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Beyond post-democracy: precarious labour in South Korea and the legacies of authoritarian developmentalism

journal contribution
posted on 2025-02-04, 16:11 authored by Kevin GrayKevin Gray
This article engages with Crouch’s concept of post-democracy and its emphasis on how economic globalisation serves to undermine democracy and facilitate the exclusion of labour. While insightful, this article argues that this approach is predicated upon a Western empirical bias that focuses on the temporal transition from the ‘consensual’ Keynesian welfare state under Fordist capitalism towards ‘coercive’ neoliberalism. This neglects the spatially differentiated nature of experiences of neoliberalism and the latter’s associated political forms. This critique is mobilised through an examination of the labour policy of the liberal Moon Jae-In administration in South Korea. Despite its progressive credentials, the Moon government failed to effectively tackle the increasing neoliberalisation of the country’s labour market or reverse trends of wage polarisation. The emergence of neoliberal democracy was less a transition from more consensual to coercive forms of rule but the rearticulation of authoritarian practices in novel forms. As an alternative, this article draws on Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution as a broader explanation of how, in conditions of uneven and combined development, dominant social groups seek to establish the political rule of capital through revolutions from above as a means of forestalling the emergence of a subaltern collective will that might disrupt the accumulation process.

History

Publication status

  • Accepted

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Journal of Contemporary Asia

ISSN

0047-2336

Publisher

Taylor and Francis Group

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Institution

University of Sussex

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

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