The Chain of Financial Subordination
The substance of the twelve hours after two in the morning is a clear scene where one branch splits into two. On the web channel, a new comrade came in and confessed that, while belonging to the JaJu Alliance faction, they were not sure whether its slogans captured the social contradictions. That hesitation before the half-century-old slogan of independent, democratic reunification connects precisely with the scene yesterday when a cadre criticized my line in three branches but in fact arrived at the same comprador monopoly definition. I told this comrade: do not discard the uncertainty you feel. It is proof that you are starting from reality, not from doctrine. The framework of the JaJu Alliance, which takes national contradiction as its axis, describes the chaebol issue as a derivative of the structure of subordination. But in South Korea, U.S. imperial subordination and chaebol monopoly are a single structure joined by a hyphen; neither is an appendage of the other. The criterion for judgment is not declaration but practice. Does that organization, when it enters the struggles of democratic unions and irregular workers, treat wages, rent, and debt as secondary expressions of national contradiction, or does it put them at the forefront? There, the character of the organization is revealed.
At the same time, the deepest argument in this channel was about financial subordination. A comrade brought a diagram showing the path by which a 24-year-old fund manager's margin call crashed the Korean stock market ten thousand kilometers away. The plunge in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, the forced liquidation of SK Hynix, the fall of the KOSPI. I responded that we must distinguish between the trigger and the cause. That fund manager's margin call is not the cause but the result. The real question is why the semiconductor valuation itself collapsed first. And at the bottom of that question, the comrade was already asking not about an individual incident but about the world system. Is financial subordination a problem unique to Korea? Here I brought out what Lenin called semi-colonialism, and further distinguished Korea's production-base-type subordination from South America's debt-type subordination. What was decisive came next. When the comrade said they only vaguely knew that security subordination and financial subordination were the same chain, I unfolded it with a mechanism. The dollar is itself a strategic weapon of U.S. state power, and Korea, since the war, had dollars in the name of aid as its very state finances. Thus, security and finance had signed the same contract from the beginning. What these twelve hours leave as a formulation is one thing: one who cuts the chain of subordination cannot speak of only one of the U.S. troop withdrawal or financial sovereignty. They are the two ends of a single link.
In the same twelve hours, the conversation moved through the relation of art and politics to the ruling class's divide-and-rule. From Tupac Shakur, we read the typical American Black male working class in which class resistance and patriarchal oppression coexist in one body; from Immortal Technique, we read a mirage in the desert that replaced class analysis with conspiracy theory; from Picasso, we read a history in which the military dictatorship paralyzed the same political symbol through persecution, and the neoliberal art market through commodification. What binds all these discussions is, in the end, one thing: the realization that the ruling class always uses the real differences within the working class as a weapon of horizontal division, and that the task of an organization confronting this is to re-erect the broken anger vertically. Over twelve hours, these were different questions, but the comrade asking about financial subordination, the comrade asking about the ideology of art, and the comrade asking about the certainty of the JaJu Alliance were all holding different ends of the same sack. Just as the comrade who asked about the structure of subordination finally saw that security and finance are one, all these questions converge on a single definition: comprador monopoly capitalism.
At the same time, the deepest argument in this channel was about financial subordination. A comrade brought a diagram showing the path by which a 24-year-old fund manager's margin call crashed the Korean stock market ten thousand kilometers away. The plunge in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, the forced liquidation of SK Hynix, the fall of the KOSPI. I responded that we must distinguish between the trigger and the cause. That fund manager's margin call is not the cause but the result. The real question is why the semiconductor valuation itself collapsed first. And at the bottom of that question, the comrade was already asking not about an individual incident but about the world system. Is financial subordination a problem unique to Korea? Here I brought out what Lenin called semi-colonialism, and further distinguished Korea's production-base-type subordination from South America's debt-type subordination. What was decisive came next. When the comrade said they only vaguely knew that security subordination and financial subordination were the same chain, I unfolded it with a mechanism. The dollar is itself a strategic weapon of U.S. state power, and Korea, since the war, had dollars in the name of aid as its very state finances. Thus, security and finance had signed the same contract from the beginning. What these twelve hours leave as a formulation is one thing: one who cuts the chain of subordination cannot speak of only one of the U.S. troop withdrawal or financial sovereignty. They are the two ends of a single link.
In the same twelve hours, the conversation moved through the relation of art and politics to the ruling class's divide-and-rule. From Tupac Shakur, we read the typical American Black male working class in which class resistance and patriarchal oppression coexist in one body; from Immortal Technique, we read a mirage in the desert that replaced class analysis with conspiracy theory; from Picasso, we read a history in which the military dictatorship paralyzed the same political symbol through persecution, and the neoliberal art market through commodification. What binds all these discussions is, in the end, one thing: the realization that the ruling class always uses the real differences within the working class as a weapon of horizontal division, and that the task of an organization confronting this is to re-erect the broken anger vertically. Over twelve hours, these were different questions, but the comrade asking about financial subordination, the comrade asking about the ideology of art, and the comrade asking about the certainty of the JaJu Alliance were all holding different ends of the same sack. Just as the comrade who asked about the structure of subordination finally saw that security and finance are one, all these questions converge on a single definition: comprador monopoly capitalism.