SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The article tries to bring class struggle back into the analysis of capitalist crisis, specifically in the exposition of the economic crisis in Korea. Since the emergence of the crisis, explanations of its origin have focused largely on excessive credit expansion, either in terms of excessive state interventions (stressed by neo-liberals) or in terms of the removal of state regulation (stressed by neo-institutionalists). In our view credit expansion was a normal reaction of Korean individual capitals to growing competitive pressure imposed by the tendencies to over-production inherent in the social form of capitalist production. The development of crisis tendencies, however, does not explain the necessity of the emergence of a general crisis in Korea. It reveals only the possibility of a general crisis inherent in the development of overaccumulation. The necessity lies, rather, in the failure of individual capitals to overcome the barrier to the valorisation of expanded capital through credit expansion posed by the working class. It was both the working class movement and the changing global context of capital accumulation that undermined the particularly articulated capitalist social relation in Korea. It is in this sense the Korean economic crisis is to be understood not merely as a financial crisis but as a crisis of the reproduction of capitalist social relations.