North and South Korea

On 3 July, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, South Korea’s national union federation, organised a rally of 8,000 workers in Seoul to demand measures to protect lives and save jobs in the Covid-19 pandemic. (South Korea has had a relatively good record on Covid, but a relative case surge since the middle of June.) Now KCTU President Yang Kyeung-soo has been arrested (2 September) for organising the rally, which the authorities are saying was in violation of Covid-control regulations. The KCTU was surrounded early in the morning and police in riot suppression gear smashed their way in...

Almost seven years ago — in October 2013 — the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) came to LabourStart with a problem. The national government had given the union an ultimatum: either it would change its rules to prohibit dismissed or retired teachers from being members of the union, or the union would be deregistered. At issue were just nine teachers who, according to the government, were illegally members of the 60,000 member union. Facing the prospect of being outlawed, the union stood its ground. Working together with its national trade union centre, the militant Korean...

Some trade-unionists have suggested swab-testing of all workers in each workplace before a return to work. The Tory government’s focus on the crude total of test numbers as the big thing has boosted this idea. Full isolation pay for those with symptoms, or identified as contacts of virus-sufferers, and social distancing plus PPE where necessary in the workplace, will help much more. So will regular (instant-result) temperature checks, widely used and effective (so far as we can tell) in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. More testing is surely needed for a “tracking and tracing” policy. When...

Martin Thomas’s article “Can we get R

In the Thursday 8pm “clapping for the NHS” on 2 April 2020, many people chanted “Test! Test! Test! PPE!” Health workers are pressing the government on its failure to meet its promises to expand testing hugely, to make PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] available to all, and to agree adequate PPE guidelines for health workers. So, even, are NHS bosses. NHS Providers, a confederation of NHS hospital, mental health, community, and ambulance trusts, said on 3 April: “There are still trusts that are unable to begin testing, and lack of swabs, reagents and test kits is a continuing concern”. They...

The South Korean film Parasite, a satire of social and economic inequality, has made quite an impression on two major institutions of world cinema. At the Cannes film festival it won the Palme d’Or, and then it won Best Film at the Oscars. It is not difficult to satirise such things, especially when there is an appetite for such in the institutions and audiences of the bourgeoisie. These are feel-good films because they help maintain the myth that world cinema is in fine aesthetic and moral health. In his previous works (The Host, Mother, Snowpiercer, and Okja) director Bong Joan-ho follows...

The Panmunjom declaration was signed by North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in on 27 April. It commits North Korea to complete denuclearisation and an end to war on the Korean peninsula, creating a “new era of peace.” Similar words were said at summits in both 2000 and 2007. Symbolically, both countries agreed to stop propaganda broadcasts across the demilitarised zone and to end leaflet drops. This all comes just a few months from North Korean missile tests and Donald Trump saying he would use “fire and fury” in response. No previous North Korean leader...

Renewed UN sanctions have not been able to break the deadlock on North Korea. As Kim and Trump flirt with war, the tensions on the Korean peninsula are fuelling reactionary politics across the region, and live-fire American-South Korean military exercises and repeated North Korean missile launches and nuclear tests. On 11 September, the UN rejected a harsher set of sanctions proposals from the US, instead adopting a ban on North Korean textile exports and capping oil sales to the country. While Trump has claimed that the oil cap is producing “long gas lines in North Korea”, commentators point...

The criminal game of brinkmanship being played between the rulers of the big capitalist powers and the Stalinist monarchy of North Korea continues to menace millions of innocent people with the threat of nuclear war. On 28 August, North Korea’s rulers fired a missile over Japan; a week later, they tested what they said was a hydrogen bomb, proving that they are now well on the way to developing a nuclear arsenal capable of hitting the mainland United States. The increased tensions are a result of two destabilising factors: a string of technical successes for North Korea’s engineers (or...