Sit-In Protests in South Korea Since 2009
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CRITICAL PLANNING 2017 197 SKILLS OF OCCUPATION AND TECHNE OF SQUATTING: SIT-IN PROTESTS IN SOUTH KOREA SINCE 2009 Eunseon Park Yonsei University Introduction to Neoliberalism in South Korea David Harvey (2007) defined neoliberalism as the combination of several factors: monetization, globalization, and privatization. The events following 9/11 and the Great Recession reinforced the totalitarianism of the state in pursuing its project of privatization and expansionary war industry (Wolin, 2008). In South Korea, the continuing frantic pace of urbanization supported by the state exacerbates these trends. Following the logic of “primitive accumulation” (Luxemburg, 1913) that transcends every stage of capitalism, the state exploits the country’s shared resources. The first decade of the 21st century saw redevelopment—gentrification—reach its zenith in South Korea. Its economic paradigm between 2000 and 2010 encompassed two bubbles, the first caused by financial openness and the second by an overheated real estate market. As a result, urban lots have increased almost threefold in the nearly since 1960 (Cho, 2010). State-led redevelopment provided two million homes 198 Eunseon Park Skills of Occupation and Techne of Squatting from 1976 to 2010, and today the urbanization level tops 90%. However, only 8% to 15% of the original residents could settle after the redevelopment. Therefore, higher income residents replaced 85% of low-income residents. Land prices rose between 48% and 258% after the redevelopment (2004 to 2008), escalating urban inequity (Korea Urban regeneration total information system, 2011). The state continues to invest heavily in urban infrastructure, enabling corporations through the privatization of key services, such as utilities, health insurance, and transportation systems (Ji, 2011). The quality of labor is also getting fragile; half of the laborers are precarious tempo- rary workers (Korea Employment Relations Association, 2013), and the gap between the highest and the lowest income is the second biggest among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (OECD, 2014). As equity in South Korean society is increasingly threatened, there are countless squats and sit-in demonstrations against these neoliberal processes. When the people raise their voices against injustice and inequity, activists and civic actors often choose sit-in demonstrations as their mode of advocacy. Most of these demonstrations take place on the streets or in open spaces. The police permitted more than 12,690 demonstrations in 2014 in Seoul alone (Korea National Police Agency, 2014). Franco Berardi (2012) argues that sit-ins, squats, and the occupation of space are inefcient strategies of demonstrations because neoliberal society is made of invisible, not physical, capital. If this is the case, then why do South Korean activists continue to occupy urban spaces? Even though Berardi’s argument is persuasive, sit-in protests remain the dominant tactic of nonviolent move- ments. There are four hypotheses to explain the persistence of this strategy. First, because neoliberal economic systems are strongly connected to real estate (Harvey, 2012), privatization of public spaces, and exploitation of the Third World’s territories and nature, occupations reveal the hidden foun- dations of these methods of capitalist accumulation. Second, South Korean protesters believe in direct democracy rather than a representative democ- racy. Third, South Korean protesters have a long history of occupying streets and public spaces against colonialism and dictatorship, and the underpinning of modern-day protests is a collective memory of gathering in open spaces. Fourth, demonstrators can stop the flow of trafc, which hinders the rhythm of urban life and subsequently the flow of capitalism; in following this strategy, sit-in protesters can expose the existence of the neoliberal economic systems to the public. To examine these hypotheses, this article will first analyze how the state and corporations have plundered the commons and CRITICAL PLANNING 2017 199 how civil society has fought for them through sit-ins and squats. The “commons” I refer to in this paper are the rivers, the mountains, and the wind—assets that cannot be owned by anyone. Michael Hardt (2010: 136), writes: Here it is useful to distinguish between two types of the common, both of which are object of neoliberal strategies of capital ([and] this can serve as an initial definition of “the common”). On the one hand, the common names the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals, and so forth. This is closely related to 17th century English usage of “the commons (with an ‘s’).” On the other hand, the common also refers, as I have already said, to the results of human labor and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects, and so forth. You might think of the former as the “natural” common and the latter as the “artificial” common, but really such divisions between natural and artificial quickly break down. In any case, neoliberalism has aimed to privatize both these forms of the common. Skills of Occupation and Techne of Squatting In this essay, I use the phrase “skills of occupation” to denote the methods used by the South Korean state in association with corporations to plunder the commons as a geographic stratum over the past decade. To avoid con- fusion, I refer to the methods of squatting a citizen uses, as a form of direct action to oppose this current, as the “techne of squatting”. This section explores in greater detail the implications of “skills of occupation” and “techne of squatting”. Crucially, the plundering of the commons cannot be reduced to a mere economic issue, nor should it be regarded simply as a kind of class con- flict. It is impossible to understand the frenzy that grips Korea today simply through the lens of equal rights in its cities. One of the biggest issues is the failure to empathize with the pain of others, an exclusion of one’s neighbors that is akin to racism, and the vanishing capacity for empathy, which are not traceable simply to inequality. It consists of many levels, including the death of art and the humanities, a lack of practical experience with the ecosystem and nature, and the absence of a general cultural style of the kind described by Henri Lefebvre as an overall culture of living (Lefebvre, 1974). The reason I focus specifically on sit-in demonstrations—among the possible forms of collective behavior—is that they open possibilities for the sharing of space, regeneration of actual sense, and experimentation with direct 200 Eunseon Park Skills of Occupation and Techne of Squatting democracy. Making South Korea into a society of entities who are sensitized to one another requires long-term, practical efforts to change the community sensibility, to protect commonality, and to transfer modes of living. Programs like Seoul’s village making are quite popular today, but communes and communities are not formed through policy. If we envision a different kind of community, if we are to make it a reality, then we have to reflect on the power of the voluntary communities that are rising today—and on the meaning they hold. We have to understand urban development methodology and the land-occupation methods of grassroots movements—as well as the politics that inform them—if projects like “eco-cities” and “village making” are to be more than gentrification efforts and do more than create new gated com- munities. It is a matter for in-depth examination, but for reasons of space, I provide here a general overview. Skills of Occupation South Korea today faces a number of crises: a democratic crisis, an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, and a crisis of human dignity. We find reverbera- tions of these crises in the suicide rate, which is the world’s highest, and in the near-daily occurrence of inhumane, unthinkable tragedies like the April 2014 sinking of the ferry Sewol, which claimed more than 300 lives (Choi, 2015). The 2003 expansion of the high-speed train network required the boring of 85 tunnels on the Seoul–South Gyeongsang line alone, depleting Cheonseong Mountain, the country’s only high marsh. The Saemangeum Restoration Project claimed its largest tidal flat.1 The Four Major Rivers Restoration Project, launched in 2009, resulted in the disappearance of 67% of riverine wetlands; dam construction resulted in more than 600 km of rivers being legally turned into the non-flowing reservoirs, yet the Korea Water Resources Corporation now plans to build another 15 large-scale dams. Even after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, Korea plans to build more nuclear power plants. These projects are only part of an ongoing parade of massive engineering efforts taking place as “state projects”—new cities, golf courses, airports, and so forth. The question that emerges is this: how has this society managed to rationalize actions that seem to defy common sense? Antonio Gramsci characterized the modern state as the construction of 1. “Saemangeum” refers to an estuarine tidal flat in the southwestern part of the Korean peninsula. The Saemangeum Reclamation Project was launched as a national project in 1991 to reclaim a large coastal area of 401 km2 by constructing a dyke that is 33 km in length. The final dyke enclosure in April 2006 has transformed the tidal flat into lake and land (Cheol-Ho, 2008). CRITICAL PLANNING 2017 201 the “imposition of political society and consent of civil society” (Gramsci, 1971). This process of gaining civil society’s consent to the plundering of the commons that I call “skills of occupation” may also be termed “strategies of rationalization.” Of the various hegemonic concepts Gramsci proposed, this process overlaps most with what he referred to as the “method for constructing a system of national governance.” I use the term “occupation” here because the plundering of the commons is an extension of the colonial system of occupation of non-European states since the 17th century.