> But the Korean working class never had
> its own party to speak of, said nothing about partition (in which case
> the Irish working class was way ahead of them) and yielded up so vast a
> mass of surplus value with little more than an occasional scream of
> pain.
Oh, it was more than a scream of pain. Apparently the family firm which had the rights to produce tear gas was the single most profitable firm in South Korea during the Seventies. The workers did lack organization, it's true, but some of the scenes in the Seoul of the Seventies looked like outtakes of Tetsuo: Iron Man (metal, truncheons, body parts every which way).
-- Dennis