ABSTRACT
What lies ahead for Korea and its people? Neoliberals and left-Keynesian/statists generally offer differing assessments about future growth prospects for the Korean economy based largely on their different assessment of the policies future Korean governments are likely to implement. As such both groups tend to think in terms of national interest and the technical challenges surrounding policy formulation within the existing structures of capitalism. The importance of class and political struggle for evaluating, envisioning, and shaping outcomes (including non-capitalist ones) is downplayed if not actually dismissed as irrelevant. By contrast, for Marxists capitalism itself is a class contradictory system whose very nature threatens working class interests, requiring an ever-widening process of class-based struggle to achieve its transformation. This section offers two chapters that seek to highlight the class structured processes that currently threaten the living and working conditions of growing numbers of Koreans as well as the importance of, and challenges to, building resistance to them.
