Imagining the Future for Korean Capitalism: Discourses and Debates from the 1980s to the 2000s

Abstract

The rapid growth of the South Korean economy has been examined by many foreign scholars since the 1960s. Apart from researches in mainstream economics, there appeared a ‘developmental-state’ approach to explaining the East Asian economic miracle since the Second World War as an alternative theoretical paradigm from the early 1980s. But domestically in South Korea, there have been also analytical discourses and debates around such issues as the nature of Korean capitalism, its characteristics and future prospects. Domestically critical discourses and even debates on Korean capitalism have been made and changed in the historically-specific contexts of contemporary South Korean capitalism since the 1980s. During the 1980s, political repressions continued under the new military regime while the Korean economy grew rapidly, which radicalized social and students’ activism for democracy. Leftist ideologies such as Marxist-Leninism or North Korean Juche ideology influenced local intellectuals and activists in the field of discourses and debates analyzing Korean capitalism of the time and prospecting for post-capitalist alternatives. But the fall of East European communist regimes and the USSR around the early 1990s as well as the blossoming of consumerist capitalism in South Korea at that time resulted in the sudden disappearance of radical social- scientific discourses and debates of the previous decade. Instead, cultural studies prevailed in academic discourses during the early and mid-1990s under changed socio-historical conditions. In 1997, however, the financial crisis occurred unexpectedly in the country and neoliberal reforms in the economy were strongly implemented domestically under the so-called ‘IMF regime.’ Around such issues as the causes of the 1997 crisis, the changed nature of Korean capitalism after neoliberal reforms, and its future prospects, there were made several discursive factions and debates among them until the 2000s. Domestic discourses on Korean capitalism have historically been constructed regarding its radical overcoming and social revolution in the 1980s, regarding studies of mass cultural consumption in the 1990s, and regarding its institutional reforms in the 2000s.