Democracy, the Free Market Economy, and May 18

Since the 1980s, the sanctity of the concept of democracy in Korea has come to dominate every cause and justification across politics, society, and the economy, and this momentum only grows stronger by the day. Left-wing groups that have freely branded certain political forces as “anti-democratic forces” have become increasingly bold, and now they have even created labels such as “far-right forces” or “pro-Japanese anti-national forces” to indiscriminately attack those who do not agree with their social views and historical perspective.

For Korean left-wing groups that seized the value of democracy and have occupied it ever since, perhaps the most symbolic event is the May 18 Gwangju incident of 1980. Korean left-wing groups tried to imbue this incident with the core value they politically needed—that is, the value they could use as a moral justification—and that value was democracy. Their efforts succeeded, and the May 18 Gwangju incident was officially granted the title of a “democratization movement.” By now, anyone who expresses a skeptical or critical view of that title must accept a considerable narrowing of their social room to maneuver.

How did Korean society come to follow this path? Of course, many right-wing politicians contributed to this trend, steeped as they were in the inertia of political power they had opportunistically enjoyed by riding on the leadership of military politicians in the past, while failing to invest that political power with any principle or philosophy of their own. There may also have been a structural problem in Korean politics: promising and “competitive” new right-wing politicians, armed with the morality and intellect of the principles of private autonomy and the philosophy of the market economy, were unable to grow politically.

But from the perspective of an individualist like me, who sees politicians as “dangerous animals,” embodiments of collectivism, democracy in the playground of political dispute, where demagogues run wild, is merely a procedural principle for mediating conflict. In essence, democracy—beyond the outward forms of elections and, in representative democracy, political parties—is ultimately majority rule in the broad sense. An election, for example, is ultimately a procedure for determining which party enjoys the support of the majority of members of that society, and the laws produced through that process are likewise made to align closely with the interests of the majority of those members.

People invoke constitutional values and mention basic human rights and freedom of expression as elements of democracy, but these are not so much the essence of democracy as a procedural principle as they are the essence of liberal philosophy. The two should not be confused. In the 19th century, classical liberalism in the West underwent changes and came to combine with democracy. During the 20th-century Cold War, left-wing intellectuals in free-world societies, enjoying favorable times, arbitrarily defined modern democracy by selecting only those elements of liberal philosophy that were useful to them as a moral justification—mostly excluding economic freedom and retaining other freedoms. Unlike the natural sciences, one of the most representative examples of a social-science term whose concept has continually been transformed by scholars and intellectuals is precisely “democracy.”

Since the concept of democracy has been used so “arbitrarily,” it is only natural that communist-bloc states also spent the entire 20th century loudly proclaiming that they were practicing democratic politics. People often say, “How is North Korea any kind of democracy?” or “Then are you saying North Korea is a democracy too?” But considering the nature of the concept of democracy as something intellectuals have arbitrarily defined to mean whatever suits them, one cannot simply deny it that way. In other words, North Korea is indeed a democracy. Why? Because it is a regime established with the support of the worker and peasant classes—the overwhelming majority—to drive out the capitalists, so although the regime may look like a dictatorship, its essence is democracy, in the sense that the majority agrees. If one considers the history of human beings as collectivist animals from a sociobiological perspective, the concept of so-called “mass dictatorship” is neither especially new nor especially strange.

And in light of this essence, democracy is not some grand sacred principle of human society; it is merely a very natural, animalistic mode of decision-making, adopted because there is no real alternative. It is also an attribute of human political behavior, in which collectivist strategies prevail—the side with greater numbers exercises its power. Even in chimpanzee groups, the alpha male is not simply the one who dominates the group because he is large and physically strong. The chimpanzee that excels in the so-called “making allies” strategy dominates the group. Human society is no different: the most effective way to advance and protect one’s interests is the collectivist strategy of gathering as many allies as possible.

People often imagine dictatorship—oppressing the masses—or some half-crazed personal dictator as the opposite of democratic politics, but this is only a very superficial and simplistic understanding. Few dictators in history focused primarily on oppressing the masses through brute force like a gang boss. Most aimed to make the masses follow them voluntarily through sophisticated—or crude—mechanisms of agitation and brainwashing, and to that end they worked to secure as much consent and support as possible from the ruling strata. Yet this method is selfish because, although a rule of mutual aid may function within a group of comrades, from the standpoint of society as a whole, conflict between groups is resolved according to the law of force, in a way favorable to one side rather than both. The group with greater power gets to determine the rules—gets to exercise legislative power—and the weaker group has no choice but to accept rules disadvantageous to itself.

In the mechanism of the economic market, when the buying side and the selling side enter into a contract, there is at least some possibility of a win-win outcome in which each considers the other’s welfare and exchanges utility. But the way politics operates is that, because there is no scale of value exchange like money, the stronger side sets the rules. No matter how beautifully and justly one wraps it in lofty rhetoric, as Immanuel Kant accurately noted, there is no such thing as a more reliable form of “political” authority than money. Politics is more collectivist, more selfish, and more violent than economics. There is little point in asking whether this essence of human political behavior is good or evil. It is simply human nature. Therefore, when discussing institutions or ideas, this is not something to be overcome, as left-wing thinkers or humanists might say, but rather something that must be actively taken into account as a constant in designing and constructing institutions and ideas.

In fact, what modern liberal democracy developed beyond the primitive democratic essence of collectivist majority rule was this: it enabled the muddy struggle of political conflict among human groups, where the strategy of making allies runs rampant, to be fought freely with words rather than bloodshed through the form and framework of parliament, and through elections it made both winners and losers accept the results of political competition. Democracy, a natural principle in the political realm, was combined with liberalism, the principle of the market in the economic realm. Even that itself was no easy task, and it took several hundred years for human beings, collectivist animals, to accept this newly designed institution of “liberal” democracy—that is, the transformation of political “struggle” into political “competition” by borrowing the principles of the economic market.

A nearby example is the Joseon Dynasty. Even then, rival ruling groups could not accept the results of victory and defeat, and in their vengeance and resentment they were desperate to send each other to the grave. It was a structure in which the winning side took all, and even low-ranking local magistrates joined in this monopoly, the result being shameless exploitation of the people. It makes little sense to compare Joseon, a closed collectivist society in which politics overwhelmed economics, with a modern capitalist state; yet historians who speak as though factional politics in the Joseon era was even slightly similar to party politics in a liberal democracy are clearly understanding the historical meaning of the latter in a completely different way.

Regardless of the emotional tendency in Korean society to sanctify the May 18 incident as a milestone in the development of Korean democracy, the essence of the May 18 incident was an enlarged political struggle: in response to the planned, crude, and dry violent political act of the preceding New Military Group regime, it sought to achieve its own political objectives through similarly violent means, albeit wrapped in passionate moral justification.

In short, it was a riot against a political coup. Certainly, at the time, there were substantial political forces supporting the former just as there were substantial political forces supporting the latter. To regard the masses who supported the former as ignorant citizens brainwashed by anti-communist education is an arrogant historical perspective. When has democracy ever existed without agitation and brainwashing? Then as now, people desire, if they can, for the political group they support to crush the other side mercilessly and seize power. This is the essence of so-called camp logic, and the politics of the so-called democratization movement in the 1980s could not have been unrelated to such camp logic.

Simply shouting liberal slogans such as the lifting of martial law and the release of opposition politicians does not make the behavior of a massed crowd throwing stones and displaying force into liberal democracy. In fact, the political philosophy and economic outlook of politician Daejung Kim, whom Gwangju citizens were cheering at the time, did not place any greater value on the principles of the market economy and private property than those of the earlier Park Chung-hee regime; if anything, they distrusted them more, following nothing more than the typical collectivist logic of socialism.

For these reasons, I do not view the May 18 incident as an event that advanced Korean democracy into liberal democracy, and I do not think a title such as “democratization movement” carries very great meaning. No one has the right to mock or maliciously slander a tragic event in modern history. But while it may accord with the essence of primitive democracy as an expression of collectivism, I find it difficult, based on my conscience and intellect, to fully agree with the mainstream view in Korean society that the procedural principle of liberal democracy—which should pursue persuasion and compromise within the framework of political “competition” through elections and parliament—was advanced through May 18.

From my perspective, the development of liberal democracy since the modern era depends absolutely on whether the principles of the capitalist market economy—competition and choice—have matured enough to outweigh political logic, that is, the power of the majority. Democracy, to begin with, is not a matter of whether one should do it or not; it is a matter of whether one can do it or not. And I believe that the maturation of democracy in the truly modern sense becomes possible only when a society moves in the direction of pursuing small government and securing more freedom for individual members of society.

Baemin Bae

History Teacher, Soongeui Girls’ High School

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Original title: 민주주의와 자유시장경제, 그리고 5·18

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2020-06-29

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=14&idx=22878