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The Asian Economic Crisis and Capitalist Restructuring: Two Approaches

Capitalist economies have been characterized in many ways: booty capitalism, disaster capitalism, crony capitalism, trophy capitalism, command capitalism, predatory capitalism, and gangster capitalism to name just a few. Each characterization stresses a particular brand of capitalism and each provides a hint of their possible causes of failure. Not one of these brands is an all-out success story; not one has achieved the cornucopia of growth and material abundance that economists had hoped for. The Four Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea — the NICs) were heralded as the exception that would demonstrate that the poverty cycle could be broken. The NICs model of export-led industrialization based on cheap exports was touted as the long-sought-after path to economic nirvana. Debating the source of this success NICs got caught up in the statist-free market debate. But the path of capitalist development has never been a smooth one; it has always been marked by instability and crises. To the bourgeois mind, crises appear to be failures of the capitalist system whereas their real function, as Marx made clear, is to clear away bottlenecks. Crises permit a process of restructuring and renewed accumulation; they might be mild recessions or huge convulsions, but they are universal. In 2007–2008, a U.S.–triggered financial crisis exploded, of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression. This crisis, which threatens to pull the United States and global economies into recession, is at first glance reminiscent of the Asian crisis of 1997. In both cases the precipitating factor is a meltdown in the financial sector (banks, brokerage firms, credit markets, hedge funds) that spreads into the “real” economy (jobs, production). The instability moves contagiously from capital markets and the “shadow banking system” to the circuits of production; moving like bird flu the instability skips over borders between Critical Asian Studies 40:2 (2008), 317–322