The Samsung Electronics unions’ recent demands for performance-based bonuses and its push for a strike can be seen as one of the various social phenomena that Korean society has been experiencing recently, caught up in the rapid growth of the AI industry.
Clashes between great powers are growing ever more brazen, and war and mass killing are seeping ever deeper into people's daily lives around the world. One Korean scholar of international politics put it this way: "The era of elegant hypocrisy has passed, and the era of honest barbarism has arrived." A clear working-class perspective is more critical now than ever. Where exactly is the world heading? What tasks confront the working class and the oppressed?
Over the past century, the history of Korea’s labour movement is a history of struggle against brutal state repression. Korea has experienced three instances over the past one hundred years where the independent labour union movement was eradicated entirely by state suppression.
