SUBSUMPTION AS DEVELOPMENT: A WORLD-ECOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE SOUTH KOREAN "MIRACLE"

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dc.contributor.advisorKipfer, Stefan Andreas
dc.contributor.authorGibson, Kyle Andrew
dc.date.accessioned2022-03-03T14:04:04Z
dc.date.available2022-03-03T14:04:04Z
dc.date.copyright2021-11
dc.date.issued2022-03-03
dc.date.updated2022-03-03T14:04:03Z
dc.degree.disciplineEnvironmental Studies
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis work offers a critical reinterpretation of South Korean "economic development" from the perspectives of Marxian form critique and Jason Moore's world-ecology. Against the "production in general" view of economic life that dominates the extant debates, it analyzes the rise, spread, and deepening of capitalism's historically specific social forms in twentieth-century (South) Korea: commodity, wage-labor, value, and capital. Eschewing the binary language of development and underdevelopment, we adopt Marx's non-stagist distinctions regarding the relative degree of labor's (and society's) subsumption under capital: hybrid, formal, and real. Examining the (South) Korean experience across three dialectically interrelated scales – regional, global, and "national" – we outline the historical-geographical contingency surrounding South Koreas emergence by c.1980 as a regime of (industrialized) real subsumption, one of the only non-Western societies ever to do so. Crucial to this was the generalization of commodification and proletarianization that betokened deep structural changes in (South) Korea's class structure, but also a host of often-mentioned issues such as land reform, foreign aid, the developmental state, and a "heaven sent" position within the US-led Cold War order. Despite agreeing on the importance of these latter factors, however, the conclusions we draw from them differ radically from those of the extant analyses. For although regimes of real subsumption are the most materially, socially, and technologically dynamic, they are also the most socio-ecologically unsustainable and alienating due to the dualistic tensions inherent to capital's "fully developed" forms, in particular the temporal grounding of value. US protestations about the generalizability of these relations aside, moreover, these regimes have always been in the extreme minority and, crucially, have depended on less developed societies for their success. Historically, this has been achieved through widening the net of capitalist value relations; however, four decades of neoliberalization has all but eliminated any further large-scale "frontier strategies" of this sort. Due to its relatively dense population vis-a-vis its geographical size, contemporary South Korea faces stark challenges that render it anything but a model of "sustainable development," but rather signal the growing anachronism of value as the basis for regulating the future of nature-society relations in the "developed world" and beyond.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/39106
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectPhilosophy
dc.subject.keywordsSouth Korea
dc.subject.keywordsEnvironment
dc.subject.keywordsMarxism
dc.subject.keywordsDevelopment
dc.subject.keywordsGeography
dc.subject.keywordsWorld-ecology
dc.subject.keywordsEast Asia
dc.subject.keywordsWorld history
dc.subject.keywordsValue theory
dc.titleSUBSUMPTION AS DEVELOPMENT: A WORLD-ECOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE SOUTH KOREAN "MIRACLE"
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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