Customer Reviews

Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation

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In their book 'Empire', Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri talked about the 1996-7 workers' general strike in Seoul, South Korea as one of the historical events against Empire.

Koo's book about working-class formation in Korea shows and analyzes how progressive and sometiems militant working-class movement of a large scale has been possible and grown up as a major political force in one of the East Asian countires which often have been well known for their docility of labor forces under conservative political rule.

This book has several merits:

1) it shows the process of working-class formation in the context of contemporary Korean development. Many books about Korean development have been written mainly in an economistic way. This book reveals people's lives and voices more realistically in the historical process.

2) while describing the historical process, Koo also tries to put his arguments on the theoretical base of weorking-class formation, especially E. P. Thompson. I think his way of doing this is very successful in this book.

3) Many books about working-class formation are mainly about the histories in the European context or Latin America. This book shows uniquely how the process has happened in the context of East Asian development.

His book is not only describing but also theoretical and analytical. And his book does not lose both academic rigidity as well as sympathy for workers' movement for social progress. With in-depth interviews of labor movement activists and the use of many domestic materials, Koo also could escape superficial observations and dry abstraction.

I find that this is one of the great books not only about contemporary Korean society but also about global working-class history. Additionally, regarding informative social (movement) history of Korea of the same period, I strongly recommend Nancy abelmann's book about famers' movement and Sunhyunk Kim's book about civil movements.