Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980

Historical Materialism #166

by Jim Glassman

In Drums of War, Drums of Development, Glassman offers an interpretation of industrialization in East and Southeast Asia that foregrounds Pacific ruling class geopolitical economic manoeuvring during the Vietnam War, challenging interpretations that ignore the effects of military violence.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Economics

720 pages, ebook

Published August 23, 2018

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of the accounts of East Asian development that aren't pabulum come from a sort of centre-left Keynesian or 'neo-Weberian' place, which is broadly accepting of capitalism but highly critical of neoliberalism - Robert Wade on Taiwan, Alice Amsden on Korea, Chalmers Johnson on Japan, Ha-Joon Chang more generally, etc. But there's quite little in the way of Marxist accounts, except to a degree on the PRC (do you know how many books Verso has published on Japan, the world's second or third largest economy for all the time Verso has been around? Two). This is from the Historical Materialism series, which also had a very interesting recent book on State Capitalism in East Asia. While that gets a little too bogged down for me in trying to justify Tony Cliff Thought, this is much more of a frontal account, taking on the "Neo-Weberians" directly and taking a long historical and geographical view. It's highly convincing in its central thesis on the immense importance of the Vietnam War and the US Military Industrial Complex in East Asian capitalist development, and it's even rather good on why this 'worked' in some countries and not others (Thailand, the Phillipines, which lacked 'disciplining of finance' and land reform...here the argument is remarkably similar to books the author probably abhors, like 'How Asia Works' by Joe Studwell). It's sketchier but I suspect accurate too on how much this all involved taking it all out on the working class in each country.

So it's good, helped by tart, often ironic writing, and it shows Marxism can after all be useful in understanding what happened here (important for Marxism that it can be, imo!!), but all that said it's hilarious that this devotes a couple of pages to South Korea locking up most of its major capitalists and nationalising all its banks - mainly to argue it wasn't that important - but devotes 200 pages or so to Gramsci, American elite formation, Lee Kuan Yew's belief in race science, and the precise nature of the presents given to each other by American and Asian leaders at summits in the 1960s.

[Ryan Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though it seems this book was at first made to respond specifically to the type of people who say “You want to see how communism vs. capitalism play out, just look at North vs. South Korea” it is so much more. Everything from the theoretical chapters constructing the authors view of “geo-political economy” to the specific details of negotiations between the US and its numerous Asian allies in the Cold War is insightful. The book lays out and convincingly argues a case that is best summarized by the understanding that the supposed “East Asian Economic Miracle” was tied, in a perverse way, to the “East Asian Massacres” just some years before.

If I could boil down how this book affected me, I would say it greatly reaffirmed war and catastrophic violence as in the absolute core of capitalism’s being. I mean this in that it is both a tool of discipline, and also a foundation upon which capital accumulation and what we call “development” can take place. This was certainly the case with south Korea.

With one last comment about south Korea, I would respond to the comment in the first sentence by saying “Fine. If you want to follow the capitalist south Korean road, you must first subject your population to conditions of borderline slavery, and then you must help kill some ~3 million Vietnamese, as that is how they became the country they are today.”