Progress by death: Labor precaritization and the financialization of social reproduction in South Korea

Abstract

This article looks at the contemporary South Korean political economy of crisis and recovery to visualize the material conditions of working-class lives and the ways in which their capacity to reproduce labor and life contradicts the regionally specific logic of ‘progress’. I visualize three critical scenes of workplace death that chart the ways in which the social reproduction capacity of the working class is fatally contracted in the era of neoliberal reforms. These scenes of death mirror the process of neoliberal transition that the financial crises of 1997 and 2008 accelerated in the region. In doing so, I articulate the notion of ‘progress by death’ as the intensified necropolitical logic of neoliberal capitalism that is led by the post-developmental state and fully transnationalized chaebol capital in South Korea. Building on feminist theories of social reproduction and the studies on the financialization of life, I argue that the logic of ‘progress by death’ as a constitutive element of financial capitalism reproduces the uneven patterns of growth and the transnational relations of violence, debt, and dispossession across Asian economies.