창작과 비평

The Quarterly Changbi 200, Summer 2023

Abstract

On April 14, we held an open symposium to celebrate the 200^th issue of Changbi. It was a space in which we examined discourses about and capabilities for a grand transformation of Korean society, toward an overcoming of the capitalist world system, a goal Changbi has consistently pursued. We gauged it in various fields, including Marxism, climate crisis and ecological transformation, commons and care, and literature. While comparing arguments by Marx and Wallerstein about the birth and extinction of capitalism, Professor Emeritus Yoo Jae-keon of Pusan National University helps us to think of the ways in which our society explores and imagines grand civilizational transformation. Re-examining Marx’s arguments, Professor You maintains that the common occupation of land and means of production and a social collaboration in the true sense of the terms are possible only when the individuality and peculiarity of our experiences, formed in our relationships with nature and society, are respected. At the same time, he asks a significant question about a new kind of class struggle, which happens between the rightwing and leftwing, about the middle class in the class structure composed of 1:19:80, referring to the theory by Wallerstein, a proponent of the world system.