Category: Situation Analysis / Imperialist War Tags: #IranWar #Hormuz #Imperialism #KoreanEconomy #OilPrices #SupplyChain Overview: Temporary Ceasefire, Permanent War Trump announced on April 21 that the ceasefire with Iran would be "extended indefinitely." Yet this ceasefire is not the suspension o...
Problem Setting: The Chaebol Is Not the Past, It Is the Present As of 2025, there are 92 publicly disclosed business groups in South Korea, comprising 3,301 affiliated companies. On May 1, 2025, the Korea Fair Trade Commission designated 92 business groups with total assets of 5 trillion won or more...
Introduction: Why Do the Limits of the 1987 System Repeat? Thirty-eight years after the Great Workers' Struggle of 1987. The South Korean labor movement was one of the most militant movements in the world, and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) grew into a huge organization with over on...
2016–2017: The Energy of the Candlelight, the Channel of Impeachment From October 2016 to March 2017, the Candlelight Revolution brought millions into the streets. The outcome—Park Geun-hye's impeachment—became a reality. However, the path of impeachment selectively processed the content of the cand...
The Threshold of an Era: The Duality of 2008 2008 is remembered for two things: the coming to power of Lee Myung-bak and the candlelight vigils. In May 2008, candlelight rallies against the import of U.S. beef with mad cow disease drew millions into the streets. This was a political rebellion, but i...
December 1997: Two Types of “Snatch and Pass” 1997 collapsed twice. The first collapse was the foreign exchange crisis in November. Inability to repay foreign debt, a request for an IMF bailout. The second, in fact, came first. At dawn on December 26, 1996, while opposition lawmakers slept, the ruli...
July–August 1987: History Changed The summer of 1987 is recorded as having two explosions. The June explosion is well known. The torture death of Park Jong-chul, the tear gas killing of Lee Han-yeol, millions marching in the streets — it was the democracy movement that brought the military dictators...
Introduction: The End of Critique Is the Beginning of Alternatives Over the previous four installments, we completed the dissection of platform capitalism. Data is not a new raw material but a tool by which capital reshapes production relations (Part 1); delivery, care, and cloud workers are a new p...
Monopoly Is Not an Exception but a Tendency of Capitalism Free-market advocates view platform monopoly as a "deviation." The narrative goes that Kakao and Naver have grown too large, and the market has been distorted because regulation lagged behind. The prescription is equally simple: strengthen fa...
"Technology Takes Away Jobs" — The Political Implications of This Proposition In 2025, Anthropic released a report on AI's impact on the labor market, stating that AI could theoretically replace 94% of the tasks performed by computer programmers. The World Economic Forum (WEF) forecasts that AI will...
Who Are Platform Workers? "Platform workers" are not a single group. According to the 2023 Survey of Platform Workers by the Korea Employment Information Service, the number of platform workers was 883,000 (an 11.1% increase from the previous year), and when combined with specially employed workers,...
Summary SetLog is a closed video-sharing social app developed and distributed by New Chat Inc. The official privacy policy states that user content such as photos, videos, and messages is end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), so the company cannot see the contents. This report statically analyzes the APK bin...
The Ideology of the "Platform Revolution" Coupang claims it is not a logistics company but a tech company. Kakao claims it is not a finance company but a platform. Uber claims it is not a transportation company but a software company. Behind this repeated self-negating narrative lies a consistent pu...
Overview SetLog is a social media application that allows users to share videos and photos within groups. It has been publicly released on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store, recording 250,000+ downloads on iOS and 100,000+ on Android as of April 2026. The developer is New Chat Inc., which is a...
Introduction: Raising the Problem — The Labor Aristocracy Phenomenon and the Reproduction of the Dual Structure On April 23, 2026, the Joint Struggle Headquarters of the Samsung Electronics Labor Unions held a 40,000-person struggle rally at the Pyeongtaek Campus in Gyeonggi Province and announced a...
The first three installments were primarily the logic of negation. We examined why capitalism structurally produces ecological crisis (Part 1), that real socialism was not free from the productivist trap (Part 2), and what class limitations each of the two leftist alternatives, degrowth and the Gree...
The leftist response to the climate crisis is not singular. If there is one strategic debate today that generates the sharpest friction within the international progressive camp, it is the opposition between Degrowth and the Green New Deal. Both positions share a critique of capitalism's ecological...
Starting with the Most Uncomfortable Rebuttal When discussing ecosocialism, the first rebuttal encountered is a historical fact: The USSR was not capitalist, but its ecological destruction was no less severe than capitalism's. The Aral Sea dried up, Chernobyl exploded, Lake Baikal was polluted. To i...
Let Us Reframe the Question The mainstream of climate crisis discourse treats 'carbon' as a material to be managed. Raise carbon taxes, switch to renewable energy, change individual consumption behavior — that is the gist. The IPCC reports, Green New Deal packages, South Korea's '2050 Carbon Neutral...
Summary From January 2026, CU logistics cargo workers demanded that the client company, the BGF group, engage in direct negotiations and resolve problems of long working hours, low wages, uncompensated ancillary labor, and lack of rest. However, BGF denied direct employer status on the grounds that...