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30 W O R K E R M I L I T A N C Y I N T H E P O S T W A R Y E A R S tions and attitudes at the end of colonial rule. Workers demanded their right to manage the factory, not just as a temporary measure to cope with an unusual situation but as a legitimate right of workers. Workers’ claims carried strong moral overtones, and a moral judgment against the logic of capitalist profit-seeking lay beneath workers’ radical demands for factory self-management.81 The moral claims of workers resonated beyond factory gates and help account for the wide acceptance of workers’ demands as legitimate by society at large. From such a moralistic standpoint, firings or factory closures, even in periods of financial crisis for the company, were regarded as immoral acts depriving people of their livelihood.82 These moralistic and also nationalistic elements were an inseparable part of Korean workers’ consciousness in the postwar years. Under certain conditions such consciousness could propel among workers strong activism of a radical nature that stands at odds with the logic of capitalist development. What was unprecedented in the self-management movement, however, was that workers went a step beyond asking for basic livelihood. Workers claimed that they were the legitimate owners of the factories—“our” factories, as they put it—which had been built with their labor. Workers also argued that it was they who were most familiar with the production process, and that they could manage the factory much better than a manager sent by the U.S. Military Government . This sense of ownership of the company and the belief in labor’s crucial role in building the economy were important developments in the postwar labor history of South Korea. The weaknesses of organized capital and the lack of legitimacy on the part of Korean businessmen resulting from their record of collaboration with the colonial authorities provided a fertile ground for this radical worker consciousness. The massive leftist political mobilization of the postwar years also contributed to the workers’ sense of importance. As we shall see, KSEC workers in the 1960s often expressed the belief that they were holding the moral high ground in relation to company owners and management. At that time management sent in by the state was viewed by workers at the yard as lacking competence and sufficient nationalist spirit. THE COMMUNIST POSITION The Communist-controlled peak labor organization Chŏnp’yŏng shared this nationalist perception of industry and labor. The Chŏnp’yŏng’s attitude toward the workers’ self-management movement, however, was ambivalent at best. This is an important point because it indicates that workers’ demands for selfmanagement went beyond what Korean Communist cadres in charge of the W O R K E R M I L I T A N C Y I N T H E P O S T W A R Y E A R S 31 labor movement were seeking.83 The labor movement of the immediate postwar years was not created by the Communists from the top down, and workers harbored a much more complex mix of aspirations and desires than the Communist leadership of the Chŏnp’yŏng wanted to see. The Chŏnp’yŏng, which boasted more than half a million members in the northern and southern parts of Korea by 1946 and probably had about a quarter million members in the south alone, was controlled by the Seoul headquarters of the Korean Communist Party.84 In the south the party position on the labor question was defined by its overall political strategy of “anti-fascist, democratic united front” (pan p’asyo minjujuŭi minjok t’ongil chŏnsŏn) rather than by a pursuit of a socialist revolution.85 Therefore, the Chŏnp’yŏng was very cautious on the matter of the ownership of factories so as not to jeopardize the party’s effort at forging a united front with progressive elements of the bourgeoisie . In its platform the Chŏnp’yŏng argued only for the factory management committees’ “right to hold and manage” the companies of pro-Japanese collaborator -traitors. As for “conscientious” Korean capitalists, the Chŏnp’yŏng’s policy was clearly that of cooperation and comanagement. It derived from the southern Communists’ evaluation of the political and economic situation of South Korea at the time, which resulted in a call for a united front with...

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