|
The Korean Alliance Against KORUS FTA is selling what it bills as a "national report," a collection of articles opposing the proposed free trade agreement with the U.S. They are written by 27 left-wing scholars and activists affiliated with the alliance. The question that comes to mind unbidden upon reading the tome is what time and country South Korea's left-wingers think they live in. "A Korea-U.S. free trade agreement is effectively an accord to surrender our sovereignty to the U.S. Empire," one writer says. Nay, says another, it is ¡°a full-fledged attack mounted on behalf of American supranational capital and Korean monopoly capital to exploit laborers, farmers and the masses.¡±
The terminology and reasoning are those of the campus activists of the 1980s: an outdated ideology that sees capitalism merely from the angle of exploitation and class struggle, and dividing the world into exploiter countries at the center and exploited countries on the periphery. They show our left-wingers stuck in the temporal and spatial misapprehensions of an agrarian Korea under Japanese colonial rule or at best in the 1950s.
"Opposition to the proposed FTA constitutes a united front that shares the aims of the Pyeongtaek struggle¡± against the new U.S. military base there, the report asserts. "The Korean Peninsula would face a military threat from the FTA since there would be repercussions from China and North Korea." There is very little difference between such talk and the anti-American and anti-imperialist propaganda North Korean radio blasts into the South.
An FTA is an economic concept that envisages the mutual benefit of two parties through give-and-take negotiations. Many countries seek FTAs because they bring on the whole more benefits than disadvantages. But Korea¡¯s left-wingers, like frogs in the well, harp only on the losses and are blind to that basic economic logic. Worse, they attempt to blind the public as well with their bid to turn opposition to the FTA into a heroic struggle against capitalism and America.
The government is not doing nearly enough to counter contamination by these anachronistic assertions. Instead of publishing its own report that would persuade the people and refute opponents to the FTA, it encourages them by saying things like, "The negotiations can be suspended at any time."
|
