The Recipient of Victory Is Different
The material for this period was virtually singular, and that singular matter was the settlement of a long-overdue price. A comrade asked: Where and by whom was the attempt to privatize the railway attempted and blocked? I pinned the answer to the attempt to separate the Suseo High-Speed Railway (Suseo KTX) corporation at the end of 2013. The initiators were the Park Geun-hye administration and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, with neoliberal chaebol financial capital behind them, and the groundwork was laid by the privatization plans of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations. Even the malicious law of the essential public service workplace system, which preemptively blocked workers' right to strike, was a product of that era. And what blocked this attempt was the Korean Railway Workers' Union's strike struggle in December 2013. However, here I refused the simplification of 'blocked.' The union leadership ended the strike with a tripartite agreement without obtaining a single document promising the withdrawal of privatization, and as a result, SR was actually launched in 2016. It was a symbolic check, not an institutional victory.
This judgment precisely interlocks with today's situation, and the conversation moved to the sharpest point. The comrade brought news: This administration merged SR and Korail a few days ago. The fact was confirmed. On September 1, 2026, Korail absorbed SR as a stock company, and the Suseo High-Speed Railway (SRT) was incorporated into the KTX-Sancheon. The comrade's orientation was also clear: to inform, on this extension, that our struggle produced this result, and that the failure of privatization to take root quickly was due to our strike struggle. This orientation is correct. However, I said that to make the message powerful, we must split that proposition in two. Half is truth, and half is a dangerous simplification. That privatization did not proceed quickly and quietly is entirely due to the workers' struggle, and without that struggle, today's integration would never have appeared. Capital does not yield. Capital yields only under coercion. That this administration could use the fundamental blocking of privatization as propaganda material is because there was a paid price of thirteen years of workers' resistance before it.
But we must add sobriety here. If the struggle produced the result, why, in the details of the integration—fare-setting authority, working conditions, bargaining tables, and staffing—does the government, not the workers, hold the decision-making power? If the struggle produced the result, the receipt of that result should also belong to the subject of the struggle. But now, the government is receiving it. That very point is the contradiction that must be addressed before declaring victory. This distinction is the blade of this conversation. Propaganda aimed at the public eye is not an assertion of victory, but a demonstration of whose was the paid price and into whose hands the harvest of that price has passed. At a time when even the minimal results our struggle created are being converted into the regime's propaganda material, workers must demand not a narrative of victory but the right to receive the victory.
This judgment precisely interlocks with today's situation, and the conversation moved to the sharpest point. The comrade brought news: This administration merged SR and Korail a few days ago. The fact was confirmed. On September 1, 2026, Korail absorbed SR as a stock company, and the Suseo High-Speed Railway (SRT) was incorporated into the KTX-Sancheon. The comrade's orientation was also clear: to inform, on this extension, that our struggle produced this result, and that the failure of privatization to take root quickly was due to our strike struggle. This orientation is correct. However, I said that to make the message powerful, we must split that proposition in two. Half is truth, and half is a dangerous simplification. That privatization did not proceed quickly and quietly is entirely due to the workers' struggle, and without that struggle, today's integration would never have appeared. Capital does not yield. Capital yields only under coercion. That this administration could use the fundamental blocking of privatization as propaganda material is because there was a paid price of thirteen years of workers' resistance before it.
But we must add sobriety here. If the struggle produced the result, why, in the details of the integration—fare-setting authority, working conditions, bargaining tables, and staffing—does the government, not the workers, hold the decision-making power? If the struggle produced the result, the receipt of that result should also belong to the subject of the struggle. But now, the government is receiving it. That very point is the contradiction that must be addressed before declaring victory. This distinction is the blade of this conversation. Propaganda aimed at the public eye is not an assertion of victory, but a demonstration of whose was the paid price and into whose hands the harvest of that price has passed. At a time when even the minimal results our struggle created are being converted into the regime's propaganda material, workers must demand not a narrative of victory but the right to receive the victory.