Introduction
Previous chapters have discussed the historical background of a series of world orders which show the restructuring of South Korean production relations in a bigger picture. Within each world order, Cox (1987) has identified common forms of state characteristic to each period, as well as expansive norms of production he claims to have played a role in the consolidation or destruction of global hegemony. This chapter brings the story of South Korean development into a contemporary age, wherein the production parameters have shifted in the embrace of the Information Revolution.
Before the crisis, Western speculators had watched the rapid growth of the Asian Tigers with awe and were astonished at how rapidly South Korea recovered from the atrocities of the Korean War ending in 1953. In 1960, Korea’s gross national product was aligned with Sudan and Ghana and still lagged behind India. Electricity was a novelty and cars still a precious commodity. However, in the following 30 years, Korea’s growth averaged 9 per cent per year and by 1996, it could claim itself the world’s eleventh largest economy. It had become the world’s second largest ship-builder, the fourth largest electronics producer, the largest manufacturer of semiconductors, and the world’s sixth largest steelmaker. South Korea was doing something right, and economists were quick to assume that policy-makers and business
experts had discovered a promising new kind of capitalism; what some called ‘Confucian Capitalism’.
But in 1997, when things went awry as a result of the Asian crisis, experts were quick to condemn nations for failing to note some of the most fundamental aspects of free market capitalism, and used the crisis to take on an increasingly pastoral role toward this sudden failed economy. Perhaps, experts reasoned, the Asian Pacific nations were not in tune with international norms of production and needed some guidance. So it became apparent that Korea had not been following all of the ‘rules’ of the Washington Consensus, and restructuring was necessary. This chapter looks at specific shifts to expectations from the labour market in the march toward globalising neoliberalism and all of its ideological baggage.
Economic crises can both unveil and re-establish historical relation- ships of exploitation between actors in the driving seat of expansive ideologies and production and groups who operate within what become compliant zones for dominant nations’ accumulation. In the case of Korea, despite democratisation, economic and social reform after the 1997 crisis followed a similar trajectory to previous periods of develop- ment under the elite-led pattern of passive revolution. I aim to reveal how Korea experienced a domestic hegemonic struggle between social forces in the context of the presently expanding knowledge-based capitalist world economy that characterises what Cox claims to be a ‘hegemonic’
neoliberal historical bloc.
Crisis-related reform and restructuring is a process that must go beyond material reorganisation and in every case, must penetrate the core of the production force to become integrated. In this light, the chapter breaks down the transformation of production after the crisis through the analysis of three aspects for restructuring corresponding with Cox’s first matrix: material capabilities, institutions, and the appeal to ideational intersubjectivity (Figure 1). This model highlights the dynamic interplay between social forces within the movement of history, and in this case during the attempts to restructure a society after economic crisis. While the function of Cox’s theoretical tool is not to predict power relations between forces, I have identified an elite-led and transnationally motivated series of changes along each category. The role of what I have called the transnational capitalist class network (TCCN) has become augmented during the crisis restructuring period and onward, and this chapter looks at increased IMF, UNESCO, and ILO relations within Korea defined as
increased incorporation into the expansive network of capitalist norms.
The evidence of an increase in elite relations and influence without worker participation shows that the first category of passive revolution is again in effect during this period.
Sklair asks ‘how does the capitalist class influence government and public opinion when it considers that its vital interests are affected?’ (2001:
27). The question is answered here from a neo-Gramscian perspective, problematising the concept of trasformismo that involves an elite-led campaign in this most recent historical period of passive revolution. The trasformismo project in the Korean case existed wherein Kim Dae Jung’s government involved workers in the political/economic agenda with various levels of penetrative strategies, the deepest of which exists in the minds of a population, thus revealing educational aspects of hegemony.
Gramsci (PN: 350) maintained that:
Every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the inter- national and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilisations.
While infrastructural and material conditions can be restructured relatively easily according to IMF mandates, it is not as immediately straightforward to ‘restructure’ and re-educate people’s skills, attitudes and behaviour, or to ensure cooperation of workers.
The Korean state’s reformist strategy during the period of post-crisis restructuring intended to secure control over a potential revolutionary worker movement against IMF and transnationally-led development.
Gramsci understood the dialectic, or the political movement of history resulting from the tension between thesis and antithesis, to be related to the variants between reformist and revolutionary politics. Showstack- Sassoon states that since ‘reformism is a version of passive revolution [Gramsci] noted that one aspect of the strategy is the break up the struggle into finite moments’ (1987: 213). Rather than allowing a dialectic moment to reach emancipatory fruition, the dominant class weakens the antithesis through fragmenting it into a ‘series of moments, to reduce the dialectic to a process of reformist evolution’ (Gramsci 1975b: 1328). It can be said that the Korean elite has constructed a reformist strategy that will promote the reform of work practices. Elite groups define this strategy as
progressive and aim to appease workers from the instability caused by the economic crisis.
The TCCN moves in both implicit and explicit ways to proselytise production norms, ideologies, and practices. Whilst the ‘globalization of capitalism’ requires control of financial capital, it is incomplete without the ownership of ‘political, organisational, cultural, and knowledge capital’
(Sklair 2001a: 17). An effective tool for the expansion of hegemonic forms of knowledge is through education and the training of organic intellectuals who are sympathetic to the cause of periodised development. Education is a socialisation tool that produces a particular discourse intended to cultivate intersubjectivities.
More specifically, the Korean government, as well as KRIVET, business owners and managers, aimed to lead adoption of globally standardised norms of production particularly in newly invested and transnationally merged companies. ‘The lesson for the working class is that the strategy of passive revolution will be attempted by the bourgeoisie’ (Showstack-Sassoon 1987: 212–3). So the ‘passive’ dis- semination of ideologically-led political/economic education could result in the cementing ingredient to leadership, via consent (Gramsci PN: 328).
Van Apeldoorn (2002: 19, 20) writes that the world-view of a hegemonic group is only normalised through the adaptation of subordinate groups’
needs into its own rhetoric. Because the bourgeoisie has not been capable of reaching hegemonic leadership status, it has enacted a passive revolution over time within South Korea.