ABSTRACT
Nationwide demonstrations, precipitated by the student movement, ended Rhee’s government in April 1960. Parliamentary democracy was restored after a national election in June 1960. However, the Democratic Party that came into power in place of Syng-man Rhee’s Liberal Party shared too much the conservative nature of the Liberal Party. Worse still, it was too deeply divided internally to meet the growing political aspiration of people after the April Revolution. Park Chung-hee and his cohorts of young army offi cers took advantage of this political turmoil and established the fi rst military government through a successful coup in May 1961. After Park’s coup, the political state went into a signifi cant transition. Exercising its force not only against labour but also against individual capitals in promoting capital investment in specifi c industrial sectors that could satisfy economic development strategies designed by the military government, the political state appeared to be separated from the immediate dominant class. The military government was not an extremely unpopular one, at least in the earlier stage of its development, receiving support particularly from the rural population because of its extremely nationalistic dedication to modernisation and economic development, and indeed, its virtual achievement in economic growth. It was in this way that the state became a moment of the inversion of capital relations, contributing to the formation and reproduction of capital relations by translating the relations of exploitation into neutral classless relations between ‘Korean’ political citizens. 1 However, the mystifi cation of the state has never been completed. The state has increasingly undermined the very basis of mystifi cation since the early 1970s, by exercising its power in response to the grass-roots struggles of the working class and politicising class struggles against the state’s control over labour. The politicised class struggle, which appeared in the form of the democratisation movement as well as the early development of ‘democratic trade unionism’, eventually led to the fi rst crisis of the politicised reproduction of capital relations at the end of the 1970s.
