Intellectuals against repressive regimes: Marxists in South Korea

In South Korea the works of Karl Marx were banned until the mid-1980s. Some intellectuals, however, initiated an intellectual movement toward the unity of theory and practice embodied in classical Marxism. They formulated a theory of colonial semi-feudal social formation and of neo-colonial state monopoly capitalism, and established this kind of Marxism as a major and perhaps dominant paradigm in the South Korean humanities and social sciences.;This dissertation is based on interviews with a sample of these intellectuals and a reading of their works in disciplines ranging from economics and sociology to philosophy and literature. The history of the movement is traced from the Japanese occupation to the 1990s. Dissident intellectuals faced severe repression under the military regimes. American approaches such as positivism, behaviorism, development theory, and neoclassical economics were dominant by the end of 1970s. Many intellectuals rejected these approaches in the early 1980s; the Kwangju massacre of 1980 was particularly important in leading many informants to move to Marxism. Many intellectuals were arrested and dismissed from their university positions. These dismissed professors and their students developed effective repertoires of social protest. These included "study rooms," research groups, publications, and ways of dealing with the government authorities. The research groups shared many of the characteristics of revolutionary groups in the natural sciences and can be viewed as carriers of scientific paradigms. Their efforts to change the social structure of South Korea were less successful, although their scholarly and artistic works were sometimes influential in stimulating ordinary Koreans' resistance against the military regimes.;There were significant differences among disciplines. Political science, law and educational science were more conservative than the other fields. Women's studies displayed a more self-effacing style than the mostly male fields. Disciplines differed in the extent to which dissidence was led by senior scholars or stimulated largely by students. They differed in opportunities and difficulties, with workers in spatial sciences facing repression for raising environmental concerns and those in education facing especially severe government repression of attempts to form teachers' unions. Generational differences were also important in all fields.