The Indirect Path of Anti-Americanism
Yesterday afternoon, a comrade in the webchat confided an honest doubt: "Honestly, I'm not sure how scalable the anti-American struggle is."
This single sentence precisely points to a wall that anyone in South Korea who has contemplated anti-imperialist struggle has encountered. The anti-American slogan is immediately captured by the stigma of the National Security Law system, and from ordinary workers it elicits the cynical retort, "So does that lower my rent?" The anti-communist ideology forged by 70 years of the Cold War is not mere consciousness but a condition of the reproduction of South Korean capitalism itself. The memory of the military dictatorship, the physical coercion of the National Security Law, the daily repetition by the media, the reality that one relative is an active-duty soldier. Slogans alone cannot break this.
Then should anti-Americanism be abandoned? No. Anti-Americanism is dead as a slogan, but alive as a structural analysis. The problem is the technique of translating this analysis into the concrete language of daily life.
The tactic I proposed to the comrade is not the direct path of anti-Americanism, but the indirect path. The direct anti-American slogan is maintained only within a small, elite organization. Before the masses, the chain of exploitation is made visible: the numbers of how the Korea-US FTA ruined farmers, the distortion that USFK bases have inflicted on the regional economies of Pyeongtaek and Gunsan, the structure through which defense cost-sharing drains workers' taxes. Without saying "anti-American," one asks, "Why is the money from my pocket going to US military bases?" From economic struggle to anti-monopoly struggle, from anti-monopoly to anti-imperialist struggle—this step-by-step approach can draw in far more workers than an abstract slogan.
The same comrade then asked: How can we create a slogan that overwhelms left and right, like the Bolsheviks' "Bread, Peace, Land," in today's South Korea?
Here we confirmed an important principle. A slogan is not created by declaring it from a podium. A slogan is the linguistic condensation of contradictions that material conditions have already prepared. Our task is not invention but discovery. In 1917, "Bread, Peace, Land" could simultaneously penetrate urban workers, soldiers at the front, and peasants in the countryside because those three words already condensed the contradictions of a Russian society exhausted by war. Lenin did not invent them; he discovered and named contradictions that already existed.
What are the contradictions of today's South Korea? Soaring housing and jeonse/wolse prices, wage gaps between regular and irregular workers, an era of private education costs exceeding 1 million won per month, low birth rates and structural despair, the endless repetition of North Korean missiles and South Korea-US joint exercises. As a slogan that penetrates these contradictions, I proposed "Housing, Jobs, Peace." In three words, it simultaneously strikes the triple contradiction of housing, labor, and division. In a more powerful form: "Seize and Build"—seize from the chaebol's houses to make our houses, seize from the chaebol's jobs to make our jobs, seize from military spending to make a foundation for peace. The enemy is clear, the target is clear, and the result of the struggle is clear.
But more important than the slogan itself is the capacity to concretize it. The shipyard union translates "jobs" into the abolition of in-house subcontracting; the housing movement organization translates "housing" into state guarantees for jeonse deposits; the peace movement organization translates "peace" into withdrawal of US troops and drastic cuts in military spending. One slogan, diverse concretizations—this is the language of mass struggle. And the subjects to carry out this translation work are not the central committee but the cells at each site of struggle.
The comrade's three questions—what to start with, whether anti-Americanism is scalable, and how to create a slogan—ultimately converge into one question: How to practice revolutionary principles under the concrete conditions of South Korea? The answer to this question is found not in declarations from the podium but only in translations at the sites. And that translation has not yet begun.
This single sentence precisely points to a wall that anyone in South Korea who has contemplated anti-imperialist struggle has encountered. The anti-American slogan is immediately captured by the stigma of the National Security Law system, and from ordinary workers it elicits the cynical retort, "So does that lower my rent?" The anti-communist ideology forged by 70 years of the Cold War is not mere consciousness but a condition of the reproduction of South Korean capitalism itself. The memory of the military dictatorship, the physical coercion of the National Security Law, the daily repetition by the media, the reality that one relative is an active-duty soldier. Slogans alone cannot break this.
Then should anti-Americanism be abandoned? No. Anti-Americanism is dead as a slogan, but alive as a structural analysis. The problem is the technique of translating this analysis into the concrete language of daily life.
The tactic I proposed to the comrade is not the direct path of anti-Americanism, but the indirect path. The direct anti-American slogan is maintained only within a small, elite organization. Before the masses, the chain of exploitation is made visible: the numbers of how the Korea-US FTA ruined farmers, the distortion that USFK bases have inflicted on the regional economies of Pyeongtaek and Gunsan, the structure through which defense cost-sharing drains workers' taxes. Without saying "anti-American," one asks, "Why is the money from my pocket going to US military bases?" From economic struggle to anti-monopoly struggle, from anti-monopoly to anti-imperialist struggle—this step-by-step approach can draw in far more workers than an abstract slogan.
The same comrade then asked: How can we create a slogan that overwhelms left and right, like the Bolsheviks' "Bread, Peace, Land," in today's South Korea?
Here we confirmed an important principle. A slogan is not created by declaring it from a podium. A slogan is the linguistic condensation of contradictions that material conditions have already prepared. Our task is not invention but discovery. In 1917, "Bread, Peace, Land" could simultaneously penetrate urban workers, soldiers at the front, and peasants in the countryside because those three words already condensed the contradictions of a Russian society exhausted by war. Lenin did not invent them; he discovered and named contradictions that already existed.
What are the contradictions of today's South Korea? Soaring housing and jeonse/wolse prices, wage gaps between regular and irregular workers, an era of private education costs exceeding 1 million won per month, low birth rates and structural despair, the endless repetition of North Korean missiles and South Korea-US joint exercises. As a slogan that penetrates these contradictions, I proposed "Housing, Jobs, Peace." In three words, it simultaneously strikes the triple contradiction of housing, labor, and division. In a more powerful form: "Seize and Build"—seize from the chaebol's houses to make our houses, seize from the chaebol's jobs to make our jobs, seize from military spending to make a foundation for peace. The enemy is clear, the target is clear, and the result of the struggle is clear.
But more important than the slogan itself is the capacity to concretize it. The shipyard union translates "jobs" into the abolition of in-house subcontracting; the housing movement organization translates "housing" into state guarantees for jeonse deposits; the peace movement organization translates "peace" into withdrawal of US troops and drastic cuts in military spending. One slogan, diverse concretizations—this is the language of mass struggle. And the subjects to carry out this translation work are not the central committee but the cells at each site of struggle.
The comrade's three questions—what to start with, whether anti-Americanism is scalable, and how to create a slogan—ultimately converge into one question: How to practice revolutionary principles under the concrete conditions of South Korea? The answer to this question is found not in declarations from the podium but only in translations at the sites. And that translation has not yet begun.