This is the acceptance speech George gave for the 2016 Kim Dae Jung Scholar’s Prize for Contributions to Peace, Democracy and Human Rights on the Korean Peninsula
By George Katsiaficas
Acceptance
Speech for the 2016 Kim Dae Jung Scholar’s Prize for Democracy, Peace,
and Human Rights, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea,
June 8, 2016.
CNU has been my home away from home since 2001.
I feel greatly honored that my scholarly work has been recognized for
helping to realize democracy, peace and human rights on the Korean
peninsula. Ever since my first visit to Gwangju in 1999, I have felt
myself to be at home. During my visit the next year, I was happily
surprised by an invitation to meet President Kim Dae Jung shortly before
his visit to Pyongyang.
In this world, money rules, and
scholarly endeavors are seldom recognized, let alone rewarded. My
everyday experiences at CNU have been continual sources of surprise,
happily so, and this award is part of that pattern. I recall another
such incident that I would like to share with you. Some years ago, a
German colleague was invited to Gwangju for the annual 518 Institute
conference. As I showed him around campus, we happened upon the statue
of 최상채 총장, Choi Sang-jae, the first president of CNU. My colleague
laughed heartily as soon as he saw the statue of a man holding a book
and wearing a modern western suit. So accustomed was he to see statues
of men on horses with military regalia and weapons, that to him, the
sight of a man with a book was a funny and exotic sight. I immediately
challenged his laughter, and he quickly agreed that the portrayal of a
scholar was a much better sight that any glorification of war. I am
proud to consider myself a scholar from CNU.
Of the many
professors here who have guided and accompanied me as I journeyed
through the experiences of 518 and Korea’s minjung movement, I must name
two: Na Kahn-chae, whose own work on the Gwangju Uprising has expanded
our understanding through his insight that it was at least a 17-year
project. Professor Na has been an indispensable intellectual colleague
as well as a good friend. Together we edited an anthology about 518
published by Routledge. Prof. Park Hae-Kwang, current director of the
518 Institute, has nurtured our friendship in Boston and Gwangju and
encouraged me intellectually and personally.
I first came to
Korea in 1999 after my book on 1968 was translated. It quickly sold
through more than 5 printings, and the publisher brought me to Seoul,
where multiple interviews and reviews afforded me access to Korean
public opinion. My wish ever since 1980, however, when I had seen news
reports on 518 while living in Germany, was to visit Gwangju, and I did
so in 1999 for one night—enough to fall in love with the city.
My book on the global imagination of 1968, 신좌파의 상상력, showed how
internationalism and self-management were the twin aspirations that
united a global New Left. From Czechoslovakia (invaded by the Soviet
Union) to Vietnam (invaded by the US) to Paris, New York and Mexico
City, the grassroots movements were practically and intuitively tied
together even though no organization united them. I developed the
concept of the eros effect to explain how this unity emerged in the
absence of organization and extensive personal contact. In my second
book (translated into Korean as정치의 전복), The Subversion of Politics:
European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday
Life, I illustrated how “consciously spontaneous” movements in Europe
challenged contemporary norms and values while integrating categories of
existence often thought to be mutually exclusive: eros and politics;
opposing the government and working for justice; breaking the law and
acting properly; and being in solidarity with the Third World rather
than enjoying their exploitation.
My books grew out of my
life experiences. In 1969, when I first became active, it was not easy
for me to participate in the anti-war movement. My father was a career
military man, a highly decorated war hero, who didn’t want to see his
“only son throw his life away.” He would come to demonstrations and
physically try to make me leave. I was twenty years old, a senior at
MIT, and had more than one physical altercation with him. It was very
embarrassing, and he sometimes hurt me. Nonetheless I persisted. When I
was put in jail, my mother stood up as I was being sentenced for
“disturbing a school” and said in Greek to the Greek -American judge:
“My son is not a criminal.” The atmosphere in the courtroom was tense,
but I exploded when the judge ordered the bailiffs to “arrest that
woman!” Needless to say, I felt incredibly guilty as my mom spent a week
in the notorious Charles Street Prison in Boston, but she rebounded and
was elected three times to the New Hampshire House of Representatives,
where she introduced the nuclear freeze initiative and other progressive
measures.
My own project begins with a very simple
proposition: ordinary people, acting together, can profoundly change the
patterns of everyday life. In more than 40 years of scholarly work, I
seek to give voice to the actions of hundreds of thousands of people.
The oft-repeated phrase, “the people make history,” cannot be
comprehended without focusing on popular uprisings, when the deeds of
hundreds of thousands speak for themselves and portray freedom’s meaning
in history.
Besides being based upon scholarly sources, my
portrayal of recent Korean history is also based upon dozens of
interviews with individuals central to its unfolding. With the help of
the 518 Institute and Na Il-sung, I interviewed dozens of former 시민군
(members of the Citizens Army), and in 2003, the 518 Institute published
two volumes of transcriptions in Korean. During my interviews, several
militia members recalled releasing unharmed soldiers they had
overpowered. One case in particular remains in my memory. A captured
young soldier began to cry when people told him he would be released.
The militia members asked him why he cried. He insisted that if he
returned to his unit without his M-16, he would be severely beaten. The
fighters deliberated and then returned his gun—but not his ammunition.
The militia picked up guns to fight, but people considered them
nonviolent— or even anti-violent—since they stopped the brutality of the
paratroopers. They hurt no one, and protected the people. The noble
attributes of the Gwangju Uprising, what Choi Jungwoon called the
“absolute community,” is diametrically opposed to US government reports
of people’s tribunals and executions in liberated Gwangju.
In
the aftermath of the uprising, Gwangju became the watchword for
democracy—the primary symbol of and inspiration for Korean freedom
struggles. Gwangju has a meaning in Korean history that can only be
compared to that of the Paris Commune in French history and of the
battleship Potemkin in Russian history. Like the Paris Commune, the
people of Gwangju rose up and governed themselves until they were
brutally suppressed by indigenous military forces abetted by an outside
power. And like the battleship Potemkin, the people of Gwangju have
repeatedly signaled the advent of revolution in Korea—from the 1894
Farmers’ War and the 1929 student revolt to the 1980 uprising.
Independent of Cold War divisions, both the DPRK and ROK praise the
people’s uprising. In this sense, Gwangju provides a point of unity
across what often appears to be an unbridgeable political divide.
The
1980 Gwangju People’s Uprising is a significant indication of the
capacity of people to govern themselves far more wisely than military
dictatorships, corporate elites, or “democratically” sanctioned
governments. People’s global capacity for direct self-government (as
well as the deadly absurdity of elite rule) is all too evident in the
wake of Gwangju. In 1980, Human Rights Watch estimated as many as 3,000
people had been killed; yet, people’s “community of love” brought
hundreds of thousands of people closer together than ever. Solidarity
sustained their struggle for seventeen years until finally dictators
Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo were convicted and sent to prison. Gwangju
is a shining example of people’s contemporary capacity to live together
with Eros at their side while death stands at their doorstep. Moreover,
in my subsequent perusal of thousands of pages of US government
documents released to the city of Gwangju, it became apparent that the
US rushed to overpower the uprising in order to impose a neoliberal
economic regime on Korea in much the same fashion as they bloodily
imposed neoliberalism in Chile in 1973; Thailand, Argentina and Sri
Lanka 1976; Turkey in 1980, and elsewhere.
As opposed to the
actions of governments, which when analyzed in the light of day reveal
sinister criminality at work, empirical analysis of the emergence of the
Gwangju Uprising provides a glimpse of humanity’s evolving collective
wisdom. Like the 1871 Paris Commune, the people of Gwangju in 1980
battled against overwhelming forces arrayed against them. In both
cities, citizens, in opposition to their own governments, effectively
gained control of urban space. Hundreds of thousands of people created
popular organs of political power that effectively and efficiently
replaced traditional forms of government; crime rates plummeted during
the period of liberation; and, people embraced new forms of kinship with
each other.
A significant difference, however, is that in
Gwangju, no preexisting insurgent armed force like the Parisian National
Guard led the assault on power. Gwangju was liberated without the
government’s defeat by a foreign power or planning by political parties;
rather, a spontaneous process of resistance to the brutality of
thousands of paratroopers threw forward men and women who rose to the
occasion. At the decisive moment in the armed struggle, the city’s
transportation workers heroically assembled a column of buses and more
than 100 taxis that led a victorious assault by more than 100,000 people
against flamethrowers and machine guns. Many key activists in this
struggle had no previous political experience.
Not only did
people rise up against horrendous violence and defeat thousands of elite
paratroopers (pulled off the front lines with North Korea with US
approval), the citizenry governed the liberated city through daily
direct-democratic rallies. There was no internecine violence nor any
looting or crime in what became known as the “absolute community.” To
illustrate people’s superior capacity for self-government at the end of
the twentieth century, we can compare the republican democracy of the
Paris Commune (its election of leaders) with Gwangju’s direct democracy
(where daily meetings of hundreds of thousands of people were its
highest governing body). We can contemplate the enormous difference
between the events of March 18, 1871 (when the uniformed, armed Parisian
National Guard seized power amid drum rolls) with those of May 18, 1980
(when Gwangju’s people began their heroic resistance to more than
50,000 South Korean paratroopers and elite soldiers). We can observe the
internal discipline imposed from above on Parisians (posters called for
“Death to Looters”) with Gwangju’s absolute community.
518
helped inspire East Asia’s regional string of uprisings that had a huge
political impact. In the US, exiled political leaders from Korea (Kim
Dae Jung) and the Philippines (Benigno Aquino) got acquainted and
returned to lead vibrant social movements. “People Power” became
activists’ common global identity—cutting across religious, national,
and economic divides as uprisings unfolded in the Philippines (1986),
South Korea (1987), Burma (1988), Tibet (1989), China (1989), Taiwan
(1990), Nepal (1990), Bangladesh (1990), and Thailand (1992). These
grassroots uprisings overthrew eight entrenched local dictatorships:
Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos was forced into exile; South
Korea’s Chun Doo-hwan was disgraced and compelled to grant direct
presidential elections before being imprisoned; Taiwan’s 40-year martial
law regime was overturned; Burma’s mobilized citizenry overthrew two
dictators only to see their successors massacre thousands; Nepal’s
monarchy was made constitutional; military ruler Hussain Muhammad
Ershad in Bangladesh was forced to step down and eventually sent to
prison; and, Army Commander Suchinda Kraprayoon in Thailand was forced
to vacate the office of prime minister.
Leading up to the
1980s, East Asian dictatorships had been in power for decades and seemed
unshakable, yet the wave of revolts transmogrified the region. These
insurgencies threw to the wind the common notion that Asians are happier
with authoritarian governments than democracy, that “Asian despotism”
continues to define regimes here. They ushered in greater liberties and
new opportunities for citizen participation—as well as for international
capital.
If these Asian movements had erupted within months of
each other rather than years, as did the 2011 Arab Spring, no doubt more
recognition would have been given to their meaningful coincidence.
Another reason that the Asian Wave is unknown can be found in
Westerners’ mistaken belief that civil society did not exist here before
Euro-American penetration. Idealizing European social history as their
only model, Eurocentrists do not find replicas of the indigenous
emergence of a bourgeoisie and the autonomous individual in Asia. They
conclude that “civil society” is nonexistent, or at best insignificant,
here. It is still said that civil societies had manifestly failed to
appear. Instead of locating Asia’s heritage of values and relations as a
resource, observers point to the dearth of American-style voluntary
groups and conclude that there is no civil society.
My book
Asia’s Unknown Uprisings focuses on people’s forms of interaction with
each other during moments of confrontations with the forces of order.
In the first volume (translated as 한국 민중봉기), I provided a view of Korean
history through the prism of social movements. Korea’s long twentieth
century produced an unmatched richness of uprisings and upheavals. From
the 1894 Farmers’ Movement against Japanese colonialism to the 2008
candlelight protests against U.S. “mad cow” beef, insurgencies
continually built upon each other. Popular movements assimilated lessons
from previous protest episodes, and people improvised tactics and
targets from their own assessments of past accomplishments and failures.
Volume 2 (translated as 아시아 민중봉기) is international in scope and deals
with uprisings in nine places, where I found connections between popular
insurgencies, revealing their capacities to learn from each other, to
expand upon preceding examples, and to borrow each other’s identities,
vocabulary, tactics, and aspirations.
Cultural, religious,
ethnic and national differences, while appearing to constitute
tremendous discrepancies between various social movements, obscure the
essential similarities of movements all over the world today. The
forging of a global culture of resistance to corporate capitalism since
1968 is nothing less than a world-historical force that is elevating
humanity from nationalities, races and religions into a species-being
that includes all humans. Whatever their specific identity today, people
increasingly recognize that their ties to each other in insurgent
movements are far more important than their ties to the rulers of their
societies. More than at any other time in modern history, people reject
the world capitalist system and seek to replace rule by the 1% with
direct-democratic forms of self-government that respect all human life
and protect the planet from predatory corporations and militarized
nation-states.
Far more than we realize, the world we live in
has been created by revolutionary insurgencies. From the American
Revolution in 1776 to the Russian in 1917, from the Gwangju Uprising and
Asian Wave to the Arab Spring, uprisings occur with astonishing
regularity. If we look at history, we can find moments in every country
when the activated population changes governments and economic
structures—even the way time and space are measured and understood. In
these moments of the eros effect, love ties exist between people that
are some of the most exhilarating feelings imaginable. I am not talking
simply about sexual ties when I say love ties. Love has many forms: love
of parents for their children and vice versa; love for brothers,
sisters and other family members; love for a significant other; and most
socially, love for one’s fellow human beings.
Uprisings are
terrible, beautiful events. They break out so unexpectedly that they
surprise their partisans as much as they bewilder their opponents. No
one relishes the task of counting the dead and wounded, of remembering
the brutality of militaries and blood in the streets. Those who
participate have difficulty overcoming the guilt they feel for injuries
and deaths, while people who do not rise to the occasion cannot easily
overcome the shame they feel for staying home (or fleeing).
In
my view, humanity’s unending need for freedom constitutes the planet’s
most powerful natural resource. In the struggle to create free human
beings, political movements play paramount roles. Uprisings accelerate
social transformation, change governments, and revolutionize individual
consciousness and social relationships. Lifelong friendships are formed
amid new values for everyday life. Even among nonparticipants, bonds are
created through powerful erotic energies unleashed in these
exhilarating moments. These instances of what Marcuse called “political
eros” are profoundly important in rekindling imaginations and nurturing
hope.
Cycles of revolt develop in relation to each other. From
the global eruption of 1968 to the string of Asian uprisings, from
Eastern Europe in 1989 to the alterglobalization confrontations of elite
summits, ordinary people glean the lessons of history. Today, not only
is there global motion from the grassroots, but the grammar of
insurgency is everywhere similar. Since World War II, humanity’s
increasingly awareness of our own power and strategic capacities has
become manifest in sudden and simultaneous contestation of power by
hundreds of thousands of people, a significant new tactic in the arsenal
of popular movements that I have named the eros effect.
During
moments of the eros effect, universal interests become generalized at
the same time as dominant values of society (national chauvinism,
hierarchy, and domination) are negated. As Herbert Marcuse so clearly
formulated it, humans have an instinctual need for freedom—something
that we grasp intuitively, and it is this instinctual need that is
sublimated into a collective phenomenon during moments of the eros
effect. Dimensions of the eros effect include: the sudden and
synchronous emergence of hundreds of thousands of people occupying
public space; the simultaneous appearance of revolts in many places; the
intuitive identification of hundreds of thousands of people with each
other; their common belief in new values; and suspension of normal daily
routines like competitive business practices, criminal behavior, and
acquisitiveness. During the Vietnam War, for example, many Americans’
patriotism was superseded by solidarity with the people of Vietnam; in
place of racism, many white Americans insisted a Vietnamese life was
worth the same as an American (defying the continual media barrage to
the contrary). On American college campuses, mainstream polls indicated
that Ho Chi Minh was more popular than President Richard Nixon. People’s
intuition and self-organization—not the dictates of any party—are key
to the emergence of such moments. Actualized in the actions of millions
of people since 1968, the eros effect continues to be a weapon of
enormous future potential.
The eros effect is not simply a
general strike, armed insurrection, or massive mobilization. Rather it
can be all of these and more. It is not an act of mind, nor can it be
willed by a “conscious element” (or revolutionary party). Rather it
involves popular movements emerging in their own right as ordinary
people take history into their hands. The concept of the eros effect is a
means of rescuing the revolutionary value of spontaneity, a way to
stimulate a reevaluation of the unconscious. Rather than portraying
emotions as linked to reaction, the notion of the eros effect seeks to
bring them into the realm of positive revolutionary resources whose
mobilization can result in significant social transformation. As Marcuse
understood, Nature is an ally in the revolutionary process, including
internal, human nature.
Furthermore, in the actions of the
activated millions, the aspirations and visions of the movement are
revealed more significantly than in statements of leaders,
organizations, or parties.
Contemporary instances of the
simultaneous appearance of movements without regard for national borders
involve a process of mutual amplification and synergy. In the period
after 1968, as the global movement’s capacity for decentralized
international coordination developed, five other waves of international
insurgencies can be discerned:
1. The European and American disarmament movement of the early 1980s
2. The wave of Asian uprisings from 1986-1992
3. The revolts against Soviet regimes in East Europe
4. The alterglobalization wave from Seattle 1999 to antiwar mobilizations on February 15, 2003
5. The Arab Spring, the Greek rebellion, and the Occupy movement in 2011
In my view, such globally synchronized waves of protest are significant
precursors of future events. Wherever we look today, from Taksim to
Tahrir Squares, from Indignados to Occupy Wall Street, people seize
public space where they can speak freely, they challenge their
government’s policies, and they build forms of organization based upon
direct democracy. Creatively synthesizing direct-democratic forms of
decision-making and militant popular resistance, people’s movements will
continue to develop along the historical lines revealed in previous
global waves: within a grammar of autonomy, “conscious spontaneity,” and
the eros effect. This global grammar of insurgency includes rejection
of control by political parties in favor of autonomous modes of
decision-making. These three qualities—autonomy, eros (international
solidarity), and direct democracy—globally tie together movements that
appear to be vastly different on the surface. This grammar of insurgency
reaches beneath and above insurgencies’ specific demands, aims and
ideologies. Their formulation of direct democracy—governance through
discussion and consensus of those for whom the decisions will have an
impact—reveals the contours of a far superior form of governance to the
current system of nation-states in which voters choose their leaders
every four or five years through contrived elections in which money
plays a key role.
Today, a global revolution with pluralist and
decentralized forms is underway. Visible in global waves of uprisings,
ordinary citizens’ aspirations for people power and more democracy
continue to emerge everywhere. While now seemingly marginalized, the
international movement today involves more activists opposing global
capitalism than at any other point in the history of our species. While
the mass media broadcast a version of history that emphasizes the need
for central authorities and social conformity, beneath the radar,
people’s understanding and self-guided actions constitute a powerful
undercurrent. As we become increasingly aware of our own power and
strategic capacities, our future impact can become more focused and
synchronized. One tendency we can project into the future is the
continual activation of a global eros effect of synchronous actions
unifying people across the world.
Simultaneously today, men and
women in all cultures yearn for love and freedom—and they actualize the
struggle in their daily lives. Our erotic passions for freedom and
justice are sublimated into political movements that unite us. These
passions grow from the tender feeling for ourselves and the extension of
that kindness to the partners of our unconscious in others. The
life-forces within us bring us together and make us strong. To the
extent we are fond of others—including other species—even when they
appear more and more different from us, we grow freer.
The real
axis of evil—the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, abetted by nation-states
bristling with weapons of mass destruction in the service of a few
hundred billionaires—will not willingly relinquish their grip on
humanity’s vast wealth. Globally synchronized struggles by hundreds of
millions of people are needed to transform the global system. As
Immanuel Wallerstein has long insisted, capitalism is undermining itself
as it condemns a billion people at its periphery to semi-starvation and
ravages our planet, while compelling all of us to work harder for more
years with less money and diminished security.
518 will help
inform future uprisings—which, however reluctantly undertaken, will be
necessitated by the crisis tendencies of the existing world system. Sad
and joyous, full of suffering while bringing forth tears of happiness,
uprisings are moments of extreme desperation, during which human hearts
act according to people’s fondest dreams. By understanding these dreams
and remaining true to them, we become more capable of a future of
freedom.
In the 21st century, Korea has moved from the
periphery to the center of the world’s culture and politics. Like the
role of Battleship Potemkin in Russian social movements, Gwangju had
national, then regional impacts with enduring resonance. In the future,
518 and Gwangju could have an important international role. I hope this
great city’s people will remain a beacon for freedom and embrace
responsibility for transforming the world into one of freedom and
prosperity for all.
