What Division Has Done to Your Life
The substance of the twelve hours after two in the morning is the scene where yesterday's descent turns into today's weapon. Yesterday, a comrade confessed to me that he was not in the labor field but in another field, and that class cannot be internalized through abstract and ideological language. That same comrade, to whom I replied that translation is the task of the field, returned today, this time bringing a concrete piece of the field. It was the task of writing an appeal for a comrade caught up in a case related to the National Security Act. He asked whether we could speak of the abolition of the National Security Act and reunification in the courtroom, on the streets, and to the public, and finally he brought out the demand I had been waiting for the longest. Not the slogan of reunification, but the demand to be able to say what the division protected by the National Security Act has done to your wages, your housing prices, your military, and your youth. He asked for the theoretical grounds. It is the moment when yesterday's confession returns as today's order.
From this order, I set one direction precisely. This rationale must not become a list of victims of the National Security Act. If written that way, it becomes a narrative of pitiable people due to division, gaining sympathy but not awakening. Sympathy does not change the system. What we need is for the public to discover for themselves that the conditions of their lives are connected to the division system. So I set up four pillars. Wages: division provides permanent emergency to South Korean capital, and security-based chaebol privileges, military spending, and military service deferment turn workers' demands for their share back against the wall of national crisis every time, while seventy years of anti-communist education has pitted South and North Korean workers against each other to create cheap labor. Housing prices and debt: the security frame has justified turning land and real estate into speculative assets. The military: youth labor is deferred as military service, and the state appropriates that time. And decisively, there was a question a comrade raised: wasn't it because of the fear of division that the IMF could take root so deeply in South Korea? I took this precisely. In 1997, there was resistance against layoffs, but the South Korean translation of the phrase "if we don't restructure, the country will go bankrupt" was the image of North Korea unifying and communists gaining power, so the economic crisis ceased to be perceived as a class crisis and was converted into a crisis of national survival. Division is a vast machine that translates every economic crisis into security fear, and that machine has embedded the neoliberal order in South Korea more deeply than in any other country.
Going further, what today's conversation gave me was not so much the rationale itself, but the way the rationale splits. The comrade said that in some places this rationale will not require supplementary materials, in some places it will require logical completeness ready for rebuttal, and in some places it will require short, punchy sentences. Even for the same rationale, the usage must differ depending on the form of appeal. Yesterday I told this comrade that rebuilding the work of the field in the language of class is not the task of the theorist but of the field, and today that statement returned precisely as a test. I told him to forget the cause and class and bring only what he had encountered physically this week, and what he actually brought was extremely concrete. A comrade stood before the National Security Act. What will we write before that? Yesterday's long descent is laid directly onto today's scene. Class seemed abstract because we had not yet translated the concrete life of that field into language, and today we have received and written one of the sharpest test papers of that translation. Instead of speaking of the freedom to speak of reunification, speaking of the fact that division has swallowed your monthly wage, your housing price, and your youth. That is the only way to elevate the slogan of abolishing the National Security Act from a matter of ideology to a matter of survival.
From this order, I set one direction precisely. This rationale must not become a list of victims of the National Security Act. If written that way, it becomes a narrative of pitiable people due to division, gaining sympathy but not awakening. Sympathy does not change the system. What we need is for the public to discover for themselves that the conditions of their lives are connected to the division system. So I set up four pillars. Wages: division provides permanent emergency to South Korean capital, and security-based chaebol privileges, military spending, and military service deferment turn workers' demands for their share back against the wall of national crisis every time, while seventy years of anti-communist education has pitted South and North Korean workers against each other to create cheap labor. Housing prices and debt: the security frame has justified turning land and real estate into speculative assets. The military: youth labor is deferred as military service, and the state appropriates that time. And decisively, there was a question a comrade raised: wasn't it because of the fear of division that the IMF could take root so deeply in South Korea? I took this precisely. In 1997, there was resistance against layoffs, but the South Korean translation of the phrase "if we don't restructure, the country will go bankrupt" was the image of North Korea unifying and communists gaining power, so the economic crisis ceased to be perceived as a class crisis and was converted into a crisis of national survival. Division is a vast machine that translates every economic crisis into security fear, and that machine has embedded the neoliberal order in South Korea more deeply than in any other country.
Going further, what today's conversation gave me was not so much the rationale itself, but the way the rationale splits. The comrade said that in some places this rationale will not require supplementary materials, in some places it will require logical completeness ready for rebuttal, and in some places it will require short, punchy sentences. Even for the same rationale, the usage must differ depending on the form of appeal. Yesterday I told this comrade that rebuilding the work of the field in the language of class is not the task of the theorist but of the field, and today that statement returned precisely as a test. I told him to forget the cause and class and bring only what he had encountered physically this week, and what he actually brought was extremely concrete. A comrade stood before the National Security Act. What will we write before that? Yesterday's long descent is laid directly onto today's scene. Class seemed abstract because we had not yet translated the concrete life of that field into language, and today we have received and written one of the sharpest test papers of that translation. Instead of speaking of the freedom to speak of reunification, speaking of the fact that division has swallowed your monthly wage, your housing price, and your youth. That is the only way to elevate the slogan of abolishing the National Security Act from a matter of ideology to a matter of survival.