As I read the outstanding essays on the South Korean Candlelight Protests in this forum, I was struck by the contours and contradictions of protests in the oft-celebrated “success” story of development in the Global South. Development scholars from various intellectual traditions have catechized South Korea's unreplicated trajectory from the ignominious “developing” to the envied “developed” status in the global hierarchies of development. The contributions to this forum, collectively and individually, vividly illustrate another side of the story—the story of exclusion, marginality, precarity, death, and neglect. Development has come at a cost, a cost that is largely paid by workers, the poor, sexual minorities, and others who do not fit easily into the categories of inclusion needed by capitalist modernity, which prioritizes economic growth and corporate interests rather than inclusive economies and ordinary people.

But this is not what struck me as I read the essays. After all, this is a common story across the globe; those on the social and economic margins are among the biggest victims of neoliberal capitalism.Footnote ¹ What struck me were two less obvious issues. First, the vibrant and powerful traditions of the South Korean labor movement met a similar fate as labor movements in other countries in the Global South, but in South Korea, the desperation led to life-and-death drama and creative attempts to develop solidarities in unlikely places. Second, also similar to many other countries, globalized neoliberal capitalism fundamentally undermined democracy, but also shaped the politics of protest in quiet and unexpected ways in South Korea.

South Korea's labor movement has been one of the most iconic labor movements of late capitalism, together with those in South Africa and Brazil.Footnote ² As in those two countries, the labor movement in South Korea developed strong traditions in the 1970s and 1980s amid struggles against authoritarianism, played an enormously important role in the transition to democracy, and developed strong industrial working classes within industrializing economies. In many ways, the three countries share broad strokes of class formation, militant labor struggles, and democratization projects in which the working classes were the central protagonists. While the three countries share this history of militant labor struggles against authoritarian rule, the democratic era has not been kind to any of the three movements or democratic forces in their societies. The irony of history is that the strong forces of democratization have also suffered some of the greatest defeats. Democracy's imbrication with neoliberal capitalism has resulted in its capture by the interests of elite economic forces, turning it into “market democracy,” in which powerful labor movements have been systematically undermined and eroded. The ways in which this has happened vary according to local context and extant cultures, but the outcome is the same: once powerful democratizing forces in their societies, the labor movements in South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil are shadows of their former selves.

This raises serious questions about capitalism and its relation to democracy, the role and place of labor and other progressive movements for justice and inclusion in the era of neoliberal capitalism, and the limits of transformative politics in the context of market democracy. If strong, militant, and organized labor cannot find a place at the table of market democracy, what chance do other movements, such as the LGBTI movement, have? In an age when celebrity politics, social media, and festival events are celebrated as the new activism, what happens to demands for more radical transformative politics that require more than ephemeral and celebratory solidarities? What happens to social and economic change when affect and consumption replace militant organizing and production in the politics of protest?

In different ways, the three articles in this forum on the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–17 highlight some of these contradictions by showing the ways in which protests, social movements, and democratic claims-making have been shaped and influenced in the neoliberal era. The Candlelight Protests erupted in three major periods—2002, 2008, and 2016–17—and signaled a new era of mass protests that brought to the streets a broad spectrum of organizations and millions of “civic-minded” individuals. The essays in this forum focus on the 2016–17 Candlelight Protests that demanded the impeachment of President Park Geun-Hye, but also incorporated myriad other demands. While the protests succeeded at impeaching President Park and promised a new era of politics, the contours of the struggles also threw up contradictions that reflected deep cleavages in society. The Candlelight Protests captured the imagination of millions of “civic-minded” people and social media for their festival-like atmosphere, the presence of youth, and the wide range of civil society organizations and individuals. The essays here also reflect the complexity and contradictions of protests that resist the deprivations and indignities caused by neoliberal capitalism.

This contradiction is vividly demonstrated in Jennifer Jihye Chun's outstanding essay, in which she shows labor's defensive retreat from high-profile militant collective action to high-stakes, high-altitude occupations drawing on “drama, ritual, and suffering to challenge the degradation of their lives.” What becomes especially important and difficult are the solidarities created on the ground with the mass Candlelight Protests as the new generation of protesters are ambivalent about labor and its traditions and prefer to “celebrate the feelings of collective joy and pleasure linked to festival-like protests.” By framing labor's refusal to disappear or be “treated like ghosts,” Chun shows how democracy under neoliberal capitalism has pushed labor organizations outside of traditional claims-making structures within formal politics as labor is increasingly treated as a disposable input. Chun shows that labor's politics of disavowal and refusal are ultimately claims about the right to life and livelihoods, dignity, and justice. What is especially instructive in this shift is that the protests no longer target primarily the state or corporations but the public. The creativity and desperation of high-altitude occupations reflect the extremes that labor must go to in order to be heard, “seen,” and noticed by the public.

In this context, the solidarities with the Candlelight Protests are crucial as they provide legitimacy and recognition in the public eye, and the immediate forms of solidarity provide great comfort to those putting their lives on the line. Yet, the solidarities are also contradictory, as the Candlelight Protests do not seek social, political, or economic transformation, but seem to want to fix the problems in the system with a strong focus on replacing leaders with new ones. Thus, while solidarity is provided for highly charged and life-threatening high-altitude protests, that solidarity does not seek to return labor to its rightful place in the democracy. Painting labor and its organizations as anachronistic outdated politics of the past, the solidarity offered by the Candlelight Protest movement is immediate and affective, but not transformative. Sympathy for labor's degradation elides support for challenging the systemic issues of neoliberal capitalism.

These internal contradictions of the Candlelight Protests highlight the crisis of democracy. It is well known that capitalism generates internal contradictions and political turmoil, but in South Korea, we see struggles that transcend the workplace to include issues of justice, equality, social reproduction, accountable states, the role of democratic citizenship, and issues of sexual orientation and foundational human rights, such as the right to live with dignity. These struggles highlight the economy's relation to political power and the state. Through desperate and creative acts of resistance, they try to elicit a response that sees the state protecting citizens from both economic marginalization and state failure and neglect. Such interrealm boundary struggles (Fraser and Jaeggi Reference Fraser and Jaeggi2018) have characterized capitalism's four major periods, which have engendered different institutional forms and normative orders as well as particular contradictions and unique traditions of protests and struggle. For example, revolts against slavery in the peripheries and democratic revolutions in core metropolitan areas challenged seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantile capitalism, whereas laissez-faire capitalism experienced socialist revolutions, fascist governments, two world wars, and numerous anticolonial struggles. The period after World War II characterized by state-managed monopoly capitalism experienced anticolonial struggles; antiwar, civil rights, women's, and student movements; and a nuclear arms race. Our current era of globalized neoliberal capitalism has engendered a total crisis that encompasses the crisis of democracy, the crisis of our planet's survival, and the crisis of social reproduction and people's ability to live dignified lives.

The essays in this forum illustrate the crisis of democracy by focusing on different threads of resistance within the Candlelight Protests. Ju Hui Judy Han's excellent contribution provides a nuanced view of the exclusionary forces within the Candlelight Protests. Despite the spectacular festival-like character of the protests, the sidelining of queer and transgender demands through the idioms of postponement and prematurity reveals the shallow commitment to transforming the political system. Rather than demanding inclusive and justice-based social, economic, and political transformation, the Candlelight Protests settled for an ameliorative approach that gave a sense of efficacy as the protesters could claim people's power because their preferred candidate was now president. Yet, the actual structures of power were left unchanged, and key democratic forces, such as labor and queer and transgender communities, remained on the margins. In this way, they exclusively conceived “the people” based on heteronormative values that excluded sexual minorities. While there is an ostensible acceptance of the demand for inclusion, the appeals to postponement and prematurity reflect the hypocrisy of liberal notions of inclusion. One can only wonder, if not now, then when will the time be right? Challenging structures of privilege is always contested, but what is particularly interesting in this case is that the demands are accepted as legitimate, but the issue is timing.

Han's article reminded me of South Africa's struggle for social and economic justice. While the issues are different, the way in which time comes into politics is seen in the contestation over socioeconomic rights,Footnote ³ which are enshrined in the constitution, but the state's failure to deliver housing, health care, and education is justified in terms of time. Socioeconomic rights are widely celebrated by both the public and the state and are vital to a democratic and just society, but the issue is the time it takes to deliver these rights. Here, the failure of the democratic state is linked to the hollowing out of state capacity and the way in which the democratic state prioritized deracializing capitalism by creating a black capitalist classFootnote ⁴ at the expense of state delivery of the basic conditions necessary to live a dignified life. For the twenty-seven years of democracy, the state has been obsessed with markets, economic growth, and maintaining credit ratings instead of ensuring the politically and constitutionally mandated goals of redistribution, justice, and radical democratic forms of rule. As protests increasingly erupt against this failure to deliver, the state increasingly combines a dangerous ethnic, nationalist, and race-based populism with a renewed commitment to neoliberal rationality. While still rhetorically supporting social and economic justice, the state reverts to a politics of time to appease people's frustration. However, time is running out for the state. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this failure into sharp relief as NGOs such as the Gift of the Givers provided more food parcels to hungry inhabitants than the combined efforts of the state. Increasingly, the public no longer accepts the excuse that it takes time to deliver dignity, justice, and inclusion.

In both South Korea and South Africa, the democratic forces demanding inclusion are challenging understandings of justice, citizenship, heteronormativity, social reproduction, equality, and economic inclusion. They are attempting to reorient public power by extending who gets included and what issues are prioritized. Han's essay is a reminder that democracy is only meaningful if it prioritizes social inclusion of all people and must do so immediately. Postponing social transformation essentially forces people to live in an empty rights-less space of a promised but indefinite future. In other words, the future we want to build must begin today.

Hyun Ok Park's insightful article on the Sewŏl ferry disaster shows that by fixing the gaze on the state's failure to protect citizens, the rights of victims, and the relationship between victims and citizens, the power and role of capital has been hidden from public view. The Sewŏl movement's focus on the state rather than seeing the power of neoliberal capitalism reflects the bifurcation of politics and economics into discrete spheres. The dominant narrative of capitalism sees it as an economic system that organizes production, but in reality it is a social system that organizes all aspects of life by operating on the background conditions of public power and the state, social reproduction, the extraction of “free” resources, and the exploitation of the natural world (Fraser and Jaeggi Reference Fraser and Jaeggi2018). By maintaining the appearance that capitalism operates separately from public power and the state, neoliberal capitalism has remade the state in its interest, allowing capital to operate behind the scenes to control the contours of social, political, and economic inclusion. It has also quietly shaped the contours of struggle.

Reflecting the separation from capitalism of the hidden background conditions, some within the Candlelight Protest movement focused on victims of state failure and insisted on sanitizing protests from militant labor regalia and radical demands of justice and equality. Homing in on the state's role in protecting citizens and the rights of victims eschewed a larger critique of neoliberal capitalism that would have made visible the state's collusion with capital. The internal tensions within the Sewŏl parents between focusing on consumer protection and a critique of the state's collusion with capital reflects this larger cleavage of amelioration within or transformation of the system. It raises the issue of whether justice is reduced to truth discovery and impeachment or elevated to demands for social and economic inclusion. Reading Park's essay reminded me of the celebrated Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which sought to rebuild the divided postapartheid nation through truth about the past and reconciliation for the future. While the deeply pained society found a degree of solace in the truth discovery, the failure to transform the structures of privilege and wealth have proven to cut deeper into the fissure of a tortured past. Thus, in a similar way, the failure to sustain a critique that links the Sewŏl tragedy to the way in which neoliberal capitalism has remade the state, from acting in the interest of citizens to ensuring that capital's interests are enshrined, turns the wrath and attention primarily on truth discovery and the impeachment of the president. The state is reduced to an individual, and the power structures that underlie the state's actions remain hidden from scrutiny. The affect-oriented, “civic-minded” politics highlights injustice to innocent consumers such as the victims of the Sewŏl ferry disaster, not politicized coproducers of production such as workers or the demands of queer and transgender people for inclusion. Of course, the Sewŏl ferry disaster is a monumental tragedy, and the underlying causes reflect a market democracy operating in the interests of capital by deregulating safety protocols, dehumanizing workers, and devaluing social and economic justice.

The Candlelight Protests inaugurated a new era of politics, but they also brought to the fore fundamental contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. While the dominant thread in the protests seems to have settled for changes within the system rather than generative and transformative changes to the system, reflecting the narrowing of democracy and the abnegation of fundamental demands of justice, inclusion, and dignity, the protests also created the space for struggles that straddle the boundaries between the economy on the one side and the social conditions to live dignified lives and the role of a democratic state in creating these conditions on the other side. Thus, the struggles and the contradictions reflected in the Candlelight Protests demonstrate labor's resilience and creativity, the interconnecting interrealm boundary struggles, and the renewal of engaged citizenship.

Despite the contradictions and shortcomings, the Candlelight Protests ignited a renewed democratic sensibility that has created space for new forms of organizing to develop, new solidarities to emerge, new material and symbolic resources to be created, and generative opportunities to be engendered. To attract millions of people onto the streets to demand change is an extraordinary achievement and must be celebrated and expanded upon. We live in worrying times in which states and corporations have colluded to create a world that is in peril and our species’ survival is at stake. The Candlelight Protests represent some of the most innovative interrealm boundary struggles of our times and have laid the basis on which transformative politics can emerge.