ABSTRACT
With the resurrection of Marxist theory across the various areas of the development field fecund debate has sprung up over Marxist methods analysis. To be sure, no single method has yet achieved paradigmatic status, yet great progress has been made in Marxism in this quest. The three chapters in Part I, then, all deal with questions of Marxian methods of analysis and the potential utility of these methods for the study of capitalist development in South Korea. Part I, therefore, makes an important contribution to the broad literature on Marxist theory and method as well as to the literature on thr Korean economy. The opening chapter of Seongjin Jeong, “Trend of Marxian Ratios in Korea: 1970-2003”, attempts to estimate key Marxian ratios, productive/unproductive labor ratio, rate of surplus value, and rate of profit, for the Korean economy during 1970-2003, by applying the method of Shaikh and Tonak (1994) and using macroeconomic data, including Input-Output Tables. Jeong finds that the increasing world economic trend toward growth of unproductive labor in capitalist economies commenced in Korea only in the late 1980s. He argues that the extraordinarily high level of productive labor during 1970-80s was crucial to the rapid economic growth of this period. Jeong further estimates that the rate of surplus value in Korea remained at a fairly stable level, around 140%, during 19802000, with a slightly increasing trend during 1990s. Unlike the rate of surplus value, the rate of profit of non-farm business sector in Korea is estimated to have fallen significantly since late 1980s, after maintaining a high plateau during the era of Park Chung Hee. Contrary to Institutionalist-Keynesian consensus which argues that the economic crisis of 1997 was anything but the crisis of “fundamentals”, Jeong attempts to prove the hypothesis that Marxian tendency of rate of profit to fall was clearly behind it. Jeong also argues that recovery of the rate of profit since 1997 crisis was enabled by increasing exploitation of working class as well as by enormous devaluation of capital.
