Patterns of 'State-led Development' in Brazil and South Korea: The Steel Manufacturing Industries

Abstract

This paper analyses the processes of ´state-led´industrialisation in South Korea and Brazil. Challenging mainstream institutionalist accounts, the paper argues that these have been concrete forms of realisation of the production of relative surplus value on a global scale through the international division of labour. Following Iñigo Carrera (2013), the paper claims that these global-scale processes have determined capitalist development in Brazil and Korea in a specifically different form. While the process of capital accumulation in Brazil revolves around the production of primary commodities for world markets and the recovery of ground-rent by industrial capital, in Korea it centres on the production of industrial commodities for world markets with a highly-disciplined and relatively-cheap labour-force performing automation-driven simplified functions. The experience of the steel industry is presented to show the main claims about both processes of ´state-led industrialisation´.