Capitalism, Conflict and Contradiction: Southeast Asia’s Development and the Reorganisation of Production

ABSTRACT

This article locates the political economy of Southeast Asia’s highly uneven and constrained development within the context of capitalism generally and, in particular, capitalism in its most recent “world market” stage. It concentrates upon development in a classically modernist sense, beyond narrow contemporary methodologically nationalist delimitations situated around growth, governance and official development assistance. It is argued that Southeast Asian development (much like the “developing world” generally) must be understood, first and foremost, in relation to key historical dynamics beyond the nation-state, including colonialism, superpower relations and, crucially, perpetually shifting relations of production. Importantly, each of these facets has played an important role in conditioning opportunities for social forces to realise their interests.

KEY WORDS:

• Southeast Asia
• development
• reorganisation of production
• industrialisation
• means of production

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Darryl Jarvis, Garry Rodan, Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri for comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this article. Several sections in this article draw on Carroll (2020).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. At certain points several countries in the region were among the fastest growing countries in the world (Abbott 2003, 5).

2. There are many scholars of Southeast Asian political economy and comparative politics who could be referenced here, many of whom have done vital work on the region. I would also include several contributors to the Murdoch School of political economy here – a school which I have been closely affiliated with. Much of the important theoretical work done by Murdoch School scholars takes aim at dependency theory (in tandem with other positions such as modernisation theory, neo-classical economics and historical institutionalism), pointing to industrialisation in the region and beyond as a significant problem (one of several) for dependency positions and noting the reorienting of focus around domestic class analysis (often analyses of the bourgeoisie or what are now sometimes described as “oligarchic elites”). For example, in Southeast Asia – Essays in the Political Economy of Structural Change – Higgott and colleagues (1985, 37) sum up their critique of dependency theory with the following: “Indeed, the pure circulationist form of the Frankian dependency school never really established itself in Southeast Asian studies as it did in Latin American studies and briefly in African studies. Class struggle continued to be a major focus for radical analysis. By the mid-1970s in Southeast Asia it was clear that industrialisation of various sorts and to varying degrees was taking place, that indigenous bourgeoisies were emerging and were both integrating with [and] confronting foreign capital.”

3. Contemporary definitions of development, of course, vary widely, and I am aware that post-development scholars, for example, might consider the above discussion economistic and reductionist (for a detailed deconstruction of typologies of development and their relevance to Southeast Asia see Rigg (2003, 37–40)). This said, given the manner in which development has been historically handled (both in the region and beyond) and space limitations, I have reserved engaging with these discussions here.

4. Rasiah breaks down the influence of ISI as follows: 1958–1967 in Malaysia; 1960–71 in Thailand; 1950–1970 in the Philippines; 1965–1975 in Indonesia (Rasiah 1994, 199).

5. In a technology sense, Fordism is associated with semi-automated assembly lines and high productivity gains attached to the extraction of relative surplus value (Schoenberger 1988, 247).

6. Investments into the electronics industry by US and Japanese companies, such as Matsushita, National Semiconductor and Fairchild, were important from the 1970s on in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines (Rasiah, Yap, and Govindaraju 2014, 646–647).

7. The Washington Consensus specifically refers to the general agreement between the US Treasury, the IMF and the World Bank for a set of ten policy prescriptions: fiscal discipline; redirection of public spending to areas offering both high economic returns and areas with the potential to improve income distribution (including primary health, primary education and infrastructure); tax reform; interest rate liberalisation; competitive exchange rates; trade liberalisation; FDI liberalisation; privatisation; deregulation; secure property rights (Williamson 1990).

8. Facing pressure to raise wages in the mid-1990s, Vietnam’s Minister of Labour, Tran Dinh Hoan, remarked “Vietnam cannot set its minimum wage higher than other regional countries … Otherwise foreign investment will not come to Vietnam, but will go elsewhere” (quoted in Rigg 2003, 35).

9. Singapore has long attracted significant and relatively large amounts of FDI; however much of this is associated with “round tripping” and ends up in other countries (Sjöholm 2013, 11–12; Aykut, Sanghi, and Kosmidou 2017).

10. China itself faces formidable difficulties in capturing greater gains from the reorganisation of production and moving up the value the chain.