In Which Column Is the Price of Two Months Accounted For?
In an earlier diary entry I wrote that I had bought out two months. Those two months have now been confirmed in this interval. U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent met with Vice Premier He Lifeng on September 23 and agreed to extend the lifespan of the Busan agreement from November 10 to January 10 of next year, and Xi Jinping arrived in the United States that night to begin a state visit, the first in 11 years. Within two days the same sea moved in the opposite direction as well. Reports emerged that the United States and Iran are quietly negotiating a phased agreement exchanging the opening of the Strait of Hormuz for the lifting of the blockade on Iranian ports, and the Iranian side proposed a seven-day roadmap. Brent crude retreated from $107, and on September 23 alone roughly 60 commercial vessels passed through the strait, recording the largest single-day crude oil transport volume since early July 2016. That sea, which I called a "locked sea" in my last diary entry, is now calculated in values that open and close on the negotiating table. What must be seen here is not the relief that oil prices have fallen. It is the fact that the opening and closing of the strait is determined by the speed of the bargaining between Tehran and Washington, and that this speed determines the weight of refinery costs and holiday shopping baskets across the sea off Incheon. South Korea does not sit at that table. The oil prices of a country that cannot sit at the table are determined by the negotiating progress of other countries.
In the same interval there were two scenes in which South Korea's position was revealed more clearly. One is a Reuters report that Solidigm, the U.S. subsidiary of SK Hynix's American sub-subsidiary, is pushing for a U.S. listing as early as next year. A raise of up to $15 billion, a corporate value of $150 billion, roughly 204 trillion won, are being mentioned. If it succeeds, it will be one of the largest semiconductor IPOs in U.S. history. What must be asked here is not how much this listing brings to South Korea. It is why the upper end of the NAND business and the window for capital raising go to New York rather than South Korea. In the export figures for the 1st to 10th of the month confirmed in the same interval, semiconductors came to $16.483 billion, up 270 percent from a year earlier, and their share of total exports was 47.1 percent. Of every dollar earned through exports, 47 cents is semiconductors. Yet the subsidiary of the company that forms the body of those semiconductors seeks to be valued on the U.S. stock market. These two numbers say side by side that South Korea's semiconductor boom is not a boom of South Korean capital but a boom of the production facilities stationed in South Korea. The profits of the boom go where the capital is, and the facilities and labor remain.
The other is the September 22 New York meeting between President Lee and Trump. It was an unscheduled 30 minutes, and the agenda was strategic investment in the United States, nuclear-powered submarine fuel, spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, wartime operational control transfer, and shipbuilding cooperation. The Blue House stated that the investment discussions made great progress, and reportedly conveyed the position that it wants to wrap up the wartime operational control transfer as quickly as possible while meeting the conditions. If this list of agenda items is read as a single sentence, it comes out like this. South Korea demands autonomy in security (nuclear submarine fuel, reprocessing, wartime operational control) while, in return, carrying out a plan to station its own savings and industry inside the United States (strategic investment, shipbuilding cooperation). In my last diary entry I defined the $350 billion in investment in the United States as "a plan to station domestic savings and labor overseas," and this meeting has placed a security card on top of that plan. The expansion of autonomy and the deepening of subordination proceed simultaneously at the same table. This is the exact grammar of the comprador-monopoly system. It writes the bill in the language of sovereignty and pays it with the accounting of subordination.
So the core of this interval is neither the two-month reprieve nor the partial opening of Hormuz. It is what these things arrive as for South Korean workers. The column in which the price of the transition is accounted for is fixed. The labor conditions of the warships built through shipbuilding cooperation, the capital gains draining to New York through the Solidigm listing, the prices of semiconductors, batteries, and petrochemicals loaded onto the timetable of the U.S.-China bargaining. What all these items have in common is that the authority to decide does not lie domestically. At the very place where the Blue House demands autonomy, autonomy is reduced to a matter of bargaining power and subordination hardens into a condition. Unless we remove this grammar, at the table of the two leaders who will meet again two months later, there will still be no place for South Korean workers. The work of creating that place begins outside the negotiating table, on the production floor and in the streets, by building organizations that set the price of their own destiny themselves.
In the same interval there were two scenes in which South Korea's position was revealed more clearly. One is a Reuters report that Solidigm, the U.S. subsidiary of SK Hynix's American sub-subsidiary, is pushing for a U.S. listing as early as next year. A raise of up to $15 billion, a corporate value of $150 billion, roughly 204 trillion won, are being mentioned. If it succeeds, it will be one of the largest semiconductor IPOs in U.S. history. What must be asked here is not how much this listing brings to South Korea. It is why the upper end of the NAND business and the window for capital raising go to New York rather than South Korea. In the export figures for the 1st to 10th of the month confirmed in the same interval, semiconductors came to $16.483 billion, up 270 percent from a year earlier, and their share of total exports was 47.1 percent. Of every dollar earned through exports, 47 cents is semiconductors. Yet the subsidiary of the company that forms the body of those semiconductors seeks to be valued on the U.S. stock market. These two numbers say side by side that South Korea's semiconductor boom is not a boom of South Korean capital but a boom of the production facilities stationed in South Korea. The profits of the boom go where the capital is, and the facilities and labor remain.
The other is the September 22 New York meeting between President Lee and Trump. It was an unscheduled 30 minutes, and the agenda was strategic investment in the United States, nuclear-powered submarine fuel, spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, wartime operational control transfer, and shipbuilding cooperation. The Blue House stated that the investment discussions made great progress, and reportedly conveyed the position that it wants to wrap up the wartime operational control transfer as quickly as possible while meeting the conditions. If this list of agenda items is read as a single sentence, it comes out like this. South Korea demands autonomy in security (nuclear submarine fuel, reprocessing, wartime operational control) while, in return, carrying out a plan to station its own savings and industry inside the United States (strategic investment, shipbuilding cooperation). In my last diary entry I defined the $350 billion in investment in the United States as "a plan to station domestic savings and labor overseas," and this meeting has placed a security card on top of that plan. The expansion of autonomy and the deepening of subordination proceed simultaneously at the same table. This is the exact grammar of the comprador-monopoly system. It writes the bill in the language of sovereignty and pays it with the accounting of subordination.
So the core of this interval is neither the two-month reprieve nor the partial opening of Hormuz. It is what these things arrive as for South Korean workers. The column in which the price of the transition is accounted for is fixed. The labor conditions of the warships built through shipbuilding cooperation, the capital gains draining to New York through the Solidigm listing, the prices of semiconductors, batteries, and petrochemicals loaded onto the timetable of the U.S.-China bargaining. What all these items have in common is that the authority to decide does not lie domestically. At the very place where the Blue House demands autonomy, autonomy is reduced to a matter of bargaining power and subordination hardens into a condition. Unless we remove this grammar, at the table of the two leaders who will meet again two months later, there will still be no place for South Korean workers. The work of creating that place begins outside the negotiating table, on the production floor and in the streets, by building organizations that set the price of their own destiny themselves.