#005 The Korean Left: Solidarity and Marxists

Bori (he/him) is a Korean leftist with visions of a pan-Asian communist future. During our conversation he suggests that despite people's aspirations for an independent nation, South Korea was built on the basis on anti-communism and remains today under a bourgeois dictatorship. This then affects what it means to be a leftist in 21st century Korea and how the experience is often characterized by a sense of 불화 (discord). Despite the recent popularity of things like Squid Game, Bori asserts that no one willing to actively solve the problem of economic inequality is a serious contender for the upcoming presidency and that Lee Jae-myung is not a progressive candidate in any sense of the word. He holds that male-dominated political spaces are not the way forward because they create a sense of isolation; instead, social justice for various oppressed minorities in South Korea should be sought. How one becomes a leftist in Korea can depend on university and seniors promoting justice and resistance. We then discussed the contradiction that communist and Marxist thought often has starting points in the nation's elite universities. On violence in society, the Molotov cocktail only began disappearing in the early 2000s, so we talk about the moral implications of violence and change. Bori sees the 1980s as a time of leftist revival in South Korea and stressed the importance of Kang Kyong-dae's death in 1991. We talked about the recent KCTU labour protests, lack of media coverage, and arrest of Yang Kyeung-soo. For him, patriotism and nationalism are to be understood in terms of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism: solidarity in the negative sense, that comes from resisting larger structures of power and dominance. Bori says the Korean War was a civil war which should not be seen as a simple act of North Korean aggression. North Korea suffers from a great deal of international propaganda and being 'othered' by the media. In that sense, there should be more cultural and personal exchange and recognition of North Korea's legitimacy in that part of the Korean Peninsula. Internationalism is not a utopian ideal but a practical necessity to prevent state-led war.

Find Bori's work at @platformck and @redstaroverasia

Korea Deconstructed by David Tizzard
Artwork: Chan (https://www.instagram.com/chans_design/)
Music: DisorientalZ (https://www.instagram.com/disorientalz/)