Socio-spatial dialectics of crisis formation and the 1997 crisis in Korea

摘要

The paper challenges the economic accounts of the 1997 crisis by stressing not only the role of time and space in the overall dynamics of Korean capitalist crisis formation and fixes, but also the dialectical relationship between capitalist dynamics in Korea and changing conditions of international political economy. Drawing on socio-spatial dialectics, the paper examines the evolutionary aspect of crisis formation and fixes and the role of financial dynamics in deployment of the crisis by drawing on a Minsk-yan notion of progressive illiquidity. In doing so, I examine how Fordist crisis and neoliberal turns in Anglo-American and Japanese economies co-evolved with peripheral Fordism through two critical junc tures: the 1987 Great Labor Struggle and financial liberalization in the early 1990s. The paper argues that dialectical processes of crisis formation and fixes led to new articulations between Korea and the international economy. Within international production networks, Korean firms set their position at the low-end of the high technology tier within regionalized production networks. In the process of building their position in production networks, Korean firms had to rely on expanded liquidity in international financial markets which allowed them to invest in unprofitable ventures in the mid-1990s. These dynamics in finance and non-finance sectors led to a double vulnerability of overaccumulation and progressive illiquidity in Korean political economy that culminated in the 1997 crisis in Korea. In short, what mattered in the crisis dynamics of the 1990s is a coupling of crisis formation in capitalist production with Minsk-yan financial dynamics that perpetuate progressive illiquidity at multiple geographical scales.