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The Middle Class Discourse and the Spread of Homo-Economicus in 1980s - How did the Market Change Society and Humans?

Sangrok Lee 1

1국사편찬위원회

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ABSTRACT

Many historians interpreted that individual freedom was oppressed and liberalism was absent in Korea from 1961 to 1987 due to the authoritarian rule of military dictators such as Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. From an economic point of view, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan government have constantly intervened in the market, but paradoxically, it has resulted in expanding the free market and expanding the capital’s capabilities through export growth. In this context, Korean society in the 1970s and 1980s needs to be reinterpreted as an extension of economic liberalism. In this period, the ‘market and capital function’ absorbed the society and manifested itself as a person who invested in himself for socio-economic self-interest. As the income of the people increased due to the effect of industrialization, the middle class was increasing in Korea in the 1980s. However, it was the spread of self-consciousness that “I am a middle class” that was increasing more than the middle class increase on the objective indicator. The gap between objective and subjective has arisen from two dimensions: the desire of lower-class workers to “I want to be a middle class” and the improvement of the level of consumer life in society as a whole. With the spread of the middle class in the 1980s, social polarization has been partially alleviated, but the sensitivity to inequality has increased. The tutorship of the Chun Doo-hwan regime was a governing act that gathers the public’s desire for equality, but due to the competitive structure of the entrance examination at the bottom of the ban and the rising pressure of the social hierarchy, the ban has become increasingly ineffective. In the 1970s, the self-development craze started from the white-collar workers spread to students and housewives in the 1980s. In the competitive society, the individualistic desire to “live better than others” was increasing with homo-economicus. The practice of speculative capitalism and the visible consumption of the upper class provided relative poverty to the lower middle class and their sensitivity to the inequality society became more sensitive. The popular egalitarian pressure acted as the driving force of the democratic movement in the 1980s. Of all the energies that led to the democratic uprising in June 1987, what we should pay attention to is the resistance to homo-politicus for life as homo-economicus. From 1987 onwards, the performance of democratization should be reinterpreted from the historical reflection on the attempts to visualize and make the ‘non-shareholders’ as political subjects.

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