The rapidity with which the South Korean working class emerged as a self-aware political force is one of the remarkable aspects of recent Korean history. During the past few decades, as industrial workers have increased in number, they have come to participate in political activity on a nationwide scale and show growing signs of class consciousness. As Koo observes, “In the 1950s or even in the 1960s, one rarely heard people talking about social classes in Korea” (1993:131). By the 1970s this situation had begun to change, and during the 1980s the working class emerged as the country's “most visible class force” (ibid.: 132). In this chapter, I examine some of the key ideological and cultural forces that contributed to its developing consciousness and show how workers in Masan fit themselves into this working class.

Class, as Thompson argues, has to be understood as “a social and cultural formation” (1966:11), “a relationship and not a thing” that “happens when some men [sic], as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs” (ibid.:9). In South Korea, a politically aware working class developed with extraordinary rapidity, because rapid industrialization created the necessary community of people with shared interests but also because a repressive state drove its intellectual opposition into the workers' movement. The presence of intellectuals allowed workers to develop sophisticated and coordinated political action, which otherwise might not have been possible in a workforce composed mostly of relocated peasant farmers. Ironically, working-class militance resulted directly from repressive government policies.