Occupying Shops to Defend Spaces of Livelihoods: From Tenant Shopkeepers’ Fragmentation to Collective Consciousness in Urban Korea

Abstract

When commercial real estate becomes a highly coveted investment commodity, tensions intensify between those whose interest lies in extracting maximum profits from their properties and those who utilize the very same spaces for making a livelihood. Through ethnographic research with a tenant shopkeepers’ social movement organization (SMO) in Korea, I analyze the new collective consciousness forming among tenant shopkeepers who are defending their livelihoods against their landlords’ rapacious use of rent hikes and evictions to fully realize the speculative potential of their properties. Examining how the SMO brings together geographically scattered tenant shopkeepers based primarily in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul, I ask, more broadly: How can the self-employed facing precaritization overcome their fragmentation and generate a new collective consciousness based on a politics of solidarity? Drawing from my case study of tenant shopkeepers and the literature on livelihood struggles elsewhere around the globe, I identify the practice of occupying livelihood spaces as playing a pivotal role in the development of a sense of collective among those previously atomized in their struggles. I advance existing scholarship by scrutinizing both the challenges and the transformative potential of the solidarity cultivated through the occupy sites in bridging divergent interests, cultural sensibilities, and political beliefs of the previously unorganized.

Considerable media attention in South Korea (hereafter, Korea) has been drawn in recent years to the swift changes in fortune experienced by commercial areas in Seoul. Whole stretches of commercial streets, once bustling and packed with small shops, seem to turn desolate in the span of a few years following rent hikes and evictions (Kim 2019). Speculative landlords are behind this occurrence by aggressively acquiring commercial properties in popular or up-and-coming commercial areas, often with the intention of selling quickly when the price of the real estate is at its peak. Some of these landlords take out large loans in order to acquire a property, operating under the assumption that they can finance their sizable interest payments by raising rents. In this way, speculation fuels sharp increases in rents by landlords comfortable in the belief that they can easily find a new tenant shopkeeper to replace one who cannot afford the increase. In extreme cases as mentioned above, such plans backfire when the commercial property price bubble bursts and a trickle of shop closures turns into a cascade. In most other cases, it is the tenant shopkeeper, uprooted from its shop, who solely bears the brunt of the speculative fervor, losing rights to the space it helped cultivate while its landlord capitalizes on the increased commercial property value. This article focuses on the process of collective consciousness formation by livelihoods wrought by such speculative advances to urban commercial space through the case study of tenant shopkeepers in urban Korea, merchants who are both self-employed entrepreneurs and renters of the commercial properties in which they run their businesses.

The collective consciousness that emerges from the contentious politics surrounding individual property owners’ speculative activities that threaten many urban livelihoods are poorly understood. Existing scholarship has mainly focused on resistance against the corporate players, often operating in tandem with central and local state entities, who seek to profit by restricting or altering the use of spaces (Brown 2015; Perry 2013, 40–3; Shatkin 2017). To list a few examples, scholars have studied: waste pickers in Bogotá who organized against city-imposed restrictions that limited their access to waste at times when recyclable waste is becoming a profitable industry (Rosaldo 2022); motorcycle taxis in Indonesia that mobilized against corporate ride-hailing platforms that had disregarded local business codes that enabled bikers to make a decent living (von Vacano 2021); and street vendors in Mexico City that fought against state-imposed restrictions that barred their businesses from prominent commercial spots (Crossa 2016). In contrast, scant attention has been paid to how efforts to defend livelihoods are mobilizing in opposition to the speculative actions of individual property owners. This inattention could be a function of the fragmented nature of the resistance by those whose livelihoods are impacted. Unlike corporations and governments that can produce mass disruption in a single stroke, an individual landlord may evict only a handful of tenant shopkeepers at a time, which impedes their ability to act collectively.

The unique feature of my case study is that the tenant shopkeepers I examine manage to move beyond individualized and isolated struggles against their respective landlords and forge a collective struggle based on their shared experiences of livelihood disruption. The capacity of these previously fragmented self-employed tenant shopkeepers to unite against speculative landowners invites the following questions: When scarce urban spaces are both sites for livelihoods as well as increasingly coveted speculative commodities, can attempts to defend the survival of livelihoods embedded in such urban spaces generate a new vision for mobilizing against the ravages of capitalism? More specifically, how can the self-employed facing precaritization of livelihoods overcome their fragmentation and activate a new collective consciousness based on a politics of solidarity?

To analyze the new collective consciousness being forged by tenant shopkeepers, I conducted ethnographic research on one of the main tenant shopkeepers’ social movement organizations (SMOs) called “People Who Want to Run a Commercial Business with Peace of Mind” (Mamp'yŏnhijangsahagop'ŭn Sangin Moim; hereafter, MSM), which is based primarily in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul. Since its inception in 2013, this SMO has been at the forefront of rallying tenant shopkeepers to find their collective voice and coordinate their actions to defend their livelihoods. MSM’s advocacy has been successful in raising awareness of how tenant shopkeepers are largely subject to the whims of the landlords who wield control over a crucial means of production for tenant shopkeepers—their shops. While I detail the achievements of MSM’s legal advocacy later in this article, for now it is enough to say that their efforts have fundamentally shifted the national debate. Even among mainstream political parties that are in many ways beholden to powerful real-estate-owning constituents, some version of MSM’s demands to curb the profits of speculative landlords is increasingly being adopted into their political campaigns.

Most of all, MSM offers an ideal case study to investigate the collective organizing of the previously fragmented. MSM’s membership did not arise as an extension of preexisting networks formed through the workplace or local place-based community networks. Quite to the contrary, prior to their being organized, the tenant shopkeepers could have been aptly described as potatoes in the sack, to use the famous moniker from Marx’s ([1852] 1994) analysis. Based on his observations of small peasants in France, Marx insightfully points to the difficulty of forming a collective class consciousness among those whose livelihoods do not necessarily result in daily interactions with others in similar trades. In particular, for tenant shopkeepers in contemporary urban Korea, the same obstacles to forming collective consciousness among the peasants who do not “enter into manifold relations with one another” (Marx [1852] 1994, 69) have even greater salience. Not only are the self-employed tenant shopkeepers spatially atomized in their work lives, but they also have little free time to associate with one another. Tenant shopkeepers in Korea must work most of their waking hours in order to stay afloat.¹ Indeed, some commercial shopkeepers do manage to find time to form networks within the neighborhoods in which their shops are located—local commercial associations (sanginhoe) are a prime example. However, these venues are ill-suited to function as loci for nurturing a collective consciousness as tenant shopkeepers because overrepresented in these preexisting place-based networks are the interests of owner shopkeepers, those who own the properties in which their shops are located. In fact, the interests of this privileged stratum of shopkeepers align more with the absentee commercial landlords than the tenant shopkeepers, particularly in times of commercial real estate appreciation when both landlords and owner shopkeepers are presented with the opportunity to realize quick capital gains through their commercial property.

As a result, the collective consciousness that I observe emerging in urban Korea takes on features distinct from those identified in the gentrification literature. Within gentrification literature, oftentimes what is being mobilized are place-based, preexisting networks intertwined with class and ethnic communities. Yet, unlike what is explored in existing gentrification literature, the collective consciousness featured in my case study does not operate by pitting old-timers and old commercial establishments catering to a working class (and often ethnic minority) clientele against newcomers and new commercial operations that cater mostly to a middle- and upper-class (and majority White) clientele. Along this line, in Korea, the emergent collective consciousness among tenant shopkeepers does not identify such process of “boutiquing” (Zukin et al. 2009) per se as a target of collective organizing. Instead, the collective consciousness of organized tenant shopkeepers is configured in a way that makes speculative property owners who maximize profits at the expense of the livelihoods of their tenant shopkeepers the direct target of collective organizing. As a result, the explanation to the ways in which previously fragmented tenant shopkeepers overcome the above-mentioned obstacles to collectively organizing must depart from the theories that primarily turn to preexisting community networks as a basis of collective organizing.

Drawing heavily on my ethnographic fieldwork with MSM, I argue that occupying livelihood spaces provides the pivotal, everyday spatial foundation that supports the development of a collective consciousness in the absence of preexisting networks and communities. I use the phrase “occupying livelihood spaces” to refer to the practice of creating encampments at livelihood spaces—in MSM’s case, tenant shopkeepers’ shops—in order to defend the livelihoods of the occupants that are rooted in, or closely interwoven with, a particular physical space. When occupy tactics are employed to defend livelihood spaces, this context offers an intelligible and straightforward logic for the need to build an encampment, possibly even more so than in other occupy struggles. As it serves the immediate purpose of defending livelihoods that might otherwise vanish in the absence of such insurgent practices, the occupation of livelihood spaces legitimizes its practice as a desperate act of self-preservation and survival, despite the collective occupation often being either outright illegal or legally contested. The practice of occupying livelihood spaces is, in this sense, distinct from workers’ sit-ins in factories or farmlands, where the purpose is not to defend livelihood spaces but rather to increase employees’ bargaining power through work stoppages. At the same time, wage workers can also engage in occupy struggles to defend livelihood spaces when they are faced with closure of their factories, mining sites, or farmlands in which they are employees.

In the next section, I draw on the existing literature to examine the potential of occupying livelihood spaces in developing a new collective consciousness among the previously fragmented. Specifically, I review the urban literature to understand how the urban context and particularly the urban spaces that enable everyday accumulated experience of solidarity can act as a catalyst to generate a newly emergent collective consciousness.

The Everyday Spatial Foundations of Collective Consciousness

Drawing on interdisciplinary urban literature discussing the transformative potential of everyday shared urban spaces, I layout a mechanism for developing a new collective consciousness among those whose social networks do not previously overlap. I emphasize that the spaces analyzed here are not limited to occupy sites but encompass a diverse array of everyday shared urban spaces, and the nature of the shared consciousness that emerges from these sites is equally diverse.

However, one common characteristic of the emergent new collective consciousness that many urban scholars have pointed out is that the diversity present in urban contexts presents a potential for creating a collective consciousness that cuts across preexisting social divides.² For example, urban and political sociologist Turam (2015) analyzes how mundane urban spaces in Istanbul—where conventionally antagonistic populations, such as pious Muslims and secular groups come into close everyday contact with one another—become breeding grounds for an insurgent collective consciousness that opposes authoritarian rule and censorship. Examples of such mundane spaces are university campuses with diverse student groups and parks and neighborhoods within mixed-residential enclaves—which the author describes as being “at the crack of urban fault lines” (11). Stressing the hidden work of everyday spaces, the author credits such spaces as having paved the way for watershed moments like the well-publicized sit-ins at Gezi Park, which, according to the author, represented the culmination of “a long-term transformation that had simmered over years in major cities” (7). Similarly, anthropologist Holston (2008) sees the urban context as combining “new identities of territory, contact, and education” with “ascribed ones of race, religion, culture, and gender” (22–3), together comprising the “active ingredients of political movements.” In particular, in his analysis of the residents of the urban peripheries in Brazil who engage in occupy struggles opposing their evictions, he demonstrates how the defiant spatial practices of encampments can lead to what he calls insurgent citizenship, which can be seen as a collective consciousness that is in tension with, and even antagonistic to, those in power. For Plys (2017), the experience of urban social mixing that took place in the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi is crucial to nurturing the insurgent collective consciousness that led to unified resistance against the totalitarian period of “the Emergency.” Here, too, the Indian Coffee House provides diverse groups of different political affiliation with a shared space in which to coordinate divergent interests and beliefs. The significance of spatially reconfiguring the everyday in creating conditions to unite disparate groups can even be traced back to the seminal work of Gould (1995), which identifies the distinctively new collective consciousness formed during the 1871 Paris Commune, as compared with that of the earlier 1848 French Revolution. The author shows that the relocation of working-class Parisians outside of the city core had the unintended consequence of creating new spaces of daily mixing—for example, in neighborhood bars—and laying the groundwork for the new neighborhood-based collective consciousness of the Paris Commune, one starkly different from the previous class-based collective consciousness that had been embedded in the factories. In summary, existing urban scholarship highlights the role of everyday shared spaces that come to embody the insurgent spirit of challenging entrenched power structures to function as a “relational incubator” (Nicholls 2008, 849), one that germinates a new collective consciousness among disparate and previously fragmented urban populations.

Of course, the mechanism of building a new collective consciousness through insurgent spaces that facilitate daily interactions and cooperation is not unique to the urban context. In fact, the most well-known cases of occupying livelihood spaces have been spearheaded by peasants. Proliferating in places with highly skewed distributions of land ownership, peasants are practicing collective occupation to stake off under-utilized land for subsistence farming (Borras Jr 2010; Routledge 2017; Tarlau 2019; Wolford 2010; Zibechi 2012). A key insight of this literature is how the process of occupying livelihood spaces and the formation of a new collective consciousness among participants can unfold concurrently, especially when livelihoods are at stake. The literature shows that peasants may initially join the occupation struggle without having embraced the alternative vision of social change, one that experiments with collective land ownership and a solidarity-based economy, espoused by movement leaders. Many peasants are, instead, drawn by the prospect of immediate individual gain, such as access to land to meet their subsistence needs. However, by taking part in the everyday coordination and cooperation that is necessary to not only defend but also govern occupied spaces, the peasants come to share broader, long-term transformative goals. Occupied territories emerge as particularly intensive sites of “political socialization” (Halvorsen et al. 2019, 1459)—a process I find to also be at play within tenant shopkeepers’ occupy sites.

Yet, a significant difference is worth pointing out in the development of collective consciousness of peasants and urban tenant shopkeepers. Peasants engaged in such occupy-style struggles are usually not a fragmented population divided along lines of politics, ethnicity, religion, and culture. To the contrary, Wolford (2010), in her careful ethnographic research on the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, shows how the peasants occupy struggle was often embedded in tight-knit communities sharing “ethnic identification” and “rural values”—values that, for example, regard squatting as a legitimate form of territorial claims making (17). Therefore, while parallels certainly exist in the mechanisms by which the spatialized practice of occupying livelihood spaces mediates the formation of a collective consciousness in the two contexts, the highly fragmented and differentiated population found in urban environments introduces additional challenges.

By extending insights from scholars that theorize how the everyday interaction in urban context can catalyze the making of insurgent spaces that foregrounds the development of insurgent collective consciousness, this article provides a framework for a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of forging a collective consciousness among the previously fragmented. In the following sections, I emphasize how the processes of activating a new collective consciousness and the practice of occupying tenant shopkeepers’ shops is co-determinant. Furthermore, I interrogate how the everyday practice of creating insurgent spaces holds the potential to usher in transformative politics, while also analyzing its pitfalls.

The Case & Historical Background

Urban Korea offers an optimal setting in which to examine the contentious politics surrounding urban space unfolding between those who enjoy the use value of the space—self-employed tenant shopkeepers—and those who attempt to maximize the exchange value of space—speculative landlords.

For one, the proportion of shopkeepers among the Korean workforce is noteworthy. While the exact number of tenant shopkeepers is unknown, due to a lack of official statistics, the fact that one out of four workers in Korea is self-employed provides a rough sense of the scale of the occupation of shopkeeping.³ This relatively high proportion of self-employed workers has persisted long after the country’s industrialization, its continuing appeal in large part owing to the country’s bifurcated labor market since the 1990s (Shin 2013). In fact, while self-employment has dropped in the so-called early industrialized countries, the high reliance on self-employment is a feature generalizable across countries who followed the road to industrialization afterwards (OECD Labor Force Statistics 2021).⁴ In these so-called newly industrialized countries, self-employment is a fallback option in the face of shortages of secure and well-compensated wage jobs (Harriss-White 2014, 988–990). In addition, due to the high prices of urban commercial properties, many find being an owner shopkeeper beyond their reach in urban Korea. As a result, when a sizable population making a living through tenant shopkeeping is vying for limited urban space, the tenant shopkeepers become increasingly dispensable in the eyes of their commercial landlords.

As a result, tenant shopkeepers are facing increasingly dire conditions in their quest to make ends meet. The majority of the shopkeepers in Korea can be considered mom-and-pop entrepreneurs based on statistics showing that among the self-employed in Korea, approximately 80 percent are small operations, running without an employee or with only family labor (Statistics Korea 1963-2015). In recent years, Korean media has sounded the alarm about the number of self-employed who work long hours and yet earn profits that barely reach the minimum wage (Gum 2019). In addition, scholars who trace inequality trends in Korea have corroborated these anecdotes with statistical data showing that, after adjusting for inflation, the income of the self-employed decreased 17 percent between 2000 and 2014, during which time the overall economy grew 73 percent (Chang 2015, 250). The average operating surplus of the self-employed, after deducting the expenses of employees’ wages and taxes, is on average only 60 percent of the wage workers’ average income (Chang 2015, 249).

MSM surfaced to fill an organizational void that left fragmented tenant shopkeepers without representation in their struggle to defend their livelihoods against individual landlords in the midst of commercial investment zeal. MSM expanded rapidly following its inception in 2013 by uniting shops scattered across Seoul to collectively organize shopkeepers facing eviction. To be sure, other SMOs mobilizing evictees preceded MSM. Militant collective organizing in the face of the violent displacement of the urban poor dates to the beginning of Korea’s urbanization. In fact, the making of modern Seoul has been enmeshed in the history of the city’s urban poor mounting large-scale resistance to being cleared out in the name of urban development and modernization (Ha 2002; Korea Center for City and Environment Research (KCCER) 1998). However, the longstanding evictees’ SMOs that were established in the 1980s were slow to see the connection between tenant shopkeepers and their traditional constituents, the urban poor. For example, the National Alliance of Squatters and Evictees (NASE), a major evictees’ organization, started out as an SMO serving residential evictees affected by mass clearance projects in urban poor communities, and only later expanded their membership to include evictees that were shopkeepers during the 2000s. Even then, NASE only expanded its membership to shopkeepers who were collectively made victims by the same large-scale development projects—government orchestrated projects often in partnership with large corporations—it had historically mobilized against. Ultimately, the prime targets of organizing were different: individual landlords in the case of MSM, versus large corporations and local and central governments in the case of NASE. That tenant shopkeepers received a lukewarm reception from existing SMOs is also understandable from a practical organizing standpoint. For existing SMOs, devoting scarce resources to mobilizing tenant shopkeepers, fragmented as they were, was not seen as a strategically promising way to expand membership. However, at the time of my research, MSM had grown into a moderately sized SMO (its members included 600–800 tenant shopkeepers) with a devoted membership that could be collectively mobilized for militant direct actions and were simultaneously organizing several occupy sites in different neighborhoods.

Methods

To understand the role that occupying livelihood spaces played in the rise of organized tenant shopkeepers and the potential of these spaces to inspire a new politics of solidarity, I combine observational data from ethnographic fieldwork with interview data. From May 2015 to July 2016, I conducted a total of 15 months of participatory ethnographic research with a tenant shopkeepers’ SMO called MSM. In addition, I conducted twenty interviews with MSM tenant members and eight with MSM allies (yŏndaein).⁵

My analytical focus on occupying livelihood spaces and everyday interactions within those spaces only emerged after entering my ethnographic field site. I certainly did not anticipate the amount of time that I would be spending at various MSM shops-turned-occupy-sites at the start of my fieldwork. Among the wide range of MSM’s activities that I participated in, many took place in MSM shops and revolved around the concrete, immediate goal of building wide support to better defend the shops from impending raids by eviction squads (ch'ŏlgŏ yongyŏk). Even the first time I met an MSM staff activist to request access to conduct participatory research, he asked to meet at one of the MSM shops where a tenant shopkeeper was challenging court-issued eviction orders by occupying its shop. I quickly learned that while MSM had an office in a central location in Seoul, when the time came to defend a shop from a raid, the staff activists brought their office work to the shops facing eviction. I participated in various activities in such shops, from pulling night shifts to organizing cultural events like mini-music concerts, theatrical performances, and public lectures designed to attract supporters.

The Militant Tactics of Defending Livelihood Spaces and Making a New Antagonistic Collective Consciousness

The forging of a collective consciousness among tenant shopkeepers is mediated through the militant tactics of defending livelihood spaces via the spatialized practice of occupying livelihood spaces. Before organizing with MSM, the primary self-identification of these shopkeepers would have been, for example, as the owner of a taekwondo studio, a fried chicken restaurant, a hair salon, a laundromat, or a coffee house; more broadly, many would have identified as part of the service, culinary, or hospitality industries. However, linguistic practice of adding the qualifier tenant to shopkeeper (in Korean, sangga seipcha or imch'a sangin) introduces a new master status with which shop owners come to identify. Identifying as tenant shopkeepers is qualitatively different from previous categories of identification, in that the collective consciousness is constituted in its relation to an antagonistic counterpart, the speculative landlords. A brief description of a day at an MSM shop when the militant struggle climaxed underlines the concurrent process of engaging in occupy tactics and developing an antagonistic collective consciousness as tenant shopkeepers.

One cold winter day around 5 a.m., while the sky was still pitch-black, I arrived at Bakery P. This small bakery was located in a quaint urban neighborhood called Seochon in the middle of Seoul. The neighborhood contained many traditional-style buildings and had experienced gentrification in recent years, in part due to the unique aesthetic of the old and the new. The night before, MSM member tenants had received a text message from MSM’s emergency call network (pisang yŏllangmang) urging them to gather at Bakery P, preferably before dawn. As the law does not require a landlord to provide prior notice to tenant shopkeepers as to the exact date and time of an eviction execution, the timing of the raid becomes a guessing game. However, it is prohibited by law in Korea for eviction squads to carry out these raids after sunset. Therefore, eviction squads historically conduct raids just after sunrise in order to complete their mission before tenant shopkeepers can mobilize in mass. Yet, the organizers have also adjusted and started preparing for early morning confrontations. When I arrived at Bakery P during the wee hours of the morning, the small store was already packed with people. Around thirty familiar faces—mostly MSM member tenants—greeted me. Due to Bakery P’s cozy size, there was limited space inside the store. I was told that more people were waiting at a nearby location, ready for ambush. The Bakery P tenants—a husband and wife—were handing out hot instant coffee to those who had just arrived, as we quietly huddled with the lights off. When the eviction squads, indeed, arrived shortly after sunrise, MSM tenants encircled the store—interlocking their arms to form a scrum, a human shield. Such action was met by eviction squads attempting to forcefully break the scrum. Toward the end of a confrontation that extended until midday, most MSM member tenants were walking around with their winter coats ripped open, some missing sleeves that had been torn away by eviction squad agents. Numerous injuries were also in evidence. Several eviction squad agents had surrounded and stomped an MSM activist, for example. During my interviews with them, many tenant shopkeepers who took part in the confrontation that unfold in various occupy sites expressed shock over the violence that was carried out under the watch of the bailiff (chiphaenggwan) and in the name of the law. Witnessing such condoned violence in these occupy sites, they professed, had “opened their eyes” to the fact that the existing legal system is not on the side of tenant shopkeepers.

The insurgent practice of occupying livelihood spaces, which can culminate in bodily confrontations, stirred the tenant shopkeepers’ raw emotions and catalyzed their radicalization. One tenant who recently confronted the eviction squad in her own fried chicken restaurant described certain scenes from the raid that remained with her: the sight of tables that she had wiped every morning, broken and thrown out on the street; the sight of raw chicken, carefully marinated by her husband the night before, splattered on a concrete floor. Very much aware of the radicalizing experience of occupying livelihood spaces, MSM encouraged new recruits and hesitant shopkeepers to first spend some time at these occupy sites before deciding to set up an encampment in their own shops.

Eventually, a sharpened antagonistic collective consciousness came to be reflected in the strong commitment of MSM to demands that sought to fundamentally rebalance the uneven power relationship between tenant shopkeepers and their landlords. A good example is MSM’s major legal victory that revised the Commercial Building Rental Relation Protection Law in 2015.⁶ In Korea, the informal practice of “right money” (kwŏlligŭm) exchange had served to recognize the contribution that an incumbent tenant had made to a commercial property—whether by physically improving the shop or by adding intangible value through building a customer base. This practice operates through a mechanism by which an incoming tenant shopkeeper pays a lump-sum fee to the outgoing tenant shopkeeper, the price of which is determined by the desirability of the commercial space. MSM brought attention to an increasingly common practice whereby landlords refused to sign a contract with an incoming tenant until the incumbent tenant’s right to the space has expired, thereby forcing the incumbent to move out without receiving any right money. By removing the incumbent tenant and relieving the incoming tenant from the burden of paying right money, the landlord can request a higher monthly rent from the new incoming tenant in exchange. MSM cast such predatory practices as “right money theft (yakt'al)” (Lee 2020, 824–25).⁷ As such, MSM continues to demand restrictions on landlords’ unbridled rights to profit, including extensive commercial rent control, guarantees to tenant shopkeepers of long-term occupancy rights, and regulations to enforce an incumbent’s right to collect right money.

MSM’s willingness to directly challenge the vested interests and profits of property owners contrasts sharply with the piecemeal reform measures and policies advanced by most politicians, urban planners, and city bureaucrats. Given a lack of political will to go against interest of property owners, policy experts and state authorities seldom embrace measures that would directly curb the speculative profits of landlords. Instead, they often opt to support measures that placate the aggrieved tenant shopkeepers. One such policy implemented in Seoul starting in 2016 establishes “long-term relief commercial property” (changgi ansim sangga), whereby the city government offers remodeling funds to landlords in exchange for the landlords’ commitment to rent their spaces to tenants for a longer term (10 years, as of 2020), and to respect restrictions placed on annual rent increases. Such policies are, by design, based on the landlord’s voluntary participation, which is only forthcoming if the conditions of the agreement sufficiently benefit the landlord. Therefore, while often packaged as a reasonable alternative or more realistic solution to protect tenant shopkeepers’ precarious livelihoods, these polices do not fundamentally address existing power imbalances. When a debate broke out in a staff meeting of MSM activists over how MSM should respond to such policies, one activist commented that “those confronting the eviction squads (while occupying livelihood spaces) are on my mind” when she evaluates these policies. In the end, MSM published a statement on its webpage that voices its criticism of the policy that does not tackle the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and its tenants.

Here, my findings show that the insurgent practice of occupying livelihood spaces that is often met with violent repression strengthens MSM’s resolve to be critical to any policy that falls short of restricting profits that come at the expense of tenant livelihoods. Furthermore, violent repression of the occupy sites has the effect of activating a collective consciousness whose antagonism can be directed toward the speculative landlords, thereby renewing MSM’s strong commitment to focusing their organizational energy on fundamentally rectifying the power imbalance between commercial landlords and tenant shopkeepers.

Embedding Occupy into the Everyday and Forming an Expansive Collective Consciousness

While the intensity of the shared experience of occupying livelihood spaces articulates an antagonistic collective consciousness among tenant shopkeepers, consolidating such emergent collective consciousness requires continued engagements beyond these sporadic, if intense, events. In this section, I closely examine the more mundane aspects of occupying livelihood spaces to analyze the particular ways in which collective consciousness is shaped through everyday interactions and rituals. In addition, I pay special attention to whether, in the face of shared urban precarity driven by profiteers, the spatialized practice of occupying livelihood spaces facilitates the making of an expansive collective consciousness that can bridge divergent short-terms interests or cultural and political differences among tenant shopkeepers as well as between tenant shopkeepers and their diverse urban allies.

As much as coming together to defend the shops from physical repression during evictions attempts can emotionally unite scattered and fragmented tenant shopkeepers from across Seoul, it was the deliberate, everyday rituals and frequent gathering that were central to strengthening a collective consciousness among tenant shopkeepers. While continuing to use their shops as spaces of commerce, tenant shopkeepers who joined MSM began operating their shops differently. First of all, MSM encouraged their tenant shopkeepers to open their spaces to daily gatherings. In one of the cell phone app-based chatrooms that all MSM members joined, frequent posts showed pictures of small, informal congregations that would form at a particular member’s shop after it closed for the day. Such meetings were especially frequent in shops that had successfully defended against an earlier eviction raid and were anticipating subsequent attempts. Some of the veteran tenant shopkeepers also took it upon themselves to regularly visit the shops of MSM’s newest recruits.

In addition, MSM member shops that had gained symbolic status as sites for defending livelihoods against speculative profit became landmarks that facilitated contact between tenant shopkeepers and other potential allies who were not tenant shopkeeper themselves. Scholarship on the various Occupy Movements finds that establishing a physical “base camp” that is open and accessible to the public provides skeptics, sympathizers, and bystanders an accessible entry point to become involved in the oppositional struggle at their own pace (Brown and Feigenbaum 2017; Milkman et al. 2013; Pickerill and Krinsky 2012). Like the Occupy Movement encampments, the practice of occupying shops offered readily available spaces for MSM’s sympathizers and allies to renew their support by casually dropping by or donating food and other supplies necessary to sustain an occupation. Indeed, the most prevalent form of engagement with MSM occupy sites was a casual visit, a practice that is captured in the remark of one ally who brought a friend to an MSM restaurant/occupy site: “Even when I meet a friend over a cup of coffee, I try to arrange the meeting at an MSM shop.” Additionally, college students who often have greater flexibility with their time—what social movement scholars refer to as “biographical availability” (McAdam 1986, 765–66)—were one of the most consistent fixtures at MSM shops. They held weekly study meetings, or, when a raid was imminent, rotated guard duty shifts. In particular, MSM shops located in culturally vibrant commercial locations often attracted allies who found creative ways to pass their time in MSM shops. For example, allies hosted various cultural and political activities in the shops, ranging from mini concerts to poetry reading. Over the course of my fieldwork, I attended many of these events organized by MSM’s allies. On the whole, the size and composition of outside allies at MSM occupy sites varied. Depending on the location and other idiosyncratic qualities of a particular site, different type of allies convened, whether minority political parties in Korea, co-op movements of progressive-leaning neighborhood associations, college student organizations, or various urban advocacy SMOs, including the Part-time Workers’ Union (alba nojo).⁸ Overall, MSM occupy sites allowed urban citizens to witness and feel the plight of tenant shopkeepers, as well as served as spaces granting tenant shopkeepers exposure to, and crucial experiences forming solidarity with, diverse others across the city.

However, I do not suggest that these interactions at occupy sites always paved smooth pathways on which diverse interests, cultures, and political sensibilities effortlessly traveled. If anything, intensive and repeated interactions also underscored differences among the participants. For example, many allies actively involved in organizing within MSM occupy sites were outspoken in their view that confronting power exercised along lines of class, gender, sexuality, and race cannot be deferred or treated as secondary to livelihood struggles. In contrast, most tenant shopkeepers had little experience with groups that consciously eschew ageism and sexism and celebrate non-conforming sexualities. This collision of different social worlds constantly reverberated within various MSM shops. Here, I present a snapshot from my ethnographic fieldwork that illustrates how MSM shops become sites at which different cultures clash, while also provide spaces for bridging such differences.

One day, right outside an MSM shop, a long-time MSM ally—who was also a singer-songwriter, and activist artist—was performing. This artist had made a name for himself by blending satirical portraits of the savagery of various vectors of power with a transgressive and outlandish performance style. While he enjoyed a large following among the young progressives in Seoul and performed at many of their mass rallies, I had been noticing that some MSM tenant shopkeepers, especially the new recruits, looked perplexed or even put off by the artist’s performances. When I glimpsed a veteran MSM female tenant in her fifties cheering and moving her body to the techno rhythms blasting from the artist’s speaker, I decided to probe further. I approached her to ask what she thought of the performance. She answered: “Ah, this! I’ve seen this many times now. The first time when I saw it, of course, I did not know what to make of it. It was strange! Now, I find it cathartic.” Another veteran female tenant shopkeeper who overheard our conversation joined in and expressed her thoughts more bluntly: “Let’s say, there are many things that shocked me when I first got involved (with MSM)…the activists not using age-based honorifics (chondaemal) amongst themselves, the girls that look like guys… I remember thinking to myself, ‘what is going on here!’…Now those people are my most trusted comrades (tongji)!” These two female tenant shopkeepers were hardly alone in this transformation. Other tenant shopkeepers, too, experienced their comfort zones being challenged by the people they encountered at MSM occupy sites. Nonetheless, as their conception of who they considered part of their inner circle—i.e., comrades—shifted through continued engagement within occupy sites, their comfort zone, too, expanded.

A significant test case for whether the collective consciousness emerging from MSM occupy sites could align previously divergent interests between MSM tenant shopkeepers and allies arose during the summer of 2018, when the government announced its decision to raise the minimum wage. For the subset of MSM tenant shopkeepers who hired employees, an increase in the minimum wage would increase operating costs and work against their short-term economic interests. Yet a close relationship had already developed in MSM’s occupy sites between MSM and the Part-time Workers’ Union. The Part-time Workers’ Union’s young and spirited rank-and-file membership had quickly established themselves as an invaluable ally as they brought new energy to MSM’s encampments. MSM tenant shopkeepers, in return, had developed sympathy over the struggles of the part-time workers. As a result of this partnership, MSM established various activities to engage with issues important to the Part-time Workers’ Union. For example, as part of their membership education program, MSM had a representative from the Part-time Workers’ Union come and give a lecture providing information on the rights of part-time workers as employees and the obligations of tenant shopkeepers as employers. When the minimum wage debate gained national attention in 2018, this relationship had matured to the point that MSM was ready to issue an official statement supporting an increase in the minimum wage. Working against the dominant narrative pitting low-income workers against their employer shopkeepers, support from no other than tenant shopkeepers themselves was enough to shift the contours of the debate, even in mainstream media.⁹ This changing landscape of minimum wage debate is reflected in an interview that Hankyoreh, a major left-leaning news outlet, conducted with the leaders of multiple precarious wage workers’ SMOs specifically on the issue of raising the minimum wage.

There are talks of fixing the system of rents and fees [for the self-employed shopkeepers], however, this fix does not come easily. Under such conditions, to the self-employed (chayŏngŏpcha), the wages they pay to their employees are seen as the easiest thing to go after and that is why they are stretching out their hands to these wages. However, the self-employed and the workers who are getting paid minimum wage are on the same side. Self-employed work is also the work that the wage workers take on after retiring from their wage jobs. As there is little social safety net, [retirees] dive into self-employed work with their pension without much preparation. (Lee 2018).

Conservative critics continued to promote the age-old narrative that raising the minimum wage would inevitably push small shopkeepers out of business or force them to reduce their number of employees. However, as echoed in the above interview with the chairperson of the National Women’s Union (chŏn'guk yŏsŏng nojo), Ji-hyŏn Na, a powerful alternative narrative emerges highlighting the “alliance of the weak” (ŭldŭrŭi yŏndae) as critical to their co-survival. I underline that such alliances did not come about simply based on abstract calculations over their utility. Strategic reason to form an alliance between the tenant shopkeeper and low-income workers had always existed as such alliance can boost the symbolic and discursive power for both parties. However, only with the on-going cooperation through occupying livelihood spaces were MSM and the Part-time Workers’ Union able to join forces at a critical conjuncture of the minimum wage debate. Concrete experience of solidarity developed through occupying livelihood spaces enabled the two groups to look beyond difference over their short-term interests and imagine a new social order where their fates are linked and long-term interests aligned.

If workers that share a shopfloor are likely to have developed a certain worker culture, or a collective consciousness prior to organizing, I show here that the lack of such a shared spatial foundation among the self-employed makes the emerging collective consciousness to be malleable and respond more to the dynamics of the occupy sites. The malleability of this collective consciousness suggests that an expansive collective consciousness, where tenant shopkeepers come to connect their own precarity with that of other urban precariats, can change course if the occupy sites cease to function as daily contact points of diverse urban precariats. Therefore, my findings suggest that in order to predict whether MSM will continue to undertake the arduous bridging work of linking their future prospects to that of low-income workers and other precariats, one must pay close attention to the dynamics within MSM’s occupy sites.

Enduring Collective Consciousness?

A crucial question that must be addressed by the evictee struggles relying on occupying livelihood spaces is whether it can build an enduring organized force supported by a stable collective consciousness. Especially when changes in the character of a neighborhood seem inevitable in the long-run and tenants advocating for their rights to an urban space in due time are displaced and dispersed, resisting eviction and displacement have often seem like a futile act.

In the case of urban Korea, building a durable base for organizing collective actions has historically been enabled through intentional decoupling of the evictees rights to livelihoods and reproduction from their rights to stay put and preserve their existing communities. If as recently as the mid-1980s, up to 13 percent of Seoul’s households lived in unauthorized settlements, by the 2000s many of these settlements for the urban poor had disappeared or shrunk considerably (Ministry of Home Affairs 1972, 1977, 1984). In the midst of this urban transformation, the long-term SMOs, such as the previously mentioned NASE, fought fiercely for evictees’ rights against aggressive crackdowns. However, even in rare cases where the resistance was able to abort some new development designed to replace them, in the long-run, settlements for the urban poor gradually eroded in the face of persistent urban upscaling pressure combined with weak tenant rights regime. Therefore, it was long-term evictee SMOs in Korea that turned to the practical goal of winning replacement housing or replacement shops for the evictees to continue their survival. This recent history has a bearing on what MSM has come to see as a realistic concession to negotiate for its members vis-à-vis their landlords as an outcome of occupying livelihood spaces.

The outcomes of MSM’s occupy struggles, if solely measured by the immediate gain of tenant shopkeepers, are at best a mixed bag. By occupying their shops, MSM seeks to win monetary compensation from landlords that will enable shopkeepers to continue their livelihoods elsewhere just as residential evictees converged to a demand to reproduce their residential conditions. In reality, each MSM’s occupation concludes with some type of compromise between the landlord and the tenant. If fortunate, the compensation offered to an outgoing tenant will be sufficient to relocate to a nearby (or comparably desirable) location. More frequently, with the amount of compensation the tenants are forced to downsize or settle for a less desirable location. Rarely does the compensation amount to a tenant shopkeeper to fully recovering the investment it has made to its shop. Yet, each encampment is a testament to the tenant shopkeeper’s willingness to stand up for its livelihood and very the experience of encampments together shapes what becomes the long-term collective goal of MSM—a legal revision that will curb the right to profit of landlords that comes at the expense of its tenants’ livelihoods. In the end, pursuing such short- and long-term goals, as an alternative to demands to stay put, enables the struggles of tenant shopkeepers to persist even when the character of a particular neighborhood or a street changes over time. When I interviewed one devoted ally who had hosted many events at various MSM occupation sites, she spoke of the continuity between occupy sites: “(an occupy site) does not end here but constantly moves and multiplies!” To be sure, I observed allies who became deeply invested in the cause of the occupation to keep coming back to partake in the encampments taking place in different locations. I also found such solidaristic practices continuing among many tenant shopkeepers far-after completing their own occupation struggles. Especially when there was an impending confrontation with eviction squads, MSM was able to turn-out a critical mass by mobilizing the densely interwoven ties and solidaristic relationships formed through the previous occupy struggles. Findings from my field site demonstrate that, with the presence of an SMO that can connect scattered occupy sites, a collective consciousness that was inspired in one occupy sites can be sustained and further calcified through another.

However, the endurance of such a collective consciousness emerging from the occupy practice is also vulnerable to the external events that can affect the steadiness in creating occupy sites. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and strict social distancing measures were enforced in Korea, MSM went through a period unable to continue to physically gather to defend its members’ shops. In the absence of occupy sites, the SMO was critically challenged in renewing the ties that constitutes the basis of its collective consciousness. Fluctuations in the real estate market, too, can dampened the need for occupying livelihoods spaces leading to the energy and connections that were formed in the one space not being able to find a next occupy site that will continue to rekindle the relationships. While the period of my fieldwork overlapped with the time with an over-heated commercial real estate market, during times when the market for real estate commodities is temporarily depressed, speculative landlords will likely refrain from their usual speculative activities. As a result, unlike during my fieldwork period where there was a constant stream of tenant shopkeepers simultaneously and consecutively engaging in the occupation of livelihood spaces, under a condition where speculative activities become temporarily dormant, a discontinuation in the occupy practices can reveal the fragility of the collective consciousness that relies heavily on the practice of occupying livelihood spaces.

Conclusion

The contentious politics between those that utilize the use value of space—either as a place to make a living or as a place to live in—and those that seek speculative gain through maximizing the exchange value of that same space are a global phenomenon. However, particularly in Korea, the sizable population flocking to self-employment in the hopes of eking out a living, and more specifically to tenant shopkeeping with a lower entry barrier, is generating a condition conducive to rampant speculation in scarce urban commercial real estates. When landlords are comfortable in the belief that they can easily find a new tenant shopkeeper to replace the incumbent who cannot afford the increased rental cost, it leads to the precaritization of these tenants’ livelihoods. However, as much as tenant shopkeepers facing disruption in their livelihoods provide a ripe condition for tenant shopkeepers’ collective organizing, the organizational structure of their livelihoods constitutes a critical barrier to the formation of a collective consciousness. Unlike industrial wageworkers who spend many hours working side by side on shop floors, the self-employed tenant shopkeepers are in many ways isolated in their work life from others in their trade. My case study on the tenant shopkeepers’ collective organizing in urban Korea, whose efforts go beyond isolated or sporadic struggles, offers a unique opportunity to analyze the challenges and potential of forging a collective consciousness among the previously fragmented self-employed while taking their spatial impediments seriously. How can they recreate spatial foundations to overcome their atomization? I utilize my case study on tenant shopkeepers in urban Korea to analyze the politics of solidarity consolidating around the insurgent practice of occupying symbolic spaces where livelihoods are endangered. My findings probe when and how such insurgent spaces can forge meaningful connections among previously fragmented tenant shopkeepers and furthermore connect the tenant shopkeepers with diverse urban allies. Drawing heavily from my ethnographic research, but also the literature on various livelihood struggles around the globe, I coin the term occupying livelihood spaces to highlight when and how a collective consciousness among the previously fragmented develops concurrently with the insurgent collective practice of an occupation. My main findings dissect two mechanisms.

First, my case study reveals that the development of a collective consciousness among tenant shopkeepers cannot be separated from the emotionally charged experience of violent repression that frequently accompanies the practice of occupying livelihood spaces—in my case, defending shops from forceful, often violent, eviction procedures. The shared experience of confronting and witnessing landlords who do not hesitate to use brutal force to evict incumbents in their drive for greater and quicker profits catalyzes the antagonistic collective consciousness among tenant shopkeepers. Such sharpened antagonistic collective consciousness is reflected in the commitment of MSM to push forward demands that sought to fundamentally rebalance the uneven power relationship between tenant shopkeepers and their landlords, instead of settling for watered-down policies offering piecemeal concessions. Therefore, the findings highlight the unique strength of the antagonistic collective consciousness—one that is clear-eyed about the antagonistic interests between speculative landlords and tenant shopkeepers—that arises from the direct action of occupying livelihood spaces in advancing an alternative vision that dares to challenge the status quo.

Second, by shifting the focus from the occasional spectacle of confrontations to the daily organizing work that sustains the occupation, I echo the insights from existing urban literature that such shared mundane spatialized practices have the unique power to develop a novel collective consciousness among the previously fragmented and divided. Unlike factory workers, who may form a worker identity and shared culture rooted in their workplace prior to organizing, tenant shopkeepers and other fragmented, self-employed workers’ organizing must operate in the absence of such a preexisting collective culture. As a result, I find that the dynamics within the occupy sites play an outsized influence on the emergent collective consciousness. In MSM’s case, my findings demonstrate how an expansive collective consciousness is forged through diverse contact with others that is required to sustain an occupation of livelihood spaces; the everyday solidaristic practices and rituals within the occupy sites lead to tenant shopkeepers intellectually connecting their own livelihood precaritization with that of other precarious urbanites. However, I do not diminish the challenges involved in building such a broad-based solidarity between those of different political and cultural sensibilities. In fact, I illustrate how MSM’s occupy sites are not immune to internal conflicts and occasional partings, as these sites become places where tenant shopkeepers encounter the city’s progressive urban culture—a culture alien to most tenant shopkeepers. However, it is my argument that the onerous process of bridging differences also transpires through these conflictual encounters, and not in their absence. While large-scale street protests and mass collective actions are often what grab the attention of both academics and the media, I shift the focus to these behind-the-scenes everyday insurgent spaces to underscore their active role in weaving together a new social fabric. By identifying a model of organizing the previously fragmented that is grounded in the practice of co-producing symbolic insurgent spaces, I contribute to the scholarship of collective action by theorizing spaces that become ever-shifting battlegrounds that highlight the contradictions of capitalism while generating experiences of solidarity among diverse others.

In bringing to the fore the pivotal role of occupying livelihood spaces, my intention is not to downplay the ways in which broader socio-economic and political structures condition tenant shopkeepers’ imaginations and actions and even shape public reactions to the tenant shopkeepers’ livelihood struggles. To be sure, historical legacies and structural forces beyond the control of individual activists close (and open) opportunity structures for articulating a collective consciousness and effectively staging collective struggles. In my analysis of the conditions that enable a making of enduring collective consciousness, for example, I emphasize the challenges that MSM faces when the need to occupy livelihood spaces temporarily disappears due to external conditions such as the downturn in the real estate market. Yet, if organizers are to capitalize when market or political conditions take a favorable turn, they must also grapple with the difficult task of building a broad base throughout the periods of unfavorable socio-economic and political opportunity structures. Therefore, this article attempts to open up an analytical space for seriously engaging with practical questions which are of direct concern to organizers and activists on the ground. These include questions over the efficacy of employing the high-risk, resource-intensive practice of occupying livelihood spaces. Despite all its challenges, the case study of tenant shopkeepers’ occupy struggles in urban Korea underscores the significance of building a spatial foundation towards the goal of forging a new collective consciousness in particular when it comes to organizing the previously fragmented. By paying close attention to its limits and potential in harnessing a more inclusive and expansive collective consciousness, this article further analyzes how and when the practice of occupying livelihood spaces can pave concrete pathways for building an enduring base to lead a transformative social change.

About the Author

Yewon Andrea Lee, an urban ethnographer and political and labor sociologist, is a Junior Professor at the University of Tübingen. Yewon is currently preparing a monograph that examines the activism of tenant shopkeepers in South Korea against their eviction that are debunking the idea that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are either shielded from capitalist exploitation or destined to be atomized and individualistic. Her next ethnographic project explores the politics of indebted population in South Korea.

Data availability

The data underlying this article cannot be shared publicly due to the privacy of individuals and organizations from which the study draws. The data will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Endnotes

1

The competitiveness of the occupation is suggested by the fact that, during the period from 2002 to 2013, 37.7 percent of all self-employed workers closed their business within 3 years while the average life span of shops was only 3.4 years (Kookmin Bank Report 2013, 8).

2

Here, it is worth noting the debate over when and how the urban context either further heightens tensions that fall along preexisting fault lines—based on race, ethnicity, religion, politics, culture, and nationalism—or helps transcend them (see, Davis and de Duren 2011; Harvey 2000; Katznelson 1997).

3

“Self-employed” is a broader category that includes shopkeepers (both tenants and owner shopkeepers) as well as those who run as business without a brick-and-mortar shopfront.

4

As of 2021, among the OECD countries, six have higher self-employment rates than Korea: Columbia (51.3 percent), followed by Brazil, Greece, Mexico, Türkiye, and Costa Rica. (OECD Labor Force Statistics 2021).

5

Each interview took between 1 and 3 hours and was conducted in a location of the interviewee’s choice. The interviews were conducted in Korean and afterwards translated into English. In the following analysis, I use pseudonyms for the names of the tenant shopkeepers’ businesses.

6

The revised law was implemented starting May of 2015, coinciding with the time that I embarked on my fieldwork.

7

The revised law is the first legal framework to officially acknowledge and protect the practice of right money exchange. However, the law’s effectiveness in preventing right money theft has been diminished considerably by loopholes that limit its application.

8

The Labor Party and the Green Party, and the Justice Party to a lesser degree, were minority party allies during the time of my fieldwork, as their members saw the occupy sites as a fertile ground in which to cultivate a grassroots base for their own parties.

9

MSM’s position was noteworthy, given most other commercial shopkeeper (or business) organizations were rallying in opposition to the raise.

Valuable comments on the earlier version of this article were provided by Jennifer Chun, Yoonkyung Lee, Hae Yeon Choo, and Rebecca Tarlau. Also, special thanks to participants and organizers of the 2020 American Sociology Association Annual Conference’s Session on Global Crisis and Cultures of Resistance/ Transformation, the 2020 Symposium on Making and Unmaking of the Speculative City: Urban Politics in South Korea at the University of Toronto, and the Global Tübingen Urban Network (G-TURN) at University of Tübingen for their critical engagement that led to crucial improvement of this article. Lastly, I thank the anonymous reviewers for their critical yet productive feedback of the article.