Endowed-Chair Prof. Kim Soo-haeng at SungKongHoe University (Seoul), the most acknowledged expert on Marxist theory in S. Korea, died of a heart attack on July 31 2015, 10:30 a.m. local time, in the US. He was 72.
Prof. Kim Soo-haeng passed away in the US because he had left for the US on July 24 to meet his two sons.
Prof. Kim, the leader of the first-generation Marxist economists in the nation, made his name for translating Das Kapital into Korean in 1990.
Born in Fukuoka Japan in 1942, Prof. Kim spent most of his adolescence in the southwestern city of Daegu, S. Korea. He graduated from Daegu Sangwon High School and received his bachelor’s master’s degrees in economics from Seoul National University. Prof. Kim was in the same university club as chair professor Shin Young-bok at Sungkonghoe University and late Kim Geun-tae (former Minister of Health and. Welfare).
In 1972-1975 Kim Soo-haeng worked at a London branch of Korea Exchange Bank (KEB). As his encounter with the 1973-74 oil crisis got him interested in economic crises, he set out to study Marx's economic theory.
In 1982, He received his PhD with a thesis on Marxist theories of economic crises from Birkbeck College, University of London. At that time, Das Kapital was on the list of prohibited books in S. Korea, so Marx is missing in the title of his PhD thesis: Theories of Economic crises: A critical Appraisal of some Japanese and European Reformulation.
Upon receiving his PhD, he started to teach at Hanshin University, but he got dismissed in 1987 for leading students’ pro-democracy movement on campus. However, in 1989, he was appointed as a professor at Seoul National University on the back of the pro-academic liberalism trend that followed the nation-wide June Democracy Movement in 1987.
Among the 33 professors of economics at Seoul National University, he was the only expert in Marxist theory. Until his retirement in 2008, he was the only professor who studied and taught Marxist theory at the nation’s top university. After retirement, he wrote columns for newspapers and joined the left-wing Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in 2010.
He also translated the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. He wrote Das Kapital for Students and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for Students, thus helping familiarize students and the general public with Marxian economics.
