Abstract
What can we learn about progressive social movements by making international comparisons? In Leverage of the Weak: Labor and Environmental Movements in Taiwan and South Korea, Hwa-Jen Liu deftly engages social change theories to explain the rise of two progressive social change movements. Starting with the notion of movement sequences, Liu sets out to examine how the historical order of social movements matters in Taiwan, where the environmental movement emerged first, followed by the labor movement, and in Korea, where the labor movement occurred first, followed by the environmental movement.
Although Taiwan and South Korea differ in ways that prove to be important to the rise of their social change movements, they share a post-Second World War history of being former Japanese colonies that later became U.S. protégés while pursuing industrialization and democratization. In this way Taiwan and South Korea make an interesting “matched pair” in which Liu examines how structural factors in each country interacted with movement characteristics to bring about progressive social change.
Liu’s description of how power was used in each movement is especially useful. Arguing that each movement took advantage of a relative lack of structural constraint in its first, or early-riser, movement, Liu shows how power was used to the advantage of the second, or latecomer, movement in each country. Power can come from the structural position of a constituency or from ideas and ideology that large numbers of people come to accept. Labor movements draw on the power of workers to withhold their labor, threatening capitalist profit margins. Environmental movements cannot threaten to withdraw labor, so instead they draw on the power of a green ideology that leads the population to demand, in the cases of Taiwan and South Korea, that companies decrease the amount of pollution they produce. Labor movements seek to maximize leverage power. Environmental movements seek to optimize ideological power.
But why did the environmental movement rise first in Taiwan, while the labor movement arose first in South Korea? It has to do with the patterns of social control and opportunities for consolidating power. In Taiwan, close monitoring of workers along with geographically scattered industrial centers stymied attempts to organize. However, this dispersion of people provided experience of industrial pollution across different strata of people, providing real-life experiences on which to build anti-pollution sentiments. Because South Korea organized its industrialization much more centrally, workers found it easier to organize but environmental problems were less well known to large segments of the population; and thus environmental problems and the consequent movements against them came to the fore later.
What did the latecomer movements—the labor movement in Taiwan and the environmental movement in South Korea—learn from the early-riser movements? Each initially tried to recreate the strategies of the early-riser movements, which did not work well because of changes in the way that the states reacted to dissent and because of the different types of power wielded by labor movements and environmental movements. In Taiwan, the strategy of pursuing of electoral politics worked well for its early-riser environmental movement but worked less well for its labor movement, which was undercut by state repression and struggled to build leverage power while developing political allies to speak for working-class interests. The latecomer environmental movement in South Korea started out by using the labor movement strategy of militant action but eventually dropped that strategy in favor working with the media to spread green ideology while continuing with the old labor strategy of grassroots organizing. These strategies reduced tensions with the state and capitalists, allowing the South Korean environmental movement to make headway.
Leverage of the Weak is a well-researched and well-written comparison of the labor and environmental movements in Taiwan and South Korea. In addition to a very engaging discussion of social change theory, what I appreciated most about Liu’s study was the heart with which the author told the story so as to extract as much useful information as possible about the successes and failures of the labor and environmental movements in these particular contexts in ways that can further the work of scholar/activists in other contexts. The author takes an unabashededly activist stance and urges red-green alliances in which labor and environmental activists can draw on each other’s strengths. In particular, labor activists can learn to develop powerful discursive tactics from the environmental movement, and the environmental movement can learn to do grassroots organizing.