Since the assassination of the U.S.- backed dictator Park Chung Hee in October 1979, the South Korean regime has gone into open crisis. There has been a powerful upsurge of the student movement with numerous university occupations. Many strikes have broken out of which the strongest were those of the miners and the steelworkers of Pusan. Militant demonstrations in the streets were held against the military dictatorship. Finally there was the urban insurrection in Kwangju that spread to many other towns in South Cholla Province and the first signs of decomposition were seen in the army during the early street fighting in that town. The U.S. command in South Korea released the troops used by the dictatorship to crush this rebellion. Those were the successive stages in the crisis of the last few weeks.
The immediate cause of the crisis was the practically unanimous rejection by the South Korean masses of a military regime installed by U.S. imperialism two decades ago after the powerful student demonstrations of 1960. Just after the death of General Park the army was divided, one sector wanting to inflate a “presentable” perspective of a certain “liberalization” of the regime. The crisis of bourgeois political leadership was accentuated. It was the return to open military dictatorship and the most brutal repression on May 18, 1980, with the arrest of all leaders of the Christian bourgeois opposition, including former presidential candidate Kim Dae Jung, liberal-Christian politician grotesquely accused of being “in the pay of North Korea,” which provoked the big explosions in the second half of May, of which the Kwangju urban insurrection was the culminating point.
But there are deeper causes to this crisis. The South Korea of 1980, is not the same as that of 1960. In the interim, one of the most rapid industrialization processes in the history of capitalism has brought it to become the third most powerful industrial power in capitalist Asia in absolute terms and the second in relation to its population and size. But alongside this ultramodern industry, a large and concentrated proletariat has grown up in the giant metropolises such as Seoul, which today has seven million inhabitants. The basis of this “South Korean economic miracle” was the superexploitation of a proletariat working June 16, 1980
Arrested rebel in Kwangju.
for starvation wages and kept atomized by the dictatorship. However, during the last period wages had begun to increase under the very effect of the “boom,” provoking a decline in investment and a slowing up of growth rates. 1980 will be a decisive year. Due to this, the students were no longer alone in front of the army like they were in 1960. A working class that is really beginning to stir will be more and more at their side. This was symbolically expressed by the fact that it was the coal miners that provided the students in Kwangju with the dynamite with which the latter threatened to blow up the government offices if the army attacked the town. The army is no longer made up essentially of peasants as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. These two changes are not very promising for imperialism and the South Korean bourgeoisie. At the present time, the Kwangju insurrection, in advance of the rest of the country, has not been able to hold out. In order to try and prevent its example inspiring other struggles of the same type the dictatorship and imperialism has _ unleashed a bloody repression against the student and worker vanguard. It is necessary to mobilize international opinion against this repression, above all the trade-union movement in Japan and the US. In a united way, the international workers and anti-imperialist movements must protect the courageous fighters of Kwangju and elsewhere against the torturers of the new dictator Chon.
After the fall of the shah, after the impetuous rise of the mass movement in Brazil, the crisis that is shaking the South Korean regime shows that the imperialist system is not only threatened in its most feeble and backward links but also in some of its “semi-industrialized satellites” that it considered to be the most reliable. Imperialism and the national bourgeoisie will defend tooth and nail their power, profits, and property in this country. The presence of U.S. aircraft carriers in the Sea of Japan, the American troops and bases linked in a unified command with Korean forces in South Korea, and the explicit threats to Pyongyang clearly indicate the resolution of Big Capital to hold onto South Korea—even if it is at an extremely bloody price.
The South Korean masses are focusing their struggle today on the conquest of democratic rights against the military dictatorship. The Fourth International fully supports this struggle. Behind the dictatorship stands imperialism determined to defend its positions in this country. A consistently led struggle against the dictatorship is interlinked with the struggle against imperialism and the U.S. military occupation. The success of this struggle will depend on _ independent organization and mobilization of the proletariat, the formation of powerful tradeunion organizations, the creation of a mass workers party, and the appearance of a revolutionary vanguard party, based on the South Korean working class and grounded in revolutionary Marxism and the program of permanent revolution, culminating in the establishment of a workers and farmers government. This struggle will inevitably raise the objective need for the reunification of Korea, presently split in two for over thirty-five years, opening the perspective of a unified socialist Korea coming out of the social revolution in the South and the political revolution in the North.
Down with the military dictatorship in South Korea! End the state of siege now! Reestablish immediately full democratic rights without any restrictions, including communists!
For the immediate convocation of a sovereign constituent assembly!
For the immediate dismantling of all imperialist bases and the withdrawal of imperialist troops from South Korea!
Active international solidarity with the victims of repression in South Korea!