South Korea: president impeached, but the workers must carry on the struggle!

Two weeks after South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s (윤석열) shocking attempt at placing the country under martial law – which was defeated after 6 hours – the South Korean National Assembly finally voted to impeach him on Saturday 14 December.

However, this does not finalise Yoon’s removal, as the Constitutional Court (헌법재판소) now has to go into a potentially lengthy legal process to approve the impeachment, and it holds the power to reverse the decision. The working class of South Korea, which staged a tremendous mobilisation to put pressure on the politicians to impeach the coup-plotting president, must carry forward the struggle on their own class basis.

Disheveled coup and shocking revelations

Since Yoon’s rapid defeat, many are still left scratching their heads as to what he was thinking. A slew of revelations since then have revealed that Yoon was indeed acting purely in the interests of self-preservation, and the actual plan for the coup was as insane as it was ill-thought out.

Many sources have now revealed that the plan was only known to an extremely small group of officials – chiefly the then-defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun (김용현) – besides Yoon himself. Even the army chief-of-staff, Park An-su (박안수), who was named the martial law commander, only found out about the plan when Yoon went on television to declare it, according to the Financial Times.

The vast majority of the military and political leadership in South Korea was not aware of this, and one of the most crucial players in South Korea, US imperialism, which has backed many coups in South Korea in the past, was not notified either.

The ranks of the armed men that ultimately make up the South Korean state were also thrown into deep confusion by the sudden order they received. Although soldiers and police carried out their orders to take the National Assembly building, reports are now revealing that many rank-and-file troops were hesitant and embarrassed to do so, which played a part in slowing down the plan.

The police appear to have been especially in disarray. Zum News reports that younger police officers are now raising objections to police tops about how they are expected to follow dubious orders without question after the coup. One young officer told Zum News that the experience of being chastised by the protesting masses for carrying out the coup was especially demoralising.

Even crazier than the poor execution of the coup was Yoon’s plan to maintain it. He planned to arrest the leaders of all political parties: not just the opposition, but his own party’s leader as well. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions’ (KCTU, 민주노총) president was also on the list of those to be rounded up. And this was not even the most insane part of the plan!

It turns out that, in order to justify keeping the country under martial law, defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun and Chief of Defense Counterintelligence Command Yeo In-hyeong (여인형) had planned to launch airstrikes on North Korea, so as to provoke a hot war. These elements were immediately removed from their post after the coup was defeated. Kim Yong-hyun himself was detained and attempted to commit suicide, implying that even more lurid insights could still be revealed.

All of this not only went squarely against the interests of the South Korean working class, but also those of the ruling class and US imperialism. Yoon and his small clique’s plan would have provoked tremendous turmoil inside South Korea, and a sudden hot war with North Korea – a nuclear state backed by Russia and China – would have opened up a new front for US imperialism at a time when it is already overstretched. With such little support from either the masses or the ruling class, this coup was doomed to fall apart rapidly.

While the coup itself failed within hours, the question of the removal of Yoon from power is another matter, which has opened up a struggle along class lines.

Mass pressure

On one side there is the ruling class as represented by all the bourgeois parties, including a significant faction in Yoon’s own People Power Party (국민의힘), who want to use legal means to remove Yoon from power and in the process diffuse the mass anger that had been unleashed by the coup. The liberal Democratic Party (더불어민주당) is the natural champion of this process, and also harbours hopes of taking back power.

While the coup itself failed within hours, the question of the removal of Yoon from power is another matter, which has opened up a struggle along class lines / Image: public domain

But immediately this strategy has been tangled up in the logic of bourgeois democracy itself. One would think that a president who so openly declared war on all of society should be swiftly removed. Yet the constitution of the Republic of Korea stipulates that a two-third majority vote in the National Assembly is required for a sitting president to be impeached, which the Democratic Party does not have. They require at least 8 members of the ruling party to vote with them for this to happen.

Faced with this hurdle, and with no intention of spurring on the angered masses into extra-parliamentary struggle, all that the Democratic Party could do was to threaten to file an impeachment vote every week.

However, the masses have already started to exert themselves in the situation. The KCTU’s call for an indefinite political general strike on the eve of the coup began to unfold throughout the week, with workers of powerful industries such as Hyundai and GM Korea, among others, staging strikes. Then, on the evening of the first impeachment vote on 7 December, over a million people sat outside of the National Assembly – many of whom had been mobilised by the trade unions – to demand Yoon’s removal.

On that day, the impeachment motion was defeated as the People Power Party decided to boycott the vote. But such a powerful amount of pressure has caused serious turmoil within the PPP. Party chief Han Dong-hoon (한동훈) later publicly called for Yoon’s impeachment before resigning his position as party leader. Individual MPs also began to voice their willingness to break ranks.

While the politicians wasted time with parliamentary horse-trades, Yoon Suk-yeol had the gall to appear on television again to defend his coup-attempt, even saying that he would “fight [the impeachment] to the end.”

This must have been a bridge too far for the ruling class, which is eager to restabilise the situation and diffuse the masses’ energy. This was probably why on Saturday 14 December, a second impeachment vote in the National Assembly – which was surrounded by at least 200,000 protesters – was passed, with 12 PPP MPs voting in favor.

Legal jostling

The National Assembly’s impeachment vote has not immediately removed the president, however. According to South Korean law, the Constitutional Court now has to convene a potentially lengthy deliberation process of up to 180 days which would finalise Yoon’s removal. All six acting judges must unanimously vote to approve the impeachment. Any vote against could restore Yoon’s presidency.

In the meantime, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo – who was originally nominated by Yoon into the position, and admitted that he failed to stop Yoon from declaring martial law – is currently the acting president. From a president who tried to suspend democracy, the South Korean masses are now governed by an unelected president.

The Constitutional Court is but one of the many legal failsafes for South Korean capitalism. It holds tremendous power in reserve should the executive or the legislature fail to maintain the system, and it can be used to overturn the will of ‘democratic institutions’.

The trouble is, the Court itself is not in good standing to exercise this power. There are normally nine seats on the Court, but three are currently vacant. The rule for approving a presidential impeachment requires a minimum of seven judges to be present at the deliberation, with at least six votes in favor. Although this rule has recently been temporarily relaxed, the fact that Yoon’s case will not be tried according to the rules could provide legal ammunition in his favor.

Aside from a myriad of muddled legal complications, on Monday it was revealed that the judge who would preside over Yoon’s case will be Cheong Hyung-sik, who was appointed to his position by Yoon himself, and is considered to be tied to the hard-right establishment that Yoon also came from.

Given the gravity of the turmoil that Yoon’s adventure unleashed nationally, the ruling class is likely to exert pressure from behind the scenes on the judges to make sure Yoon is properly removed. Nonetheless, this is not yet a foregone conclusion given that now any of the judges hold the power to restore Yoon by casting a single ‘no’ vote.

Even in the likely event that the Court removes Yoon and takes him out of the picture, South Korean society will not simply return to normal as the ruling class hope.

As we explained in our previous article, Yoon’s idiocy exposed the nature of the South Korean state to the whole of society, revealing all the repressive tools it keeps in reserve to use against the masses. Moreover, the tremendous social crisis that led to the mass ferment which threatened Yoon Suk-yeol in the first place will not disappear under capitalism. A new epoch of South Korean class struggle has opened up, and the KCTU has an important role to play in it.

KCTU’s role

Throughout South Korea’s political turmoil, the KCTU took some important steps in introducing the working class into a situation that the ruling class would otherwise try to keep it out of. The fact that its leadership called for an indefinite political general strike immediately after martial law was declared was a key step forward in galvanising the working class to take matters into their own hands.

Throughout Asian countries, political strikes are either outright illegal or kept off the table by servile trade union leaders. In contrast, the call of the KCTU created discussions in the ranks of the labour movements in neighboring countries about the necessity for the working class to be able to use a powerful tool in their hands – the strike – as a way to fight for their common political and social demands.

The KCTU’s class independence and willingness to mobilise the workers to enter the scene of politics has, in fact, tremendously benefited it as a trade union in the past. In 2016, when there was similar mass anger that led to the ouster of then president Park Geun-hye, the KCTU also launched political strikes. In the process it gained authority among a wider layer of workers, which contributed to the KCTU’s rise to become South Korea’s biggest trade union, surpassing the FKTU (the traditional yellow union deeply in bed with the bosses’ interests).

This is a clear example that rebukes the idea that the labour movement should refrain from participating in politics so as to not damage their relationship with the state or hinder the interest of the movement, an idea which has been rife in the Asian labour movement.

This time around, the KCTU took the same steps to actively organise political strikes and mobilise mass rallies. However, given that the social crisis will not be solved by the removal of Yoon Suk-yeol, the KCTU, as the leading organisation of South Korean workers, now needs to take some further steps.

As the leadership itself has correctly pointed out in a recent statement:

“The power of workers and citizens that prevented unconstitutional martial law and achieved Yoon's impeachment must now be directed towards achieving major social reforms.”

To begin with, as we have pointed out throughout our analyses in recent years, the KCTU must take steps to establish a mass political party that is directly connected with the labour movement, which South Korea still lacks. The leadership of the KCTU who have already raised this idea should immediately work to act on this. Otherwise, the South Korean masses will only have a vote over which bourgeois party will rule over them every few years. They will remain under the political domination of the bourgeoisie.

Currently, the KCTU has raised the idea of dismantling Yoon Suk-yeol’s People Power Party, and has pledged to mobilise its ranks to campaign for this to happen. While it is absolutely correct to kick out all of Yoon’s cronies, it is also clear to all that the formal disbanding and rebranding of political parties is a norm in South Korean politics.

The People Power Party is itself merely the latest iteration in the series of political parties that represented the conservative wing of the ruling class. It has had many names – including ‘Grand National’, ‘Liberty Korea’, ‘Sainuri’, and ‘United Future’ – before it ended up as the PPP.

A formal disbanding of the PPP does not in and of itself remove these elements from their positions of power. This same political bloc would simply rename themselves to something else and resume where the PPP left off.

Moreover, it would be a mistake to lose sight of the role of the liberal parties, above all the Democratic Party, whom the KCTU has struggled against before. The Democratic Party may have some differences with the PPP on some foreign policy and social issues, but when it comes to the class question it is just as vicious an enemy of the working class. This is because both the liberal and conservative camps represent and defend capitalism as a whole. They must all be opposed through a positive political alternative of the working class.

If this isn’t done, then South Korea will flounder in the same social crisis that has ravaged the workers and youth for years. In that context, not even the reasonable reforms that the KCTU has in mind – such as amending the deeply anti-worker labour laws – could be achieved.

Instead, a broader program for the socialist transformation of society 2 one that puts the workers in charge of society, expropriates the Chaebols to be placed under workers’ control, and kicks out US imperialism – is the necessary cornerstone for a genuinely powerful political alternative to the capitalist status quo.