Solidarity in troubling times

Against Abandonment is an urgent intervention in our troubling times. As conditions of precarious life become more severe, as ordinary people find themselves confronted with intensifying extractivism by capital and increasing autocratic state repression (including war and genocide), it becomes ever-more important to understand when and how protest movements abide despite their losses, and indeed, failures, as Jenny Chun and Judy Han put it. The book argues that South Korean social movements endure against precarity through a praxis of solidarity which generates relationships and shifts affective valences. Solidarity is, then, not merely an outcome of protest, and protest is not simply a strategy. Solidarity is “catalytic” (p. 118), creating forms of being-together that refuse neoliberalized precariousness. Protestors labour to care for others within movements, sustaining each other and building and holding material and meaningful protest spaces, thereby changing urban landscapes and opening future possibilities.

Based on over a decade of ethnography, interviews with key activists and an extensive activist archive collected over years, including many images, this book makes several major contributions to the study of movements to resist late capitalist political economies. First, the authors define precarity as an affective terrain, through its “structures of feeling,” using Raymond Williams’ famous concept, which emphasizes the wider-than-individual sensibilities that shape people’s experiences in any particular moment. Drawing on a range of social theory, most centrally feminist, black, queer and indigenous abolitionist work, the book argues for how “precarity is a structure of disavowal” (p. 44) produced by capital and the state, which denies belonging to, indeed the humanity of precarious workers (pijŏnggyujik), migrants and minoritized residents in South Korea. By framing precarity as more than a set of working conditions or labour market positions, Chun and Han centre how protestors collectively refuse to accept the devaluing of their lives. Consequently, by beginning with the wider affective structure of precarity, they bring a range of protests and protest movements—social and labour movements, often considered separately—together through broadly common experiences of such abandonment. They ask, why do protestors keep protesting, despite failures (p. 42)?

Second, the book examines protest repertoires across this range of protest movements for what they offer symbolically, specifically looking at embodied and life-threatening actions. These include nongsŏng, or place-based occupations; high-altitude occupations (kogong nongsŏng), in which protestors occupy particularly risky sites such as tall structures, like cranes, bridges and smokestacks; hunger strikes, which draw on moral conviction; slow motion forms of prostration (samboilbae and och’et’uji); and, forms of public religion, such as pavement prayers and vigils. The book argues that such repertoires and rituals are performative, deploying Diana Taylor’s work, intended to “make visible” precarity as structural violence (p. 73, emphasis in the original). Indeed, the high-altitude occupation by unionist and activist Kim Jin-suk, at the top of a crane for 309 days to protest mass layoffs at Hanjin, a shipbuilding and logistics company, vividly and dramatically represents the stakes. She was 50 years old when she began her occupation, drawing on the memory of her comrade’s earlier kogong nongsŏng in which he ultimately killed himself. Kiryung Electronics workers underwent thirteen days of gruellingly slow och’et’uji prostrations over 67 km in solidarity with Ssangyong Motor workers. Korean Train Express (KTX) women unionists held a nongsŏng in Seoul Central Train Station for three years to contest sexism and their precarious conditions. Such protests perform workers’ and others’ embodied vulnerability, call on witnesses and supporters to maintain and sustain protestors’ bodies, draw on deep and historical moral beliefs and symbolism and spatialize claims to belonging. Thus, by demonstrating both their duress and commitment, protestors transform publics.

Third, the book argues that solidarity is generative. Chun and Han insist that solidarity is not merely a representation of unity, but a set of concrete relations enacted (and ongoing) in time and place. In particular they examine the relationships between tangsaja, protestors actually affected by events and conditions, and other activists and supporters. Detailing a number of different protests from high altitude protests to hunger strikes to occupations, they show how protestors worked across struggles to recombine and redirect connections, drawing on prior moments to energize new efforts. In the process, they elicited expanded and revitalized relationships. Women workers thus built solidarity as “radical dependency,” a term sourced from Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Solidarity as relation, then, depends on and also alters the affective terrain, bringing a “politics of hope and interdependency” (p. 124) against isolation, becoming itself a praxis of refusal against abandonment.

Fourth, in order to build solidarity, protestors sustained their movements through a range of caring labour—the cooking, the cleaning, the hospitality—what the authors call “caring infrastructures,” following the infrastructural turn and using Christina Sharpe’s idea of “wake work” that looks to the ongoing and exhausting labour of support and engagement required of sustaining life in the wake of racist violence. Sister Maria, the pseudonymous Catholic nun, worked carefully over decades to support tangsaja, erode hierarchies among activists and within institutions, and offer her consistent labour. Chun and Han argue that care is both relational and reflexive, building on Joan Tronto, which requires questioning positionalities and inequalities, and therefore, holds difference without absorbing it into unity. In the process, activists generated a “politics of copresence” (p. 165) among tangsaja, supporters and their publics to counter neoliberal logics.

Another key intervention is how protests are place-making, how they disrupt the city to remake urban space. Drawing on feminist and abolitionist geographers Doreen Massey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Chun and Han show how protests have borrowed from and adapted a range of historical forms with deep resonance from colonial days through the 1980s student protests, 1990s labour rights and democracy movement and more recent campaigns against worsening labour conditions and government corruption. They do this by returning to specific sites and by drawing on historical and located practices of past and contemporary struggle, including the Sewol ferry movement and the diverse Candlelight protests against President Park Geun-hye, demonstrations in support of Korean women indentured as “comfort women” under Japanese colonialism, and marches to the Blue House, the presidential residence, all seen more generally as contestations over kwangjang, the public square. In these overlapping and imbricated spatial claims, protestors therefore altered the terrain of the city, remaking it into a “space of dense connection” (p. 221).

These interconnections shift attention away from transcendental conditions which cause grievance, such as an abstracted “neoliberalism,” or assessing the outcome of specific protests to the dynamics of how protestors act within these wider contexts to generate and sustain new forms of relating and therefore enable new worlds of belonging. In this way, even failures bring about significant effects, by shifting the affect of a particular conjuncture. Protests as forms of sociality and relationality thus enable not only ways of surviving but also means of imaging alternative political worlds.

I want to raise a few questions from my own preoccupations at the moment and from my own location in South Africa. Abandonment in the book is shorthand for the power of non-protection and “leaving to let die” of workers and a range of minoritized residents of South Korea, primarily by the state and also capital. In refusing such precarity, protestors fundamentally appeal to the state (and capital) for better belonging. While their encampments and protests constitute new spaces of relationality, building and sustaining ways of being-with each other, the protests are nevertheless still directed at activating state or employer responses, with the exception perhaps of the creation of Cool Jam, the movement centre for activists and tangsaja. I want to think about an interesting tension here. Povinelli (2011) writes about abandonment as generating conditions for relations outside of a politics of recognition and belonging. Against Abandonment offers decades of returning to protest to articulate claims of belonging from, in particular, the state, even as it argues that building relationality may be more significant now as a counter-force. Thinking from South Africa, I might ask what does “belonging” mean to protestors? Has there been a change in the politics of belonging, viz. the state over the period charted? To what extent is belonging within “nation” or as “citizen-worker” wearing thin now? Has the relative affective weight of a notion of belonging changed?

This brings me to my second question. The book offers us new conceptual ground from which to think across “cases.” We are prompted to compare repertoires, relations between those affected and other activists, infrastructures of care and processes of place-making. The South Korean example shows a neat synergy between precarity as affective landscape and protest repertoires that assert its vulnerabilities to a wider audience, compelling moral, religious and ethical resonances. How do differences in the “structures of feeling” of precarity offer a terrain of comparison? In South Africa, Black life is too easily expendable; it is “necropolitical” (Membe, 2003). Basic state services like health care, education, electricity, water provision, and safety function only patchily for many working class and poor Black residents and indeed, increasingly, even much of the middle class. On one hand, very different repertoires of confrontational refusal, for instance, seem less nowadays to perform to state response or to claim rights. On the other, publics turn against the abandoned. We can think of the recent Stilfontein disaster, when hundreds of informal miners were trapped underground, and public debate raged about leaving them to die. The structure of feeling of abandonment and precarity must be located concretely and conjuncturally, an important argument of the book. But, this begs a question about their very “relational comparison” (Hart, 2018), of how to hold different structures of feeling within the same frame to understand their co-constitution, in this case of claims for belonging and rights and demands for division and exclusion.

A final question regards the affect of the book itself. This is a hopeful book, both in its emphasis on hope as praxis from Mariame Kaba, and in its own sensibilities. I happened to be reading the novel Human Acts by Han Kang just before I received Against Abandonment, and what struck me was the common interest in the language of relationality that runs through both books. In Human Acts Han Kang writes about the student demonstrations in Gwangju in 1980 and the wider democratization protests and their brutal repression. In the novel, she portrays the trauma, and more so, the isolation of the trauma of these events from her characters’ perspectives. These were valiant and courageous protests for sure. They involved students, workers, and activists, and drew from historical legacies. But, the Nobel Laureate focuses on the long-lasting disturbances on those who remained and those who remembered, and how that memory emerges and what it means for the future. In her rendering, the past surfaces, intrudes into the present and these discordant temporalities relay the continued effects of state repression on ordinary people’s defence of ways of relating. Thus, the former “Factory Girl” recalls, “Like the time your feet led you to the square, drawn there by the resonant song of the young women on the bus, even though you knew that armed soldiers were stationed there. Like that final night when they asked who was willing to stay until the end and you quietly raised your hand” (Han, 2016: 172–173). The narrative expresses longing to repress the memories and yet their insistent coiling outward to remind her of the binding stakes, both the ongoing desire for alternative political worlds and their relationships, and ways of living with the individual and collective afterlives of disappointment and betrayal. Han Kang seems to emphasize the ambivalences of protest and indeed, of the hard and slow work of care.

In On the Inconvenience of Other People, Berlant (2022: 9) writes about ambivalence, which they understand as “incommensurate wants.” Thus a scene of “ambivalent receptivity” is one for which “people say they want, are uneasy wanting, try to make do with, try to get at, go in and out of caring about, and want to be okay with” (Berlant, 2022: 9). Berlant works with forms of relationality that are not only hopeful, caring and self-sacrificing. They also consider how togetherness is forged through feelings of envy, paranoia, rage and ambivalence. Berlant (2022: 8) writes of trouble as both encountered problems and a persistent disturbance of subjectivity by and through each other, such that even ambivalence reminds us of relating without a guarantee of belonging. What does one do with that ambivalence that reaffirms co-presence but that also makes analysing protest not always hopeful, even when bolstered by Mariame Kaba’s notion of doing hope?

Against Abandonment presents a deeply detailed story of South Korean protest movements and their relations, histories and stakes. It raises questions relevant for social movement and labour scholarship broadly and also calls us to consider and debate what those forms of being-with are and can be. I thank Jenny Chun and Judy Han for allowing me to think with them through this expansive and careful work.