[Kim Seong-kon] No extra specter of Marx hovering over Korea

Lately, newspaper reviews stated that Seoul Nationwide College canceled an undergraduate course on Marxist economics because of the lack of registered college students. It’s only pure on this period of the worldwide financial system. In truth, Marxist financial concept turned extinct as a failed experiment within the early Nineteen Nineties when communist nations in Jap Europe, the Soviet Union, and China gave up on it and adopted free market rules.

In that sense, canceling a course on Marxist economics was a much-belated measure as a result of it ought to have been abolished about 30 years in the past already. However, nevertheless, it was nonetheless an epoch-making incident in South Korea, contemplating that Seoul Nationwide College has lengthy been a middle for nurturing Marxism in South Korea, each within the humanities and social sciences.

For a very long time, Marxist students in Korea have taught that massive companies, similar to Samsung, have been exploiting their employees ruthlessly. Right now, nevertheless, Samsung has grow to be some of the enticing workplaces, at which many younger folks need to work as a result of it affords high-salaried jobs. Certainly, as an alternative of exploiting its employees, Samsung has created so many well-paying jobs that everyone envies and admires it. Moreover, Karl Marx’s theories are not legitimate on this period of digital forex and bitcoins.

Within the Nineteen Eighties, radical left-wing students and literary critics in South Korea led the “Nationwide Literature” and the “Individuals’s Literature” actions, based mostly on Marxist literary criticism. They preached that literature should serve the folks and the nation by depicting the depressing predicaments of manufacturing unit employees, tenants and sharecroppers. Additionally they argued that literature needs to be a instrument for political ideologies.

At the moment, few folks realized that such a motion was already common and ongoing in communist nations. Certainly, in communist nations, literature was thought-about nothing greater than a instrument for political propaganda that served the ideology of the authoritarian chief and his regime. Not figuring out it, South Koreans naively believed at the moment that the anti-government political activists had been patriots who cared for the folks and the nation. Maybe a few of them had been, however for many of them, “the folks,” identical to “literature,” was merely a instrument that would assist them win their ideological warfare towards the right-wing army dictatorship.

The notion that literature ought to serve political ideologies critically distorted literature as a result of literature needs to be free from ideological warfare. Literature additionally can’t be restricted to depicting the miseries of the poor, the underprivileged, or the disinherited. As an alternative, literature ought to painting numerous facets of human lives, together with these of the wealthy and privileged, as nicely.

Furthermore, literature ought to transcend nationwide boundaries and grow to be common with the intention to attraction to a worldwide mindset. Due to this fact, literature can’t be merely “nationwide literature” or “folks’s literature.” As an alternative, it needs to be “international literature” or “all people’s literature.” These Marxist students and critics additionally known as for “realism” as an efficient literary motion to depict the lives of the folks. Nevertheless, clinging to Nineteenth-century “realist” aesthetics within the postmodern period is like combating with a bamboo spear within the age of drones and laser weapons.

Alas! Far left students and literary critics dragged Korean literature into the labyrinth of Marxism that was solely legitimate within the Nineteenth or early twentieth century. Resulting from their myopic nationalist and other people’s literature campaigns, Korean literature regressed to the place it was half a century in the past, throughout a time when it needed to embrace the concept of worldwide literature.

Fortuitously, from the Nineteen Nineties on, youthful writers, who had been free from political ideologies, started writing novels in regards to the complicated lives and agonies of contemporary women and men. These writers adopted a brand new sensibility and a postmodern perspective that was lastly in a position to overcome the heavy-handed ideology that burdened the earlier technology. As an alternative, they described “the insufferable lightness of being,” as Milan Kundera put it. After a decade of the ideology-dominating period, Korean literature turned “free from ideologies,” eventually.

Within the Nineteen Eighties, radical college students in South Korea, too, had been intoxicated by Marxism. Whereas combating towards the army dictators, they studied the Marxist theories of Georg Lukacs, Lenin, Castro and Mao. They even adored the North Korean chief Kim Il-sung’s “Juche” ideology. At the moment, they secretly whispered to one another the forbidden phrase in South Korea, “Nice Chief, Comrade Kim Il-sung” with a responsible smile. Consequently, they turned pro-North Korean individuals who needed to show South Korea right into a socialist nation, or a “folks’s democracy.”

Those that studied or taught at school at the moment knew the fact behind such issues fairly nicely, however extraordinary folks didn’t understand it in any respect. In any other case, the Korean folks wouldn’t have voted for them and made them drag the nation again to the Nineteenth century, which was Karl Marx’s period.

Right now, we live within the twenty first century when Marxism and communism are extinct. We strongly hope that the specter of Marx not haunts us in Korea.

Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul Nationwide College and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth School. The views expressed listed here are the author’s personal. — Ed.