The South Korean Bourgeoisie: A Class in Search of Hegemony

The South Korean Bourgeoisie: A Class in Search of Hegemony Carter J. Eckert "Our country's businessmen have not been able to acquire public esteem. On the contrary, [they] have been denounced or kept at a safe distance with feigned respect. There are, of course, a variety of reasons for this." Kim Woo-Choong, Chairman of the Daewoo Group.' If Marx and Engels had ever turned their attention to Korea, they might well have characterized die contemporary Korean state oftheir time as a committee for managing the common affairs ofthe yangban. And with good reason. The yangban aristocracy exercised an extraordinary degree of influence over both their state and society. Not only did they own much of the land, the main form of wealth; through their control and manipulation of the state civil service examinations, strategic intermarriage (including the provision of royal consorts), and the formation of active yangban associations at the local level, they were also able to maintain a position of political power from one generation to the next that invariably rivaled, and not infrequently surpassed, the power of the Chosön kings. Such wealth and power, moreover, were sustained within the society as a whole by occasional top-down marginal adjustments and reforms in the distribution system , and by widely diffused Neo-Confucian cultural and ideological 1. In Kim Ujung [Kim Woo-Choong]. Segye nun nöiko, hai il ún mant'a [The world is wide, and there's much to do] (Seoul: Kim Yöngsa, 1989), pp. 16—17. 115 116Journal ofKorean Studies norms articulated and propagated by the yangban themselves. This formidable array of economic, political, and normative resources made the yangban as a class virtually impervious to attack from either the state or other segments of society. In turn, the yangban's deep penetration of both state and society contributed significandy to the remarkable political and social stability that characterized the five centuries of Chosön rule, the longest dynasty in East Asian history.2 In purely economic terms a native bourgeoisie now bids fair to be the historical successor to the yangban as South Korea's dominant class. But one wonders if Marx and Engels, were they still writing today, would not at least hesitate before describing the contemporary South Korean state as a committee in the service of the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois political power in South Korea, though clearly growing, is still a far cry in both scope and impact from that traditionally wielded by the yangban. In the social realm, moreover, one finds a striking contrast between the respective positions of the two classes. As the quotation at the beginning of this essay suggests, the Korean bourgeoisie remains, despite its wealth and increasing political influence, a decidedly unhegemonic class, estranged from the very society in which it continues to grow.3 The origins of this problem are complex and historical, and they ultimately raise fundamental questions about the stability of the existing capitalist system in South Korea. 2.See, for example, the following works: Edward Willett Wagner, "The Ladder of Success in Yi Dynasty Korea," OccasionalPapers on Korea, no. 1 (April 1974), pp. 1-8 and The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1974). See alsoJames B. Palais, Politics and Policy in TraditionalKorea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); "Stability in Yi Dynasty Korea: Equilibrium Systems and Marginal Adjustment," Occasional Papers on Korea, no. 3 (June 1975), pp. 1-18; "Han Yong-u's Studies of Early Choson Intellectual History," JournalijfKorean Studies 2 (1980): 199-224, especially 219-21. See also Fujiya Kawashima , "A Study of the Hyangan: Kin Groups and Aristocratic Localism in the Seventeenth - and Eighteenth-Century Korean Countryside," Journal of Korean Studies 5 (1984): 3-3.8. 3.The concept of "hegemony" that provides the framework for this essay is based on the work ofAntonio Gramsci. See Gramsci's Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks, edited and trans, by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers paperback, 1971). I have also found the following works useful for understanding Gramsci's thought: Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: A Study ofAntonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles...