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intellectual class’ (Gramsci 1975: 134). Traditionally, intellectuals take charge of the management of national common sense and order the understanding of reality. The role of intellectuals is to sustain or to fight for hegemonic leadership, fully aligned with the government and responsible for spreading the ideology of the dominant classes to the subaltern. Leaders at the helm of capitalist expansion work to ensure ‘the promotion and expansion of a mode of production’ (Bieler and Morton 2004: 95) via elite-directed estimations of ‘proper’ economic development and supportive modes of production that have become increasingly shared internationally. For effective expansion of decided modes of development, the formation and enlargement of groups of organic intellectuals in the workplace and across civil society who are sympathetic to development strategies becomes increasingly important.
So here, I look at a historical background of the struggles for con- solidation of global hegemony via the consolidation and development of those groups who are linked to the impact of struggles upon South Korea, covered in the following chapter. Gills reminds us that ‘the domestic and the international are … as inseparable as the political and economic as aspects of social power’ (Gills 2001: 234).
Several authors have written about the historical patterns of capitalist proliferation and world accumulation, including Fieldhouse (1982), Frank and Gills (1993), Wallerstein (1996), Amin (2000), and Beaud (1983).
Discussions of inequalities and exploitation inherent to the global capitalist system constitute the bedrock for these authors’ work. I am indebted to these writers for their commitment to disclosing a more complete picture of histories than many standard history textbooks offer, and in this chapter I will focus on the historical expansion of capitalism as led by elites, whose forms of state promulgated this process.
Facilitated by organic intellectuals, who ultimately manage the expansion of ideologies of historically specific modes of production, capitalism has enjoyed various hegemonic and less hegemonic phases (Cox 1987). Cox (1983, 1987) writes about modes of production and forms of state relevant to four historic periods with the purpose of making a claim regarding whether or not historical blocs can be named
‘hegemonic’, according to conditions for Gramscian hegemony of consent and coercion. Within Cox’s matrices of forces, a ‘world order’ is similar to Gramsci’s concerns of ‘historical blocs’ (Cox 1981: 139, 152 fn14). Cox breaks down world orders into four historical periods: 1845–1875, 1875–
1945, 1945–1965, and 1965–present (1981: 170) and looks at directed
changes throughout each period (1987) to pinpoint prevalent modes and relations of production. Cox reasons that some world orders have been more hegemonic than others, but for the present analysis, I have not focused on distinguishing a global hegemony from a non-hegemonic historic bloc. Instead, I look at the way in which elites have struggled to accumulate power through the expansion of a progression of forms of state and production relations that were intended to become and remain expansive across the world. This differs from the way the next chapter treats ‘forms of state’, which are nationally located, and claimed to exist within an ongoing case of passive revolution.
In this chapter I identify expansive forms of state throughout each historical period tailored toward dissemination of production relations in South Korea. Elites throughout Korea’s history have typically aimed to consolidate groups of nationally-based organic intellectuals or workers who are sympathetic to development plans and become members of elite groups themselves. Intellectuals of this nature involve foreign experts, who come from domestic institutes of research and government agencies. These outsiders work with local management to train workers to become organically attuned to market-led forces, and as such, these intellectuals have sophisticated and perpetuated the myth of the immutability of the expansion of capitalism into many layers of social life. The previous chapter discussed the various interpretations of the concept of ‘hegemony’ at length, and specified that I will not rely on realist interpretations of single-state power. Rather, the profundity of Gramscian hegemony is acknowledged, and at the global level,
‘hegemony’ refers to:
… dominance of a particular kind where the dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent, function- ing according to general principles that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading state or states and leading social classes but at the same time offer some measure or prospect of satisfaction to the less powerful.
(Cox 1987: 7) The struggle for hegemonic leadership is therefore heavily ideological. At the national level, elite, state-operated groups aim to educate workers to adapt to capitalist ideology through the implementation of directed norms of production, which ‘unif[ies] secondary groups into an historical bloc
with a fundamentally capitalist world view, while it enters the conscious- ness of the masses as part of their confounded and fragmentary “common sense”’ (Rupert 1987: 30). A hegemonic worldview of capitalism thus serves to protect elite interests and to steer social forces away from the articulation of alternative world views. Organic intellectuals form the most important group in this process, as they either actively incorporate, or alternatively resist norms that hegemony-seeking groups attempt to propagate. During Pax Britannica in the mid-nineteenth century and Pax Americana in the mid-twentieth century, the formation and success of particular knowledge for development that resulted in consolidated hegemonic projects (Cox 1983: 170) universalised certain economic doctrines. My analysis underscores the way in which this has been achieved, because it provides a background for analysing these social forces at the national level in times of international hegemonic struggle.
In order for the expansion of ideas that contribute to production practices seen in the skills required of workers to be fully hegemonic, consent as well as coercion of workers is required. Workers are most affected by changing expectations but without accompanying concession mechanisms, production norms are unlikely to become established. Cox does not emphasise the role of workers and how they are integrated into hegemonic projects and I aim to resolve this deficiency by looking at a specific case study of the management of workers in one semi-peripheral state, in the following chapter. Cox’s work (1987) begins this type of exploration by making suppositions regarding emerging social forces and forms of state that grew up emerged during the expansion of modes of production in each historical bloc from the late nineteenth century to the present.
This chapter takes Cox’s work into account by identifying relations between leading nations’ elites to understand forms of state prevalent within each period, and also observes characteristics of production relations specific to historic periods. Cox’s work lacks analyses of specific nations’ experiences with the incorporation of certain expansive norms, based around supposedly hegemonic modes of production, so in this chapter I assess Cox’s analysis over four periods, showing his and other authors’ ways of describing hegemonic and non-hegemonic periods of history.
So, reflecting upon Cox’s second matrix, Chapter 2 conducts an analysis of configurations of forces through a discussion of the forms of state and social forces emerging from the expansion of certain forms of
production relations throughout four periods of world orders. This analysis is important as a background for the following chapter, which clarifies how the societal ‘need’ for particular types of human capital at various points in history is grappled with at the national level, in conjunction with the restructuring of capitalism.