Anti-Imperialist Women’s Action (the ‘Republic of Korea’)
The rights of women to survival and development are being gravely threatened amid the flames of World War 3 that is sweeping across the globe. Since the outbreak of World War 3 in 2022, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been reduced to battlefields and colonies of imperialist powers, while the dignity and lives of women have been brutally violated. The imperialist states, through their efforts to prolong the war, are facing structural fiscal deficits and crises of sustainability. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects global economic growth at 3.3 percent in 2026, a figure far below the average recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the global surge in oil prices and the disruption of supply chains triggered by the war against Iran are accelerating economic crises, inflation, and recession across countries. Women throughout the world have been reduced to victims of destruction and massacre, domination and exploitation, and are suffering under increasingly unbearable conditions.
Marking International Women’s Day 2026, the International Labor Organization (ILO) reported that generative artificial intelligence (AI), when combined with existing labor-market structures, could widen gender inequality. While male-dominated occupations showed an AI exposure rate of 16 percent, female-dominated occupations recorded 29 percent―nearly twice as high. Country-level analyses likewise revealed the heightened vulnerability of women. The principal cause lies in economic structures characterized by a heavy concentration of women in service-sector employment. The dualization of the labor market continues to deepen with each passing day.
The situation is particularly severe in the ‘Republic of Korea (ROK),’ where structural discrimination remains deeply entrenched. In 2024, the ‘ROK’ recorded the largest gender wage gap among OECD countries, while the female employment rate stood at only 54.7 percent. In sectors where irregular employment remains disproportionately prevalent―including care work, transportation, cleaning, environmental services, and delivery work―the number of female workers increased sharply from 2.04 million in 2015 to 2.74 million in 2022. During the same period, the number of male workers in such sectors rose from 1.93 million to 2.12 million, only about one-third of the increase recorded among women. Career interruption is also a serious issue. It is common for unmarried women to move from regular employment into irregular employment or unemployment following marriage and childbirth. The root cause of the extreme low birthrate of the ‘ROK,’ severe enough to provoke warnings of demographic collapse, lies precisely here.
The ruling class utilizes discrimination between women and men, between irregular and regular workers, and the unpaid character of domestic labor to politically redirect women’s hostility toward men while concealing the multilayered structures of economic exploitation. The subordinated and distorted nature of the ‘ROK’ economy is most clearly manifested in its colonial subcontracted economy under US and Japanese imperialism. The triple and quadruple structures of exploitation and plunder imposed by imperialism, comprador capital, and pro-US neoliberal governments are vividly reflected in the low-paid wage labor and unpaid domestic labor performed by ‘ROK’ women. If the average wage of a male regular worker is indexed at 100, that of a female regular worker stands at 74.5, while that of a female irregular worker is only 39.3. In dual-income households, women spend 11.9 percent of their day performing domestic labor, compared to 4.1 percent for men. Gender inequality in the ‘ROK’ is compounded by the country’s feudal social legacy and the deeply rooted patriarchal tradition of male supremacy, both of which are preserved by imperialism and its subordinate regimes.
Such discrimination and inequality are clearly demonstrated by the manner in which the women’s question in the ‘ROK’ society is reduced to narratives of “misogyny” and “gender conflict,” thereby concealing its true character, allowing it to remain unresolved for prolonged periods, and turning it into a tool of establishment politics. Pro-US fascist forces in the ‘ROK’ encourage misogyny on social media, convert it into so-called electoral support, and use it, together with regional antagonisms, to intensify gender conflict. At the same time, certain strands of extreme feminism in the ‘ROK’ obscure the social, political, and class dimensions of women’s oppression by presenting them as merely biological issues. By turning away from the fundamental elimination of structural discrimination and instead emphasizing individual women’s advancement and personal success, they obstruct class solidarity.
Military domination by imperialism directly and indirectly threatens the lives of women. Crimes against women are known to be vastly underreported due to severe social stigma and pressure placed upon victims. It is estimated that the actual number of such crimes may be ten times higher than the number officially disclosed. Based on this standard, crimes committed against ‘ROK’ women by US forces stationed in the ‘ROK’ (USFK) are estimated at between 300 and 600 cases annually. Although only a fraction of these incidents become public, even among reported cases the indictment rate stands at merely the 20 percent level. Among the crimes committed against women by the USFK, the 1992 murder of Yun Geum-i and the 2002 killing of two middle-school girls by a US armored vehicle stand as stark examples of the brutality and cruelty of an imperialist occupation force. Like the perpetrators of numerous tragic incidents that have occurred around US military bases in other countries, those responsible for these outrageous crimes escaped meaningful punishment. The reality faced by women in the ‘ROK’ is not fundamentally different from the miserable conditions imposed upon women and oppressed peoples throughout the world. This is because the common root cause of these problems lies in imperialist aggression and domination.
Today, NATO, the command center of World War 3, is frantically seeking to turn the ‘ROK’ and East Asia into new battlefields of global conflict. In April, French President Macron and a delegation from NATO visited the ‘ROK’, respectively promoting the so-called “freedom of navigation” in the Strait of Hormuz and the standardization of the ‘ROK’’s arms industry according to NATO specifications. The NATO standardization of the ‘ROK’’s defense industry is intended to facilitate the smooth deployment of ‘ROK’-made weapons in the war in Ukraine. At its 2026 Summit, NATO placed the increase of military expenditures to 5 percent of GDP and the expansion of military assistance to Ukraine at the center of its agenda. It has also invited pro-US Arab states to participate while advancing plans to intensify and expand the Eastern European and West Asian fronts. Following NATO directives, the pro-US reformist government in the ‘ROK’ is accelerating the transformation of the country’s defense industry into a subcontractor for NATO. At the same time, USFK increasingly treat the ‘ROK’ as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” positioned between China and Japan, expanding their operational scope from the ‘ROK’ to the entire Indo-Pacific region. The imminent danger of war in the ‘ROK’ and the East Asia clearly demonstrates that the dignity and lives of the ‘ROK’ women are being driven to the brink.
Throughout the twentieth century, Korean women wrote a noble history of resistance with their blood in the struggle against imperialist oppression. They have courageously resisted domination and exploitation imposed by the three decades of pro-US military-fascist rule and the pro-US neoliberal regimes that followed, thereby proving themselves to be subjects of their own liberation.
More than half of those killed in the genocide in Palestine are women. At the outset of the war against Iran, 168 schoolgirls were reportedly killed in the bombing of a girls’ school in Minab. What does this horrific reality tell us? The overwhelming majority of civilian casualties in war were always women and children. At present, wars are either ongoing or imminent on nearly every continent. As the storm of World War 3 sweeps across the globe, the urgent task before humanity is the formation of a broad world anti-imperialist front capable of uniting the peoples of the world. History and present reality alike confirm that the unity and struggle of women throughout the world constitute one of the most pressing tasks of our time.
Women are one wing of the anti-imperialist struggle and one wheel of the anti-imperialist revolution. We are convinced that the social emancipation long sought by women will be achieved along the historical path of development advancing from national liberation to class liberation, and ultimately to human liberation. Women throughout the world, including those in the ‘ROK’, form a vital pillar of the world anti-imperialist struggle and the all people’s resistance. They will inevitably defeat imperialism and become the genuine masters of a new society centered on the people.
