common people's party
| The Jinbonuri discussion board has very little interesting stuff to read nowadays when it's long since big calibre contributors like Jin Jung-gwon have left for greener pastures long time ago. This one is no gem of commentary but an interesting piece nevertheless, throwing in social categories, political parties, Park Chung-hee, and small businesses. These sentiments are not entirely unfamiliar from my own time among the neighborhood shopkeepers, among whom GNP was clearly most favored (but there were even DLP voters). Name: Self-employed (2006-04-29 18:48:04, Hit : 43, 추천 : 5) Categories at del.icio.us/hunjang: seomin • stratification • Koreanpolitics |
Antti Leppänen, 8:13 AM 
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Comments to note "common people's party" (Comments to posts older than 14 days are moderated)
It is interesting ideologically that the petite bourgeoisie are commonly identified with the common people/ordinary people even though they only make up a small minority of the population of most countries. This has long been the case in the UK - there's the old phrase that 'Britain is a nation of shopkeepers', although if that were true the majority of the population would be of South Asian origin...
Perhaps in Korea, like most developing / semi-developed countries the petite bourgeoisie, and particularly its lower end in the milieu of street vendors and hustlers, makes up a larger proportion of the population than it does in Europe or the US. But the reality is that their identification and self-identification as the core of the common people is largely ideological and mistaken - in the Korean context the new working class of irregular workers would make a much better candidate for the role of sOmin / common people.
To my mind this identification of the petite bourgeoisie with the common people is a sort of useful displacement of reality within bourgeois ideology. It means that the ideals of the bourgeoisie (individualism, self-reliance, competition, private property, wealth accumulation) can be promoted and naturalised, while simultaneously being given a slightly egalitarian, non-elite gloss.
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