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

Recently, newspaper reports said that Seoul National University canceled an undergraduate course on Marxist economics due to the lack of registered students. It is only natural in this era of the global economy. In fact, Marxist economic theory became extinct as a failed experiment in the early 1990s when communist countries in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China gave up on it and adopted free market principles.

In that sense, canceling a course on Marxist economics was a much-belated measure because it should have been abolished about 30 years ago already. Nevertheless, however, it was still an epoch-making incident in South Korea, considering that Seoul National University has long been a center for nurturing Marxism in South Korea, both in the humanities and social sciences.

For a long time, Marxist scholars in Korea have taught that big corporations, such as Samsung, have been exploiting their workers ruthlessly. Today, however, Samsung has become one of the most attractive workplaces, at which many young people want to work because it offers high-salaried jobs. Indeed, instead of exploiting its workers, Samsung has created so many well-paying jobs that everybody envies and admires it. Besides, Karl Marx’s theories are no longer valid in this era of virtual currency and bitcoins.

In the 1980s, radical left-wing scholars and literary critics in South Korea led the “National Literature” and the “People’s Literature” movements, based on Marxist literary criticism. They preached that literature must serve the people and the nation by depicting the miserable predicaments of factory workers, tenants and sharecroppers. They also argued that literature should be a tool for political ideologies.

At that time, few people realized that such a movement was already popular and ongoing in communist countries. Indeed, in communist countries, literature was considered nothing more than a tool for political propaganda that served the ideology of the authoritarian leader and his regime. Not knowing it, South Koreans naively believed at that time that the anti-government political activists were patriots who cared for the people and the country. Perhaps some of them were, but for most of them, “the people,” just like “literature,” was merely a tool that could help them win their ideological war against the right-wing military dictatorship.

The notion that literature should serve political ideologies seriously distorted literature because literature should be free from ideological warfare. Literature also cannot be limited to depicting the miseries of the poor, the underprivileged, or the disinherited. Instead, literature should portray various aspects of human lives, including those of the rich and privileged, as well.

Moreover, literature should transcend national boundaries and become universal in order to appeal to a global mindset. Therefore, literature cannot be simply “national literature” or “people’s literature.” Instead, it should be “global literature” or “everybody’s literature.” Those Marxist scholars and critics also called for “realism” as an effective literary movement to depict the lives of the people. However, clinging to 19th-century “realist” aesthetics in the postmodern era is like fighting with a bamboo spear in the age of drones and laser weapons.

Alas! Far left scholars and literary critics dragged Korean literature into the labyrinth of Marxism that was only valid in the 19th or early 20th century. Due to their myopic nationalist and people’s literature campaigns, Korean literature regressed to where it was half a century ago, during a time when it had to embrace the idea of global literature.

Fortunately, from the 1990s on, younger writers, who were free from political ideologies, began writing novels about the complex lives and agonies of modern men and women. These writers adopted a new sensibility and a postmodern perspective that was finally able to overcome the heavy-handed ideology that burdened the previous generation. Instead, they described “the unbearable lightness of being,” as Milan Kundera put it. After a decade of the ideology-dominating era, Korean literature became “free from ideologies,” at last.

In the 1980s, radical students in South Korea, too, were intoxicated by Marxism. While fighting against the military dictators, they studied the Marxist theories of Georg Lukacs, Lenin, Castro and Mao. They even adored the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung’s “Juche” ideology. At that time, they secretly whispered to each other the forbidden phrase in South Korea, “Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung” with a guilty smile. Consequently, they became pro-North Korean people who wanted to turn South Korea into a socialist country, or a “people’s democracy.”

Those who studied or taught at college at that time knew the reality behind such things quite well, but ordinary people did not know it at all. Otherwise, the Korean people would not have voted for them and made them drag the country back to the 19th century, which was Karl Marx’s era.

Today, we are living in the 21st century when Marxism and communism are extinct. We strongly hope that the specter of Marx no longer haunts us in Korea.

Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. -- Ed.

By Korea Herald(khnews@heraldcorp.com)