Progress by death: Labor precaritization and the financialization of social reproduction in South Korea

Abstract

This article looks at the contemporary South Korean political economy of crisis and recovery to visualize the material conditions of working-class lives and the ways in which their capacity to reproduce labor and life contradicts the regionally specific logic of ‘progress’. I visualize three critical scenes of workplace death that chart the ways in which the social reproduction capacity of the working class is fatally contracted in the era of neoliberal reforms. These scenes of death mirror the process of neoliberal transition that the financial crises of 1997 and 2008 accelerated in the region. In doing so, I articulate the notion of ‘progress by death’ as the intensified necropolitical logic of neoliberal capitalism that is led by the post-developmental state and fully transnationalized chaebol capital in South Korea. Building on feminist theories of social reproduction and the studies on the financialization of life, I argue that the logic of ‘progress by death’ as a constitutive element of financial capitalism reproduces the uneven patterns of growth and the transnational relations of violence, debt, and dispossession across Asian economies.

Keywords

financialization labor precarity social reproduction South Korea workplace death

A capitalist notion of progress preconditions a capacity to augment and advance beyond the present life form. In the formula, the speculated future is expected to be ‘greater’ than the present life in both quantity and quality. What is less salient in this popular notion of ‘progress’ is the mysterious calculus of increased capacity, that is, the social reproduction of human capacity in its totality – what Marx ironically omits in his analysis of ‘accumulation and reproduction on an expanded scale’ in Capital vol. II (Marx 1978: 158). Like his contemporary political economists, Marx oversimplified the function and material reality of variable capital into a money relation expressed in the wage (see Gago 2020: 123–124). How do people survive in harsh economic crises when mass layoffs destroy communities, wages fall to an extreme level, and welfare benefits dissipate? Put differently, how do people whose life conditions are fatally contracted in times of financial crisis, pandemic lockdown, and climate disaster experience the ‘progress’ – the fantastical capitalist logic of recovery and continued growth?

In response to the pandemic, South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced in July 2020 a New Deal that focuses on building a ‘digital’ and ‘green’ economy (Lee 2020). Moon’s New Deal promises a US$133 billion-dollar investment and the creation of 1.9 million new jobs in targeted sectors. This must be distinguished from the previous developmental state’s economic planning that overdetermined the rate of growth from the 1960s to the 1980s through consecutive 5-year-economic plans under the authoritarian regime. The New Deal does not include a growth rate indicator. Instead, it aims to re-direct the flow of capital to ‘green and digital’ industries. The state, like a financier, now speculates on and oversees the form of economic growth. In addition, to borrow Aihwa Ong’s notion, the state’s desire to revamp its ‘pluripotency’ (Ong 2013: 70), defined as power to multiply competitive edges in the global war on biotechnology and security, is now conjoined with the explosive formation of new stock market actors such as ‘tonghak ants’ (individual investors with small-size assets) in South Korea.¹ As Ong (2016) suggests, expandable lives experimented upon in science labs and stock markets in East Asian contexts are not simply becoming fungible; they are also generative of unexpected knowledge and affect that can potentially disrupt the existing circuits and hierarchies of power in global capitalism. How will this new desire of the state and the popular ethos of financial subjects affect the process of the financialization of life in the unfolding pandemic era?

This article aims to articulate a double mechanism of financialization as the process that destabilizes the socially necessary labor time embodied in a commodity circuit (production-circulation-consumption), and simultaneously as the process that threatens the vital time of social reproduction by shortening the ‘life-times’ (Tadiar 2013) of precarious populations.² I look at the contemporary South Korean political economy of growth to visualize the material conditions of working-class lives and the ways their capacity to reproduce labor and life contradicts the regionally-specific logic of progress. To this end I first review the unique path of the developmental state’s financialization process punctuated by the two major financial crises in 1997 and 2008. While many scholars have attempted to explain key actors and drivers of the crises, a working-class standpoint is largely absent in the dominant discourse. I shed light on this missing part of the financial crisis-recovery discourse by focusing on the changing working-class labor and life conditions – that is, the changing ‘social reproduction strategies’ of the working class (Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage 2019: 618).³ Second, I track the ways South Korean chaebol (big conglomerates) shift their profit targets to the reproductive sectors – such as life insurance, biotechnology, food and basic goods retail, and the media and entertainment industries – and show how this new growth strategy, which focuses on financial gains in the realm of social reproduction, intensifies precarity both in the processes of the working-class labor and life. I call this tendency of chaebol’s ‘differential capitalization’ process in the neoliberal reform era the financialization of social reproduction (Park and Doucette 2016: 545). Third, I visualize three critical scenes of workplace death that chart the ways in which the social reproduction capacity of the working class is fatally contracted in the period. These scenes of death mirror the process of neoliberal transition that the financial crises of 1997 and 2008 accelerated globally. This section focuses on the violent nature of labor precaritization and the changing landscape of labor struggles reconfigured mainly by contingent workers in South Korea.

I use the notion of social reproduction not to simply denote a set of caring acts but as a general contradiction between capitalist reproduction and the broader human and non-human capacity to reproduce a society. While the claim of ‘crises of care’ is useful in explaining the phenomenon of individualized practices/deficits of care, the latter approach articulated in feminist theories of social reproduction allows us to understand the totality of the social relations that constitute the practices and processes of social reproduction. To be more specific, my focus is the mode of working-class social reproduction in contemporary South Korea. In this article, I show, first, that the impact of financialization is not limited to the traditional production sphere and, second, how in the post-developmental regime the chaebol-led financialization process penetrates deeply into the sphere of social reproduction. I track this dual process by focusing on (1) how chaebol capital exploits contingent workers to the extent that the level of exploitation leads to the workers’ premature deaths and (2) the ways in which chaebol capital invests in reproductive commodities – such as insurance, food and retail, and entertainment – for financial profit. This double penetration of chaebol capital into working-class lives is intensifying the level of precarity in the spheres of both production and reproduction in South Korea.

In turn, contingent workers have no other means (e.g. welfare provisions) of social reproduction but to accept the death-ridden jobs as I visualize the three categories of workers’ deaths below. Seen from the standpoint of the working-class subjects who are exploited at workplaces and experience multiple forms of dispossession in their living conditions through austerity measures and the commodification of basic social goods, the two processes are not only deeply connected but also mutually intensifying. The goal of this article is to show how chaebol capital operates in both spheres, exploiting labor and extracting the social capacity to reproduce. This double process of chaebol-led financialization makes the reproduction of working-class lives almost impossible. I explain this death-ridden growth pattern with the notion of ‘progress by death’. Furthermore, I track the double penetration of chaebol finance into working-class lives – that is, the subsumption of the spheres of production and reproduction under the chaebol-led financialization process – as an example of the general tendency toward a financialization of social reproduction in the global regime of financial capitalism. I argue that the logic of ‘progress by death’ is a regional strategy of the financialization of social reproduction that is in direct contradiction to working-class social reproduction in contemporary South Korea.

Feminist theory of social reproduction

Behind the economic and cultural logic of compressed growth in South Korea, this essay sheds light on the subliminal scenes of contingent workers’ deaths and struggles for radical forms of social reproduction. Building on Marxist feminist theories of social reproduction, I use the notion of social reproduction to denote the two contradictory processes: on one hand, the process of the social reproduction of labor-power that maintains the existing capitalist order; on the other hand, alternative reproductive processes of the societal capacity to care and support lives despite of or directly challenging the violent social relations and injustices that proliferate premature deaths of racialized and feminized populations.⁴ I claim that the former aims to expand the ‘value form of wealth’ (Postone 1993: 308) and that the latter is mediated by the real wealth or what Nancy Fraser (2019) calls ‘social surplus’ in socialist futures.⁵ The latter is often secured by informal networks and subversive provisions, such as mutual aid, community kitchens, and what I call perverse (non-normative) care relations. The latter mode of social reproduction is not only in contradiction to the former, it is also a site where radical visions of social progress are experimented on. This dialectic notion of social reproduction as the site of social struggle where differences (e.g. gender, race, sexuality, and ability) and the divisions of labor are re-produced and re-negotiated indebted to the recent feminist debates around the ‘intersectional politics of social reproduction’ (Vinay & Ramamurthy 2018: 996). Drawing on Black feminist theories of intersectionality, Tithi Bhattacharya proposes rethinking the relation between the labor theory of value and the intersectional constitutions of different social categories in the complex processes of social reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017: 17). Beyond the descriptive understanding of social reproduction as life-making activities or as the background of capitalist production, this turn to intersectionality focuses on the complex layers of contradictions that regulate and constitute the social relations of care, dependency, vulnerability, and intimacy, encompassing the private and the public spheres in capitalist society. For instance, women-of-color scholars in the United States have shown that care labor has been ‘differentially distributed according to gender, class, race, and citizenship’ through coercive social relations (Glenn 2010: 184), through a technique of the separate spheres (Hurtado 1989), through the politics of erasure in social movement historiography (Nadasen 2015), and in the expansive transnational circuits of uneven social reproduction (Francisco-Menchavez 2018; Parreñas 2015; Tadiar 2013).

Another key development in feminist studies of social reproduction is a historical materialist framework attentive to multiple scales. In this journal’s thematic issue on social reproduction (Vol. 43), Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill highlight ‘a variegated, differentiated, and constitutively uneven terrain of social reproduction in the global political economy’ as the central inquiry for feminist historical materialism (Bakker & Gill 2019: 504). The focus on ‘variegated geographies of social reproduction’ in the era of uneven neoliberalization (Bakker & Gill 2019: 515–516) can challenge the West-centric frames of reference that oversimplify and overdetermine capitalist development and social reproduction patterns in the historiography of global capitalism. Potentially, studies of ‘variegated’ forms of social reproduction can at times expose unexpected self-knowledge and hope on the biopolitical potential (Ong 2016) and, more importantly, what Cindy Katz calls ‘countertopographies’ of struggles waged by differentially situated people against the transnational alliances of capital and political power. Katz elucidation of topography as ‘a particular location and the totality of the features that comprise the place itself’ (Katz 2001: 720) is quintessential in articulating the countertopographic social reproduction praxes that are fugitive (e.g. efforts to organize ‘the undocumented’ workers) and that are exposed to excessive military and police violence (e.g. the Black Lives Matter Movement and Hong Kong Protest).

Indeed, what is at stake in feminist studies of social reproduction is not simply producing knowledge about different experiences of people and aspirations for a better life – in other words, individualized demands for ‘greater’ futures. A radical feminist critique of social reproduction is another analytic focus I propose in this essay through my inquiry into the mode of social reproduction articulated by the regionally specific logic of progress in South Korea that is subsuming the larger body of precarious feminized laboring subjects in Asian economies. The radical praxis of social reproduction directly challenges the mode of ‘capital reproduction on an expanded scale’ that continues to reduce general societal capacity to caring and supporting working and poor people’s lives and that continues to devastate the earth. It encompasses all the resurgent forms of the anti-capitalist social movements that have emerged globally in the neoliberal era, such as climate justice strikes, abolitionist politics for racial justice, indigenous struggles against extractivism, and global protests against neoliberal austerity and precarity. The common ground of these ‘variegated’ forms of social reproduction contradictions/struggles across the globe is their acute critique of the forms of ‘growth’ mediated by financialized capital and, more importantly, their creative efforts to find alternative ways of life – what Stefania Barca calls ‘forces of reproduction’ (Barca 2020). This radical refocus on social reproductive struggles will enable us to articulate ‘the intricate relations among discrete places’ and to expand our ‘countertopographic’ knowledge on how things can be changed across multiple scales and how plural new meanings and forms of progress can be articulated in the spaces of discrete but connected struggles (Katz 2001: 721). Such a ‘countertopographic’ praxis of social reproduction may reveal the long ignored ‘undercommons’ (Harney and Moten 2013) and ‘submerged life words’ (Gómez-Barris 2017: 4) – that, against all odds, have made the less-than-human and non-human lives persist – as strategic sites for organizing change that aims to turn the destructive tide of global capitalism. In this essay, I look at the contingent workers’ lifeworlds through a feminist lens of radical social reproduction to explore the ways we can rescale working-class struggles from below once again.

The life mediated by financial capital

Nancy Fraser claims that the key characteristics of today’s capitalism are its financialized form and its crisis tendency that is rooted in ‘social-reproductive contradictions’ (Fraser 2016: 99). The peculiar character of financial capital, according to Cédric Durand, is that its ‘purchase – dissociated from any use-value – corresponds to a purely speculative rationale; the objective is to obtain surplus value by reselling them at a higher price at some later point’ (Durand 2017: 28). A primary manifestation of the financialized form of capitalism was the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which was simply the effect of the real subsumption of the US housing market to financial capital. In this context, the crisis tendency of ‘social-reproductive contradictions’ lies in the material reality that housing continues to be an absolute social necessity – that is, its use-value can never be entirely negated in any speculative future. Indeed, in many industrialized countries, the housing market speculation and growing household debt are the key manifestations of the financialization of life.⁶ For instance, tracing the exponential increase of household debt in South Korea in the 2000s, Dong-Jin Seo claims that ‘the triangular relation of time-affect-money [as finance] overdetermines the form of familial life that operates at the center of the financialized world’ (Seo 2015: 73). In fact, many scholars point out that the explosive increase of household debt after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis has been nothing but the post-developmental state’s strategy to transfer ‘the financial trouble from banks and industrial enterprise to ordinary households and individuals’ (Chang 2019: 102) and, in consequence, ‘the finance-led debt economy’ is accomplished overcoming the past patterns – that is, the developmental state-led debt economy (1960s–1970s) and chaebol -led debt economy (1980s–1998) (Park 2018: 88).⁷ Furthermore, Chan-Jong Park’s study shows that the size of household debt compared with GDP surpassed the government debt and that of non-financial companies in 2017 (Park 2018: 86). Through the dialectic lens of feminist social reproduction, I propose looking closely at these financialization processes that permeate the general societal capacity of caring/managing the populations exposed to neo-liberal techniques of exploitation, extraction, and precaritization. I call this tendency the financialization of social reproduction that is underway both in the private and public spheres, unfolding in variegated forms and uneven patterns across the globe.⁸

Moreover, in a critique of the debt-driven recovery schemes after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Rocío Zambrana claims that this financialized stage of ‘debt ought to be understood as an “apparatus of capture,” one that functions as a form of “coloniality”’ (Zambrana 2018: 16). In the reproduced colonial relations between the United States and Puerto Rico, which manage the recurring everyday crisis, the mechanism of debt captures bodily capacities and the ‘life-times’ unlived that are speculated for future profits. In particular, feminized bodies are doubly exposed to precarity imposed by austerity measures:

Women are at the same time ‘not counted on’ in terms of the decisions regarding budget cuts that impact every aspect of her life and ‘counted on’ to assume the gaps in care, labor (physical, emotional), time, resources (her body, material needs). A pedagogy of the indebted woman, then, tracks the distribution of precarity by colonial exceptionality. It thereby tracks the deepening of race/gender/class hierarchies that comprise coloniality. (Zambrana 2018: 22)

Here, ‘the indebted women’ embody the exceptional history of the social reproduction of the colonial relations that contains hidden traces of violence. This embodiment is ‘pedagogical’ in the sense that the women ‘study’ the history of violence through their bodies and labor (Harney and Moten 2013: 62). Zambrana suggests that such traces of violence must be ‘reckoned’ first and cut through the praxis of ‘unbinding’ of the captured bodies from the form of social relations mediated by financial capital (Zambrana 2021; 144). The process of financial accumulation that continues to debilitate the reproductive capacities of Puerto Ricans – indeed, the prime example of the financialization of social reproduction – cannot be delinked from the colonial history of racial capitalism in the Americas, which is the real process of capital accumulation that has been reproduced generation after generation.⁹

The focus on mediation requires us to look at the root cause of the relation of ‘capture’ through financial debt. In addition to the significance of state policies (e.g. government bailouts and taxes) and household factors (e.g. debts and wages) as the conditions of possibility for financial accumulation in the advanced neoliberal regimes, we cannot overlook the parasitic relationship between financial capital and the real profit in commodity production. Durand distinguishes financial capital’s ‘parasitism’ in industrial production from an ‘accumulation by dispossession’ that is indirectly related to labor exploitation:

The logic of parasitism is based on the maintenance of a minimum profitability level as a financial norm. It serves as a filter on production projects, eliminating even profitable initiatives that do not reach this minimum level. This selection contributes to weakening growth and depressing employment. But it only exists because some of the circuits of capital valorisation offer bigger returns. (Durand 2017: 154)

The reproduction of financial profit is dependent on the ‘selective’ and speculative process that further eliminates the use-value dimension of commodified goods by heightening financial profitability as the sole driver of production and reproduction. This parasitic nature of financial capital thus becomes a ‘dead weight on the social reproduction process as a whole’ (Durand 2017: 155). The shortage of COVID-19 testing and personal protective equipment in the US healthcare industry as well as the lack of the federal-level policy reveals the harsh effect of financial capital’s ‘dead weight’ that for decades has been lifted by individual households and the offshore production of basic goods, primarily in China and Southeast Asia. Even as the worst moments of the pandemic were still unfolding across the globe, Wall Street recovered at a faster rate than the real economy and suffering human bodies. How, then, can we define the relationship between the growing COVID-19 death rate and the life cycle of financial capital? Financial capital, much like a virus, cannot grow on its own without the living labor and a social body – that is, biopolitical regulations of differentiated populations – that are external to or externalized for its expanded reproduction.

Chaebol-led financialization and labor precaritization

No doubt the structural adjustment required after the 1997 Asian debt crisis strengthened the chaebol hegemony in South Korea. Joo-Hyung Ji argues that South Korea has completed its shift to a neoliberal state that prioritizes financial accumulation and industrial innovation over the developmental state legacies, such as planned industrial deepening strategies and the state’s control of banking and finance (Ji 2016: 247). The process of financialization in South Korea is led by the ‘changing accumulation strategies of chaebol companies mainly through flexibilizing industrial capital’ – that is, distinguished from that of the United States (led by stock value expansion) and that of China (led by the state) (Park et al. 2017: 99). In the two decades since the so-called International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis of 1997–2001, chaebol capital has been centralized in the top conglomerates and especially in the top five big conglomerates (Wi 2014: 12). Coevally, the investment pattern of chaebol capital shifted from traditional manufacturing and heavy industries (e.g. automobile and shipbuilding) to the energy, logistics, media and information technology sectors (Wi 2014: 27). This financialization process, which was orchestrated by multiple actors, including economic administrators, financial experts, and the IMF (Ji 2011), entailed not only a shift in power from the state to chaebol and to transnational financial capital but also a shift in the way of life – that is, the political economy of social reproduction. Neoliberalization in the context of South Korea cannot be understood without this transition of the developmental state’s role from the active incubator of big conglomerates to the major facilitator of transnationalized chaebol capital accumulation (Ji 2016).

First, the logic of finance – the gradual elimination of the use-value dimension – changed public services and public jobs into a profitable market for financial investment. Public services writ large were targeted as a strategic sector that could facilitate the expansion of the financial market (Ji 2016: 249–250). After two democratic-party-led governments under which the neoliberal reform blueprint was laid out, Lee Myung-Bak, the former CEO of Hyundai Engineering and Construction, won election in 2008. The Lee government (2008–2013) executed the largest restructuring of the public sector to date, including merging, privatizing, and downsizing public services. The slogan, ‘Finance-and-Service-Centered Industrial Restructuring’, promoted by the Lee Myung-Bak government envisioned a large-scale privatization of ‘healthcare, education, basic goods (water and electricity, etc.), and pension fund’ that were based on ‘stable and wide public needs’ (Lee et al. 2008: 35). In the first 2 years of his term, the government completed the privatization of 7 public financial institutions and the partial sale of shares of five major public companies (airport, energy, and electricity), and it eliminated 12.7% of all public sector jobs.¹⁰

Second, since the late 1990s, labor precaritization has been a consistent policy of both right and left governments. The regime that followed the 1987 Democratization Movement saw the growing aspirations of organized labor (e.g. the union density level peaked at 19.8% in 1989) as the biggest threat to chaebol capital and the neoliberal financial elites. As I argue elsewhere, since the late 1990s, contingent labor has been actively formalized by the state through neoliberal reforms (Yulee 2021: 525). Exponential economic growth under the developmental-state regime (the late 1960s to the 1980s) was sustained because the legal rights and welfare of feminized and contingent workers, which remained outside the law, were violently suppressed by the ‘militarized’ modern state (Moon 2005). The neoliberal labor reforms that started in 1996 under the Kim Young-Sam government included legalizing mass layoffs, subcontracting, and outsourcing. The Act on the Protection of Dispatch Workers (1998), which lifted the primary employers’ responsibility by deregulating labor intermediaries, and the Act on the Protection of Fixed-term and Part-time Workers (2006), which legally recognized the pijŏnggyujik (irregular or contingent work) category, completed the neoliberal labor regime. After the 1997 debt crisis, the rate of female contingent workers peaked at 69.5% (male contingent workers: 45.4%) in 2001 and fell to 50.7% (male contingent workers: 34.2%) in 2019. Female contingent workers in South Korea today earn 53% (male contingent workers make 70%) of the regular male workers’ wage.¹¹ I call this phenomenon the reproduction of feminized labor on an expanded scale under the post-developmental neoliberal regime.

Still, those who adopt macroeconomic perspectives tend to index all economic activities primarily as production, overlooking the intricate relations and dynamics between production and social reproduction. Consequently, it is difficult to show how the societal-level ‘deficit’ accrued by lowering wages and shrunk welfare benefits as well as the privatization and commodification of essential public services functions in households and working-class lives.¹² In other words, under this mainstream view, the sites of social reproduction are left in the shadows where labor-power is replenished and the dominant social orders are negotiated. In the same vein, the biggest loophole in the studies of chaebol is the inquiry of how the monopoly of a few big conglomerates – notorious for their octopus-like business expansion based on family ties – has shaped the lives of ordinary people in their everyday reproduction. For example, in a single day one can eat three ready-made instant meals purchased at a supermarket, watch a movie at a theater, meet friends at a coffee shop, and stop by a convenience store for late-night snacks, and all of these commodities can be connected to a single holding company in contemporary South Korea. In what follows I show how the space of social reproduction is actively mobilized for financial accumulation under the neoliberal regime. The South Korean neoliberalization process is unique because it has been led by the financialized chaebol capital (Kim 2017; Park & Ducette 2016; Park et al. 2017).

Third, the apex of the neoliberal transition unleashed the legal shackles that limited chaebol capital’s ‘double dominance of industrial production and the financial market’ (Lee et al. 2008: 55). Since the enactment of the Capital Market Integration Law in 2009, the top 10 chaebol companies have established financial auxiliaries and expanded incorporation of industrial capital and financial capital (Park et al. 2017: 123). For example, CJ Incorporation (hereafter CJ), which separated from Samsung in 1997 and transitioned into a holding company in 2007, owns the largest shares of 13 affiliate companies in the food and food service, bio pharma, home shopping and logistics, and entertainment and media sectors. CJ’s current CEO is the grandson of the Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul. CJ’s net income doubled in the past 10 years, and CJ is now the 14th largest company in South Korea and the second fastest growing company after SK (the dominant telephone and Internet service company). On the Academy Award stage, when the South Korean film Parasite (2019) directed by Bong Joon-ho won Best Picture, the middle-aged women who some mistakenly identified as the domestic worker character was, in fact, CJ’s Vice CEO. She praised her brother, Lee Jae-hyun, the CEO of CJ Group, in her speech. What an irony that the film’s graphic depiction of ‘parasitic’ relations between the richest and the poorest families – some claim that it represents neoliberal underclass lives in South Korea today (see Eileen Jones’ article in Jacobin) – was made by the country’s top chaebol family capital. The film expresses a twisted awe of and admiration for the new bourgeois. Inequality, and more precisely working-class degeneracy, is visualized as the product of space (such as the cityscape and house interior and exterior), instead of class, which is the ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1980: 22) dominant but not without tensions and points of break in contemporary Korean popular culture and media.

How does CJ’s dominance in the sectors of food, bio pharma, media, and logistics shape the reproductive life cycle of working people? Unlike the Walmart model, which relies on offshore production and the expansive logistics industry, CJ’s growth model is deeply embedded in domestic production, targeting the domestic labor force and the consumer market as its strategic site for profit gain in South Korea. Instead of offshoring the production lines, CJ affiliate companies rely on the labor that since the 1990s has been cheapened by the ‘legalized expansion of precarious labor’ (Yulee 2018). CJ Entertainment & Media describes its growth strategy as a ‘glocalization’ that utilizes the ‘national business context and local culture’ as major resources for global expansion (Park 2017). In other words, the gendered and racialized divisions of labor that have subtended global production in South Korea and more broadly throughout emerging economies in Asia are becoming a platform for financial accumulation by the chaebol companies.

South Korea is notorious for its fatally long working hours, recorded in 2019 as the third longest after Mexico and Costa Rica in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.¹³ The long working day has been sustained by chaebol capital’s investment in shortening the socially necessary life-time by commodifying quotidian reproductive activities such as eating, resting, socializing, and entertaining. In the delayed welfare state that for a half-century has promoted the strategy of ‘Growth First, Distribution Later’, the social reproduction of labor power and surplus populations now under the neoliberal state has become a profitable market for chaebol capital’s expanded reproduction. CJ’s exponential profit increase in the consumer markets of food, pharma, media, and logistics in the era of neoliberal transition is a prominent example of the tendency to financialize social reproduction, which must be understood as a regionally specific form of a social reproduction pattern that has emerged in the era of neoliberalization.

The socially necessary reproduction time of precarious workers

In the past few decades, the socially necessary reproduction time of contingent workers in South Korea has shrunk to a fatal level that is the counterpart of the long working day. In 2016, South Korea’s high rate of fatal occupational injuries (5.3) was close to that of the United States (5.2) but lower than that of Mexico (7.7), while high-income countries like the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada have maintained rates of 1–1.5.¹⁴ In contrast to other advanced economies, South Korea’s GDP growth and industrial advancement have not been accompanied by a lowered workplace fatality rate. In fact, the numbers hide the real condition of fatal labor that operates through and by intensifying the existing structure of social hierarchies. Contingent workers, including migrant workers, in South Korea account for most workplace deaths – a phenomenon widely criticized by labor activists and scholars as ‘outsourcing of risk’ and ‘migratization of risk’. What follows is a map of the seemingly unrelated death scenes politicized in the interplay between the top-down neoliberal policies and the reconfigured working-class struggles.

Scene I: mass layoffs in the heavy industries

Jinsook Kim, the first elected female union leader of the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation, waged the longest in record, 309-day-high-altitude protest [kogongnongsŏng], the so called ‘sky protest’ (Lee 2015), in the No. 85 tower crane at the Hanjin Heavy Industries shipyard in Pusan in 2011.¹⁵. This life threatening, record-breaking protest, which permanently debilitated Kim’s body, has since become a normative tactic for the growing number of contingent workers in South Korea. In 1981, Kim became the first ch’ŏnyŏ (unmarried women) welder at the then Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation, and in 1986, she became an elected a union leader (Nam 2009). The subsequent rise of the Hope Bus Movement (a civilian support-group-organizing strategy) during Jinsook Kim’s protest reveals the changing landscape of labor struggles in the era of neoliberal restructuring. Studying the changing forms of labor struggle in the transitional period, especially in heavy industries, helps us identify and reveal the ways in which the neoliberal state and chaebol capital debilitate organized labor’s capacity to reproduce itself – that is, the social reproduction of working-class power and of the minju (democratic) union-building movement.

The juncture articulated by Jinsook Kim’s protest, especially the discursive shift from the political mourning of the dead comrades and the union-centered strike to the community protest represented by the Hope Bus Movement, was not simply reactionary to the neoliberal attack on the organized labor. I claim that it has generated transgressive and transformative working-class knowledge that is still unfolding in the era that followed. What inspired Jinsook Kim to move beyond the state of mourning her comrades’ deaths, Kim Ju-ik and Kwak Chae-gyu, who killed themselves during the devastating cycle of mass layoffs, and realize that the fight is much bigger than the union struggle? Here is her speech welcoming the third Hope Bus crowd that gathered at the shipyard on the 207th day of her protest:

207 days.

Juik wrote his will three times; Chae-gyu couldn’t even write one.

It was time for me to fully understand their minds,

If there was Twitter in 2003, we could have been able to save Ju-ik.

If there was Hope Bus, we wouldn’t have lost Chae-gyu.

The one who made me climb up here was Cho Nam-ho, who cherished money more than human lives; those who make me come down would be you . . .

Hundreds of workers stand up facing the front line, every day continuing struggles and writing their last wills. When the KTX female attendants continue their struggle for three years, even when Kiryung Electronics comrades were fighting for six years, their struggles were not ours. When fifteen people died in the Ssangyong Motor struggle, we felt sorry but failed to make it our own front line.

Now, we are seeing what solidarity has made possible.

The way naïve and weak individuals gather and make a miracle.

We also witnessed how savagery and madness have crushed hope.

Let’s not forget, that is the only way to imagine the future we draw.¹⁶

Kim’s voice changed over the course of her protest. In her speech on the 207th day, she spoke not only to union members but also to people outside the shipyard, trenchantly reflecting on the deaths the union could not prevent, the front lines they failed to expand, and the solidarity they should have forged with the growing number of contingent workers beyond the Hanjin Heavy Industries Union. Kim started to speak for the contingent workers and those who did not have proper names, titles, or belonging.¹⁷ She witnessed the power of the ‘plural set of bodies’ (Butler 2015: 58) gathered at the shipyard through the Hope Bus movement, who were singing, dancing, and expressing the form of life they imagined, despite ferocious police violence and against the emboldened chaebol capital power of the neoliberal labor regime.

The progressive union-driven reconfiguration of the working-class front lines in the traditional manufacturing sectors in general and the shipbuilding industry in particular was centered around the question of how to fight the immediate threat of mass layoffs; that was the dominant strategy until the early 2000s. This was accompanied by a sober examination of the expanding contingent workforce through the practice of a multiple layering of subcontractors in the industry – a practice that deeply fractured worker solidarity and livability. In the following era, Jinsook Kim, who kept her promise by climbing down the crane, became the beacon of the new labor organizing praxis that expanded her activism far beyond her workplace. Jinsook Kim met with young queer labor activists in underground reading group meetings and walked 100 kilometers from Busan to Daegu, gathering hundreds of supporters along the way and meeting her old comrade Park Moon-jin, a dismissed union leader of the Youngnam Hospital who waged a devastating solo high-altitude protest for more than 200 days. What becomes visible in her lively Tweeter feeds and in labor newspaper stories is the new topography of working-class struggles forged not at the center (i.e. traditional unions or the regular workforce) but precisely around the fracturing peripheries wherein the othered laboring subjects wage deadly fights. In a letter written on the second day of her protest, Jinsook Kim promises to make her struggle against the neoliberal restructuring in the shipbuilding industries ‘a path to rebirth’ that would turn the tide of mass-layoffs and death-rides.¹⁸ This necromancy, mourning her dead comrades but filled with an aspiration for a restored life, haunts the ever-increasing number of contingent workers and their struggles in the following era in South Korea.

Scene II: public sector privatization

In the period that immediately followed the Lee Myung Park government (2008–2013), the effect of the public sector restructuring became politically visible through the most vulnerable laboring bodies. On 28 May 2016, 19-year-old Kim arrived at his worksite passing security cameras and the big crowd to fix the malfunctioning security door at the Guii Subway Station. Within 2 minutes, a train on the oldest and busiest subway line in Seoul crushed his body. Kim had graduated from high school the year before and thought himself ‘lucky to find the job’. He was employed by Unsung PSD, a subcontractor of Seoul-Metro, and had hoped to transition to regular employment with the parent employer Seoul-Metro. Kim’s death was not the first case in subcontracting companies, and the number of injuries and deaths have increased in the name of public sector ‘innovation’. Subcontractors both lowered entry-level workers’ wages in the public sector and maximized the risk of workplace injury and death among contingent workers.

The toll of workplace death and injury among contingent workers soared to an unprecedented level during this period, a fact that went unrecognized until the steep increase was politicized by another alarming death. Kim Young-gyun, age 24, died alone around midnight, his body cut into pieces and coiled by a conveyor belt that carried coal fuel at the Korea Western Power Company, one of five major energy companies separated from the state-owned Korea Electric Power Corporation and privatized in 2001.¹⁹ Young-gyun was a novice who had worked at the site for 3 months after receiving only 5 days of training. On the night he died, he was using his cellphone flashlight to conduct a regular check-up of a conveyor belt in a dark factory filled with coal dust. The company claimed that the building did not require electric lights because it had full ‘daylight’. The spectacle accident stirred practitioners of neoliberal policies to doubt the effectiveness of the energy sector privatization, and, more importantly, organized labor became fully aware of changing labor conditions that disproportionally affect the life possibilities of contingent workers.

‘The outsourcing of risk’ can only be understood in the context of the growth model that the South Korean state and economy have stubbornly held onto for a half-century. The reliance on gendered low-wage labor since the 1970s – that is, the formation of sharply gendered divisions of labor in the transition from light to heavy industries – has changed its name from the feminized factory labor to pijŏnggyujik (contingent/irregular labor). The feminization of labor – defined as both the feminine character of labor (the sharply gendered division of labor) and its effects on the general conditions of labor (e.g. low-wage, form of contract, induced docility and flexibility, and little to no job security) – has been the prominent social character of Korean labor. The political economy of ‘progress’ in the two major public service sectors, transportation and electricity, became shockingly visible through the deaths of two young contingent workers. The neoliberalization of essential public services, and outsourcing in the maintenance and repair sectors in particular, extends and renews the old gendered division of labor that has operated as the condition of possibility for the continued expansion of production and growth. In other words, the pijŏnggyujik formation is nothing but an expanded reproduction of labor precarity in the historical process of South Korean capitalist development. The logic of progress continues to expand and redefine feminized labor in the name of pijŏnggyujik, the process that I critique elsewhere as the ‘politics of forgetting’ that limits the possibility of a radical critique of the reproduction of feminized labor in the neoliberal present (Yulee 2021: 538). It is in this context that I pay attention to the relation between the premature deaths of two young men (i.e. intensified workplace fatalities) and the social reproduction of feminized labor. In terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, education, ability, and age that constitute the social divisions of labor, how the intersectional social relations are reproduced? How does this process of neoliberal social reproduction affect the lives of the working people who mourn and fight for the unlived futures of dead comrades, co-workers, sons, and daughters, curtailing the logic of progress?

Scene III: migrant labor in the intimate sphere of social reproduction

The last scene to which I draw a link in this topography of feminized labor and intensified labor precarity includes the laboring and caring migrant bodies subsumed under the neoliberal labor regime. A photograph of two devastated parents – the mother of Kim Young-gyun holding hands with the father of Jaibun Prayong, a 34-year-old Thai man whose body was devoured by the conveyor belt in an industrial waste processing factory – captures the transnational circuit of precarious labor and its human network of intimate social reproduction.²⁰ The political mourning of the unlived present and future of the two young men, as a form of social reproduction protest, is intended to push the boundary of the national law that demarcates the bodies that deserve protection, value, and redress. What is salient in the image of the two devastated parents ‘holding hands’ is the demarcated intersection of race, ethnicity, and class that reproduces precaritized laboring bodies transnationally. These precarious bodies are necessary and thus essential to maintaining the rate of economic growth; even under the pandemic hit, the projected GDP growth in South Korea has been estimated to be 3%. The ‘Kim Young-gyun Act’, proposed by organized labor and progressive politicians and passed in 2019, promises to reduce the rate of the ‘outsourcing of risk’ only at a limited and gradual scale. The intimate link between labor and fatality needs to be explained in the historical context of growth and development – that is, its internal logic of progress – and not just in terms of measures of prevention and punishment meted out through legal measures. How can a disease be cured when the cause is unknown?

Behind the politically visible hidden abode (the places of production and reproduction) lies the intimate sphere of social reproduction wherein human bodies, familial ties, and, indeed, national identity are reproduced through transnationalized care labor performed by migrant women in particular. Their reproductive labor is registered as ‘non-work’ and therefore is never recognized in the discourse of labor precarity. Even though there is a political effort to visualize migrant workers’ fatal working conditions (the expression of the ‘migratization of risk’), the increasing number of migrant brides and their precarious living conditions are never captured in the national statistics. Joo-hee Chun (2019) argues that the way the ‘outsourcing of risk’ is politicized in the media and by civil society in general discursively reproduces the gendered relations of risk. The Korean Women Migrants Human Rights Center has been keeping a record of domestic violence in migrant households, including the number of migrant brides killed by their intimate partners. Between 2007 and 2012, they reported 10 migrant women’s deaths. Seven deaths were recorded in 2014 alone (Heo 2015).

That there is insufficient statistical evidence to reveal a link between the death rate of migrant workers and that of migrant brides reveals precisely how the discourse of precarity operates through the binary of production/reproduction and, in turn, reproduces the existing hierarchical relations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Young-sook Heo, the activist at the Korean Women Migrants Human Rights Center, points out that

brokered international marriages operate like the process of [transnational] prostitution that exploits economic hierarchies between countries. In the transactional relation, brokered marriages in general and the sexualized bodies of migrant women in particular are demanded to reproduce the purity of national identity and membership. (Heo 2015: 7)

Both migrant workers in the production sphere and migrant brides who reproduce labor power and normative familial lives through cross-border marriage (Lee 2012) bear the burden of the lowered cost of social reproduction in high-risk manufacturing and waste recycling jobs, agricultural sectors, and poor rural households by further limiting their capacity to reproduce their life possibilities.

Progress by death

In 2019, the total number of officially-reported South Korean workplace deaths was 2020.²¹ From January to November 2020, 498 died of Covid-19, revealing that occupational fatality constituted a considerably greater threat to working people than the pandemic. The gradual decline in the number of workplace fatalities per 100,000, from 8.2 in 2009 to 4.7 in 2020 (ILO ‘Fatal occupational injuries per 100’000 workers by sex and migrant status’), hides the uneven development of the labor market that has been propelled by outsourcing, subcontracting, and migratization during this period. The government statistics that count the cases reported through the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act (1963) not only underestimate but exclude workers not protected by the Labor Standard Act (1997), such as special employment (independent) contractors, migrant workers, domestic workers, and small businesses with less than five employees.²² The workplace fatality rate in the shipbuilding industries was twice as high as the national average and, according to official records, was the most dangerous sector in 2018.²³ The government investigation committee found, first, that the root cause of the high fatality rate in the shipbuilding industries was the expansion of subcontracting practices and, second, that the contingent workers’ deaths comprised almost 80% of all deaths between 2007 and 2017.²⁴ The condition in general is not greatly different in the transportation and energy sectors. The reported migrant workers’ fatality rate showed a gradual increase from 4.16 in 2014 to 6.11 in 2018. This phenomenon characterizes financial capitalism expressed in South Korea. Note that I am not suggesting that the character is endogenous. Rather, I contend that the logic of ‘progress by death’ extends and reproduces the existing order of financialized global capitalism through this regionally specific strategy. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson note, ‘contemporary capital, characterized by processes of financialization and the combination of heterogeneous labor and accumulation regimes, negotiates the expansion of its frontiers with much more complex assemblages of power and law, which include but also transcend nation-states’ (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013: 5). In other words, the shifting configurations of the global order mediated by financialized capital overdetermine the functions and characteristics of the state and the region. The inversion of the term ‘death as progress’ reveals the violent nature of the social relations and the ways in which contingent and migrant laboring bodies absolve the risks of compressed development for the few who benefit from this mode of growth and societal reproduction in South Korea. However, a simple inversion – revealing the violent nature of the logic – does not entail ‘unbinding’ the bodies that are captured in the structure of infinite growth-death.

What makes the ‘unbinding’ of the precarious bodies from the logic of progress by death possible? Social reproduction crises are immanent to the logic of ‘progress by death’, as shown in the three scenes of premature death in South Korea. As Ruth Gilmore points out in the context of the United States, premature deaths result from an ‘overdetermination of race, gender, class, and power’ that continues to capture the racialized bodies disarticulated from the global commodity circuits (Gilmore 2002: 15). In South Korea, the form of premature death signifies the process of deeper articulation and integration of the labor market into financial capitalism – that is, the process of deepening subsumption and subjection of precarious laboring bodies. In addition, financial imperialism is very much alive in the triangular foreign policy circle composed of the two Koreas, Japan, and the United States that operates through extravagant military spending and the continued denial of colonial violence. This, in turn, overdetermines labor value and the quality of life – that is, the vital societal capacity of reproduction – of precarious subjects. I insist that the political strategy of collecting statistics and demanding law reforms in the formal sector, which is the dominant form of labor activism in South Korea, is simply a mitigation measure that does little to subvert the logic of progress.

The financialization of social reproduction can be specified as the ways in which the time one spends for the reproduction of one’s life and intimate social ties is subsumed under financial capital – that is, financialized chaebol capital in South Korea.²⁵ My interest here lies in the ways that the life-time necessary for the reproduction of a decent life is subsumed under the commodification and financialization processes. While the shortened/reduced social reproduction time is celebrated in the mainstream media as a form of liberation from toil for upper-middle-class consumers, contingent and migrant workers experience the shrinking life-time of social reproduction through the fatal expansion/fluctuation of labor time as a form of dispossession and violence. For instance, consumers of Uber or Amazon Prime in the US economy enjoy the shortened reproductive time precisely by reducing the reproductive capacities of precarious workers as platform technologies grow by intensifying existing racial and class divisions of labor. In South Korea, the Covid-19 lockdown caused a 30% increase in delivery services, which resulted in 15 burnout deaths of courier delivery and logistics workers between January and August 2020. The neoliberal discourse of self-exploitation has little explanatory power in this context. The stakes are the changing scales and mechanisms of exploitation and expropriation by the financialization of social reproduction and the rampant expansion of platform technologies that are reconfiguring the entangled geography of production and social reproduction. In the heartland of financial capitalism, the life-times of vulnerable populations abandoned by the state are becoming goldmines in which financial surplus can be speculated – as in the case of Puerto Ricans hit by hurricanes (e.g. the investment of US financial capital in electricity and basic social services) and the black and brown lives incarcerated in the United States (e.g. the growth of the prison industrial complex in the era of financialization). Here, dehumanized lives – more precisely, those characterized by unlivable living conditions created by austerity measures – function as financial commodities whose future livability becomes the object of speculation by savvy investors across the globe.

Conclusion

The life precaritized by neoliberal austerity measures and recurring global financial crises has created an ideal condition for chaebol capital to accumulate financial surplus in South Korea’s social reproduction sectors. While the post-developmental state actively legalized the precarious workforce through neoliberal labor law reforms since the late 1990s, the life-times of contingent workers have been doubly exposed to chaebol capital dominance in the spheres of production and reproduction. The phenomena called the ‘outsourcing of risk’ and the ‘migratization of risk’ must be understood as key strategies of the economic growth model promoted by the state and chaebol capital. The delivery and logistics workers’ deaths under the unprecedented Covid-19 social lockdown reveal the fatal transaction between the long working day and the social reproduction time necessary for a decent life, which is the hidden mechanism of expanded growth in the South Korean economy.

Progress by death as a regional mode of growth that constitutes and operationalizes financialized global capitalism near and far characterizes the way of life promoted by the South Korean state and by the fully transnationalized chaebol capital. I have attempted to articulate the features that comprise the place in its totality (Katz 2001) to reveal its transnational dimension, instead of highlighting its national character. Articulating ‘necro-activism’ as the dominant mode of social justice movement mediated by dead bodies in South Korea, En Jung Kim urges that the ‘transnational circuits of harms’ that uphold the necropolitical labor regimes in Asia need to be traced and the justice for the debilitated and deceased must be imagined beyond the normative healthy laboring bodies (Kim 2019: 17). Indeed, ‘unbinding’ the bodies from necropolitical power beyond the calculus of justice and redress requires a radical social reproduction praxis that can activate other modes of production, consumption, and reproduction.

Through the notion of progress by death as the intensified necropolitical logic of neoliberal capitalism expressed in contemporary South Korea, I have elaborated on the political economic function of the disposability and death of living body-labor that circulates in the spheres of production and social reproduction. I argue that the logic of progress by death as a constitutive element of financial capitalism articulated in South Korea reproduces the uneven patterns of growth and the transnational relations of violence, debt, and dispossession across Asian economies. As transnational capital travels embodying its historical traces and national ingredients, I claim, progress by death must be understood as the immanent catastrophic social relation that stretches and stiches together Asian economies and their feminized contingent laboring subjects who continue to subtend global capitalism.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Jiwoon Yulee

Notes

Author biography

Jiwoon Yulee is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University. Her research centers on the political economy of labor precarity, social reproduction, alternative unionism, and financialization in East Asia and the United States. Yulee is currently working on her book manuscript, Expressive Struggles: Social Reproduction of Feminized Labor and Neoliberal Time in South Korea.

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