AN Eye Witness Account of Capitalist South Korea

I met relatives for the first time at Incheon Airport, South Korea. As we travelled towards Seoul, I looked out the car window. Out there were signs of highly urbanised life: tall, twenty storey buildings clumped together in the distance and we hadn’t even reached Seoul, the capital city, just yet. I remember being eager to see every aspect of South Korea, especially the ‘development’ of an ‘Asian Tiger Economy’ under capitalism. In the following article I will share my experiences of and some of my discoveries about South Korea: conversations with the people, a rally for workers’ rights that I attended and my thoughts on the situation in general of socialists and left-wing activists in South Korea.

The Journey to Korea

In the first place, I have to mention that it has been a painful and long journey for our family to finally return to South Korean soil again after many years of living in Australia. As a child I remember the threat of repression from the immigration authorities and the fear of deportation from Australia despite having actually been being born and raised in Australia, myself. Here in Australia I witnessed the denial of equal rights that in its turn gave way to exploitation at the hands of greedy bosses. My parents often worked as subcontractors for supermarket cleaning companies, pushed trollies and worked in the textile industry. The pay was meagre, $500 a week for full time work. Today, our working class situation is one of many where migrants and all working class people endure exploitation at the hands of the Australian capitalist system.

The Plight of the Elderly in South Korea

An elderly working class man doing it tough in South Korea: it is common to witness many resorting to collecting recyclables for petty cash in a country where an aged pension is virtually non-existent.

I was catching a taxi to the nearest bus station to travel to Daegu, a city of industry and technology. The taxi driver was a middle aged man and he was curious about my accent so I told him I was from Australia and he responded by telling me that Australia was a “good country.” I was wondering what he thought was that “good” about the imperialist nature and colonial origins of wealth in Australia but he then started to talk about the plight of the elderly in South Korea, something he was obviously very worried about. He said that a big problem in South Korea was the high rate of suicide amongst the elderly in the country. He was very aware that Australia was a so-called social democratic ‘welfare state’ that has some sort of welfare system and assistance for the elderly in place in contrast to the right-wing South Korean system where traditional Confucianist family principles dominate and there is very limited social welfare. I expressed my sympathy with him about the fact that there needs to be lots changed in South Korea towards providing assistance for the elderly. But without much time left, I quickly explained how Australia won a social welfare state and basic free health care as a result of workers’ struggles, also mentioning how Australia likewise has lots of changing to do especially around the issue of xenophobia and attitudes to migrant workers. If I had more time, I would have explained that Australia is an imperialist country where racism is a big problem. That the system and media scapegoat migrant workers so much that it often leads to racist attacks on migrants. That a system that has been founded on a white supremacist agenda of colonialism has always been racist towards the Aboriginal people. That the socio-economic disadvantages suffered by Aboriginal people stems from the historical and ongoing bloody theft of their property and that even to this day Aboriginal people die in state custody at a terrifying rate due to the brutality of the capitalist police. That Australian-owned businesses super-exploit the toilers of Australia’s Asia-Pacific neighbours and that some of the crumbs of this looting finds its way into funding social services within Australia and that, nevertheless, despite this hundreds of thousands of people in Australia live in abject poverty and are forced to skip meals and skip prescription medication just to get by on welfare. Continue reading →