1. We salute all those who took to the streets in South Korea last night to oppose President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt to impose martial law and forced him to withdraw his declaration six hours later.

2. The incompetence with which Yoon and his cronies conducted the coup is no reason for complacency. This was a serious attempt to silence the opposition majority in the National Assembly and to suppress all political activity. It was directed particularly against the workers’ movement, with clauses in the declaration banning strikes and protests and ordering striking medical workers to return to work. If they are allowed a breathing space, Yoon and his right-wing supporters may learn from their mistakes and come back for a second try.

3. Korea has been a bitterly divided society ever since the civil war that followed the Second World War. This is expressed in the partition of the peninsula between North and South. The South Korean right continue to look back to the military dictatorship of 1961-87. Martial law was last imposed by General Chun Doo-hwan when he seized power in 1979 and brutally repressed the Gwangju uprising. Mass strikes by railway workers were needed to force out in 2017 the corrupt right-wing President Park Geun-hye, daughter of the original military dictator, Park Chung-hee.

4. Even after a workers’ and students’ revolt ended military rule in 1987, the threat from North Korea has been used to justify extensive restrictions of civil liberties under the National Security Law. Yoon played on the threat from the North in his speech last night, denouncing ‘the threats of North Korean communist forces and … the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces’. He has been a loyal ally to the United States, escalating the very dangerous confrontation with North Korea, supporting the containment of China, and sending aid to Ukraine.

5. The attempted coup is of global significance. Other neoliberal presidents – Emmanuel Macron in France and Javier Milei in Argentina – are struggling to implement their policies without parliamentary majorities. If Yoon succeeded, this would be a tempting precedent. When Donald Trump returns to the White House in January, the Republicans will control all branches of the US government. But if things start to go wrong for him, he will be tempted to resort to directly anti-democratic methods. The storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, which Trump encouraged, failed when the national security apparatus finally intervened to stop it. We can’t count on being so lucky again.

6. Yoon’s incompetence has encouraged some on the left to say coups are outdated. This is foolish. The most important mass rising of the 21st century, the Egyptian Revolution of 25 January 2011, was crushed by the bloody military coup mounted by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on 3 July 2013. There has been a series of failed coups in Latin America, where murderous military regimes ruled within living memory.

7. The martial law declaration in South Korea is yet another symptom of the destabilisation of mainstream bourgeois politics since the global financial crisis. It must be utterly crushed and Yoon and his cronies driven from office and imprisoned as soon as possible. The indefinite general strike called by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions must be prosecuted all-out till the Yoon administration is utterly ousted. If Yoon tries to hang on, then we will help build a worldwide protest movement in solidarity with the struggle to defend democracy in South Korea.

The Coordination of the International Socialist Tendency

4 December 2024