ABSTRACT
In an attempt to explain the development of the form of the state without abstracting it from the totality of capital relations, we put the state back into the transformation of the way in which capital relations are organised, articulated and reproduced. In this sense, this study of the Korean state was the study of the development of capital relations in Korea. However, it was not an attempt to merely reconfi rm the class character of the state by showing how the political state has been determined by ‘economic’ class relations. Rather this study aimed to discover the way in which the particular form of the capitalist state has emerged from the socio-political class struggle. We saw that there has been a signifi cant transformation from the ‘old’ politicised settlement of capital relations, in which the reproduction of capital relations largely relied on political control over individual capitals as well as labour, to a marketised articulation in which the reproduction of capital relations is more monetised. At the same time, however, we also saw that, as long as capitalist reproduction relies on the subordination of the mass of the population to the expansion of capital, new forms and subjectivity of class struggle keep emerging and complicate the transformation of capital relations as well as the form of the state.
