The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea by Hyun Ok Park (review)

Has the Korean peninsula unified? This is perhaps a bold question as the two Koreas seem perennially locked in constant conflict and unification appears nothing more than a dream. Yet, Hyun Ok Park, a professor of sociology at York University in Canada, argues that the peninsula in fact has been unified by neoliberal capital and transnationalism. This is all part of a larger trend, she argues, as Northeast Asia is becoming an economic entity in its own right through flow of trade and capital.

Divided into three major parts, the book begins with an overview of capitalist democracy within the framework of historical repetition and goes over the modern opposition between socialism, democracy and dictatorship. In part 2, Park focuses her analysis on the various Chinese-Korean communities that have settled in Yanbian and in Seoul. Park uses a rich library of interviews she conducted to explore the deep links between the Chinese-Korean community in Yanbian and the Korean-Chinese community in Seoul. Most interestingly, she explores the dual nationality of Korean-Chinese in the present and in the past, arguing that the experience of rejection and violence Korean-Chinese face in South Korea mirror that which they experienced during the Cultural Revolution. While comparing the Minsaengdan Incident of 1932-36 to present-day concerns along the Tumen River Valley, Park argues that observers must ignore traditional geopolitics and understand that these communities have already been united under a capitalist unconscious.

In part 3, Park deconstructs North Korea’s marketization, the Korean unification movement and North Korean human rights movement. Her analysis of marketization in North Korea is largely nothing new, but she devotes considerable space to the Korean unification and North Korean human rights movements. She places the North Korean human rights movement squarely as part of the “U.S. strategy of reconfiguring East Asia in the post-Cold War era” and argues that Korean missionaries translate a “market fantasy about neoliberal capitalism into yet another abstract language of spirituality and decipher the formula of wealth making.” (p. 286)

Park lays out a solid thesis that while the two Koreas remain divided by traditional markers of the nation-state, notably borders, these borders are porous and their communities have become united through an unconscious capitalism. It is no secret that the two Koreas have become much more integrated economically than during the Cold War – South Korean capital is now in North Korea, for example, through the establishment of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, and North Korea is actively courting capital and trade from overseas through its “special economic zones” in the country’s northeastern region. Park traces this trend from its macro to micro level, arguing that the capitalist unconscious is a uniting factor for all Korean communities inside and surrounding the Korean peninsula.

Her work also highlights the dichotomies between these communities. She interviews Korean-Chinese and North Korean defectors, who, while appreciating South Korea’s capitalist paradise, speak of the persecution that they feel, even from each other. Korean-Chinese complain that North Korean defectors are “liars,” while North Korean defectors feel treated like “commodities” by Korean-Chinese. These ill feelings mirror perceptions by South Koreans of both communities and highlight the ultimate difficulty of cultural and social unification. Park lays the ground for understanding the two Korea’s economic unification—the most straightforward part of the unification process, one could argue. But real unification requires much more than the act of simply uniting two economic systems. Trade, capital, money – these are things that are easy for anyone to understand, regardless of the economic system they have lived under. North Korea has seen the rapid growth of jangmadang, black markets, that have allowed the country’s citizens to more or less embrace capitalism. Cultural and social unification, which can include the unraveling of decades of contradictory history learned in schools, different understandings of citizenship and government, and other more difficult issues, will, in comparison...