By Gregory Elich
As the South Korean Constitutional Court’s impeachment trial of President Yoon Suk Yeol heads toward its finish, a second trial has opened at the Seoul District Court, in which the president is charged with the crime of insurrection. As I reported in January, substantial evidence points to Yoon’s intention to unleash a campaign of mass repression under martial law. Recently, startling new evidence has emerged that paints a much darker picture of Yoon’s plan.
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By Gregory Elich
Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. By Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2022, xiv + 227 pp., $80.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781503610255
By all accounts, precarious labor has been playing an increasingly significant role in global capitalism in recent years. Employment in nonregular positions tends to be of limited duration, providing low wages and little or no labor and health protections. Essentially, business offloads the risks of work onto the worker while simultaneously cutting labor costs. This trend has broader ramifications in eroding social protections even for regular workers. Indeed, the authors of Precarious Asia argue that the binary categories of regular vs. irregular work and formal vs. informal work fail to explain the complexities of developments in global labor. In their view, the term precarious work should be applied to any worker who bears the risks of employment, regardless of labor categorization.
“Asia is the world’s factory,” the book reminds us, and what happens on the continent is directly connected to economic patterns elsewhere in the world. The shift toward precarious labor within developed capitalist countries produces competitive downward pressures on labor throughout the global value chain. In focusing on Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, the authors intend “to understand the similarities and differences for the insights they can provide into precarious work in different national contexts and to suggest some generalizable conclusions from the three cases” (6). This global perspective is crucial for understanding the interconnected nature of labor issues.
By Gregory Elich
Since South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed attempt to impose martial law on December 3, a steady stream of revelations has emerged from reporters and investigators, painting an increasingly disturbing picture of events. Plans drawn up by Yoon’s co-conspirators included a shocking level of brutality and the promise of repression on a mass scale. His administration even made efforts to provoke a conflict with North Korea to bolster the case for martial rule. Although many Western reports framed the end of martial law as a triumph of democracy, South Korea is not out of danger yet. The extreme right actively opposes Yoon’s impeachment, and it remains to be seen if the Constitutional Court will confirm Yoon’s impeachment.
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By Gregory Elich
Since the U.S. military brought its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to South Korea in 2017, it has met with sustained local resistance. THAAD is the centerpiece of the numerous actions the United States has undertaken to enmesh South Korea in its hostile anti-China campaign, a course that Korean peace activists are fighting to reverse.
By Gregory Elich
In recent days, U.S. media have been proclaiming that North Korea plans to initiate military action against its neighbor to the south. An article by Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, neither previously prone to making wild assertions, created quite a splash and set off a chain reaction of media fear-mongering. In Carlin’s and Hecker’s assessment, “[W]e believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.” They add that if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is convinced that engagement with the United States is not possible, then “his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using [his nuclear] arsenal.” [1]
By Gregory Elich
Text of talk delivered on May 16, 2023, at the International Strategy Center’s ‘International Conference for Peace in Northeast Asia: The South Korea-US-Japan Military Alliance is Stoking a New Cold War.’
Hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Gregory Elich to discuss the anniversary of the beginning of the Korean war and how the US divided the peninsula, how the war has had lasting effects on both sides of the Korean Peninsula and led to intense repression of progressive political elements in the south, and why the Korean Peninsula is so important to US imperialism.
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People’s Forum presentation co-sponsored by Monthly Review and the Korea Policy Institute.
The Korea Policy Institute’s Christine Hong and Martin Hart-Landsberg talk with the writers of the book’s new introduction, Tim Beal and Gregory Elich.
By Tim Beal and Gregory Elich
For a book on contemporary events to have a new edition seventy years after the first is a rare achievement. Izzy Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War has a continuing relevance for three major reasons: it is a tour de force of investigative journalism; the Korean War was a pivotal event in post-1945 history; and the combination of the two—the method of investigation and what it revealed of machinations behind the official curtain of obfuscation—can be brought to bear on a wider scale in order to understand what has happened since then and what is happening around us now, and into the future.1 There is a certain constancy in human affairs. Deceit, deception, and manipulation are characteristics of power, perhaps especially of modern “democratic” political power—what country does not claim to be adhering to democracy? In addition, the international framework fixed in place by the Korean War, dubbed the “Cold War,” is still with us despite superficial detours into rapprochement. In 1952, when Hidden History was first published, the United States was in hot war with North Korea and China, and in cold war with the Soviet Union. In 2022, when this edition is being issued, the United States is in proxy war with the Russian Federation, successor to the Soviet Union, and in cold war, perilously close to turning hot, with North Korea and China. In the United States itself, the flailing president is struggling to stay afloat in a turmoil that his administration had a major role in producing, and the political climate is increasingly intolerant of dissent, redolent of McCarthyism.2 Stone would find the situation in 2022 sadly, depressingly familiar.
Read More »Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Gregory Elich to discuss South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s state visit to the US and what might be on the agenda with regard to South Korea’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, the potential for South Korea to be a bigger part of the US tech war against China as tensions between the US and China escalate, and how this visit may impact inter-Korean relations as the US prepares for a conflict in East Asia.
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