South Korea’s Transformation into an Imperialist Power

ABSTRACT

Due to a combination of specific factors South Korea experienced a rapid process of industrialization and capital accumulation. This process has resulted in the country’s transformation from a semi-colony dominated by US imperialism in 1945 into an emerging imperialist state in the 2000s. Today South Korea’s economy is dominated by large corporations—the chaebols—which have dominated the domestic market for a good few decades. These corporations, moreover, export not only commodities but also capital. As a result there has been a massive increase in foreign investment by Korean capitalists, both in imperialist countries and in countries of the South. Today, South Korea’s chaebols have secured a prominent place among the top global corporations. The chaebols usually consist of a vast network of formally independent firms, but they are united under the common administrative and financial control of a single family via a complex cross-shareholding structure. South Korea’s imperialism still faces some limitations, especially in the political field given the presence of US troops and Washington’s ongoing influence in Seoul’s ruling circles. However, the dramatic economic rise of South Korean capital has created the preconditions to shed these political limitations too in the foreseeable future.

KEYWORDS:

• South Korea
• imperialism
• political economy
• monopolies
• capital export

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This essay is based on an extensive study recently published as a booklet (see Pröbsting 2019b) and a German-language study (Pröbsting 1996) of which a substantially shortened English-language summary “Capitalist Development in South Korea and Taiwan [China]” has been published at https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/capitalism-in-south-korea-taiwan/.

2 For a more detailed elaboration of the Marxist theory of imperialism and its relevance for the world today, see Pröbsting (2019a, 2013, 2008).

3 It is true that people usually refer to Lenin’s book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism as his most elaborated work on this issue (see Lenin [1916] 1974c). However, one has to bear in mind that this book was written in 1916 for legal publication in Tsarist Russia, whose heavy censorship was well-known, and Lenin could publish his work only in mid-1917, after the February Revolution. In contrast, the essay “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (Lenin [1916] 1974b) was published in December 1916 in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, the illegal theoretical journal of the Bolsheviks at that time. Hence, Lenin could express himself without any restrictions in this essay.

4 For a more substantive elaboration on this issue see Pröbsting (2016a).

5 We have dealt extensively with the issue of the emergence of new imperialist powers. On Russia as an emerging imperialist power, see Pröbsting (2014a, 2014b).

6 See “Wikipedia: Economy of South Korea.” Accessed March 19, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_South_Korea.

7 Lenin elaborated the category of state-monopoly capitalism in 1917:

Here was have what is most essential in the theoretical appraisal of the latest phase of capitalism, i.e., imperialism, namely, that capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism. The latter must be emphasised because the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called “state socialism” and so on, is very common. The trusts, of course, never provided, do not now provide, and cannot provide complete planning. But however much they do plan, however much the capitalist magnates calculate in advance the volume of production on a national and even on an international scale, and however much they systematically regulate it, we still remain under capitalism—at its new stage, it is true, but still capitalism, without a doubt. The “proximity” of such capitalism to socialism should serve genuine representatives of the proletariat as an argument proving the proximity, facility, feasibility, and urgency of the socialist revolution, and not at all as an argument for tolerating the repudiation of such a revolution and the efforts to make capitalism look more attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do. (Lenin [1917] 1974, 447–448; emphasis in the original)

8 See “LEXUS-Hurun China Rich List 2019.” http://www.hurun.net/EN/Article/Details?num=CE08472BB47D.

9 For a discussion of this issue and a number of statistics, see Pröbsting (2013, 134–143).

10 See “Trends in Union Density,” dx.doi.org/10.1787/888934026943; see also Kong (2006).

11 See “Trends in Industrial Disputes,” dx.doi.org/10.1787/888934027133; see also OECD (2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Pröbsting

Michael Pröbsting is the international secretary of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT). He holds a Master of Science in Political Science from the University of Vienna, Austria. He has authored a number of books and essays. Among his recent publications are “Is India a New Emerging Great Power?” (in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, vol. 48, no. 1, 2020: 31–49), “India: A Regional Power with Failed Ambitions” (in Problems in Political Economy, no. 4, 2020: 187–196), “Great Power Rivalry in the Early Twenty-First Century” (in New Politics, vol. XVIII, no. 3, 2019: 45–52), and “Capitalism Today and the Law of Uneven Development: The Marxist Tradition and Its Application in the Present Historic Period” (in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, vol. 44, no. 4, 2016: 381–418).