SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This article aims to examine the recomposition of capitalist work in South Korea. Based on Marx’s understanding of capital as a form of social relations of the extraction of abstract labour, this article shows the continual reorganisation of capitalist labour in Korea by tracing the interaction between the movement of capital and labour. Particular focus is on the recent movement of capital that precipitated the massive irregularisation of capitalist work. This article presents how labour has been subsumed to the logic of the reproduction of the social conditions of capital accumulation after the Asian economic crisis. However, it does not examine this process as a one-way process of labour being recomposed by the movement of capital. Rather, I illustrate this process by closely looking at the way in which labour moves beyond the social arrangement of exploitation by founding itself on the newly emerging labour activism in Korea.