#uneven development

Within a dependency research programme, a global historical approach is essential. While there has been much heated debate regarding the success of Korea, most accounts simply start in 1960 and focus on domestic policies, and most mainstream accounts tend to focus solely on the role of institutions and market‐based policies.33 Within the dependency research programme, in contrast, it is imperative to go back to the development of capitalism in Korea. An important element in this development was Japan, Korea's colonizer, which was actively attempting to conquer China (Eckert, 1990; Kohli, 2004). It was beneficial for Japan to integrate the Japanese and Korean economies, which required industrialization in Korea. Faced with opposition from protesting Koreans in 1919, Japan played the capitalist class against the agrarian sector and included Koreans in the industrial commission of 1921, which opened the door for Korean industrial capitalism and the development of a Korean capitalist class with a financial structure intricately linked to the state. Korean businessmen were thus ‘not so much subordinated by the political structure as incorporated into it’ (Eckert, 1990: 125). This is in stark contrast to how capitalism developed in other peripheral economies, which shaped local industry in a much more exploitative and extractive manner (Amin, 1974; Frank, 1967a; Kohli, 2004; Rodney, 1972). This historical development of capitalist production structures laid the foundations for the industry that later emerged as a part of the well‐documented developmental state (Amsden, 2001; Chibber, 2003; Kim, 2010; Wade, 1990). During this period, Korea actively managed its trade by using both import substitution and export promotion policies, thus largely following the policy prescriptions of dependency theorists (Amin, 1990; Ho, 2012; Margulis, 2017). In this way, the structures of production were ultimately shaped in a very different way in Korea than in other parts of the periphery at the time. Understanding how the production structures were historically and politically shaped within the global economy leads to a much richer and deeper understanding of Korea's successful industrialization process than approaches that attempt to measure Korea's policies, human capital or institutions at a certain point in time.

Redistribution is often seen by mainstream economics as running counter to the pursuit of growth.  A common argument is that state attempts to counter uneven development typically result in a misallocation of resources.  Areas that cannot benefit from investment to the same degree as others, areas where the marginal product of an investment will be less, nevertheless get it.  But at least until the early 1970s, the view of the central planners in Western Europe was that there was no inconsistency; that guiding new industrial development into areas of labor surplus could reduce the pressure on labor and housing markets in major industrial agglomerations and so allow the price competitiveness of exports to be maintained.  At the same time, by trying to make employment conform more to the existing distribution of population, investment in new housing could be restrained; something important in the aftermath of the Second World War and the overwhelming demands of reconstruction, particularly in the larger cities.

"The temptation in the light of this critique is to eschew all appeal to universals as fatally flawed and to abandon all mention of rights as an untenable imposition of abstract ethics as a mask for the restoration of class power.  While both propositions deserve to be seriously considered, I think it unfortunate to abandon this field to neo-liberal hegemony.  There is a battle to be fought not only over which universals and what rights shall be invoked in particular situations but also over how universal principles and conceptions of rights shall be constructed.  In this the critical connection forged between neo-liberalism as an evolution of a particular set of political-economic practices and the increasing appeal to universals, ethical principles and rights of a certain sort as a foundation for moral and political legitimacy should alert us.  The Bremer decrees impose a certain conception of rights upon Iraq.  At the same time they violate the Iraqi right to self-determination.  "Between two rights," Marx famously commented in his chapter on struggles over the length of the working day, "force decides."  If class restoration entails the imposition of a distinctive set of rights, then resistance tot he imposition entails struggle for entirely different rights. The positive sense of justice as a right has, for example, been a powerful provocateur in political movements: struggles against injustice have powerfully animated movements for social change.  The problem, of course, is that there are innumerable concepts of justice to which we may appeal.  But analysis shows that certain dominant social processes throw up and rest upon certain conceptions of justice and of rights.  To challenge those particular rights is to challenge the social process in which they inhere.  Conversely, it proves impossible to wean society away from some dominant social process (such as that of capital accumulation through market exchange) to another (such as political democracy and collective action) without simultaneously shifting allegiance from one dominant conception of rights and of justice to another.  The difficulty with all idealist specifications of rights and of justice is that they hide this connection.  Only when they come to earth in relation to some social process dot hey find social meaning."

Uneven Development

Uneven Development