This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues that the position of the East Asian countries within the hierarchy of world capitalism has remained anything but static, and that a key but often neglected factor in shaping the trajectory of East Asian development has been precisely that of domestic social struggles in which workers have played a central role. The book explains Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, which provides a means of achieving policy of democracy promotion by elucidating how processes of state-society contestation are situated within the wider dynamics of the interstate system. The rise of labour as a collective actor occurred in tandem with the emergence of a broad pro-democracy movement. Japanese labour's response to the economic slowdown of the 1970s involved seeking increased participation in policymaking at the national level, although this is a strategy that has met with mixed results.