[Opinion] Intellectual Socialism

Under the Japanese colonial rule, Koreans had difficulty finding jobs, even with higher education. Like Korea, it was similarly hard for people of other colonized nations to become the mainstream in their societies. With all chances of beginning their careers blocked off, many intellectuals turned to socialism, choosing to remain as outsiders of the society and dreaming of subversion. Thus go the historical reasons for Korean socialism having been led by intellectuals and not the labor classes.

After gaining independence from Japan and with the start of the Cold War era, socialism was barred from the South Korean society. Research on ideology was carried out clandestinely, with limited data. The people of South Korea, infused with anti-communist ideas, held vague sentiments of antagonism towards socialism and did not know it in depth. In effect, socialism never had a chance to come for a testing in the Korean society. Then in the 1980s, the leftist movement became all the rage, eventually giving rise to the Roh Moo-hyun administration, also led by the intellectual groups.

However, Korea’s left-wing is often criticized as lacking a sense of pragmatism. A leftist movement that is not based on a sound understanding of the reality is bound to result in power struggles over who is theoretically right and who is not. It tends to neglect more urgent issues such as how to improve people’s lives or respond to outside changes, including globalization and digitalization, ending up nothing more than a rigid ideological body. Not far removed from such a state are the young intellectual politicians in the current administration who push for policies that fall short of reality and who claim themselves to have been right even when their efforts turn out to be dismal failures.

An increasing number of leftist intellectuals are said to be withdrawing their support of the Roh administration. It would surprise no one when centrist intellectuals turn their backs on the incompetent government, but it is a rather different story with the left-wing, who criticize that Roh’s policies did not lean enough to the left. However, there are no accounts of these leftist intellectuals putting themselves in the shoes of the low-income families to understand their suffering, nor of those who insisted on forcing through a clause on market dominant player in the Newspaper Act making an apology or repentance when the same clause was judged to be unconstitutional. They should bear in mind that an ossifying left-wing that fails to provide alternatives will only end up isolating itself.

Hong Chan-sik, Editorial Writer, chansik@donga.com