wages and Class Struggle in South Korea”. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 17(4): 385–408.
Jones, Leroy P. and Il Sakong. 1980. Government, Business and Entrepreneurship in Economic Development: The Korean Case, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kim, Hyung-A. 1995. “Minjung Socioeconomic Responses to State-led Industrialization”, in South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. Ed. Kenneth Wells. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Kim, Joon-Kyung, Shim, Sang Dal and Kim, Jun-Il. 1995. “The Role of the Government in Promoting Industrialisation and Human Capital Accumulation in Korea”, in Growth Theories in Light of the East Asian Experience. National Bureau of Economic Research: East Asia Seminar on Economics Series, Vol. 4. Eds Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger. Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press.
Ko, Won. 1977. “Kim Chi-ha: Poet of Blood and Fire”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 9(2): 20–25.
Koo, Hagen. 1993. “The State, Minjung, and the Working Class in South Korea”, in State and Society in Contemporary Korea. Ed. Hagan Koo. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.
Lee, Jeong Taik. 1988. “Dynamics of Labor Control and Labor Protest in the Process of Export-Oriented Industrialisation in South Korea”. Asian Perspectives, 12(1): 134–158.
MacDonald, C. 1986. Korea: The War before Vietnam, New York: The Free Press.
McNally, David. 1988. “Globalisation on Trial: Crisis and Class Struggle in East Asia”. Monthly Review, 50(4): 1–13.
Marx, Karl. 1975. “Critique of Hegel’s Philospohy of Right”, in Karl Marx: Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Moody, Kim. 1997. Workers in a Lean World, London: Verso.
Ogle, George E. 1990. South Korea: Dissent Within the Economic Miracle, London: Zed Books.
Pye, Lucian, 1985. Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority, Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rees, D. 1964. Korea: The Limited War, London: Macmillan.
Song, Byung-Nak. 1994. The Rise of the Korean Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sung, Yeung Kwack. 1990. “The Economic Development of the Republic of Korea, 1965–1981”, in Models of Development: A Comparative Study of Economic Growth in South Korea and Taiwan. Ed. Lawrence J. Lau, 2nd edn. San Francisco, CA: ICS Press.
Thompson, Edward P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin.
Thompson, Edward P. 1991. Customs in Common, London: Penguin.
Wells, Kenneth. 1995. “Introduction”, in South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. Ed. Kenneth Wells. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Whelan, R. 1990. Drawing the Line: The Korean War, 1950–1953, London: Faber.