ABSTRACT
Introduction The general crisis in Korea showed that capital and the state could not effectively confront the deconstruction of the early confi guration of capital relations. Nor could they suppress the manifestation of the immanent contradiction of capitalist development. It was not until the four-year restructuring period in the aftermath of the general crisis that a new basis of further capital accumulation began to emerge in Korea. The new basis however was created on the basis of large-scale capital liquidation as well as massive unemployment and growing job insecurity imposed on the mass of the working population. Nevertheless, it was through this misery and at the expense of the working class, that capital relations in Korea appeared to fi nd its way out from the long contested transition since the 1980s. The newly elected Kim Dae-jung government pushed forward a fully-fl edged neo-liberal ‘reform’ geared toward the rule of the market. Indeed, the restructuring process after the crisis brought an enormous change in the way in which capital relations in Korea are reproduced, showing a transformation from the old settlement to a new one based on the rule of money. However, the restructuring process was indeed not a smooth one but full of confl icts and collusions between the old and new forms of capital, labour and the state. Although the old organised labour had been increasingly subsumed to the new strategies of capital and the state, the highly contested and prolonged process of restructuring also created the new forms and subjectivity of class struggles that penetrated into different moments of the expanding circuit of capital. It is through these struggles that the unresolved contradiction of the newly created basis of capital accumulation is manifested.
