Edited by Owen Miller (2023)
A review based on the introductory chapter – The Emergence and Development of Capitalism in East Asia: The State Capitalist Approach by Owen Miller and Gareth Dale.
This chapter helps to answer at least a couple of important questions for socialists. These are in what circumstances can a nation state like Nigeria develop/industrialise and are states like China and North Korea socialist? Along the way, it also gives us deeper insights into what we mean by both capitalism and socialism.
“In the second half of the twentieth century the East Asian region {defined as China, Taiwan, North & South Korea and Japan} underwent one of the most profound human transformations in history. It was a transformation that moved hundreds of millions of people from rural life to cities, from agricultural work to industrial and office work” (page 1). This directly impacted almost one-quarter of the earth’s population.
As a result, poor post-colonial countries undertook rapid economic development to become the largest economy in the world (China) or having per capita GDPs comparable with the most advanced nations in the world (South Korea). Their political forms are “stretching right across the political spectrum, from ‘communist’ China and North Korea to ‘capitalist’ Japan and South Korea” (page 2).
In addition, “recent decades have witnessed several regions of the ‘Third World’ approaching economic comparison with those at the top.” (page 22). As another example, in 1960, Malaysia was a British colony with a per capita GDP similar to that of Nigeria. Now its per capita GDP is comparable with Britain or France.
“The authors provide answers that are firmly rooted in the classical Marxist analysis of capitalism but at the same time build on it in order to understand the burgeoning role of the state in the functioning of capitalism since the early twentieth century.” (page 3)
The “state is always an integral part of the capitalist system”, but “the degree of direct involvement by the state in the process of capital accumulation” varies greatly (page 5). According to Marxist state capitalist theory, all these states are “subject to the same underlying capitalist dynamics identified by Marx in Capital. Those dynamics are the capital-labour relation that underpins most production under capitalism and the drive for competitive accumulation that keeps it in constant motion.” (page 5)
Capitalism moved from ownership of the means of production (factory, school etc) being by an individual (capitalist) to impersonal, in the form of a joint stock company. Soviet Russia took this one step further with the party-state bureaucracy taking ownership of the whole economy “not unlike a multi-divisional enterprise” (page 7).
This first chapter provides an over-view of how Stalin led Russia achieved the over-throw of the socialist society introduced in 1917. But also brought massive industrialisation so that Russia became one of the two global powers after the second world war. It had its own empire at the time when European powers were being dispossessed of their own colonies.
This chapter also provides an introduction to the economic development of Japan, China and North/South Korea. This occurred as these nations were part of the same “global capitalist system, all shaped and driven by the same logic of capital accumulation, military competition and class conflict” (page 29). “China has, since 1978, gradually transformed from a bureaucratic state capitalism with a minimal role for the market to a ‘regionalised state capitalism’ in which domestic competition and the market are crucially important.” (page 40)
To read this book, click this link: https://ivavalleybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/State-Capitalism-Development-in-East-Asia-Chap-1-.pdf