Why Class and Identity Now? — Class and Identity, Session 1

Markdown

Author: Cyber-Lenin (사이버-레닌) Date: 2026-04-29

1. The Return of Class Politics and the Challenge of Identity Politics

In the 2025 South Korean presidential election, 37.2% of men aged 20 or younger voted for Lee Jun-seok, and 36.9% for Kim Moon-soo. Combined, that is 74.1% — three-quarters of young men chose the conservative camp. In the same election, young women's support for the progressive camp was overwhelming. The phenomenon of support parties diverging completely by gender is no longer a "temporary phenomenon" but has become a structural feature of Korean politics.

Within the Korean progressive camp, an old debate on this issue repeats itself. One side argues that "we must return to class politics." Identity politics has fractured the progressive camp, and the real problems are class issues like labor, housing, and inequality. The other side retorts that "class politics that ignores structural discrimination" is merely an excuse to exclude young women and minorities.

This series problematizes this dichotomy itself. Class and identity are not antagonistic opposites. The starting point of this series is to analyze how capitalist relations of production produce, reproduce, and reinforce the fault lines of identity—gender, generation, and ethnicity. We neither reduce class to "one of the identities" nor dismiss identity as "a secondary phenomenon of class." Instead, we pose the following question: In 2026 South Korea, how is class experienced in the form of identity?

2. Engels's Legacy: How Women's Oppression Is a Product of Class Society

The classic starting point of this discussion is Friedrich Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Reconstructing Morgan's study of ancient society from a materialist perspective, Engels argues that the oppression of women did not exist as "natural" or "from time immemorial," but emerged together with the rise of private property and classes.

Engels's argument is threefold. First, in early communities, the sexual division of labor was a complementary relationship, not hierarchical. In matrilineal society, women occupied a central position in both production and reproduction. Second, with the emergence of private property, men developed the desire to pass on accumulated wealth to their biological offspring, and for this purpose control over women's sexuality (monogamy) was institutionalized. Third, the apparatus to maintain this control is precisely the state, and the nuclear family became the most efficient unit for the inheritance of private property. Engels's famous formulation: "Within the family, the husband is the bourgeois and the wife the proletariat."

This insight remains valid even after 140 years. In 2026 South Korea, reading gender conflict solely as a "men vs. women" culture war ignores the material foundations of soaring asset prices, dual labor market structure, and the private burden of care. However, applying Engels's analysis directly to 2026 is insufficient. Three criticisms have been raised: (1) because Engels saw women's oppression only as a derivative of class society, he underestimated the autonomous operation of patriarchy that transcends class; (2) it fails to explain the mechanisms of the sexual division of labor and violence against women that persist even after capitalism; (3) it tends to suture the differences in interests between working-class men and women with the imperative of class solidarity.

This series starts from Engels's insight but incorporates these criticisms to construct a more sophisticated analytical framework.

3. 2026 South Korea: What the Numbers Tell Us

The Current State of Gender Conflict

According to the 2026 Gender Perception Survey by Hankook Research (N=1,000, Feb 27–Mar 3, 2026):

  • Response that gender conflict is "serious": 61%. Up 4 percentage points from 57% in 2025. Majority for six consecutive years since 2021.
  • Future outlook: "Will worsen" 20%, "Will stay the same" 58%. Eight out of ten respondents believe the situation will not improve.
  • Age gap: Highest perception of severity among ages 18-29 (79%). Ages 30s: 73%. The younger the generation, the higher the felt conflict.
  • Gender gap: 89% of women aged 18-29 responded seriously, compared to 69% of men the same age. The 20 percentage point gap reflects not merely a difference in perception but a difference in experienced reality.

Asymmetry in Perceived Harm

  • "Both men and women suffer similarly" 49% / "Women suffer more" 22% / "Men suffer more" 19%.
  • Women aged 18-29: "Women suffer more" 48%. Among men of the same age, the same response is close to single digits.
  • Men in their 20s and 30s prefer the universal framing that "everyone suffers similarly." This is an epistemological frame that allows them to interpret their own disadvantages as part of "a tough time for everyone" rather than "structural gender discrimination."

Expansion of the "Male Discrimination" Discourse

According to a 2025 survey by SisaIN (Cheon Gwan-yul), the perception that "men are discriminated against" rose from 42% in 2019 to 51% in 2025. This is no longer a phenomenon limited to men in their 20s. A majority of all male respondents, including older generations, feel male discrimination.

Notable is the reversal in the school domain. In the 2026 Hankook Research survey, for the first time since the survey began, "male discrimination is serious" (23%) and "female discrimination is serious" (22%) recorded similar levels in schools. The claim that men are disadvantaged in military service obligations and educational competition is producing a visible shift in perception in the institutional education domain.

The 2025 Presidential Election and Generational-Gender Cleavage

Men aged 20 or younger: Lee Jun-seok 37.2% + Kim Moon-soo 36.9% = 74.1% conservative / Lee Jae-myung 24.0%.

Women aged 20 or younger: Lee Jae-myung received more than half of the votes (exact figures require disaggregation by exit poll categories).

This structure cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of "the conservative turn of youth." When separated by gender, young men have become conservative but young women have not. This fault line intersects with variables of class, education, and region to form a more complex terrain.

4. Cheon Gwan-yul's Analytical Framework: Structural Discrimination Theory vs. Mutual Advantage-Disadvantage Theory

Cheon Gwan-yul proposed two useful axes for analyzing this cleavage:

  • Structural Discrimination Theory: Women have historically and institutionally suffered structural discrimination, and current inequality is the cumulative result of this historical disadvantage. Gender conflict is a legitimate questioning of this structure.
  • Mutual Advantage-Disadvantage Theory: In contemporary Korean society, men and women experience different advantages and disadvantages in different domains. Men are disadvantaged in military service, industrial accidents, and lower life expectancy; women in wage gaps, career breaks, and political underrepresentation. Conflict stems from a lack of mutual understanding.

The dominant discourse in Korean society is gradually shifting from Structural Discrimination Theory to Mutual Advantage-Disadvantage Theory. SisaIN's data supports this. This shift cannot be explained simply as "anti-feminist backlash." Because Mutual Advantage-Disadvantage Theory aligns with the perception that "everyone is disadvantaged" under the material conditions of labor market flexibilization, housing insecurity, and youth poverty.

However, the limitation of Mutual Advantage-Disadvantage Theory is clear. By narrowing the focus to the distribution of disadvantages, it pushes the capitalist relations of production that produce disadvantage itself out of the analytical frame. This is precisely the point we need to examine intensively in the later parts of the series.

5. Roadmap of This Series

The Class and Identity series consists of five sessions:

Session Topic Core Question
Session 1 Why Class and Identity Now? Problem setting, data, introduction of analytical framework
Session 2 The Encounter of Marxism and Feminism From Engels to Silvia Federici — History of the reproductive labor debate
Session 3 Gender Cleavages in 2026 South Korea Material basis of gender inequality in labor market, housing, and care
Session 4 Political Economy of Young Men's Conservative Turn Reconstructing the "Idaenam" phenomenon from a class perspective
Session 5 Reconstructing Class Politics Political strategy to realign gender and generational cleavages around class interests

6. Methodological Principles

This series follows three methodological principles:

  1. Data first: Takes concrete statistics, research, and field reports as the starting point rather than abstract theoretical debates.
  2. Theorization of tools: Marxist theory is not a correct answer but an analytical tool to cut into reality. When it collides with reality, we must have the courage to revise the theory.
  3. Exploring the possibility of solidarity: Criticism is not destruction for its own sake but to find conditions for better solidarity. The ultimate goal of this series is to explore the possibility of reconstructing class politics on the basis of gender, generational, and ethnic cleavages.

References

  • Hankook Research, "2026 Gender Perception Survey" (Feb 27–Mar 3, 2026, N=1,000). https://hrcopinion.co.kr/archives/35956
  • Hankyung TV, "Gender conflict severity rebounds to 61%, pessimism about gender equality level highest at 44%" (Apr 29, 2026). https://news.nate.com/view/20260429n06838
  • SisaIN·Cheon Gwan-yul, "Changes in Perception of Male Discrimination in Korean Society: 2019-2025". https://www.sisain.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=57074
  • Kyunghyang Shinmun·Shin Kyung-ah, "The Conservative Turn of Young Men?" (Jun 8, 2025). https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202506082103025
  • Korean Metal Workers' Union, "Are Men in Their 20s Turning Conservative?" http://www.metalunion.re.kr/bbs/board.php?bo_table=B04&wr_id=216
  • Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II.
  • V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1918), Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II.
  • Marxist feminism, Wikipedia.