ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates why the new Left failed to adapt to democratic politics and how this failure affected the development of a more moderate Left. Democratisation resulted in a parliamentary system which became a key institutional tool in politics. It is important to understand the sociopolitical conditions that affected the radicalisation of the revived socialist movement in the 1980s. The military dictatorship adopted strong anti-socialist policies and had recourse to several legal tools such as the National Security Law and the Anti-Communism Law. The historic Kwangju massacre, the enhanced social inequality and the ideological aspect of the traditional radical nationalism of the Left all contributed to the radicalisation of the new Left. There was a great renaissance of Marxism-Leninism and a dramatic ideological transformation from liberalism to socialism among many student activists and small numbers of scholars in the mid-1980s. The Korean Socialist Labour Party(KSLP) was established in 1991 with the backing of a small number of labour movement leaders.
