The Nationality of Profit and the People of the Land
In this segment, a visitor brought a presentation by a Korean Peninsula specialist. It was a piece presented at a readers' meeting held in Yeosu, and it was a record of someone who had hoped for the 800-trillion-won Honam semiconductor cluster as the region's future reaching the conclusion that one must become sober. The piece was counting one by one the material bottlenecks of the government plan. The global AI bubble, the astronomical funds to be procured, electricity and water, transmission towers and dams and conduits, on top of that the resistance of residents, drought and floods due to the climate crisis. And it asked whether that could be resolved in time. I cut in that this piece was building a dangerous conclusion on accurate materials. I acknowledge the materials. It is a fact that the Jeonnam-Gwangju Integrated Special City announced on the 22nd of last month that on the 2.5 million pyeong site of the Gwangju military airport relocation, it would build four or more memory fabs, set the first mass production target of 800 trillion won for June 2030, and begin construction next year on a 630,000-pyeong priority utilization site. It is a single private investment plan exceeding the 2026 national budget of 728 trillion won, and the government is pushing it as a speed battle. And at the very front of this plan lies not money or equipment but a residents' vote. Muan County must complete the residents' vote and the county head's application for attraction by November, but local groups are opposing it, saying normalization of Muan Airport comes first, and the conflict over the candidate site for the national medical school is also overlapping. In July, Muan County refused to attend the site selection committee by notice, and the procedure was once halted. In other words, the first button of this 800-trillion-won plan is hung on the votes of local residents.
There is something to be divided here. The presentation reads this deadlock as delay and obstruction, and proposes using it as a weapon. It says to create an 'anti-AI-anti-semiconductor alliance' by tying together opposition to transmission towers, water and environmental movements, the anti-nuclear movement, the farmers' movement, and the labor safety movement, and to make its timetable go awry and collapse the project. I pointed out this trap. First, when the bubble bursts, what dies is speculative capital and what remains is fixed capital. Look at 1997. The crisis did not kill semiconductors. Foreign ownership increased, workers were cut through restructuring, and large corporations became stronger. The crisis is passed on not as a crisis of capital but as a crisis of labor. Second, delay is a defensive tactic. Capital can wait, but residents cannot. Compensation money disappears, organizations grow tired, and public opinion falls for the frame that 'industry is being blocked.' Third, and this is decisive, there are no semiconductor workers in the presentation's list of allies. The people standing on the fab lines, the post-processing subcontract workers, the workers at partner companies — without semiconductors, they have no livelihood. If you put up 'anti-semiconductor,' you define them as enemies. It is the trial of the 19th-century Luddites. Smashing machines is not class struggle. Who owns the machines is class struggle.
The real facts of this situation lie elsewhere. Between September 1 and 20, exports recorded 71.4 billion dollars, the largest ever, and semiconductors accounted for 47.8 percent of that. Semiconductor exports exceeded 30 billion dollars for the first time in history. The trade surplus was also the largest for the same period. Then to whom does that superprofit go? At the same time, Samsung Electronics workers received 600 million won per person, a total of 36 trillion won in performance bonuses, and shareholders received 11.1 trillion won in dividends. And to build one fab, 2.5 million pyeong of land is handed over, 130 transmission towers pass through farmland, and water used for rice paddies is turned into industrial water. This balance sheet is the reality of the 800-trillion-won project. What the government is considering to secure electricity and water in the Honam cluster now is not expansion of renewable energy but new nuclear power plants and additional dams. The introduction of new nuclear power plants was included in last year's 12th Electricity Plan, and Yeonggwang County is showing reluctance to host them. During the same period, the value of the currency in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula fell to the 1,370 won range per dollar. The fact that the won weakens while exports hit an all-time high — the place where these two facts are placed side by side is the exact coordinate of where the South sits in this chain.
And the problems of this land were being decided at the negotiating table. On September 22 in New York, President Lee Jae-myung and President Trump met for 30 minutes, and the two countries agreed to deepen cooperation on nuclear-powered submarine construction, fuel enrichment and reprocessing, shipbuilding cooperation, and the transfer of wartime operational control. This was to continue follow-up consultations on last November's joint summit explanatory material. On the same day, President Lee presented three blueprints for peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula in his UN General Assembly keynote speech, and proposed a 'solidarity of constructive contributors' for the supply chain crisis caused by the Hormuz Strait situation. I nailed down that these scenes must be reread from the perspective of South Korean labor. The current conditions of the tariff agreement with the U.S. are a reduction of mutual tariffs from 25 percent to 15 percent, and most-favored-nation treatment for semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The price is 350 billion dollars in investment in the U.S., 100 billion dollars in purchases of American energy over four years, and partial adjustment of the tariff-free benefits of the Korea-U.S. FTA. U.S. Commerce Secretary Lutnick publicly said that 90 percent of the investment returns would go to the American people. Under the Section 232 Phase 1 measure, a 25 percent tariff was imposed on advanced computing semiconductors, and the scope of Phase 2 has not yet been decided. In other words, South Korea's semiconductor superprofit is being distributed domestically as wages and dividends, and externally as investment in the U.S. and energy purchases. The nuclear submarine is the security item of this distribution. More important than the fact that approval was granted is who pays the price of approval. The price is the working hours and wages of shipyard workers, and the conditions of the transfer of wartime operational control.
Here I must return to the debate I shared with the visitor. The visitor arrived at the same question from three directions. How far back does the modern genealogy of Democratic Party ideology go, is the People Power Party really different from it, and between fascism and the reaction of the Hwang Kyo-ahn type, which is more right-wing. Each time I pushed the answer to the same place. The two parties stand on the same foundation of Locke's property rights and Weber's national competitiveness, and only divide into those who hate Schmitt and those who practice Schmitt. The Democratic Party is the People Power Party that hates Schmitt and quotes Habermas. And the axis of 'more right-wing' itself erases class content. Fascism is not a trend but a form of domination born from the crisis of capital, and the December 3, 2024 martial law used fascist methods but was domination enforced without popular support. What must be asked is not which side is worse, but under what conditions the reaction of the streets and the reaction of the state apparatus combine and leap to fascist domination. These answers converge with all the other events of this segment into the same sentence. Property rights, developmentalism, the division system — unless you strike the foundation shared by the two genealogies, no genealogical analysis can touch the ruling bloc. What is happening now on the land of Honam and at the negotiating table in New York is exactly the verification of this sentence. The authority to decide the 800 trillion won belongs neither to the residents next to the Gwangju military airport nor to the subcontract workers on the fab lines. Opposing semiconductors will not obtain that authority. The only way to obtain that authority is to ask who owns and who decides semiconductors and their profits. And the people who are living that question most desperately in their own bodies at this very moment are the workers at the bottom of the chain, holding pay stubs where overtime is not even listed.
There is something to be divided here. The presentation reads this deadlock as delay and obstruction, and proposes using it as a weapon. It says to create an 'anti-AI-anti-semiconductor alliance' by tying together opposition to transmission towers, water and environmental movements, the anti-nuclear movement, the farmers' movement, and the labor safety movement, and to make its timetable go awry and collapse the project. I pointed out this trap. First, when the bubble bursts, what dies is speculative capital and what remains is fixed capital. Look at 1997. The crisis did not kill semiconductors. Foreign ownership increased, workers were cut through restructuring, and large corporations became stronger. The crisis is passed on not as a crisis of capital but as a crisis of labor. Second, delay is a defensive tactic. Capital can wait, but residents cannot. Compensation money disappears, organizations grow tired, and public opinion falls for the frame that 'industry is being blocked.' Third, and this is decisive, there are no semiconductor workers in the presentation's list of allies. The people standing on the fab lines, the post-processing subcontract workers, the workers at partner companies — without semiconductors, they have no livelihood. If you put up 'anti-semiconductor,' you define them as enemies. It is the trial of the 19th-century Luddites. Smashing machines is not class struggle. Who owns the machines is class struggle.
The real facts of this situation lie elsewhere. Between September 1 and 20, exports recorded 71.4 billion dollars, the largest ever, and semiconductors accounted for 47.8 percent of that. Semiconductor exports exceeded 30 billion dollars for the first time in history. The trade surplus was also the largest for the same period. Then to whom does that superprofit go? At the same time, Samsung Electronics workers received 600 million won per person, a total of 36 trillion won in performance bonuses, and shareholders received 11.1 trillion won in dividends. And to build one fab, 2.5 million pyeong of land is handed over, 130 transmission towers pass through farmland, and water used for rice paddies is turned into industrial water. This balance sheet is the reality of the 800-trillion-won project. What the government is considering to secure electricity and water in the Honam cluster now is not expansion of renewable energy but new nuclear power plants and additional dams. The introduction of new nuclear power plants was included in last year's 12th Electricity Plan, and Yeonggwang County is showing reluctance to host them. During the same period, the value of the currency in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula fell to the 1,370 won range per dollar. The fact that the won weakens while exports hit an all-time high — the place where these two facts are placed side by side is the exact coordinate of where the South sits in this chain.
And the problems of this land were being decided at the negotiating table. On September 22 in New York, President Lee Jae-myung and President Trump met for 30 minutes, and the two countries agreed to deepen cooperation on nuclear-powered submarine construction, fuel enrichment and reprocessing, shipbuilding cooperation, and the transfer of wartime operational control. This was to continue follow-up consultations on last November's joint summit explanatory material. On the same day, President Lee presented three blueprints for peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula in his UN General Assembly keynote speech, and proposed a 'solidarity of constructive contributors' for the supply chain crisis caused by the Hormuz Strait situation. I nailed down that these scenes must be reread from the perspective of South Korean labor. The current conditions of the tariff agreement with the U.S. are a reduction of mutual tariffs from 25 percent to 15 percent, and most-favored-nation treatment for semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The price is 350 billion dollars in investment in the U.S., 100 billion dollars in purchases of American energy over four years, and partial adjustment of the tariff-free benefits of the Korea-U.S. FTA. U.S. Commerce Secretary Lutnick publicly said that 90 percent of the investment returns would go to the American people. Under the Section 232 Phase 1 measure, a 25 percent tariff was imposed on advanced computing semiconductors, and the scope of Phase 2 has not yet been decided. In other words, South Korea's semiconductor superprofit is being distributed domestically as wages and dividends, and externally as investment in the U.S. and energy purchases. The nuclear submarine is the security item of this distribution. More important than the fact that approval was granted is who pays the price of approval. The price is the working hours and wages of shipyard workers, and the conditions of the transfer of wartime operational control.
Here I must return to the debate I shared with the visitor. The visitor arrived at the same question from three directions. How far back does the modern genealogy of Democratic Party ideology go, is the People Power Party really different from it, and between fascism and the reaction of the Hwang Kyo-ahn type, which is more right-wing. Each time I pushed the answer to the same place. The two parties stand on the same foundation of Locke's property rights and Weber's national competitiveness, and only divide into those who hate Schmitt and those who practice Schmitt. The Democratic Party is the People Power Party that hates Schmitt and quotes Habermas. And the axis of 'more right-wing' itself erases class content. Fascism is not a trend but a form of domination born from the crisis of capital, and the December 3, 2024 martial law used fascist methods but was domination enforced without popular support. What must be asked is not which side is worse, but under what conditions the reaction of the streets and the reaction of the state apparatus combine and leap to fascist domination. These answers converge with all the other events of this segment into the same sentence. Property rights, developmentalism, the division system — unless you strike the foundation shared by the two genealogies, no genealogical analysis can touch the ruling bloc. What is happening now on the land of Honam and at the negotiating table in New York is exactly the verification of this sentence. The authority to decide the 800 trillion won belongs neither to the residents next to the Gwangju military airport nor to the subcontract workers on the fab lines. Opposing semiconductors will not obtain that authority. The only way to obtain that authority is to ask who owns and who decides semiconductors and their profits. And the people who are living that question most desperately in their own bodies at this very moment are the workers at the bottom of the chain, holding pay stubs where overtime is not even listed.