Abstract
Studies on the political economy of development in the ‘third world’ have long been dominated by the statist school. Positioning itself against neoclassical convictions that ‘unfettered markets are the only key to economic success’ and that ‘state intervention in the economy invariably leads to failure’, this school has rightly underlined the importance of institutional regulation of capital and the state’s active role in the developmental performance of ‘third world’ countries. The South Korean state, with its astonishing growth rates and ‘upward mobility’ in the global hierarchy, has been celebrated by statist scholars as the paradigmatic example of the ‘developmental state’. Fascinated by the ‘miraculous’ and ‘tigerly’ economic performance of this country and rarely bothering to discuss the condition of labour, such statists (usually Western scholars) have promoted it as an exemplary model for the rest of the developing world by emphasising the ‘productive’ leadership of the state in economics, and presenting it as a benign and class-neutral actor committed to raising the wealth and prosperity of its fellow citizens. Dae-oup Chang’s book is a fresh and striking account that reminds us of the essential fact to which statists tend to remain blind: that the developmental state is a capitalist state.
In this book, Dae-oup Chang provides a critical reading of the formation of the South Korean state, unveiling the theoretical and political problems of what came to be known as the ‘developmental state’. Equipped with a rigorous theoretical framework based on an understanding of the state as a social form deriving from capital as a relation, he successfully presents the theoretical shortcomings of the statist accounts that conceptualise the state as external to and above society, showing that these accounts indeed reproduce the mystification process inherent in capitalist relations, and reveals the class character of the South Korean state by tracing its historical formation as a capitalist state.
The first four chapters of the book are dedicated to the introduction of the political problem, i.e. the widespread popularity of an approach among oppositionary movements and circles in South Korea that sees the state as an appropriate vehicle for democratic and egalitarian reform, followed by a critique of the theoretical assumptions feeding this approach, and the development of an alternative theoretical framework. Although theories of the developmental state have played a significant role in undermining neoclassical assumptions, Chang contends, they have derived their framework from empirical analyses and have taken the separation of state from society for granted, ending up with an identification of the state as state managers and capital as a set of businessmen, eventually failing to grasp the contradictory mode of existence of the capitalist state. He further argues that neither the traditional Marxist theories of the state, be it in their structuralist or essentialist variants, have been more able to solve the puzzle of the capitalist state. Instead, he develops an alternative approach that builds upon the findings of the German Derivation School (a current not unfamiliar to readers of his journal, which emerged in the heyday of the state debate among Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s but was for a long time forgotten) that consider the state as a form deriving from the value relations in capitalism. Simply put, his argument is that just as the law of value in Marx’s theory makes the coercive relations of exploitation appear as technical economic relations between equal parties, the capitalist state appears to be an expression of political relations between equal, free citizen subjects, mystifying its role in the reproduction of capitalist relations. Hence, contrary to the statist accounts, the state here finds its meaning within the totality of capitalism, appearing to be separate from capital yet subordinate to capital relations. Two important corollaries follow: the rejection of the idea of state autonomy from capital, and the introduction of the class struggle as centrally constitutive of the capitalist state.
In the rest of the book, Chang employs this theoretical framework to trace the historical transformation of the South Korean state within the totality of capitalist relations. In so doing, he arrives at significantly different conclusions from statist accounts that reduce the story to an empirical analysis of the balance of power between state managers and businessmen, and shows the active role of labour in shaping the development of capital relations and state formation. The political implications are clear: it is futile to expect the state to achieve a stability that can overcome the crisis-ridden nature of capitalist development, not to mention to meet demands for democracy and welfare, and the opposition should consider the labour movement, with its old and new forms of subjectivities and organisations, as the centre of the struggle.
In the last decades, it has been an almost fashionable habit to praise Marxism for its theoretical sophistication, yet to consider it inherently useless in concrete analysis of the contemporary world. And it is true, in my view, that Marxist debate on the state has hardly advanced in terms of an empirical research agenda since its peak in the late-1970s, leaving the ground for empirically rich but theoretically superficial and politically narrow-in- horizon statist studies. Chang’s book successfully operationalises Marxist theory for a concrete understanding of the contemporary capitalist state, and shows that the aforementioned oversight need not be the case. Yet it must be acknowledged that there is a lot to be covered in terms of theoretical and empirical grounds to compensate for the decades-long absence, and for Marxist perspectives to re-emerge as a challenging alternative to mainstream accounts. This book should be regarded as part of the beginning of that process.