The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea

by Namhee Lee

In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history of the minjung ("common people's") movement in South Korea, Namhee Lee shows how the movement arose in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the repressive authoritarian regime and grew out of a widespread sense that the nation's "failed history" left Korean identity profoundly incomplete. The Making of Minjung captures the movement in its many dimensions, presenting its intellectual trajectory as a discourse and its impact as a political movement, as well as raising questions about how intellectuals represented the minjung. Lee's portrait is based on a wide range of underground pamphlets, diaries, court documents, contemporary newspaper reports, and interviews with participants. Thousands of students and intellectuals left universities during this period and became factory workers, forging an intellectual-labor alliance perhaps unique in world history. At the same time, minjung cultural activists reinvigorated traditional folk theater, created a new "minjung literature," and influenced religious practices and academic disciplines. In its transformative scope, the minjung phenomenon is comparable to better-known contemporaneous movements in South Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Understanding the minjung movement is essential to understanding South Korea's recent resistance to U.S. influence. Along with its well-known economic transformation, South Korea has also had a profound social and political transformation. The minjung movement drove this transformation, and this book tells its story comprehensively and critically.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Academic, Grad School

368 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Hiroki · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author delineates how Undongkwon as counterpublic sphere had been constructed through alliance between intellectuals and workers, and the notion of minjung had been emerged as a counter narrative (the minjung project). She also focuses on bifurcation between intellectuals and workers and limitations of the minjung project, as well as its inadaptabiliy to post-democratization, post-modern society. Consequently, she argues, after 1990s "the tension and ideals of the 1980s have been only partially attaind, and the movement's experiences are increasingly becoming images and fragments 'for the purposes of nostalgia or pastiche'"(p.303).
Finally, she proposes that "Treating the minjung movement as a rightful subject of history not only historicizes the conditions of its emergence as a political and social force but also generates a historical praxis. The purpose is... to give history the capacity to enable individuals and society to reconceptualize social relations in an empowering and participatory ways"(p.303)

The book is really exciting and interesting for me, although it is also difficult to understand, I needed to read other books which it references. It includes many details and suggestions to study Korean minjung movements and even social movements in general, particularly intellectuals' dilemma under historical responsibility and discourse of moral privilege which made intellectuals participate in emancipatory movements and matter of representations. It is that tension between intellectuals' assumption and even belief of workers' purity and subjectivity which assure intellectuals of the needs of education to workers and their participation in labor movements, on the one hand, and the fact that the presumed demands or responsibility for intellectuals' involvements, accompanying their own sacrifices - expulsion from collage and imprisonment-, hinge on the great social and ethical inequalities, on the other hand. In short, the dissident intellectuals' project to create an Utopian and equal society, in its practice, needs inequalities in a society, as well as is not sustainable without inequalities between workers and intellectuals. Its unavoidable tension can not only dismantle solidarity among actors but also forge many techniques for alliance.

[Ana Widia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hasil refleksi pembacaan buku ini dengan kondisi sosio-politik Indonesia:

Demokrasi pada dasarnya bertujuan memastikan setiap orang—termasuk mereka yang termarjinalkan—memiliki suara. Tidak ada satu pun kelompok yang boleh tertinggal. Untuk mencapai demokrasi yang benar-benar sehat, suara ‘labour’ menjadi kunci, karena merekalah kelompok yang paling mudah dimobilisasi akibat pengalaman penindasan kolektif. Dari sinilah lahir kekuatan perubahan, sebagaimana terlihat dalam berbagai gerakan historis seperti Gwangju Movement. Luka bersama menciptakan basis perjuangan yang kokoh.

Dalam mengorganisir, yang pertama dibutuhkan adalah rasa kesetaraan: kesadaran bahwa kita sama-sama tertindas. Bukan datang dengan sikap “juruselamat”, tetapi hadir sebagai sesama yang berjuang. Itulah fondasi solidaritas yang autentik.

Namun solidaritas saja tidak cukup tanpa perubahan struktural. Kita membutuhkan reformasi kebijakan ekonomi yang pro-industri agar lapangan kerja formal semakin luas. Semakin banyak pekerja formal, semakin besar pula basis dukungan demokratis yang dapat berserikat dan bersuara. Sebaliknya, selama sebagian besar pekerjaan masih informal, proses konsolidasi gerakan buruh akan selalu sulit—karena mereka terfragmentasi, tidak terlindungi, dan sulit membangun organisasi.
Karena itu, demokrasi yang kuat membutuhkan transformasi ekonomi. Industrialisasi dan kerja formal memberi fondasi bagi kelas pekerja untuk bersatu, menuntut hak, dan memastikan tidak ada yang tertinggal dalam proses berdemokrasi.

I hadn’t anticipated the book to be this intellectually rigorous—nor did I expect its insights to resonate so profoundly with contemporary dynamics in Indonesia, particularly within the landscape of labor movements.

Kudos, Namhee Lee!

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good introduction to the democratic people's movements in South Korea in the 1980s. It is also a solid historical monograph and gets into the details of intersecting factions, performance rituals, and publications that brought the movement together. Lee draws from a plethora of primary resources from Korean newspapers and magazines to many English language sources commonly engaged in the dialogues of historians.

[Juhyundred · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Lot of solid information, a little belabored and theoretically vague at times

[kingsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

a genuine must read for any person with stakes in korean political movements and history.

[C Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and precise account of South Korean politics. Read parts of it for a Political Science course, but found it interesting enough to read in its entirety.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read really fast.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a presentation in my Korean History class. I felt that that this book was a little bit tedious, but as the book went on, I became more and more interested.