In a late night announcement on December 3rd, South Korea entered martial law. The President, Yoon Suk Yeol, cited alleged "anti-state actions" being taken by the left-liberal bourgeois opposition Democratic Party government in parliament. Subsequently the military was mobilized, parliament was shut down and protests criminalized. Exposing the class nature of the maneuver, the only real use of the military was directed against the ongoing national doctors strike which was promptly crushed. Soon after the declaration the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, affiliated with the bourgeois Democratic Party, issued a call for a general strike to its 1.1 million members, saying the strike would start Wednesday at 9 a.m. local time and would last until the president’s "regime" abolished martial law and the president stepped down. After using the military to crush the doctors strike, the military suddenly chose to respect the vote by the parliament to overturn the order, and the martial law came to a quick close with the bourgeois democracy & labor peace "restored".

Yoon’s conservative "People Power Party" is the Korean bourgeois pro-United States party, which in recent years has taken an increasingly hardline stance against North Korea amid the general build up towards the next inter-imperialist war. In contrast to the move towards softening of relations between North and South Korea over the last decade, Yoon’s Party has advocated for a hard shift towards escalation, engaging in greater military cooperation with the United States, adopting major aspects of Washington’s trade war policies against China and cooperating with moving aspects of it’s own high-tech supply chains and production to the United States. Thus the People Power Party, represents industrial interests within South Korea that are more firmly tied to the United States, and thus frustrates the attempts by the more "peaceful" elements within the Korean national bourgeoisie who had aspired to unite the peninsula to become their own regional capital and imperialism, something that is not in the interest of either China or the United States.

Yoon had insinuated that the opposition in control of the parliament had sympathies for North Korea, amid the denial of both his budget proposals by parliament, the threatened impeachment of his top prosecutors, gave him impetus to call in the military. This short-sighted power grab by conservative bourgeois forces in South Korea, parallels trends seen emerging across the world as the bourgeois regimes divulge into a stew of so called "corruption" scandals as they chaotically rush to shed their democratic veneer, amid a proliferation of proletarian labor revolts as a result of the mounting economic catastrophe. Like in the United States, the South Korean bourgeoisie is engaged in increasingly hostile internecine battles, where both bourgeois parties engage in partisan struggles willing to mobilize it’s police and military agencies against it’s opponents as they struggle to deal with the mounting crisis. Meanwhile they work to lock the proletariate into the now age old fascist & anti-fascist battle, ahead of the next inter-imperialist war. Both Yoon and the leader of the opposition, Lee Jae-myung, are wading through their own separate corruption scandals with the opposition recently calls for independent investigations around corruption allegations against top officials and others, including his wife, who was caught accepting a $2200 purse as a gift.

The South Korean Economy has been experiencing an economic slow down. The Won, after a 45-month low, has reached a 1.5% inflation rate year per year. The country’s stock market is one of the worst-performing in the world this year. A weaker Won, paired with export slowdowns, have caused South Korea to almost slip into a recession, only growing their GDP by 0.1% by the end of the third quarter after a 0.2% decrease. Due to these economic fears, the Bank of Korea has cut interest rates, which would only serve to place bandages onto a faltering system.

The military of South Korea, during the country’s 6 hour stint with martial law, ordered the cessation of the doctor’s strike, which the current government had previously stated they would use legal means to end after calling the strike "regrettable". This would be the end of the strike, as the military has declared that anyone who violates this order could be arrested without a warrant. The strike, which had been started over the South Korean government’s decision to change the enrollment quota of medical school, had been taking place for three months. While the strike is threatening to the bourgeois the striking doctors, mainly junior doctors, had cited monopolistic concerns over the influx of new students into the medical field, which would devalue their labor, instead of fighting for maintaining their wages and increasing those of all workers, they fought to oppose a government program that would certify more medical workers enlarging the reserve army of medical workers so as to drive down their wages.

The National Samsung Electronics Union has been on protest for months after workers returned to their jobs on August 8th of this year. Despite a large number of workers in the company being represented by the union, the negotiations for wage increases and better working conditions ultimately failed. The Samsung strike had gone on from July 7th to August 5th, almost one full month, but the ongoing effects are still being felt. Samsung is the largest of the South Korean Chaebols, or massive dynastic corporations that dominate the South Korean economy. This strike, the first in Samsung’s history since its founding in 1969, is historic. It shows the first signs of the weakening grasp of the South Korean Bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

The role that the threat of the indefinite general strike by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) played in ending president Yoon’s plans for martial law demonstrates that the warring bourgeois will always work to bring the workers to it’s side either through forceful violence or through the lie of a common interest in defense of nation or "democracy", and yet still the true power lies in the hands of the working class. Until the mid 1990’s the KCTU operated as an independent mostly illegal union in the times of the dictatorship. As the economic boom of the "Asian Tigers" developed, the brutal South Korean dictatorship was transformed into a "democracy", and the independent unions began to be bargained with. As their their power grew along with the enlarging of the South Korea capital, it could likewise afford to fund a labor aristocracy. After it’s KCTU’s official recognition, it has increasingly worked with the bourgeois state in promoting a common national interest between the workers and the bourgeois.

Thus for the bourgeois, it’s tolerance of the unions is contingent upon the economic times, the ruthless & violent repression of the workers movement is the common history of the international working class within the bourgeois democratic-fascist states. The short, sighted attempt by the union to "defend democracy" ultimately only works to ensure fascism. By leading workers away from identifying their fundamentally antagonistic relation with capital and the need for proletarian dictatorship as the only solution to the viscous violence of the bourgeois, they lead the workers to cling even harder onto the decaying corpse of bourgeois democracy in a futile struggle to maintain their aristocratic position within the world imperialist order. Thus it is imperative that workers within KCTU work to rid themselves of their opportunist leadership & fight for general strike action not to defend bourgeois national democracy, but to unite workers across the world to oppose the mounting inter-imperialist war with the slogans of revolutionary defeatism.

Our party stands resolute in our stance on bourgeois democracy as inextricably linked to fascism. Without bourgeois democracy there could be no fascism, as the bourgeoisie has turned "democracy" to mean "worship of the individual". It has divorced political struggle from class, an ahistorical and anti-proletarian action that must be rectified with the destruction of democracy. The fault of democracy is in its desire to see the individual, or at least the bourgeois idea of the individual, as sacred.

With the involvement of the national bourgeoisies of both China and the United States on the prowl for Korean expropriations, it comes to no surprise that the North and South are not united. They are but pawns in a cold imperial war over markets. The only method of which to shed this ever looming threat of imperial war would be for the working class to consolidate in class unions to prepare for the eventual revolution led by the Communist Party.