Anton Jager has suggested that the contemporary political culture of societies within the advanced (or over-developed) zones of the capitalist world-system can best be understood through the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’. Periodization and diagnosis all in one, hyperpolitics characterizes an era of intense politicization, on the one hand, where the political is extremely personal, and of low levels of institutionalization, on the other, with civic engagement in parties, unions, and diverse sticky forms of community organizing at a minimum. Fervid political emotions churn against a backdrop of material stasis. A concern with the impasses of the fleeting, instantaneous, effervescent and apparently consequence free modes of clicktivism is shared by Anna Kornbluh, who argues that immediacy has become the dominant cultural style of ‘too late capitalism’. Artistic practices of immediacy, such as autofiction, forgo the operations of the symbolic and immerse their subjects in the urgent flow and blur of affects, in the sphere of (digital) circulation and negate the conditions from which theorizing and the scaling-up of thought can take place. Vitiated first-person narratives and emanations of hyperpolitical dramas are not a problem for Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater 2-10 (2023), a staggering feat of novelistic mediation, one which produces a history of South Korea from below, from the everyday experiences of the industrial workers whose bodies built the modern nation and whose minds dream of socialist worlds liberated from waged work.
Mater 2-10 takes on the challenge of narrating a political history of the left in Korea not only from the perspective of rank and file organizers but also from the serially defeated. As one character questions ‘why does our family only ever side with the losers and never the winners’. Mater 2-10 adopts and adapts the form of the generational saga as it follows a family of ‘commies’ and their network of friends, accomplices, and lovers, whose commitment to an egalitarian project can feel like a curse in a world inclined to the violent suppression of hope and class hatred. The novel spans the arc of Korea’s development through colonial modernity under Japanese occupation, post-colonial modernity superintended by the US military, to the late modernity of global de-industrialization. As a consequence, the subjects of struggle also mutate, shifting from the underground activities of the socialist opposition to imperial domination the 1930s and 40s, to the occupations and sit-ins of laid-off workers in the twenty-first century. The industrial proletariat pivots from building a vanguard capable of contesting ownership of the means of production to defensive rearguard defenses of identities and worlds that are being dismantled – unfixed or disturbed capital.
The novel begins in the present (or near-present), in a period of South Korean history punctuated by labor disputes, strikes, marches, and unrest. Factory workers have abandoned the streets and taken to the skies, scaling and occupying chimneys, cranes, and power plant cooling towers: the symbolic architecture and material infrastructure of capital. For laid-off workers like Yi Jino, ‘the clock had stopped’ and these high altitude protests are one of the few resources available to the ‘powerless, nameless people’ to demonstrate their ability to endure and survive. Jino and his colleagues are conscious that their demonstration also entails a struggle over mediation. The bosses who oversee factory closures are ‘no more than abstract symbols of capital, silently fulfilling the role society gave them’. Personification of capital coincides with the de-synchronization of the workforce, as Jino reflects that his boss inhabits ‘a time entirely different’ from the laborers, whose lives he is disconnected from and whose faces he has no memory of. Jino’s vertiginous campaign is measured in days; however, having occupied the heavens, he is visited by ancestors and spirits, like his grandmother Shin Geumi, who set history in motion once again, as they transport Jino back across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century.
One of the emergent figures of the late modern landscape, the structurally redundant worker, is paired in Mater 2-10 with one of the preeminent technological images of modernity: the locomotive. Yi Jino comes from a family of Korean laborers who have made their living working on the railways, as metalworkers, lathe operators, technicians, engineers, and drivers. Jino’s precursors revere the train as a manifestation of the new, a future which relies on their intellectual capabilities and knowledge to become actualized. A core component of the Japan’s developmental project, the experiences of rail workers bleeds into questions regarding imperial subjectivity and subjection, as well as the imperative to break from the twinned occupation of colonizers and capitalists. The railroad is not only synonymous with modernity, but its branches and lines are concretized narratively, as the routes activists and workers use to shuttle across the nation and continent, slip the police, and sometimes the dead-ends down which they are stranded and disappear. Yet if the railways supply the novel with its content and material conditions, the stories that are told and re-told across generations escape the linear tracks of history and are inherited through spirits, visions, and dreams, forms of folklore which combine with realist details but articulate them otherwise.
Economically Mater 2-10 encompasses the era of Korean modernization, from its construction under conditions of colonization to its dis-assemblage under pressures of regional competition, outsourcing and off-shoring. Politically, the novel explores the ways workers self-organize from below, through their experiences on the ground. Somewhat dismissive of the role of intellectuals as awkward outsiders, activists run book clubs, print pamphlets, distribute leaflets, argue, debate, and develop elaborate strategies to deceive the ‘thought police’ and buy time for comrades to escape when captured. There are faction fights and complicated efforts to unite different sections of the Korean left, calls to mobilize and drives to expand the constituency of socialism on the factory floor. During the Japanese occupation, organizing entails a pedagogical mission of self-education but also one that is necessarily clandestine and underground: communists are hunted by the colonial administrative apparatus – one of the continuities between Japanese and American domination. In the present of Jino’s airborne occupation, what’s left of the unions participate in forms of mutual aid, run community centers and, importantly, supply Jino with sustenance to keep him going. Ideas, language, and actions feed into the novel’s project of mediating the transformations of Korean society, changes that are contested and resisted by workers who separate what they do from what they want to become.
Mater 2-10 does not flinch from the violence unleashed against those fighting to abolish hierarchical social formations. Activists are persecuted, hunted down, tortured, broken mentally, and murdered. The novel arguably traces three regimes of death which elucidate continuities and discontinuities within oppression. First, there is the vast bureaucratic machine which uses archives, reports, and interviews to target, intimidate, arrest, detain, and incarcerate. With the transition to the US occupation, the police infrastructure remains in place – commie hunters are valuable assets – but violence is also deputized to the streets. Paramilitary squads and groups are empowered and tacitly given support to break up committee meetings, ambush marches, and crack the heads of subversives. For Jino and his contemporaries, whilst the hard power of the state remains a perpetual threat, death is now associated with the impersonal and de-personalizing forces of the market. ‘What shattered workers wasn’t rage but despair’, a change in the affective composition of labor which isolates workers and enervates their strivings: ‘another protest assembly would end, and the workers would be on their own … The world has always been as indifferent as the universe. It is lonely, still, and silent. Tedious, worthless everyday life crushed them all. Dismissal was murder’. One of the new challenges for solidarity is creating institutions beyond the values and associations of the workplace, creating collective meaning against the disturbed headwinds of capital flight.
For Lukacs the historical novel dramatizes the prehistory of the present; it captures the molecular unfolding of the future – (our present) – and measures how characters react to situations beyond their immediate comprehension and control. More recent exponents of the historical fiction have lost faith in such a teleological view of progress and instead register the becoming-nightmare of history. Ambitions for the actualization of another world are deposited in moments of bifurcation and divergence, where the official record is shadowed by phantasmatic dream-worlds of what could have been. At times, Mater 2-10 shares this vision of the de-dialectization of history, of difference over progress. Workers’ plots are not sublimated into a macro-narrative of revolutionary stabilization but are blocked or obstructed, preserved at best as unrealized ‘not-yets’. Informing Ilcheol (Jino’s grandfather) that as a wanted party activist he will need to head north across the 38th parallel, Kim Guenshik, reflects that ‘doesn’t it seem like life is always falling short or turning into something other than what we hope for’. If the novel sets out to inscribe the proletarian subject within the narrative of Korean modernization, it does so without lapsing into the heroic sentiment of socialist realism.
If there is a dialectic at work in the novel then it perhaps resembles a Sartrean one of winner loses. Jino’s protest is a success of sorts and the company agrees to re-instate the laid-off workers. Yet Jino and his colleagues discover that they have been re-assigned to a derelict factory out of town and the novel ends with them obliquely drinking to their abandonment, the revenants of the industrial labor movement condemned to haunt the spectral remains of industrial production. So if the Left loses when it wins perhaps Mater 2-10 holds out the possibility that defeats might in fact be victories – at least in the long run. Shin Geumi observes that whilst ‘it always looks like your losing at first, but in the end, the weak are destined to win. It’s just frustrating that it takes so long, is all’. There are few easy wins and certainly no immediate or spectacular breakthroughs. In a novel deeply invested in the micro-expressions of daily life, of the rituals of solidarity practiced in socializing, sharing food, and drinking, it is clear that Geumi’s message is not one of passivity or conformity. This is no endorsement of gradual electoralism or trust in linear advancement: the temporal relays and delays in the narrative undermine such possibilities. The weak might be destined to win but not in this novel and not so far. Any victory will only be achieved through the continued project of creating left-wing gestures, organizing class consciousness, and preserving the memory of all those who have fought for a just world.
Thomas Travers 