May 16, 2021, marks sixty years since the military coup by South Korean general Park Chung-hee, installing a regime credited with two decades of rapid economic growth and the birth of South Korea’s all-powerful chaebol industrial conglomerates. However, this so-called “Miracle on the Han River” was only possible due to the rampant exploitation of workers. In the 1960s and 1970s, Park Chung-hee’s “growth-first” economic policies relied on unbelievably long working hours, low wages, murderous workplace safety standards, the strict repression of workers’ rights, and rampant pollution and ecological devastation.

To understand the coup, we first need to look at the period that began with liberation from Japanese colonial forces. As a recent history of Korean capitalism by leftist scholar Park Seung-ho demonstrates, the events of May 16, 1961, were a key moment in an ongoing war waged by the South Korean ruling elite and American imperialism to crush the surge in socialist, worker-led movements in post-liberation Korea. For it was the annihilation of working-class power and leftist organizing by the post-1945 United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) and the vehemently anti-communist, anti-worker Syngman Rhee administration that created the conditions that made the coup possible.