The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea

THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS

THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS

FROM KOREAN UNIFICATION TO TRANSNATIONAL KOREA

HYUN OK PARK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    New York

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK   CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

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Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54051-3

This publication project was supported by the Korea Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Park, Hyun Ok.

The capitalist unconscious : from Korean unification to transnational Korea / Hyun Ok Park.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17192-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54051-3 (ebook)

1. Korea (South)—Social conditions. 2. Capitalism—Social aspects—Korea (South) 3. Korea (North)—Social conditions. 4. Socialism—Korea (North) 5. Korean reunification question (1945-) I. Title.

HN730.5.A8P39 2015

306.3′4209519—dc23

2015010090

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

COVER IMAGE: Cho Chonhyun, Footsteps on the Border

COVER DESIGN: Chang Jae Lee

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Michael Burawoy and Harry Harootunian

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I: Crisis

1. The Capitalist Unconscious: The Korea Question

2. The Aesthetics of Democratic Politics: Labor, Violence, and Repetition

Part II: Reparation

3. Reparation: On Colonial Returnee

4. Socialist Reparation: On Living Labor

5. Chinese Revolution in Repetition: The Minority Question

Part III: Peace and Human Rights

6. Korean Unification as Capitalist Hegemony

7. North Korean Revolution in Repetition: Crisis and Value

8. Spectacle of T’albuk: Freedom and Free Labor

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Korea is already unified in a transnational form by capital. The prevailing ability to overlook flows of people, goods, and ideas crossing the borders of South Korea, China, and North Korea—beyond economic aid and the widely publicized trail of North Korean refugees—attests to the continued reign of the Cold War’s legacy and a seemingly undeniable sense of capitalism’s victory over socialism. Recognition of transnational Korea requires a historical approach that consigns the current Korean nation formation to the history of Korea and the Korean diaspora in the twentieth century. The ongoing transnational interaction of Koreans is constituted by asynchronous adoption of neoliberal reforms in Korean communities, each of which imagines them as a new democratic order. The Capitalist Unconscious presents the postcolonial and Cold War history of socialism and capitalism as the history of the neoliberal present. During the Cold War, rivalry between the two Koreas contrived their territorial integration as the normative vision of Korean ethnic and national sovereignty. Despite the tenacity of this Cold War formula, the current capitalist and democratic integration of Koreans across borders has once again destabilized ethnic and national relations of Koreans, which have been a vortex of the Asian order ever since the large-scale migration of Koreans to Manchuria (northeast China) and neighboring countries from Japanese rule. In turn, the unfolding disagreements over the identity and rights of border-crossing Koreans within each community and across them expose the unevenness and disjuncture of the current capitalist expansion on a global scale, which each Korean community construes as a transition from socialism to capitalism or from military dictatorship to democracy. The purportedly hegemonic spread of neoliberal capitalism is in fact the latest response of each Korean community to its singular crisis during the Cold War era that shaped nation formation, whether socialist or capitalist.

The border between North Korea and the world is not another Berlin Wall. The German model of national unification is not suitable for Korea. Unlike East Germany during the Cold War, two key forces have integrated North Korea into the global capitalist system in the post–Cold War era: Its new economic relationship with China and South Korea and the border-crossing migratory labor of North Koreans, both of which are inextricable from socioeconomic changes within North Korea. The German experience pertains to the Cold War context. Adopting it for Korea would mean disregarding the massive political, socioeconomic, and cultural changes in North Korea since the 1990s. North Korea and the United States and its allies may well agree on the importance of capital investment in North Korea. One might ask what is preventing us not only from recognizing that North Korea has already combined socialist ideology and capitalist economic development, as China has done, but also from accepting their consequent synergy that is to be determined by the society and the state. North Korea, in fact, has been on that thorny road for decades. Even if the North Korean regime falls in the near future, the politics and history of the neoliberal capitalist and democratic present discussed in this book will continue to inform an important strand of unfolding change in its society.

The booming field of North Korean studies regards the state’s capricious marketization and its clash with the people’s desire for privatization and democracy as the defining reality of North Korea in the current moment. However, this book interprets the latest conflict of the state and society as the newest instance of their repeated struggle to reconcile the continued contradiction between socialist construction and pursuit of rapid industri­alization under postcolonial condition and national division. Given that this contradiction was integral to socialist experiences during the twentieth century, The Capitalist Unconscious provides a comparative account of North Korean socialism in light of the history of permanent and continued revolution in the Soviet Union and China. Today’s politics concerning North Korea pits economic engagement with North Korea against protecting the human rights of North Koreans. Called the Sunshine Policy, trade and other forms of economic cooperation between the two Koreas are adopted as the means for peaceful reconciliation and gradual political change by progressive leftist South Korean governments. The protection of the human rights of North Koreans through the means of regime change is advocated by forces as various as South Korean and global NGOs, converted former pro–North Korean radicals, Christian evangelists, and the United States–led war on terrorism. This political antinomy in the approach to North Korea obscures their consensus on the capitalist market system and the rule of law as cornerstones of democratization. The vehemently opposed proposals for North Korea are spectacles of neoliberal capitalism, in which Korean and global communities displace their own contradictions arising from capitalist consensus and deepened socioeconomic inequality at home onto the task of democratizing North Korea.

The neoliberal capitalist and democratic present in the Korean peninsula is entwined with the Korean Chinese community in northeast China through the cascading labor migration of Koreans from China to South Korea and from North Korea to China. In South Korea, Korean Chinese migrant workers provide cheap labor in caring of children, the elderly, and the sick, as well as in restaurants and karaoke places. Apart from working in coastal regions of China in factories owned by South Koreans, North Korean migrant workers not only farm land of Korean Chinese farmers who left for South Korea but also work in the thriving service sectors opened up by Korean Chinese with their remittances from South Korea. Neoliberal capitalist reforms ruptured the promise of a welfare society in South Korea; low-paid Korean Chinese labor contributes to maintaining its facade. Some Korean Chinese make sense of their experience of migratory work in South Korea by remembering the Chinese Cultural Revolution as intra-ethnocide. Remembrance in South Korea of this deeply repressed history authorizes an investigation into the Chinese revolution as the history of their present-day relationship with South Koreans. The double inversion of Koreans from anticolonial revolutionaries to counterrevolutionaries, and from partners of socialist internationalism to national enemies characterizes the tumultuous process of Koreans becoming a national minority in the People’s Republic of China. The repeated construction of Koreans as others has coexisted with the history of Korean leadership during the anticolonial revolutionary struggle in Manchuria and Koreans’ extensive participation in the socialist construction. This paradox has unsettled their national identities and rights, although it is often shrouded by the ready-made narrative of the model minority. Constructed primordial attributes of Korean ethnicity supplied the content for exclusion of, and violence against, Korean Chinese. Yet the repeated otherization of Koreans was the form through which they became a national minority: Korean and Chinese revolutionaries in China vainly continued to resolve the contradiction between the socialist dictum and the intensified drive for industrialization; and this impossibility was inverted into the construction of Koreans as others. When the state calls privatization the reparation of socialist wrongs, the current diasporic migratory work of Korean Chinese in South Korea becomes the mechanism of reparation in unexpected ways. Savings and remittances from their work in South Korea reverse the construction of their status as others and victims. Their migratory work actualizes socialist promises for housing, healthcare, and education as commodities.

The history of Korean migration to Manchuria under Japanese colonialism becomes an ur-history of transnational Korea. Narrative and affective memories of colonial migration are exchanged among Koreans across borders, as they negotiate with each other the terms of migration, work, and rights. As North Korean migrants and Korean Chinese become undocumented labor respectively in China and South Korea, their evoked memories of colonial migration tame their struggles with exploitation and uncertainty and keep the capitalist dream alive. Both the ethnic compassion and perversion that migrant Koreans express toward their Korean employers and middlemen need to be understood in the context of their transnational capitalist present. Moreover, the language of reparation of colonial wrongs enabled South Korean activists to identity Korean Chinese migrants as colonial returnees, contesting the terms of their return and recovery of (South) Korean citizenship. This advocacy of Korean Chinese as ethnic nationals clashed with advocacy of non-Korean migrant workers that was framed in cosmopolitanism. Reparation for Korean Chinese was criticized for discriminating against non-Korean migrant workers.

The politics of reparation, the promotion of peace and reconciliation, and the advocacy of human rights constitute three repertoires of neoliberal democracy. I conceptualize them as market utopia and delineate utopian impulses behind the historical shift toward neoliberal democracy. Neoliberal democratic politics postulates diverse groups of migrant workers as anyone other than laborers: non-Koreans as cosmopolitan beings, Korean Chinese as colonial returnees, and North Koreans as refugees. This fragmented representation of migrant workers masks their shared ties with one another and with South Korean workers under conditions of neoliberal capitalist production. It also helps NGOs and the South Korean state to manage them as productive laborers by legalizing their work and yet denying their right to change workplace. The analysis of the democratic politics of migrant workers makes this book a study of labor in the putative postlabor era. I discern the capitalist consensus, discursive or unconscious, which resides in ethnic, national, and democratic politics of border-crossing Koreans.

Focused on Korea and Asia, this book concerns the issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the current era of global capitalism and political sovereignty. This book was completed at another moment of sweeping ethnic and national violence in world politics and widespread expropriation of people from their communities. Diagnoses of current events are often made in reference to earlier occurrences of civil war, apartheid, ethic separatism, and the Cold War. Prescriptions to resolve the violence are envisaged using modalities from historical examples. This mode of historical repetition in popular discourses and political consciousness is a primary concern of this book. The Capitalist Unconscious demonstrates that the historical content of each instance of ethnic and national politics is revealed when the concept of repetition is interrogated as a form whose mundane and haunting recurrence needs to be deciphered in conjunction with ongoing changes in global capitalism and global democratic politics.

NOTES ON ROMANIZATION AND TRANSLATION

I follow the McCune-Reischauer system and Pinyin system for the romanization of Korean and Chinese respectively, except for works and names that have their own specific conventions, for example, Kim Dae Jung. All translations from Korean and Chinese materials and interviews are my own unless otherwise noted.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book draws on years of ethnographic and archival research in South Korea and northeast China. It would have been simply impossible without all of the migrants in South Korea and China who gave their time and shared their experiences with me, even as they faced daily challenges and uncertainties. Community organizers, policy makers, and scholars in Seoul and Yŏn’gil also set aside their immediate tasks to explain their work and introduce me to their community. I am especially grateful to Lim Kwangbin, Chon Sinja, and Son Ch’unil. Going beyond acts of friendship and collegiality, they helped me at many stages of my research in finding important resources and contacts. I appreciate the generosity of Cho Ch’ŏnhyŏn, who showed me his video stills and photographs and made them available for this book.

The research and writing of this book is imprinted with decades of learning and inspiration from Michael Burawoy and Harry Harootunian. Their different intellectual thoughts and modes of interpretation have provided the enriching foundation from where I ventured into diverse theoretical and philosophical traditions and developed the sociopolitical and historical problematics explored in this work. Since my embarking on the research for this book in Ann Arbor, many friends and colleagues listened to my thoughts and offered me invaluable feedback and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Gay Seidman, George Steinmetz, Julia Adams, Rebecca Karl, Yukiko Hanawa, Ken Kawashima, Janet Poole, Hong Kal, Jesook Song, Janice Kim, Pak Kyongtae, Lee Yonghee, Chang Yongsok, Yi Jin-kyung, Goh Byeong-gwon, and Ko misuk. My special gratitude goes to Andre Schmid who made Korean studies in Toronto an open intellectual space. I thank Lee Chunja and Lee Hyunju for delicious meals and support in Seoul and Toronto. I am also grateful for institutional and intellectual support from York University and its sociology department, especially Peter Vandergeest, Radhika Mongia, Peter Landstreet, Himani Bannerji, Hira Singh, Philip Walsh, Fuyuki Kurasawa, Luin Goldring, Lesley Wood, Larry Lam, Nancy Mandell, Margaret Beare, Jackie Siebert, Rita Kanarek, Tom Cohen, David McNally, and the former dean, Robert Drummond.

The momentum for this book project was sustained over the years by presentations in lectures and workshops, where I tried out my emerging ideas and received critique and support, at the University of California in Berkeley, Stanford University, University of Iowa, Cornell University, University of Illinois in Urbana and Champagne, University of Toronto, McGill University, University of British Columbia, University of Manitoba, Columbia University, National Chiao Tung University, Hanyang University, Duke University, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I am particularly grateful to their organizers, including Jennifer Chun, Judy Han, Elaine Kim, Gi-Wook Shin, Sonia Ryang, Michael Shin, Nancy Abelmann, Andre Schmid, Janet Poole, Adrienne Hurley, Tina Chen, Tani Barlow, Rosalind Morris, Joyce Liu, Cheehyung Kim, Nicola Di Cosmo, and Michael van Walt van Praag. This book also grew alongside teaching seminars on capitalism, global modernity, memory, and the philosophy of history. I appreciate very much the insights of all my students, especially Jonathan Adjemian and Alex Wolfson at York with whom I mulled over difficult texts. I extend my wholehearted gratitude to Lise McKean for her support and copyediting of this book manuscript draft after draft in its variant incarnations.

The research for this book was supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Program on Global Security and Sustainability, the American Council of Learned Societies, and later the Academy of Korean Studies. The writing of the book began at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and years later I returned there to complete it. At the Institute I found my deepest thoughts, and my scholarship matured into an otherwise unimaginable form. I attribute them to the intellectual engagement beyond immediate utilities and received rules of scholarship, for which I am grateful to the faculty of the School of Historical Studies. Nicola Di Cosmo’s pastoral support for fellows created an environment where writing became as ordinary as sharing meals and laughter. I appreciate Nicola’s suggestion for a new title of the book, leading to the present one. Together with my thanks to Caroline Bynum’s support, I express my sincere gratitude to Piet Hut in the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies for extending my stay and allowing me to complete the book in such a reflective environment. The many hours spent each day in the Institute’s library acquired a collective flair in the company of Heinrich von Staden, Christopher Jones, and Sabine Schmidtke. I also would like to thank the Institute’s library staff, especially Kirstie Venanzi, for all the books that arrived at my desk, as well as other staff members for many nourishing treats and pleasant rides to downtown. I enjoyed conversation with a diverse group of scholars, including Carol Gluck, David Lurie, Ching Kwan Lee, Jos de Mul, Mark Driscoll, Diane Nelson, Weirong Shen, Moon-Kie Jung, David Eng, Yannis Hamilakis, Chen-Pang Yeang, Aihe Wang, Anna Krylova, Nikolay Tsyrempilove, Yucel Yanikdag, Barbara Walker, and Judi Byfield. The incredible summer writing camp with Jungwon Kim, also at the Institute, enabled me to muster loose and overflowing ideas and complete the revision in time; words are inadequate for conveying my gratitude for her earnest faith in the book and beyond.

I extend my deep gratitude to Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press for her enthusiasm and commanding support for the book. Jonathan Fiedler has taken care of details in the production process with a great ease. I am grateful to the two exceptional reviewers selected by the Press for their generous intellectual engagement with different scholarly orientations and for their incisive reading on both historical and theoretical fronts.

My siblings and my extended family in South Korea and the United States fill my life with love and perspective, and the period of researching and writing this book project is no exception. Through well-orchestrated webs of daily talks, Mija, Yoon Duckkeun, Sookja, Scott Saki, Namkyu, Kim Miheh, Hyun-Sook, Stan Young, Hyun Joo, Moon Seongho, Jiyon, Hyewon, Yonghoon, Justin, Minjae, Minkyong, Amanda, Caroline, Seonghyun, Jooyoung, and Terry have showered me with blissful surprises and given me strength. I also thank my uncle Kim Hyongju for his embrace of my study. Living in our midst and in my heart are my parents, Park Ro Tack and Kim Yang Rye. The detailed notes on everyday wisdom and knowledge they left behind bear their extraordinary times with the twentieth-century Korea. This history and its inflection with the current condition are the subject of this book.

Map 1: Asia

Map 2: Korea and Yanbian

PART I

CRISIS

1

THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS:

THE KOREA QUESTION

Korean unification is the quintessential problematic of the Cold War order in East Asia and concerns the national quest for decolonization. This book presents a new conceptual approach to Korean unification that observes a metamorphosis from a rapprochement between the two Koreas to the formation of a transnational community that includes Korean diasporic communities as major participants. Routine questions on Korean unification ask whether and when the two Koreas will be unified. The book’s thesis is that capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. This form of unification is not shaped by the long-awaited form of territorial integration and family union but rather is driven by the exchange of capital, labor, and ideas across the borders of Korean communities, including the Korean diaspora. The national division of Korea and the superpowers’ rivalry over it was the bedrock of the Cold War. Since the 1990s, the transnational Korean migration across the two Koreas and China constitutes a privileged venue of Korean unification, a new capitalist democratic order in East Asia, and an immanent link between them. The colonial migration from Korea to northeast China (Manchuria) in the first half of the twentieth century becomes an ur-history that Koreans in North Korea, South Korea, and China draw on to reinforce and challenge the terms of their capitalist integration.

Transnational Korea does not involve a convergence of Korean communities on the modular form of neoliberal capitalism despite the hegemonic role of capital. Instead, local meanings for transnational Korea are constituted by asynchronous constellations of old and new socioeconomic and emancipatory projects within each community. The rise of transnational Korea does not result from South Korea’s victory in its rivalry with North Korea. It ensues from each involved Korean community’s simultaneous experiences of socioeconomic crisis and crisis resolution by means of privatization, deregulation, and border-crossing labor migration. Transnational Korea is formed under the specific historical conditions of crisis in industrial development in Korean communities. A new capitalist network among Korean communities is transforming their inimical relations of the Cold War era into socioeconomic exchanges aimed at resolving the crisis. This book focuses particular attention on the cascading labor migration of Korean Chinese and North Koreans that integrates radically different economies: Korean Chinese migrate to South Korean cities to work in the expanding service economy, and North Koreans migrate to China for agricultural work formerly performed by Korean Chinese and for work in cities in burgeoning small businesses made possible by their remittances from South Korea.

I theorize capitalist experience as an unconscious that consists of the sociopolitical and historical unconscious. Market utopia is the sociopolitical unconscious that represents the capitalist experience in narrative, corporeal, and sensorial practices in quotidian life. The experience of expropriation, exploitation, inequality, and border crossing becomes the basis for a social construction of democracy that I conceptualize as market utopia. Whether in socialism or welfare capitalism, the vision of democracy during the industrial era concerned the power of the masses attesting to their critical role in consolidating mass production, mass consumption, and the dream of collective sovereignty. Market utopia is an alternative democratic practice that corresponds to the hegemonic domination of neoliberal and financial capitalism. Notwithstanding their importance, narrative constructions neither exhaust their experience nor entirely integrate with other experiences of socioeconomics, such as everyday routines, predicaments, and contradictions that Korean migrants register through bodily expression involving work, protest, emotion, and illness. Market utopia entails three repertoires of democratic politics—reparation, peace and reconciliation, and human rights—whose shared capitalist logic is explicated in this book.

The historical unconscious concerns the memory form of history and the temporal structure of subjectivity. When one is preoccupied with discerning new capitalist and democratic logics, such attention to the new may inadvertently foster a historicism that projects a rupture or a transition as if the old disappears. I examine how this historicism is authorized by the problematic concept of epochal transition and bring history to the forefront of the inquiry. Different economic sectors have undergone disparate changes in the putative era of financial capital. For example, the industrial sector shrank, but not all factories moved overseas or closed down. Instead of proclaiming the demise of the industrial sector, we need to delve into the new nexus between industrial capital and financial capital that is forged with the changed vision about the state. Furthermore, earlier utopian ideals have not vanished but returned as unscheduled revenants, haunting the hegemonic neoliberal democracy. Thus, the issue is about not only how to create a new politics but also how to recognize it when it emerges. History takes up philosophical status, since history is a matter not of aggregating events but of understanding and experiencing time through narrative, corporeality, and memory. I place the capitalist unconscious within the framework of historical repetition to examine the form and content in which the capitalist unconscious appeared at different historical moments.

FROM KOREAN UNIFICATION TO TRANSNATIONAL KOREA

Since the 1990s, capital has spearheaded the transnational form of Korean unification. This new form eludes even watchful eyes because of the fixation on the unification of territorial nation-states as envisaged during the Cold War. Unification discourses and practices offer few clues for recognizing the new transnational form of Korean unity. Old and new tropes of Korean unification transpose the trauma of national division into a substance for reestablishing an organic national whole. The Cold War notion of returning to an undivided past through territorial union continues to inform unification politics in the aftermath of the Cold War. The imposition of national division by foreign superpowers against Koreans’ will was a powerful Cold War narrative. Accordingly, the dissolution of the global Cold War is commonly understood as removing foreign opposition to Korean reunification. Thus the collapse of North Korea is considered imminent, with Korean unification only a matter of time. The German experience is held up as the model for assessing the economic capacity needed by South Korea for the peaceful integration of North Korea. Brief and tearful reunions of families separated since the Korean War have galvanized moral calls for reunification and fortified their normative imperative. Given the post–Cold War allure of the imminent realization of national union, cultural differences between the two Koreas resulting from decades-long separation rather than military enmity are perceived as creating barriers to genuine reunion and threatening reunification—even if territorial integration is achieved. These forays into the return to an undivided whole obfuscate the fact that Korean ethnic sovereignty assumes a new form of transnational community that eschews belabored forms of family reunion and the singular nation-state.

In my approach, the current form of Korean unification is not merely a matter of national and familial reconciliation. Rather, it is constitutive of a new capitalist and democratic order in post–Cold War Asia. During the Cold War, the Korean national division was paradoxically consolidated by diametrically opposed states that elevated unification to the sublime objective of national independence and used it to consolidate military dictatorship (Cumings 1981; Koo 1994; Bleiker 2005). Each state participated in an intensified race for military armament and state-led industrialization. If the Cold War is to be understood not just as a military rivalry between superpowers but also as an American project of establishing capitalist hegemony, then the post–Cold War does not negate the Cold War order but reconfigures a global capitalist order marked by porous borders and neoliberal democracy. Paik Nak-chung (1998), a renowned literary critic in South Korea, has offered a rare account of the role of capital in transforming the Korean division in the post–Cold War era. Writing soon after the 1997 financial crisis, Paik observed that investment and trade with North Korea by South Korean conglomerates riled but fell short of annihilating the national division. This resilience of the Korean division, he argued, underscores that the national division has become the system (ch’eje) with its own mechanisms of reproduction, which in this case are military and political forces within and beyond the Korean peninsula that sustain the Korean division. In my view, Paik has underestimated the unruly changes in the post–Cold War capitalist system that are accompanied by changes in national and global politics of sovereignty.

Capital-driven transnational Korea offers a missing link between the normalized task of Korean unification and the prevalent disenchantment with unification in South Korea. Democratized public space in South Korea is marked by indifference and skepticism over the viability of Korean unification, as well as by defeatism among activists whose roles in unification efforts no longer gave them prominence. Scientific surveys and opinion polls on unification conducted by the government and research institutes affirm the demise of the wish for unification, which seems to be interrupted only by intermittent family unions hosted by the two states. Without a prospect of meeting again, family unions turn the decades-long awaited moment into a spectacle of human tragedy. The public’s disaffection with unification in South Korea is often attributed to concern over its economic cost. Accordingly, the economics of unification needs to be seriously interrogated. I consider this economic disenchantment with unification to be a phenomenological index of the global capitalist integration of the two Koreas and the Korean diaspora. Even then, global capitalist integration repeats sentiments of a necessary yet impossible union in the future. The exchange of capital and labor satisfies long-standing aspirations for reconciliation among Koreans while taming the urgency of Korean unification into regularized enactments of market exchange. The missing link is that Korea is already unified in a transnational form by capital. Transnational Korea coheres under the act of commodity exchange across Korean communities. This material substance is conceived, enacted, and reproduced as the new everyday reality of the post–Cold War era. The border crossings of people, goods, and money bear with them fantastic desires for wealth, security, and the primordial belonging. Capital occupies the transnational space of Korean interactions through the affective politics of the ethnic nation.

Transnational Korea locates a new form of Korean ethnic sovereignty within capitalist crisis and its historically specific response to the crisis and discerns within it a new cultural-political register of democracy. Buck-Morss (2002:39) argues that if the era of the Cold War is over, it is perhaps less because one side has won than because the legitimation of each political discourse found itself fundamentally challenged by material developments themselves. Similarly, the Korean Cold War has subsided since the 1990s despite perennial military tension between the two Koreas. This is less because South Korea won the Cold War than because the two Koreas simultaneously faced crises that were bound up with a global capitalist crisis. An analysis of the capitalist crisis and its attempted resolution in each place is necessary to make legible the emergent transnational Korea. As much as the global capitalist crisis at the end of World War II laid the political economic foundation of the Cold War and the Korean division, a new global crisis of industrial accumulation provided the momentum for the waning of the Cold War. This means that Korean unification is a problematic of global capitalism and its corollary regime of democracy rather than an a priori question of ethnic sovereignty.

Led by South Korean capital, transnational Korea signifies a distinctively uneven integration of East Asia in the post–Cold War era, which belies both the prevalent imaginaries of regional unity and the persistent strength of nation-states. South Korea grants Korean Americans de facto dual citizenship while constraining the rights of Korean Chinese to visit and work in South Korea. Inequality between the two Korean diasporic communities has become the most contentious issue together with the status of North Korea in the formation of the deterritorialized Korea. Devoid of capitalist exchanges with South Korea, Koreans in Japan and Russia remain invisible in transnational Korea. A hierarchical transnational community is anomalous with the ethnic principle of citizenship and the dichotomy of home and diaspora.

Postcoloniality

Conceptualizing the national question as a postcolonial question is key to understanding the shift in the imagined Korean community from Korean unification to transnational Korea. The two Koreas’ Cold War rivalry for territorial integration of the nation has a postcolonial character. The division of Korea after liberation from Japanese rule was not simply the result of intervention by the superpowers. It was also the result of the domestic struggle over social reforms to address the inequalities exacerbated by colonization. The Cold War fixed the decolonization struggle as a competition between state socialism and military capitalism. Under the banner of permanent revolution, the North proceeded with a socialist form of decolonization, conducting land reform, purging colonial collaborators, and consecrating the memory of anticolonial struggle as the basis of its Juche (self-reliance) ideology. The South developed a military state that delayed land reform and reinstated collaborators with Japanese power in key administrative and military positions. The interlocking relationship in South Korea of military dictatorship, American influence, and capitalist development formed the central question in the social formation debate of the 1980s. Postcolonial politics in the Korean peninsula, with its fixation on the Cold War division of the nation, is similar to the politics in postwar Japan, where defeat and US occupation led to Japan’s becoming engrossed with its relationship with the United States. In Young’s (2012) observation, the postimperialist history of Japan was reduced to postwar history, mainly determining responsibility for the war. In building a Cold War bloc in Asia, the United States in the early 1960s led the South Korean state to agree to Japan’s offer of a one-time monetary settlement in order to bury the issue of colonization and compensation.

The post–Cold War era has reconfigured postcolonial desire, constructing the Korean nation in transnational form. The issue of reparation of colonial wrongs has been reopened in South Korea in the post–Cold War context, most notably in conjunction with reparation for women who were mobilized by the Japanese state as sex-workers for its military during the colonial era. Marx’s observation that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the next time as farce is apropos of the Korean context. If Koreans in China and North Korea enjoyed amicable relations as communist brothers in the past, their uneven capitalist integration since the 1990s has produced hierarchical relations defined by the market exchange of money and labor. Their hierarchical relations with South Koreans are mapped onto new repertoires of democratic politics in hegemonic South Korea, namely, reparation, peacemaking, and humanitarianism. In this conjuncture, the colonial history of migration to Manchuria becomes the ur-history of transnational Korea. Memories of Japanese colonization provide Korean Chinese and North Koreans with a discourse for articulating quotidian experiences and actions (see Park 2005). The repeated migration of Koreans in these two historical moments does not mean that the pattern of Korean migration then and now is similar. Instead, it discloses the repeated paradoxical tension of territorializing and deterritorializing forces that arises from the interplay between global capitalist expansion and the state’s role in it.

Historical repetition is more than resemblance and memory. Recognition of repetition interrupts the linear historical temporality that frames neoliberal democracy, at the same time pointing to the very logic of capitalist expansion that triggers repetition. Buck-Morss (2002:31) notes that unlike Hegelian or Marxist philosophies of history, the conception of the ur-form presumes no continuum of historical development and no deterministic necessity as to the outcome. Similarly, the colonial history of migration as the ur-form of transnational Korea requires an approach beyond the thesis of colonial modernity. The latter locates the origin of capitalist development in the colonial era, implicating the origin of Korean modernity in what was called Western modernity, which Japan simultaneously sought to imitate and overcome in its metropole and colonies (e.g., Shin and Robinson 2001). My analysis reveals instead that the colonial history of migration to Manchuria provides a basis for identification and disidentification with the neoliberal democratic order. The book examines the present, in which emerging global capitalist and democratic regimes rupture the lives of border-crossing Koreans. Memories of colonial migration configure experiences of capitalist and democratic changes. Koreans across borders comprehend and contest the hierarchy among their communities through their articulations of new memories.

Transnationalism

Transnational Korea reveals its instability as soon as it is explored substantively. Conflicts and contradictions arise from practices and narratives over Koreans’ border-crossing interactions. Ethnicity, nation, cosmopolitanism, peace, and human rights are key spatial sites of political economic and cultural exchanges of Koreans across borders. Neither here nor there, these spatial sites are liminal zones whose principal function is to offer the time and place for capitalist transactions. With its inherent contradictions, transnational Korea rests on cosmopolitanism and nationalism, both of which provide crucial, though not always functional, services for capitalist expansion. Nongovernmental organizations in South Korea, for instance, espouse cosmopolitanism in defining migrants’ rights as human rights while bringing nationalism in through the back door. Nation-states and migrants also appeal to transnational as well as national ties.

Transnational Korea exceeds the framework of diaspora studies and transnational migration studies, which take the nation-state as the unit of analysis by regarding diaspora as the extension or transcendence of the nation-state. Theories of transnationalism revolve around ethnic and global homogeneity, such as Appadurai’s (1996) ethnoscape and the global human rights regime, and local differentiation such as diasporic culture (Clifford 1992; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Braziel 2003). However, neither pole of this theoretical polemic explains the hierarchical structure of the Korean transnational community. This hierarchy also challenges the principle of ethnic citizenship, which postulates symmetrical inclusion of all members of the same putative ethnic group regardless of differences in social status, residence, or citizenship (Brubaker 1998). The notion of long-distance nationalism conceptualizes overseas members as an extension of the home nation-state (Anderson 1992). However, studies of diaspora and transnational migrants present them as others of nation-states, who disperse across borders, live in interstitial spaces of states, and make no fixed commitment to either home or host states, but instead develop multiple, hybrid identities (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc 1995; Soysal 1995). Thus, an important concern in these studies of diasporic and transnational migration is the status of the nation-state and its membership system within contemporary globalization. As a result, the studies present a dyadic analysis of home/host nation-state and diasporic migrants, which regards the latter as a whole and the others of the nation-state. This dyadic framework is adopted in the proliferating studies of foreign migrant workers in South Korea, the Korean Chinese diaspora, and North Korean migrants for investigating discrimination in South Korea, diasporic networks, ethnic and national membership, and multiple belongingness (Sŏl 1999; Cho 2008; Pak Kyŏngt’ae 2008; Ryang 2008; Jaeeun Kim 2011).

Current studies of citizenship and transnational migration do not adequately address the complexity associated with these hierarchical relationships across transnational Korea. Different positions, rights, and bargaining powers of Korean diasporic communities as compared with South Korea, as well as in relation to one another, demand an analytic framework that goes beyond the conventional dyadic analysis of the home state and diaspora and instead takes the home/host nation-states, non-Korean migrants, and different diasporic Korean communities together. When one observes diasporic communities one by one, the position of Korean Americans in transnational Korea resembles that of Hong Kong Chinese investors in China, where the Beijing government welcomes their investment but treats them like married daughters whose loyalty no longer belongs to their natal family (Ong 1999). The status of Korean Chinese working in South Korea is similar to that of Japanese descendants who returned to Japan from Brazil in the 1970s (Linger 2001; Lesser 2003). I argue that it is possible to observe a hierarchy among them only when we examine Korean diasporic communities all together. This book demonstrates that transnational Korea is inextricable from the capitalist imperatives that shape the hierarchical relations among involved Korean communities.

My analysis of the global scale of Korean capitalism and its hierarchical structure also considers the problem of the instrumental logic of capital. I probe South Koreans’ portrayal of North Koreans and Korean Chinese as cheap laborers and consumers of surplus commodities. My analysis links global Korean capitalism and its form to the simultaneous crisis of industrial accumulation in the two Koreas and China and their conjoined struggles to resolve the crisis through the exchange of capital and labor among them and imagine such exchange as a process of democratization. The problem of capitalist crisis must be investigated thoroughly in order to recognize the new form of Korean unification. In the Hegelian formula, the crisis of global capitalism is found in the transnational form of Korean sovereignty that emerged out of the effort to overcome the crisis. Or conversely, the analysis of the Korean transnational community demonstrates global capitalism’s universal logic and intrinsic crisis. This suggests that the index of Korean ethnic sovereignty is not ethnic and national content nor ideological motifs (cultural differences, ethnic purity, or level of economic development). Rather, it is articulated first and foremost in its commodity form.

CRISIS, SOCIALISM, AND SOVEREIGNTY

To explain the capitalist logic of transnational Korea, I offer an analysis of capitalism, particularly its valorization and the historical expressions of its immanent crisis. Transnational Korea involves a simultaneous crisis in South Korea, North Korea, and China, and their interlocking process of crisis resolution. A thorough analysis of crisis in capitalism and socialism is therefore warranted. My discussion focuses on the shifting characterization of socialism, especially on the gap between its utopian vision and actuality, as its relationship with capitalism has been theoretical and political terrain for envisioning emancipatory politics. The law of value and the state-capital nexus are two axes of the debate on the crisis of capitalism and the construction of socialism as an alternative. I integrate analyses of global capitalism and biopolitics as a framework for the study of living and dead labor in this book.

Capitalist Crisis and Socialism

Theoretical and historical assessments of capitalist crisis concern the issues of how crisis originates in the very processes of large-scale industrial capitalism and whether the resolution of the crisis requires revolution or reform (Lenin 1917; Marx 1976; Steger 1997). Rejecting market equilibrium as a solution to crisis, Keynes (1936) regarded creating a demand for consumption as a means to forestall declines in the sale of goods. In leftist circles the crisis of capitalism has three structural sources. One is underconsumption, since the masses’ consumption power decreases in proportion to capital accumulation that depends on reducing wages (Luxemburg 1913). Another is overproduction, as the monopolistic capitalists are driven to invest in technology and machinery, expand capacity for production, and enhance labor productivity (Lenin 1917). A third source of crisis is a tendency of falling rate of profit: the constant capital spent on buildings, technology, and other costs of production increases disproportionately over variable capital spent on labor costs; and reductions in the workforce cause the rate of profit to fall, since profit requires surplus value, that is, unpaid labor, even when capitalists increase the mass quantity of