Social Movements, Protest, and Contention, v. 42. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xv, 225 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$27.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-8952-1.
Taiwan and South Korea, the two largest of the four East Asian Tigers, attracted global attention for the rapidity of their industrial development under authoritarian rule. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of popular protests calling attention to some of the negative consequences of this development, particularly as regarded labour exploitation and environmental degradation. The sequencing of labour and environmental movements in the two societies was reversed, with environmental protest coming first in Taiwan, and labour in Korea. The question of movement sequencing is at the core of this book, inspired largely by Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement”: popular movements to protect aspects of society and nature that had been converted into fictitious commodities in the process of capitalist industrialization.
Taking movement power as her organizing concept and Mills’ “method of difference” as her approach, Hwa-Jen Liu analyzes the origins of the movement sequencing, the consequences of this sequencing for subsequent movements, and then the trajectory of the four central movements in the two societies.
She argues that movements derive power from different sources, such as the structural position of their main constituents (the labour case) or the power of ideas and ideology that are accepted by people who cut across class lines (the environment case). Of course, in practice, movements draw on both structural and ideological power. Turning to “movement emergence,” the author utilizes time series data to trace the escalation of protest activity. Key to this emergence is success at breaking out of institutional confines, which, in these two hard authoritarian states, were quite potent. But it is important to recognize the differences here, much of which can be traced to the different patterns of industrialization: Taiwan’s quasi-Leninist corporatist system, combined with large state-owned enterprises and small private firms, monitored and suppressed labour activism. On the other hand, the geographic dispersal of firms and their record of heavy pollution created the ground for popular awareness of the consequences of this development pattern, which then evolved into a protest movement. The political elites utilized the evolving electoral system to publicize environmental issues and bring them into public discourse. When the labour movement later emerged, it took the electoral route as well.
In Korea, by contrast, geographical concentration of large enterprises contributed to the formation of worker consciousness and labour’s ability to leverage this into a protest movement. Pollution was also more concentrated and its effects less dispersed among the population, stunting the rise of environmental consciousness. Politically, Korea had a series of often unstable military regimes without the kind of effective incorporationist party organization in Taiwan. This political structure created fertile ground for dramatic protest action for all causes.
Once these first movers had achieved some success, subsequent protesters were able to benefit from their experience, either utilizing the electoral system as labour did in Taiwan, or organizing aggressively as environmentalists did in Korea. The respective states took note, of course, changing their responses, resulting in a cat and mouse cycle where the movements also changed leadership and tactics.
While Polanyi’s ideas about the double movement served as initial inspiration, Antonio Gramsci hovers above and throughout the book—in particular, his thinking on the formation of collective actors. That involves the evolution from the economic-corporate level to that of class, and then to the hegemonic level of universal social interest. Liu’s two types of power are located at different levels in this schema: leverage at the economic-corporate and ideological at the hegemonic. Therefore, the labour and environmental movements had different points of departure, faced different challenges, and followed different trajectories. Basically, the leverage-based labour movement needed to develop ideological power as it attempted to move in the direction of hegemonic power, while the identity- and- ideologically-based environmental movement needed to garner leverage power at the economic-corporate level. This dynamic, interactive process, with learning, setbacks, and coalition making along the way, forms the basis of the book’s narrative.
Liu starts by exploring how to determine when a movement emerges. She argues that this involves the synchronization of escalating protest activities with the emergence of new consciousness: in other words, action and consciousness. It is not a matter of forming organizations. Utilizing interviews as well as documentary evidence, she traces the movements’ emergence in great and compelling detail. She demonstrates how the Korean state excluded and repressed the labour movement, resulting in a “desperate fighting spirit” (80), while Taiwan’s state incorporated the labour movement on the island.
Liu acknowledges the particular characteristics of labour and environmental protest movements as well as the special historical contexts of Taiwan and South Korea. But she succeeds in highlighting her contribution to social movement theory by drawing our attention to the importance of deconstructing the starting points and trajectories of all movements. She also strongly advocates movements speaking to each other, unabashedly wanting to see a labour-environmental alliance, where the strengths and experience of each can complement the other.
Stepping back from the particularities of the cases under examination here, readers and activists can certainly gain insights into the details of movement development. Although there are many quotes from interviews in the book, its approach is highly structural. I would have liked biographies of key figures and an attempt to understand their mindset as they analyzed challenges and developed strategies. I also think more attention should have been paid to the different roles Taiwan and Korea played in the Japanese imperial division of labour, which had consequences for the development of a large industrial working class and protest field more broadly in the latter than in the former. Finally, with undeniable evidence, the book lays much of the blame for labour repression and environmental degradation on capitalism, but we know that the actually existing socialist world committed probably worse atrocities in these and other realms, while repressing labour and environmental movements with more brutality and effectiveness than Taiwan, Korea, and other capitalist societies.
Thomas B. Gold
University of California, Berkeley, USA
pp. 318-320