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

The pithy, remarkable claim at the opening of Hyun Ok Park's latest book—that "capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form" (p. 3)—is a claim about both an empirical reality and an ideological situation. The unification Park identifies is not of the territorial kind, nor does it concern separated families or irredentist notions. The empirical quality of unification revealed in Park's study is capitalist integration driven by the flow of commodities—specifically labor, money, and ideas—across the borders of North Korea, China, and South Korea. Park's fieldwork in Northeast Asia traces this flow, and the book presents fascinating interviews of the people who make these journeys. One theme among the North Koreans' experience is the narrative of "Ididn't have to come but still …," which Park considers as a discourse of migration within global capitalist integration: entrenched in the narrative is nothing less than the North Koreans' own notion of freedom grounded in market democracy (p. 256).

It is no longer secret that North Koreans move in and out of the North Korea-China border (albeit illegally, but not too different from the Mexico-US border) economic opportunities in China, Southeast Asia, and, for a small portion of them, South Korea. Moreover, we now know that market activities within North Korea have been an important part of the people's everyday life for the past three decades. The interviews in this book support this picture, but Park's assessment is entirely unique. What Park shows us is that North Koreans are no longer leaving North Korea to escape hunger or dictatorship. Instead, they leave to escape the risks and failures of the market within North Korea: "The crisis does not necessarily stem from the socialist state's regulation of markets, as often assumed for in North Korean studies, but from the inherent uncertainty of the market" (pp. 264–65). There has been an unregulated and ubiquitous market in North Korea for a while, and its people have been essentially leaving this market for more profitable markets outside the country. As a researcher in North Korean studies, I had a hunch about this possibility, and it was a major satisfaction to see this analysis in print. This analysis is also tied to Park's statement that "socialism in the twentieth century was an idea borne of industrial capitalism … [and that] the dictatorship of the socialist state was grounded in the social process of pursuing industrial accumulation" (pp. 18, 31). Capitalist integration is indeed a global process. The difference between actually existing socialism and actually existing capitalism is, then, more about Cold War imaginations than about any real difference.

The most compelling part of Park's book is the discussion on the ideological side of Korea's unification under capital. This discussion moves forward with Park's original notion of "market utopia." The concept and practice of freedom, equality, and democracy today have moved away from historical contingency toward idealism based on commodity circulation: "Market utopia imagines an all-encompassing power of the market and is concerned with the individual freedom, legal rights, and protection from state violence. Market utopia rests on the market's logic of homogenization … as well as on the idea of the market as a self-regulating institution" (p. 25). Market utopia also rejects organized politics in favor of spontaneous individual actions and abstract ethical concerns of self-improvement (p. 27). The concept of market utopia is, then, used to examine what Park considers as three repertoires of democratic politics: reparation, peace, and human rights. These sections are thrilling to the mind. For Park, liberal reforms and privatization in China are reparations for its socialist revolution, ways to make up for the deprivations of state socialism. Allowing migration of Chinese Koreans to South Korea as sources of cheap labor is part of this capitalist reparation. Peace and human...