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

The continued division of the Korean peninsula has raised long-standing debates about the likelihood and possible timing of reunification. In The Capitalist Unconscious, Park argues instead that the shift from the Cold War politics of the 1990s has in fact already unified the Korean peninsula in a way that is “not shaped by the long-awaited form of territorial integration and family union but rather is driven by the exchange of capital, labor, and ideas across the borders of Korean communities, including the Korean diaspora” (3). She analyzes the meanings and underlying logic of these exchanges—what Park sees as manifestations of the “capitalist unconscious” of the title—in South Korea, China, and North Korea. In the process, she utilizes archival sources and ethnography, including oral interviews with migrants, government officials, and others. Individual chapters explore migrant and marginalized laborers’ experiences, government policies and social tensions, as well as the changing and often contradictory mobilizations of history in each of these three locations, with particular attention to how “capital occupies the transnational space of Korean interactions through the affective politics of the ethnic nation” (7).

Park’s central claim in this work—that since the 1990s, the Korean peninsula can be best understood as a transnational entity where unconscious capitalist assumptions are masked by overlapping yet irreconcilable narratives of identity—is intriguing. Interrogating the logic of capitalism allows Park to parse phenomena that otherwise seem contradictory, such as how the labor movement in South Korea provided iconic momentum for democratization, only to result later in laws and policies deployed to protect the property rights of private corporations to the significant detriment of workers. The final chapters, which focus on South Korean engagement with the North, internal North Korean governmental policies balancing socialism and market economy, and changing narratives surrounding North Korean out-migration, respectively, are particularly effective.

Not all of the book’s elements coalesce equally well, however. At times, Park’s examples and case studies feel randomly selected, such as in the chapter on Korean Chinese migrant workers, which depends almost exclusively on a handful of disparate interviews conducted within a two-week period in January 2002. Her subsequent chapter on the past experiences of Koreans in China is also thinly sourced, poorly integrated into the rest of the book, and baffling in how it frames the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the Korean Chinese community. A problem that runs throughout the book is its failure to contextualize the selected case studies sufficiently, limiting its usefulness for scholars without an in-depth understanding of Korean history.

Another issue is that Park relies on abstract concepts and dense, theoretical language to a fault in the introductory framing chapters, ultimately creating an argument that exceeds the scope of what her often rich source material can support. Even though Park deftly traces individual instances of capitalist logic and effectively illuminates ruptures in differentially mobilized narratives of ethnic nationalism, the question remains—to what degree can the uneven flows and exchanges that Park identifies be meaningfully interpreted as unifying?