iCOOP puzzle: localistic practices, internationalism values, and Fair Trade in South Korea’s cooperative movement

ABSTRACT

This article illuminates an intellectual puzzle of how South Korean cooperative movements attempt to overcome the dilemma between localistic practices and the value of internationalism. Moving beyond anti-capitalistic debates of building links globally, the cooperative movement brings Fair Trade products from developing countries to consumer cooperatives in South Korea, resulting in a scaling up of community economies globally and forging real international solidarity. Engaging with feminist theories put forward by Gibson-Graham and their collaborators, this article calls upon an expanded feminist politics that challenge the “spatial bounding” of community economies that are often joined with localistic practices. Born as one of the most significant forms of community economies to address the economic precarity of grassroots farmers and workers during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, iCOOP was set up as a consumer cooperative federation to support local Korean producers with alternative market linkage. Through Fair Trade movement, iCOOP serves as an interesting case to overcome localistic practices and nurture the value of internationalism. This article develops an expanded feminist politics of community economies to confront the tendency of localistic practices by providing four layers of analysis: value, campaign tactics, new governance structure, and scaling solidarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-capitalism
• feminist politics
• cooperatives
• Fair Trade
• South Korea

Notes

1 As an aside, we agree that reframing the economy is a site of struggle that requires strategies of representation and articulation, yet we do not agree that structural factors of organizing the economy can be easily replaced by discursive articulation or logics of framing and representation, missing out the basic political economic analysis and serious groundwork required for analysing the space for resisting or moving beyond a capitalist economy. Neither capitalism, community economies, nor commons are a fairy tale. Opening nuanced ways of understanding contemporary economic life is urgently needed, but there is no shortcut to avoid neglecting the analysis of political economy to imagine that we are living in a fairytale world where the technology of power from all fronts – capital, state, and power – are only a tiny part of the iceberg.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jiyun Jeon

Jiyun Jeon is a research fellow in Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She earned her PhD in cooperative management from Sungkonghoe University in South Korea. Her research focus lies on business ethics, cooperative and Fair Trade.

Ngai Pun

Ngai Pun is Chair Professor in Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She obtained her Ph.D. from SOAS, University of London. She was honoured as the winner of the C. Wright Mills Award for her first book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), which has been translated into French and Chinese. Her co-authored book, Dying for iPhone: Foxconn and the Lives of Chinese Workers (2020) has also been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese. She is the sole author of Migrant Labor in China: Post Socialist Transformation (2016, Polity Press), editor of seven book volumes in Chinese and English. She has published widely in leading international journals.