Brad’s Reviews > Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980 > Status Update

The ruling class is a powerful and important concept; it should not be spread thinly across all capitalists, simply because capitalism is a predominant way of producing within a given society; nor is it a title that should be denied to those actors who wilfully and meaningfully abet capitalist development, even if they are not formally capitalists in their own right.

capitalist development proceeds not merely by the seemingly more benign activities of technological innovation and market expansion but via the class-based and imperial violence that underpins this.

"States...do not act; rather, classes and class fractions act through them, just as they act through markets. If one imagines that 'the state' can provide a stable site of from which to marshal the forces of development, one can only miss the messy, contingent, and ultimately more interesting geo-political economic struggle that constitutes the deepest driving force of development."

The deeper the dive into "global production networks" where technology transfers and Japanese industry shape transnational capital (i.e. Samsung), the more instructive is the historical dialectical contrast with a case outside the "Pacific ruling class": Bulgaria, which had to reverse-engineer a national industry via its own channels.

Balkan Cyberia

Among the various contributors to operating costs, all inputs for South Korean [steel] firms were somewhat higher, except for labour costs.
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Relative 'social disarticulation', where productivity growth substantially outstrips wage growth, is precisely one of the major factors that differentiates the process of productivity growth in the Global North and the Global South.