This international conference [held in Tokyo, on 15-16 November 1997] commemorating the 60th anniversary of Gramsci's death, finds us at the threshold of the "historic 20th century." It means that we are at the appropriate time to appreciate the true legacy of Antonio Gramsci. Freed from any kind of political hastiness, we need not be confined to considering his work as just one other classic of the past century. Generally speaking, when the legacy of a foreign thinker is passed onto other countries, it is selected and interpreted through the filters of the particular history of those countries, and the case of "Gramsci-study" in South Korea is no exception.
Gramsci's thought was not introduced to South Korea until the middle of the 1980s, because there had been the notorious Anti-Communist Law which banned the reading of any kind of left-wing literature. Nevertheless, anti-government intellectuals and student activists endeavoured to read and apply various Marxist theories within their opposition movements against the military governments. Thanks to the partial victory in their intransigent struggle culminating in 1987, the military government finally accepted the introduction of democratic procedures for the next presidential election. To the dismay of the majority of the Korean people, however, the opposition movement failed to unify their presidential candidates, and lost that historic election. In the process of reflection on this bitter defeat of 1987 and on the Bolshevik strategy that had prevailed among opposition movements, the issues and questions treated by Gramsci--together with his concepts, such as, "civil society," "hegemony," and "war of position"--attracted great attention among the intellectuals of South Korea. Starting with a translation of Selections from the Prison Notebooks and several studies on Gramsci from the English-speaking world, discussion on Gramsci became popular.
In the great upheaval from 1989 to 1991, a controversy arose concerning the ideological implications of Gramsci's concept of "civil society." On the one hand, some post-marxists in South Korea, influenced by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, tended to interpret Gramsci's text as the wholesale substitute for Marxist class-problematics. On the other hand, several "orthodox" Marxists criticized Gramsci's concept of civil society as something inspiring a reformist strategy. Some Gramscian scholars tried to emphasize that Gramsci's thought had itself been the outcome [END PAGE 9] of hard efforts to overcome the sterile dichotomy of "orthodox" and "reformist" Marxism. Nevertheless, these arguments could be said to be concentrated too much on the political aspects of Gramsci's theory, and to rely too heavily on the interpretations of Anglo-Saxon scholars. It should be added that this is merely another example of the overall hegemony of Anglo-Saxon academic society, which can easily be observed in any intellectual project carried out in South Korea.
In this context, it is encouraging that recently several attempts have been made to deepen the understanding of the historical background and, especially, the "Italian" characteristics of Gramsci's work. First, Choi Jang-jip, the leading Gramscian sholar in South Korea, tried to interpret the modern political history of South Korea consistently through the concepts of "trasformismo" and "passive revolution" elaborated by Gramsci. It is further evidence of the fact that Gramsci's text is abundant in reflections giving valuable guidelines for the analysis of the historical experiences of non-western societies that made the transition to the modern world without the typical bourgeois revolution.
The second attempt, made by Kang Ok-cho (the present writer), is to re-evaluate the "southern"-- or, rather, the "complex"--aspects of Gramsci's work wherein he elaborated his views not about the typically "western" society, but about the society where the "western" and the "southern" were mixed, and the "modern" and the "pre-modern" entangled. It is remarkable that the reflection of the Prison Notebooks converges on the theme of surmounting the overwhelming influence of the traditional intellectuals in Italy (where the pre-modern tradition was deeply rooted) and of the creation of the new organic intellectuals. These complex aspects are essential to understanding Gramsci's work. (By contrast, the approaches of Lukàcs and Korsch--who are considered, together with Gramsci, as "the real originators of the whole pattern of Western Marxism" by Perry Anderson--were based on the position of the industrial workers in Germany and Hungary.) This somewhat new approach starts by reconsidering the relation between Gramsci and the "Southern Question" in Italy, not only as one of the important problems that Gramsci paid attention to, but as something that relates to the profound characteristic of his outlook on the world. In this context, Kang focuses on "meridionalismo", the particular social thought of modern Italy, where Gramsci found and absorbed something that was lacking in the revolutionary theory of his day, and tried tointegrate it into the existing Marxist theory--which explains, partly, how he succeeded in innovating Marxism in a direction not only different from Soviet Marxism, but also dissimilar to Hegelian Marxism.
Furthermore, Kang argues that this new perspective introduced by Gramsci could be described as "the standpoint of the South", in the sense of the critical point of view of the South towards the North in general, or in the sense of historical consciousness open to conflicts on the geographical or spatial level. By reassessing the "standpoint of the South" in Gramsci, Kang suggests, Gramsci's thought could be distinguished more clearly from any kind of liberal (or liberal-left) [END PAGE 10] problematics. Thus, Kang distances herself from Laclau and Mouffe's misleading interpretation of "hegemony" which tends to identify the concept totally with the problem of the consent-making process, and from the theory of civil society put forward by Habermas who concentrates on elaborating a universalized abstract model while paying little attention to the specific context of the historical "vecchiumi" of the relevant society. In this renewed reading, Gramsci's work can serve as a very important source inspiring our hard but critical efforts to overcome the aggravated conflict between the South and the North, both on the global and on the nation-state level.
The history of Gramsci study in South Korea has been too brief to make a significant contribution to the international research on Gramsci. Nevertheless, situated in the unprecedented historical conjuncture that calls for a task that is simultaneously modernist and post-modernist (because our main historic task is to achieve national unification, which is a typically modernist task--but one that would be made possible and desirable only by the formation of a new social system that goes beyond the modern experience whether it be of the capitalist or of the "socialist" kind), the Gramscians in South Korea have a greater possibility for a productive conversation with Gramsci than those in many other countries. Hopefully, this possibility may come true as a small but meaningful contribution to Gramscian studies worldwide.