The constitution of the KCTU, its aims, platform and program (all available on the internet) show that an organization "forged" as it says "through struggle and sacrifice", goes a long way in challenging the system. It fights for a whole series of basic democratic rights like free speech, the freedom to organize, freedom of assembly and the press plus a 40-hour week, full employment, equal pay, decent wages, a full welfare system and much more. History, however, has shown that even if capitalism is forced by the workers' movement to grant such demands, it cannot guarantee all of them and the 'lust' for profit will constantly drive it to undermine each one of them.

Some of the KCTU material hints that an alternative to the 'Chaebol economy' could be one of a 'regulated' market economy. It talks of "protecting the small and medium-sized businesses" and seems to envisage the conglomerates being broken up and the smaller private owners being somehow persuaded to honor a code of moral conduct in favor of their employees. The KCTU's own statistics and experience show that at present it is precisely the medium and small companies who are the most vicious in denying workers their fundamental rights.

The alternative would be to argue for taking at least the 30 biggest conglomerates and the banks into democratic public ownership, and doing away with the pernicious system of sub-contracting. Then their employees and other workers could be involved in deciding, through regularly elected representatives, what happens within these 'empires' and in the economy as a whole. If small employers say they cannot pay decent wages and honor labor codes without help, this should be examined by workers' representatives. If they are found to be working for the big firms, those firms should be made to pay up. If not, and they are performing a useful service, they should be able to claim some kind of assistance and encouraged to look for efficient, cooperative ways of carrying on their business.

The KCTU is keen to learn from workers' experiences in other countries. It is highly conscious of the importance of international solidarity and anxious to make direct links with workers throughout the world. But on issues like the 'Social Clause' in international trade agreements, there are also different points of view. There is a big danger entailed in trusting the direct and indirect representatives of the bosses to improve the lot of workers in any country. Issues like child labor, bonded labor and poverty wages must be fought head-on by the labor movement - nationally and internationally. Apparently magnanimous stipulations in trade agreements can be used as forms of protectionism for firms based in the richer nations.

The complete opening up of South Korea to what would amount to 'economic invasion' by US or any other imperialism would cause considerable further hardship for working people and must be opposed. But the KCTU must insist that decisions about controls and subsidies are not made in the interests of protecting inefficient Korean capitalists who can push up prices at workers' expense. Solutions put forward in the labor movement must be based on the need to fight for control in the economy to be taken into the hands of the working people - the majority in society.

On international links, there is an urgent need to forge direct contacts between organized workers in different countries - working in the same industries or for the same multinational companies. Exchange of information and experience internationally together with solidarity action are essential for the success of the workers' movement. But the KCTU and other Korean labor movement bodies and projects should harbor no illusions about the aims of organizations like the ICFTU, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation or others who profess a touching concern for their plight. There is a saying, "If you sup with the devil, use a long spoon!" Accept the offers of help in terms of finance and resources by all means but be sure there are no strings attached. Workers must guard against rich benefactors posing as friends of the movement trying to dictate the direction in which the emerging trade union movement of South Korea should go. Trade Union leaders and European Social Democrats are notorious for their devious ways of acting, in reality, as defenders of the exploiting classes.

It was such gentlemen as these who wined and dined the leaders of many a political general strike - against the Franco dictatorship in the Spain of the 1970s, against the South African apartheid regime. They beguiled them with sweet talk about the advantages of the 'social' market and the wisdom of co-operating with the bosses - those very bosses who were the power behind the regimes they had been fighting for decades.

Members of the Committee for a Workers' International also discussed with some of these brave fighters at the height of their struggles, including leaders of the South African mineworkers and COSATU. But rather than fight things to a finish, these once-courageous leaders took the line of least resistance. They not only swallowed the arguments about capitalism, but turned their backs on the struggle for socialism. They betrayed the aspirations of their members. Some of them crossed the class divide completely, giving up the movement to become owners of businesses themselves and line their own pockets as employers of other people's labor.

This must serve as a warning that even the best-intentioned leaders, like those of the KCTU, if they fail to adopt a program and method of struggle that challenges capitalism, they will inevitably move to the right. Inherent in reformism is betrayal.

As things stood in South Korea even at the end of January 1997, was it possible for the movement to have been taken further? The 'heavy battalions' cannot be kept constantly on a war footing without the perspective of a fairly swift victory. As workers' leaders in Hyundai Precision Instruments explained a month later:

"We couldn't have carried on indefinitely. We had already lost a month's wages. Other sections like telecom workers were not being called into the strike. We had to shoulder the main burden... And then 'Hanbogate' broke and the Hwang defection and the killing in strange circumstances in Seoul of a prominent defector from the North. All that detracted from our struggle".

And these distractions were no accident. It is a tried and tested method of South Korean regimes. When in difficulty, engineer a defection and start up a scare campaign. 'Hanbogate' itself was probably also "engineered". The company had already been in trouble for more than a year and could surely have been kept going at least for another few months. There is widespread speculation about how this hare was released - some say by members of Kim Young-sam's own Minju faction to save him from the wrath of the striking working class. Others say by members of the right-wing faction within his party who wanted to see him thoroughly discredited and unable to put the man of his choice in to run for president in the December elections. (This could be particularly important if he wants to avoid the fate of the last two heads of state - imprisonment.)

Either way you could say (and some did) that a skilful leadership of the movement could have used both issues to its advantage and gone onto the offensive. The scare stories about the economy being in danger and about a "communist conspiracy" should not have been able to shake the confidence of the working class in action. There were those amongst the seasoned South Korean activists who felt the strike should not have been scaled down when it was. The government had been weakened possibly irrecoverably and then it was let off the hook.

Had the president's ratings not rocketed when he jailed his predecessors for their part in the bloody Kwangju massacre and put on trial some of the richest, most corrupt and powerful heads of the Chaebol? People had grown angry over the failure to investigate and punish notoriously anti-union companies. There was the Korea Automobile Insurance Corporation. It was discovered that Assembly members on the Labor Commission looking into the firm's activities had been given bribes hidden in fruit baskets. And now, in the Hanbo case, the chairman of the fourteenth largest conglomerate had been caught sending gifts of $460,000 to the chairmen of two of Korea's largest banks stuffed into instant noodle boxes.

Enough was surely enough! Wasn't this the time to get rid of the lot of them? Wasn't this just final proof that the system was rotten to the core and didn't deserve to survive? A party could have demanded that, instead of the superficial investigations by parliamentarians and lawyers into the scandal, there should be a tribunal of workers' representatives. There were a quarter of a million jobs at risk at Hanbo and its sub-contractors. The $7 billion of public money that went to bail out the banks would come from workers' pockets, one way or another. Attempts to use the crisis to bully workers into dropping their action - the need to save the stricken economy from collapse and so on - could have been pre-empted by propaganda that immediately put the blame squarely on the Chaebol for everything that was happening.

A party could have articulated the feelings of millions, and put them like this: "We are tired of laboring to line the pockets of these infamous fraudsters. It is these same Chaebol that are demanding that we pay for their survival. We say 'no', we can run society without these parasites. They have created these giant conglomerates and run them like mini-kingdoms. We will fight for them to become public property run on principles of workers' control and workers' management. We will set up those people's committees again and show that we can create a workers' government. We will organize a plan to be implemented not through terror and coercion by generals and their bankers but drawn up and operated on thoroughly democratic and co-operative principles by elected representatives of all the working people".

It is the actions of these layers of workers that have emboldened the many individuals and groups well versed in Marxism, forced until now to operate in conditions of clandestineness and speak only half the truth. Protesters and campaigners have gone further than ever before in lampooning the government, in condemning the Chaebol economy and in demanding the president's resignation. So what stayed the hands of the strike leaders?

Scaling the strike down towards the end of January to give the government and the Assembly a chance to rescind the laws may in itself not have been a bad tactic especially given that only certain sections were involved in all-out action. They were already beginning to resent having to bear the brunt of the bosses' revenge and the loss of wages while other sections were still at work. But even though the strike had moved into another gear with the Wednesday and Saturday action, sections of the government and the police were feeling humiliated by the lifting of the arrest warrants and the possibility of a climb-down. Indecision gripped the government.

A 'classical' revolutionary situation had not developed but all the elements were there in embryo. It was, to use a racing analogy, the 'first time out' for the KCTU in terms of a political general strike. The country had not been paralyzed. Big factories were occupied but transport was rarely stopped. (If the leaders had wanted all-out action, they probably would have found, as was the case in the French general strike of 1995, that 'the public' would have been overwhelmingly on the side of the workers in spite of inconvenience to their lives). The movement had been strong enough to draw the middle layers of society to its side but not to split the forces of the state. Things did not reach that stage.

While the workers held the moral high ground in society, there was not a situation of dual power with representative bodies thrown up by workers that vie with existing state organs for control in society. Though badly debilitated, the government was not totally suspended in mid-air. The ruling class had been severely shaken but still held the reins of power. But at least the outlines of a pre-revolutionary situation were taking shape and a powerful desire was developing in the hearts of working people for finishing with the government and throwing the Chaebol giants off their backs.

On the other hand, it might have turned out that even a leadership using such methods and standing openly for socialist change, on weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of the movement, could have judged it necessary to limit the strike to the single aim of annulling the new laws and regard it as a dress rehearsal for future battles. But it is clear that even to guarantee the abolition of these anti-trade union and anti-working class measures, much more was and will be needed.

If there had been a moment when a different leadership, in place before things got to this stage, could possibly have made a bolder challenge, the opportunity was fast slipping away. Once the scale of the bribes-for-loans scandal was being revealed and leading members of the ruling party were being arrested, the headlines had been captured and the desired diversionary effect had been achieved. The leaders of the KCTU made threats about renewing the strike if the Labor law was not annulled but it is doubtful whether they were still in a position to re-mobilize the movement. Industrial action is not like a tap that can be turned off and on at will.

And, as if to make assurance doubly sure, there was the Hwang Jang-yop defection from the North. The announcement was undoubtedly premature - given that he was not yet out of China, let alone in the safety of South Korea - and rushed into, not only to distract attention from the KCTU Congress. It just so happened that the students were due to return to the universities after their long winter break and the much-quoted letter, supposedly written by Hwang, appealed to the students not to be beguiled into joining the protest against the government.

The vast publicity around his statement was no doubt aimed at trying to intimidate the working class with scare stories about 40,000 agents of the North being at work in South Korean society. This figure is exactly the same as that given in a report drawn up for the Public Prosecutor's Office last October. (It had talked of "10,000 core leftists and 30,000 more lukewarm 'pinkos'" who had either sent letters to the North or accessed North Korea's homepage on the internet).

In the event, the KCTU's May offensive was also dropped and energy was invested in preparing to stand a candidate in the presidential elections. Whether it will be a totally independent trade union candidate or a joint candidate with the present opposition parties is not, at the time of going to print, decided. The outcome of this inevitably heated discussion will say a great deal about the leadership of the movement.