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Theorizing the Intellectual Class by the Anti-colonial Movement in the Period of the Great Depression
Journal of Humanities
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The 1920s was a turning point in the dimension of ideological history, in that socialism as ideology and movement began to exert a huge influence. Especially, interest in socialist ideology led to fresh emergence of class theory. The socialists attempted to theorize freshly the role and the task of the intellectuals in the course of constituting the theory of the anti-colonial revolution on the basis of the class axis of the working class and the peasantry. This dissertation deals with the issue of the intellectuals in the terrain of the class theory. However, we must keep in mind the effect of the political situation on the class theory, and the tension between the class structure and class consciousness. In order to clarify how the intellectuals were understood in the dimension of the class theory in the colonial Korea, the focus should be on the way the newly-imported concept of the intelligentsia was understood. This paper shows how the anti-colonial movement, especially the socialist intellectuals defined themselves and their status as intelligentsia within the national liberation movement in the period of the Great Depression. Not only did the Depression of the 1930s give huge economic damages to all the social strata of Korea during the Japanese colonial period, but also exerted enormous impacts on the emotional and psychological dimensions. The intellectuals were very sensitive, and the Depression drove forth the rapid process of differentiation amongst intellectuals. In the Depression era, the intellectuals were divided into subgroups, such as modernists, nihilists, and fellow companions of working class. These radical intellectuals as fellow travelers were forced to have their own identity adjusted to the new context which were different from the 1920s. They tried to be workerist intellectuals, not intellectuals with white hands. In the course of this differentiation, the ideological struggle was waged against the reformist petit-bourgeois intellectuals. However, with harsh ideological repression by the Japanese imperial authority and the changing circumstances, the intellectuals had to cope with another round of ordeals.
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