Week 4: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight.

NOTE:

To those who joined from the ESII course, remember the readings ARE IN THE Ewha Central Library Reserve. Two of you weren't in class on Friday to get the handout that I made for you of Schnaiberg's Chapter 5. That was an important lecture. I suggest you both make an appointment with me to catch up on this issue.

A topic that came up in lecture was comparing Korea to the treadmill model. Some students wanted to read what I read about the scale of dependence on the Korean economy in international trade (instead of its own consumers, which is the treadmill model). Therefore, I repost that article this week.

(Note that this is different from a treadmill model since the 'citizen/labor/consumers' are outside a single state/monopoly capital arrangement, and its hard to see how the could affect Korean state or corporate interests through Schnaiberg's idea of the treadmill (which depends on all competing in a single polity).

(Schnaiberg's model of what is responsible for environmental damage is entirely a model of internal consumers supporting this system. It falls apart if you expect to blame Korean consumers or any domestic consumers for what their chaebol are doing internationally.

(I will discuss other critiques of Schnaiberg in a short introduction before the film we watch next week. Some critiques are mentioned in the Buttel reading. Look at its chart for a change of how Schnaiberg has been arguing over the years, which makes breaks the original internal state model of the idea.)

The film we watch is Who Killed the Electric Car. It has some treadmill elements though is a case of "cooperation and conflict" which highlights some of the limitations of [1] "abstract" additions and withdrawals as well as his [2] abstract issues of all government levels cooperating in the treadmill, or [3] all monopoly capital cooperating in the treadmill, etc., or [4] the issue whether it has to actually be more environmentally degradative as it expands, or [5] whether all citizens support such a model actively or passively as Schnaiberg argues.

To summarize the below article, it indicates that instead of 92% of production going overseas, that 92% is combined imports and exports, instead of just exports as I thought.

This serves as a correction to what I said. Another correction: there were places mentioned that are more extreme like Malaysia, Taiwan, and other countries.

In the Korea Times:

link to the image showing the expansion of dependence on international trade from 2001 to the present, from 57% to 92% now. Source: Statistics Korea

11-11-2009 18:34
92 Percent of [Import and Export Combined] Economy Linked to External Trade


By Yoon Ja-young
Staff Reporter

Imports and exports made up 92.3 percent of the Korean economy last year, breaching the 90-percent mark for the first time.

Economists warn this could lead to the economy being harmed by external factors due to the country's dependence on the sector.

According to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, Wednesday, the ratio of exports and imports to national income was 92.3 percent last year, a record high.

Exports accounted for 45.4 percent, with imports claiming 46.9 percent.

The ratio of trade to national ['national'? meaning entirely domestic organizations of production/consumption?] income hovered between 50 and 70 percent until 2007, but suddenly jumped by over 20 percentage points last year.

Some economies depend more heavily on trade than Korea.

Singapore saw its ratio record 361.7 percent last year, followed by Hong Kong with 348.4 percent. [Though these are city states; Korea is a rather sizable territory being compared unfairly with a city-state; Korea is in its own class in other words, and should be left out of comparisons to these formations of city-states. Compare Korea better with these countries below:]

Among other Asian countries, Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan also had higher ratios than Korea.

Dependence on trade is inevitable for a small economy such as Korea that has to export goods and services.

However, the trend can incur problems.

"Export-led growth is known to incur such side effects as increasing volatility from overseas shocks, a withering domestic market, and decreased job creation," said Kim Bae-keun of the Bank of Korea.

He added that export-led growth worsens trade terms, while advances in technology on the domestic market increase both consumption and real income.

Korea, for example, saw its economy shaken amid the global financial crisis last year.

The won-dollar rate breached 1,500 won per greenback as the Korean currency faltered.

The outlook for the fourth quarter and next year is also negative as falling demand from the country's export markets mars economic recovery.

In the case of Hong Kong, the World Bank estimates the economy to contract by 3 percent this year due to a high dependency on trade.

The Japanese economy, meanwhile, depends only 31.6 percent on trade, with its domestic market sufficiently developed. [Average GNP per capita in Japan is almost twice that of Korea's, so more purchasing power.]

The government has been pondering ways to develop the domestic market [though doing this in a 'treadmill' fashion according to the below]. It is especially focusing on [how to consolidate] the services industry, such as education, medicine and law.

"Our economy fluctuated too much due to outside shocks," Strategy and Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun said last week.

"Changing the structure of the economy is not an easy task, but it can't be delayed any longer," he said, adding that further deregulation [i.e., allowing larger units] was needed in the services sector. [i.e., toward monopoly capital preferment which leads to the greater difficulty in the first place? Schnaiberg's critique of the 'treadmill' model of an alliance support for growth is that it fails to deliver the social equity it promises and instead it leads to instability socially and environmentally instead of is a way out.]

chizpizza@koreatimes.co.kr

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http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/11/123_55306.html


2.


1. Mark Whitaker

2. Treadmill Politics? An analysis of Samsung's bias on the four powers of the state's developmental policies toward greater monopoly capitalism

3. I post this to get a picture about Samsung's position within the Korean state. Does it fit the treadmill model? It's additionally a book recommendation for those who want to find it.

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[Column] A society between freedom and servitude: Boycott Samsung

Hong Se-hwa, Planning Editor

The book “Thinking About Samsung (Samseong-eul Saenggakhanda)” by attorney Kim Yong-cheol is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the Republic of Korea of today.

In particular, it shares the way in which state organizations have contorted themselves miserably in the face of Samsung, South Korea’s largest chaebol.

When the Samsung management scattered about a slush fund of astronomical proportions, government organizations repaid the debt of gratitude by covering up all manner of illegalities and improprieties.

The autonomy of a modern state “ruled by the authority of law” came crashing down. The fact that so many calls for direct action through a Samsung boycott campaign have erupted, chiefly through the Internet newspaper Pressian, can be attributed first and foremost to the rage citizens feel about being betrayed by the state.

Samsung’s was not delegated power through an election, but it has already taken the nation in its grip. Former president Roh Moo-hyun’s remark that “Power has gone over to the market” was not far off from the sense that his own administration was also under Samsung’s control. Public prosecutors and special prosecutors, the National Tax Agency and the Financial Supervisory Service, the National Assembly and the judiciary - all have betrayed the people’s expectations for the realization of law and justice in the face of Samsung’s authority [in developmental direction toward more subsidization and discriminative policies that support only monopoly capitalism expansion].

All have negated their own reasons for being. And by issuing a special pardon for an individual conglomerate head, former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, President Lee Myung-bak clearly demonstrated the thesis presented early on in critical national theory, namely that “the state is the steward of capital.”

Once a thief has successfully committed an act of thievery without consequence, he grows bolder. Without a doubt, the illegalities and improprieties of Samsung’s management, their accounting manipulation, tax evasion and labor exploitation will be even more untrammeled in the future. The only source left for the power to contend with the omnipotence of Samsung, a conglomerate that does not even have a labor union, lies with the consumer. Awakened citizens, however small their number, are ready to accept financial loss and inconvenience.

Every time they waver, they will ask themselves, “Do I want to pass on this rotting society to my children?” And every time they find themselves pursuing some small convenience today, they will remind themselves that it will rebound as a heavy chain of servitude for their children and their younger siblings.

The deciding factor that determines where a community lies in a capitalist society, between freedom and servitude, is the check on the power of business by civil society and the power of balance. Ultimately, it depends on the understanding of capital by the worker who produces and the citizen who consumes, and the way in which they behave accordingly. For, as I have already stressed, the authority of capital loses its footing when the worker stops producing and the consumer stops consuming. Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch in a capitalist society, so we cannot obtain freedom of its own accord. Whether as an individual or an organization, we must pay the price of inconvenience and difficulty if we are to aspire to freedom.

In a so-called “Good Country for Doing Business,” namely one where the state serves businesses rather than businesses serving the national economy, direct action by citizens such as a Samsung boycott could easily be denounced as “anti-business” or even “anti-society” and “anti-state.”

But this then begs the question of who is more anti-society or anti-state than the management at Samsung, who make sport of the nation and persist in prohibiting labor unions. [Schnaiberg argued that monopoly capital prefers labor unions. Hmm. A problematic point I think in the treadmill model of smooth workings of organized labor and organized monopoly capitalism?]

A European laborer once asked, “If Samsung disallows unions, why don’t you respond with a boycott?” And, indeed, if the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) were truly “militant,” the Samsung boycott should have taken place a long time ago. Such a campaign would be a blessing in disguise for Samsung as well, allowing it become a brand corresponding to the “global economy” everyone is talking about.

History evolves when we wage real battles. I will start myself by making a vow, as someone who has always emphasized modernity. Let us not talk of the labor movement, welfare and distribution while skirting the battle with the power of capital, and with the power of Samsung at the apex of that. Let us not talk of social progress or the maturity of democracy, ecology, gender equality, true education or minority rights. They are mere alibis.

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.

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http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_opinion/411971.html