In the 1960s, Park, then an economics major at Korea University, and Kim, an SNU student, promised to study together. They obtained and read banned books to understand the misery facing Korea at the time. They would sit up all night discussing the dependency theory and imperialism. "We concluded that we needed theories, so we decided to go abroad to study,” Park recalls. After graduation, they worked for commercial banks to earn money for their air tickets. At Goethe University Frankfurt, he read "Das Kapital" by Karl Marx to his heart's content and persuaded Kim, who was working for a branch of a Korean bank in Britain, to study at the University of London. It was at that time that they made friends with Jeong Woon-young, who was studying at the University of Leuven in Belgium.

In the early 1980s, the three were employed as professors by Hanshin University, which thus became a citadel of Marxist economics. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, many students and researchers abandoned political economics. "I then realized that the boom of Marxist economics had been nothing but a fad in the 1980s,” he admits. “I thought a lot of people who studied Marxist economics at that time should have gone into politics instead."

"Clearly, the 20th century proved that socialist revolution was doomed to failure." A socialism that relied on totalitarianism, on violence, was defeated by capitalism. Park instead looks forward to a "post-capitalist society, where revolution is abandoned." It is there, he believes, that "Marxist economics still holds water.”

In his opinion, the antonym of capitalism is not "socialism" but "humanism." Capitalism aspires to a materialistic society, not a human-based one. Its worst evils have to some extent been curbed because it was combined with democracy. But it is political economics that can critically analyze capitalism by studying surplus value, wages and labor productivity and shedding light on relations between materials and humans and between humans themselves, he believes.

Park warns that under the neoliberal system, restructuring and mass unemployment are inevitable properties of capitalism, which tries to enhance the "organic composition of capital" by reducing the ratio of labor to means of production. That is where leftist approaches, such as social welfare policy and unemployment benefits can help achieve social integration.

Marxist political economics has disappeared from the syllabus at SNU. But Hanshin University, even when Park retires, will still have seven professors who specialize in the field. Park’s legacy will remain.

(englishnews@chosun.com )