The Political Economy of Development and Environment in Korea

Jae-Yong Chung, Richard J. Kirkby

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134627301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book looks at Korea's economic, social and spatial development processes from the early Modernisation period to the financial crisis of 1997. It focuses on the political and ideological control of the state during the developmental era, as well as the environmental problems of Korea, and examines how society and environment have been used as means to attain rapid accumulation. Providing an holistic approach to Korean development, this title allows a comprehensive view of Korea's economic miracle as well as its recent problems.

1 A new framework for environmental analysis

The vast new literature concerning the environment is marked by its empiricism and its lack of broader conceptualisation. Few studies start from political economy, from the position of the state. The present work aims to avoid this fundamental shortcoming, and in this chapter we will set out our framework for so doing: regulation theory. In recent times, three distinct ecopolitical perspectives have evolved: environmental problems as problems of ‘participation’ came to the fore in the 1960s, of ‘survival’ in the 1970s and as opportunities for ‘emancipation’ in the late 1980s. This at least is the plausible view of Eckersley:

the last three decades have seen a general broadening of ecopolitical dialogue as a result of the gradual interpenetration of these themes or phases of inquiry. That is, the participatory, survivalist and emancipatory phases may be seen as representing the thesis, antithesis and higher synthesis respectively in the ecopolitical dialogue of the last three decades.

(Eckersley 1992, p.7)

Each phase of ecopolitical development has widened the spectrum of the environmental debate, rendering environmentalism¹ a commonplace of the 1990s (O’Riordan 1981, 1989, Dobson 1990). If we can summarise the cleavage within environmentalism, there are three main strands: technocentrism, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, within which lie further divisions. Explanatory frameworks stemming from Marxism, eco-anarchism and Gaianism span this spectrum. These both prescribe the manner of resolution of environmental problems and take particular stances towards their causes.

Theories of development–environmental analysis: a review

The liberal and the neo-classical approaches which represent the technocentrist perspective are the least critical of the underlying political-economic order, blaming technical processes for environmental problems whether these be the failure of the free market or the inefficiency of state intervention. The problem is not seen to lie at the heart of the economic and political system itself. The prescribed solutions are improvements in technology, the application of measures such as taxes on carbon emissions and fines for pollution, and the like. Moreover, nature preservation is viewed in terms of resource conservation, where natural goods have instrumental value to the society. This has spawned a significant literature centering on environmental economics (Hufsmidt 1983, Nijkamp 1977, Pearce 1993). The solutions are anthropocentric and limited within the existing mode of development. In addition, such market approaches can be used to justify protectionist strategies, for example, advanced industrialised countries may levy environmental taxes on products from countries with lower environmental standards. The market-liberal betrays a partial, narrow understanding of both the causes of, and solution to, the environmental morass.

It is the green movement of the last three decades of the twentieth century which of course is the dominant voice of the environmental movement. The anti-technocentrism of mainstream greens disposes them to regard environmental problems as the consequences of ‘industrialisation’ per se (Porritt 1984). The moralising and voluntarist tenor of the greens would elevate attitudes and personal values to prime place. They would thus take issue with the societal assumptions of post-enlightenment science; the Judeo-Christian tradition, patriarchy, invoking ‘greed, hubris and original sin’ are all to be blamed (White 1967, Capra 1982, Pepper 1991, pp.116–118). Human beings in general and the self in particular come to be seen as the ‘seventh enemy’ (Higgins 1980). ‘We have met the enemy and it is us’ (Parsons 1977): this is rightfully characterised as ‘a self-accusing and self-moralising abstraction’ typical of ecocentrists and arising out of their strong neo-Malthusian tradition (Pepper 1993, pp.90–91). The greens’ consensus holds that ‘limits to growth’ must underlie all human activity, and this translates directly into ‘Gaian’ desires to fashion societies that mirror the rest of nature and are subject to its self-limiting laws.

Atkinson’s (1992) prescription of bioregionalism perfectly encapsulates the desire for living within the means of ecological limits. Bioregionalism entails a return to a network of small decentralised ‘democratic’ communities based on ecological planning concepts – for example the carrying capacity of a river basin in constraining future settlement (Atkinson 1992). There is more than a hint of authoritarianism, a conviction that all decentralised societies will necessarily construct themselves upon the values of democracy, liberty, freedom and justice (Sale 1985, Dobson 1990, p.122). The approach of the ‘bioregionalists’ fails to consider how economic linkage with other communities can be squared with the maintenance of local autarky. Nor does it explain how freedom of the individual is compatible with the exclusion that a localised system implies (Harvey 1993, p.45). Pepper (1993) criticises the ecological movement for its inherent strain of liberal economics, to ‘subjective preference’ and cost of production theories (p.43).² The lack of close analysis of the socio-economic conditions underlying environmental problems has been the fundamental weakness of the greens.

In contrast to the greens and liberal approaches, Marxism posits a view of the society–nature relationship which is complex and dialectical (Pepper 1993). Further, the historical materialist approach holds that it is not just individual ‘greedy’ monopolists or consumers who are to blame for environmental problems, but rather the mode of production itself – the productive forces and relations which constitute capitalism. Marxists hold that it is the specific interface of capitalism with nature which creates environmental degradation and human misery on the scale we have witnessed in the second half of the twentieth century. The polarisation of consumption, an inseparable feature of capitalism, is also a fundamental cause of environmental degradation (Seabrook 1985, p.37, Pepper 1993, p.91). It is this school of thought that provides the most insightful perspectives on the environmental question. We must, however, distinguish between the prognostications of socialist thinkers within the Western capitalist democracies and the practice of state planning in those national formations which in the twentieth century have characterised themselves as ‘socialist’ or ‘peoples’ republics. Here, technocratic and anthropocentric approaches to nature have generally been very much to the fore. ‘Scientific’ determinism has brought numerous promethean projects in which domination of nature is essential and even ‘heroic’ (Harvey 1993, pp.3–4). The proponents of a human-dominated nature are not confined to ‘socialist’ states such as the former Soviet Union, or present day China with its mammoth Three Gorges project: while liberal marketeers pay lip service to the environmental programme, the essence of their approach is to promote economic ‘growth’ through an uncritical reliance upon technical means. There are few who dare to be so explicit in their advocacy of the complete domination of nature as Grundmann (1991).

In many postwar Western societies there is a further complication. As the working classes were incorporated through the welfare statism of postwar Western economies, the transformational potential of class revolution was called into question. Working class communities have often regarded environmental movements as a threat to their livelihoods. The curtailment of hazardous industrial activities in sectors such as in the chemical industry suggests loss of jobs. These considerations in the advanced industrialised countries brought the new variant of Marxism seen in the Frankfurt school of critical theory. Its adherents concern themselves with the whole process of capitalist accumulation and its social and political context, including conflicts within civil society and the state. This has broadened the traditional Marxist debate centred around social relations of production to a more comprehensive political-economic approach encompassing the economic base, civil society and the state. The emphasis of the Frankfurt school is not so much on the conflict within the workplace, but rather on the conditions of reproduction, that is the struggles in the arena of welfare and collective consumption. Since the responsibility of redistribution of wealth and provision of collective consumption falls on the state, the neo-Marxists’ contribution is particularly important in theorising its functions.

The dominant structuralist approach within radical state theory isolates three tiers: the economic base, civil society and the state as the superstructure. There are various schools of thought within leftist state theory, including the instrumentalist, the neo-Gramscian and the neo-Ricardian. While instrumentalists focus upon the state’s manipulation by capital, neo-Gramscians emphasise the importance of ideology. Neo-Ricardians dwell upon the economic constraints governing state actions. The arguments are further discussed in due course.

An important and more recent contribution has come in the form of ecosocialism. This approach builds on the neo-Marxists’ themes and tries to overcome the human-nature dualism, while incorporating environmental problems into the Marxist theory of production. Much of the ecosocialist literature has risen above anthropocentrism, in that both labour and nature are taken as objects of exploitation, as means of production in the capitalist accumulation process (O’Connor 1988, Enzensberger 1974). Ecosocialism maintains that the domination of labour and nature by the capitalist accumulation process lies at the root of social and environmental problems. Thus, it incorporates both environmental problems and social justice issues, suggesting a new concept of ‘environmental justice’ (Harvey 1994). There is a clear influence from the approaches of Marxist geographers which link the mode of production/accumulation process to the ‘production of nature’, production of space and uneven development (Smith 1984, O’Connor 1989). David Harvey, for many the epitome of critical thought regarding space and society, steps into the arena of environmental concerns by asserting the heterogeneous nature of the desired socio-ecological landscape, the indispensable function of socio-ecological projects to the resolution of alienation and to the ‘opening up (of) diverse possibilities of self-realisation’ in some socialist future (Harvey 1993, pp.44–45). Harvey postulates a ‘geographical historical materialism’ in which ‘socio-ecological’ struggles are the fulcrum of societal transformation (1993, p.44).

While such approaches offer a good starting point, we must also recognise that there remain epistemological shortcomings. Meta-approaches are bound to lack the methodological means whereby global and national/local economic phenomena are linked to environmental issues. They tend to deal with environmental problems in abstract form under universal forces of capitalism, providing no framework by which concrete analysis may incorporate those political and ideological projects which regulate societal behaviour. Existing theories of the state and space require synthesis if the causal mechanisms of environmental problems are to be illuminated.

The subsequent sections endeavour to set out a conceptual framework for the study of environmental degradation, taking account of the complex mechanisms of capitalist accumulation and the forces which control the interaction between socio-economic developments and the environment. The theses concerning the interrelationship between the dynamics of capitalism and ‘nature’ and space touch on the mode of production, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist accumulation process and the dynamics of accumulation.

Capitalism, production of space and the environment

The mechanisms which bring about environmental degradation are considered here through an examination of various constructs and theses which focus on the interrelationship between the capitalist mode of development and environment.

Production of nature thesis

This thesis focuses upon the historical relationship between humankind and nature through the mode of production, from primitive to capitalist. It tries to overcome the dualistic conception of nature in both bourgeois and Marxist literature,³ of external nature, first nature, and man-made nature, second nature,⁴ and tries to see the totality of the transformation of nature through the changing human/nature relationship, which is primarily affected by the development of the mode of production (Marx 1959, Grundmann 1991, Smith and O’Keefe 1980, Smith 1984, O’Connor 1988).

According to Marx:

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head, and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power.

(Marx 1959, p.283)

This statement asserts that the interaction between ‘man’ and nature is through the labour process: the labourer does not only transform nature, but in the process he also changes his own nature.⁵ As divisions of labour increase, social relations become central to the interaction between humankind and nature. The division of labour is systematised in the production of subsistence goods as well as a social surplus, the latter becoming a necessity for the reproduction of the society as a whole. In short, this led to the division of society into classes and the control of the means of production and the exploitation of the majority by a specific class.

The differential ability to control people and nature, which affect productivity, has profound implications for consciousness, politics and socio-cultural life as a whole. Entire modes of production came into being as a certain way of enhancing productivity, and directed by particular social relations. So ‘…the totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’ (Marx 1893, pp.20–21). The development of social institutions such as the state and organised religion not only dictates the direction of surplus production, it also intervenes in the way in which human beings interact with nature. Social development splits the harmonious balance of nature. No longer does the abstract natural individual ‘man’ fit simply into an equally natural environment, since the relation with nature is mediated through social institutions. Thus, the production of a permanent social surplus allows humankind to begin the long process of emancipating itself from the constraints of nature. But at the same time, the increased social control, which a more complex society necessitates, enslaves a large part of the population (Smith 1984, p.39).

The transformation of mode of production through history has thus changed the relationship between man and nature: from use-value production to production for exchange, to capitalist production for surplus value. Throughout history, each mode of production – and the social relations which pertain to it – has been displaced by the ensuing one, a process precipitated by the developments of the productive forces (Peet 1991, p.63, Smith 1984). As this process intensified, so did the exploitation of nature, the alienation of humankind from nature as an ever greater surplus was extracted as a means of emancipating from nature’s constraints. The progressive nature of the capitalist mode of production not only sought means of production and markets on a world scale for the first time, but also – as it developed internationally – dissolved all other modes of production under it (Smith and O’Keefe 1980, p.35).

In a capitalist society, it is the ‘production of nature’ that unifies the previously separate social and natural realms, but it does so without the loss of their separate identity:

it is not just this ‘second nature’ that is increasingly produced as part of the capitalist mode of production. The ‘first nature’ is also produced. Indeed the ‘second nature’ is no longer produced out of the first nature, but rather the first is produced by and within the confines of the second. Whether we are talking about the laborious conversion of iron ore into steel and eventually into auto-mobiles or the professional packaging of Yosemite National Park, nature is produced. In quite concrete sense, this process of production transcends the ideal distinction between a first and a second nature. The form of all nature has been altered by human activity, and today production is accomplished not for the fulfilment of needs in general but for the fulfilment of one particular ‘need’: profit.

(Smith and O’Keefe 1980, p.35)

Smith and O’Keefe (1980) claim that the idea of production of nature offers a superior framework within which to view natural disasters. The concept emphasises not nature or society as such, but primarily the relation that is responsible for shaping both nature and society in the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of appendices
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A new framework for environmental analysis
• 2 Economic development, state strategies and social change in Korea
• 3 Spatial strategies and the emergence of uneven development
• 4 Environmental degradation in Korea: a historical overview
• 5 Environmental problems in the three spatial zones
• 6 Mode of social regulation, environmental movement and the state
• 7 EOI mode of development and a sustainable future
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index