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This essay supplies brief historical context on the Candlelight Protest movement in South Korea (2016–17) and provides the thematic and theoretical framing for the forum “The South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement and Its Discontents.” It lays the groundwork for approaching the study of the protests and assessing their historical and contemporary value for the push for political change, challenging economic norms and social renewal in Korea. In particular, this essay helps frame the forum as a platform for interrogating the connections between revolution, democracy, and capitalism and the limits of and potential for political change within the political economy of Korea and elsewhere.

This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

The vanishing critique of capitalism within the Sewŏl movement for truth finding has revealed the bare face of the current democratic order and its rule of law. This article presents the Sewŏl movement as the bellwether, in a synchronic sense, of the Candlelight Protests that have become a modality of direct action in South Korea. I seek to contribute to our understanding of the life politics that has become a key marker of struggles against the state-capital network since the 2000s. I ascribe the antinomies of truth finding and mourning and of massacre and accident in the Sewŏl movement to the democratic collective unconscious that regards the 1987 moment in South Korea as an irrevocable rupture from dictatorship to democracy. The Sewŏl movement illuminates how the axes of organization and spontaneity and of reformism and revolution in the Candlelight Protest movement are not so much binaries, or oppositions, as hieroglyphic signs of the democratic unconscious and its excesses that contest the temporalizations of the capitalist present.

This article discusses queer and transgender voices that took part in the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–17 but became sidelined during the special election that followed Park Geun-hye's impeachment. Drawing from theories of queer temporality and feminist critiques of homogenous time, the article argues that idioms of postponement (najunge) and prematurity (sigisangjo) have significantly shaped liberal political discourses regarding the timing and timeliness of social change and minority politics in South Korea. These normative idioms of temporality articulate the stakes of being out of place in time.

This commentary provides a critical discussion of the three essays in this forum and reflects on the similarities and differences between the crises of democracy under globalized neoliberal capitalism in South Korea and South Africa.