Week 9 Reading Response: Liberalism, Liberalization & The Social

The readings for this week discuss neonationalist, neoliberal and statist responses to economic and social crises and issues in Japan and South Korea resulting from the liberalization of economic markets. Yoda outlines the dangers of market mentality in the social that neonationalists and neoliberals appropriate for their own projects and the failure of the adoption of liberal democratic principles to reconcile the contradictions of an accelerated and overloaded capitalist economy. Although, there is an acceptance of capitalist liberalization of financial markets in Japan and South Korea, both Yoda and Hart-Landsberg and Burkett articulate the reluctance of the state to completely relinquish its authority and let global capitalism run itself. According to the authors, the South Korean chaebol has become an enemy of neolibeals who want the state to deregulate, stop protecting national conglomerates, and open its markets to international competition. As labor management in Japan merges what Yoda articulates as the traditional and enterprise societies to capitalize on and more thoroughly discipline the labor force, labor in South Korea has become increasingly more unruly to discipline. Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett discuss the work of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in fighting capitalist restructuring efforts that attempt to exploit labor for surplus value. The authors suggest KCTU build solidarity internationally with other workers movement.

According to Foucault, in the lectures from The Birth of Biopolitics, liberal government functions to supervise (to surveil) and to intervene only when economics is not able to carry itself and the country. He talks about a crisis of governmentality alongside state-phobic apprehensions that are a kin to the mistrust of the state and global capitalism for labor unions in the Hart-Landsberg and Burkett reading. Perhaps liberalism’s performance of a separation between public and private, church and state, function to produce dissonance and anxiety, that makes capitalism thrive on fissures and difference while alluding to homogeneity and sameness. Foucault articulates a new programming of liberal governmentality by which state and economy shift roles and the liberal governmentality apparatus “asks the economy how its freedom can have a sate-creating function and role” (95). How do we see this new programming functioning in our readings on Japan and South Korea as they attempt to negotiate liberal democratic principles and the liberalization markets?