Korean Marxism: Hegemony and difference

Courtesy of Hugo Jehanne

By David A. Tizzard

The only thing which is consistent about life in Korea is its inconsistency. The nation lurches between pride and shame, between the east and west, between triumphant success and devastating failure, between a hypermodern safe paradise and a drug-tainted misogynistic murderous dystopia. There is no single Korea. There is just the totality of all the incomplete views.

These competing views are presented on Tik-Tok and YouTube, in academic conferences, lecture rooms, and government ministry meetings, on domestic television, and in the international press. All of these different views point to a meta-difference. That is to say, the manner in which these differences are conceptualized is a difference in itself.

Ignoring the largely inaccurate and ethnocentric western view of Korean politics which paints the conservatives as Republicans, President Yoon as Trump, and the Democrats as the progressive, human-rights loving good guys, domestic politics here is often divided between the right and the left with specific reference to their view of Korean history, Japan, and North Korea. The culture issues of other countries, of intersectionality, trans-rights, and all those other things, barely register when compared to whether or not Pyongyang should be seen as a friend or an enemy, if Tokyo's colonizing past should be remembered or forgotten, and what role the American military should play on the peninsula. These, more than anything else, are some of the main dividing lines of Korean politics. The left will insist that the true nature of Korean politics lies in a fundamental antagonism to the Korean right which ruled from 1948 to 1998. The French political theorist Chantel Mouffe describes this as agonism: the necessary and fruitful competition between different political points of view.

But to insist that this is the division that organizes and describes Korean politics is a position in itself. Because to conceive of a society as being a reaction to an impossible center from which the left and right diverge is the foundation of current Korean politics. Strictly speaking there is no center. That is the golden ideal. To conceive of the political Korean center is to pathologically deny the impossibility of a center being formed because of the left-right split. Conversely, the other view is that the center is all there is. That the medium position is the norm from which we divide ourselves into left and right. Every way in which we conceive of difference is a political gesture. All differences are meta differences.

The same logic can be applied to sex and gender relations in Korea. Many in Korea, more so than people in Europe in my experience, will insist that the difference between men and women is innate. That there is a binary divide between male and female that is operated and understood on physical biology. Thus men complete mandatory military service, women have pink parking spaces marked by a figure with a skirt, and all have a number assigned to them on their national identity card. But if this binary division were to be lost, it would eradicate much of the foundations on which Korean gender conversations rest. To insist either on biological sex or performative gender is a political gesture encased in the current framework. The manner in which the difference (or lack thereof) between men and women is conceptualized is itself a political gesture.

This is hegemony. While the term is often understood in cultural or Gramscian terms, it also has ontological and epistemological implications. Hegemony is the process in which you persuade people to agree upon the same set of differences. The framework and boundaries of conversation, and therefore thought itself, are limited and demarcated.

In post-Althusserian conversations, we are supposed to seek the point at which difference is transcended. This is known commonly as consensus. We like to think of the idea of consensus as when differences are mediated and a satisfactory compromise is achieved between two ideologically opposed antagonists. However, that misunderstands hegemony and the Korean political historic experience. Rather than compromise between opposing views, consensus is when there is no difference in the first place.

That's why any conversation about Korean politics or gender that remains in the existing framework of currently established differences is tied to the existing hegemonic structure and, therefore, conservative in its nature. If people argue about Korea's relationship with Japan in the existing structure, they are preserving the existing left-right political split and thus supporting the binary divide that keeps the two political parties in power. The truly progressive approach would be to re-conceptualize the relationship in entirely new terms. The same is true of gender. To argue for full equality of women in Korean society is noble. To be radical, however, is to think of ways in which the differences between men and women could be thought of differently. Any conversations that don't do this are limited by hegemony.

This, at its heart, is an argument couched in Marxist terms just as it is Lacanian and Althusserian. For Marx, the revolution he dreamed of was not about seeking compromise, better pay, and improved employment conditions for the working class. It was not about negotiation. The important thing was the complete removal of the structure of differentiation itself: the class structure. For Marx, there was no a-priori working class. This was an imaginary position enforced through false consciousness. Zizek and Lacan take this argument on by saying that to remove the system of difference is to enter a completely new progressive potential in which the real and the imaginary fall apart. A new world in which difference has yet to be created.

Thus, there is no universal consensus that the left and right in Korean politics will ever achieve on the issue of Japan or North Korea. There is no ideal state to be achieved. Neither real nor imaginary. It is not the case that the two parties have to put aside differences and work together to achieve some utopian Platonic form. Instead, in a more Taoist fashion, the key is to dig down deep. Past the dual-arising opposites and to a time before the hegemonic binary of political difference was established. That is where progressive potential is to be found.

Dr. David A. Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He is a social/cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the Korea Deconstructed podcast, which can be found online. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.