The loss or lack of stable and decent jobs among ever-increasing numbers of South Koreans has inevitably led to the stagnation and even decline of wage income across society (in a stark contrast to the phenomenally swelling corporate dividends and financial transaction profits accruing to foreign investors). Poverty has seriously expanded both in absolute and relative terms, but the notoriously ungenerous and underinstitutionalized social security system has failed to alleviate the inequalities and destitution to meaningful extents. In fact, South Korea’s Continental European-style social security system predicated upon stable regular employment, as regular jobs are disappearing massively and rapidly, has often led to aggravation of inequalities and destitution.

Even after struggling to reduce consumption, South Korean households in rapidly growing numbers and proportions have been entrapped into heavy indebtedness to banks, credit card companies, private usurers, kin members and friends, and even the state. Within a decade since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the total debts of South Korean households nearly tripled. In particular, the first few years of the twenty-first century saw South Koreans’ household debts literally exploding. Considering that this was also the period of remarkably fast post-crisis economic recovery, such economic recovery seems to have been in part sustained by South Koreans’ borrowing-based consumption. The extent of South Korea’s household indebtedness, vis-à-vis both disposable income and financial assets, now far surpasses those of most developed countries (including the much troubled US). Not surprisingly, the poorest group shows a particularly high debt-service burden. (For them, even the quality of debt-service is most horrendous because they are often denied by regular banks and thus forced to rely on exploitative private usurers.)
In sum, behind the rosy pictures of the South Korean economy as an internationally conspicuous case of prompt recovery from the recent global financial crisis, grassroots South Koreans in rapidly growing numbers are confronted with their own financial crisis of heavy personal and familial indebtedness. This is another, increasingly crucial, component of the so-called financialization trend in the contemporary world political economy.

This paper analyses the current crisis in Mexico, in historical and international perspectives, and its negative effects on workers. It evaluates the structural and short-run causes of its severity, focusing on the specific nature of the neoliberal model imposed in Mexico in the last three decades, and on the particular economic policies carried out in 2008-2010.

Even though South Africa is a society “which is … undergoing profound political, economic and social transitions” (von Holdt and Webster, 2005), there is simply not enough South African political economy research and analysis of the relation between production and reproduction, as well as the implications of contemporary capitalist restructuring of work and labour for the reproduction strategies of the labour force. This has significant implications for understanding the evolution of post-apartheid systems of accumulation and the Minerals-Energy Complex that characterises the South African economy. This paper will seek to use Wolpe’s analysis as a point of departure thereby “reconstructing it with a view to understanding the new mechanisms for the genesis and reproduction of cheap labour power, which leads inevitably to the state, civil society and the formation of classes and class alliances” (Burawoy, et al, 2005). According to Webster (2006), labour power and the extraction of surplus value are being reproduced under new mechanisms in post-apartheid SA. The actual processes of the social reproduction of labour and the strategies of survival that engage them can yield more nuanced understandings of the multiple dimensions of insecurity faced by contemporary labour. In particular, to what extent is the relationship between capitalism and social reproduction reproduced post-apartheid?

The discussion of social reproduction does open up the whole question of a working class political economy. Is what we call "social reproduction" actually not also containing elements of "production" of use values for working people? What is the extent and relevance of peripheral activities outside and yet inside the ‘capitalist circuit of production’? In other words, what is the validity of the notion that the site of reproduction contains seeds of the political economy of labour that can delink from, and transcend the political economy of capital/the MEC? All the above questions could open the door for consolidating and diversifying a political economy approach to the analysis and understanding of post-apartheid evolutions of the MEC and related accumulation. The paper will point its antennae in this direction.

These are interesting questions perhaps, but what is their relevance for a conference on international political economy? My response is that political economy is rooted in society and vice verse. The classic study is Engels’s Conditions of the Working Class in England, seminal in the development of abstractions that led to Capital. For various reasons, not least the rise of distinct academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, the craft of linking the local and global, the social and economic, and description with theory, is much diminished. But can we understand the eruption of neo-liberalism without the seismic shift in the balance of class forces that spread outwards from its epicentre in the UK and US? And doesn’t a full account of the 2008 crunch require some appreciation of the sociology of housing and health care? Contrariwise, social scientists need a critique of political economy if they are to comprehend the broader dynamics of popular unrest and political change. This paper is a contribution to the conference’s concern to think across disciplinary boundaries. It comes from a sociologist, who, in working up from a rebellion of the poor, hopes to meet political economists moving beyond a crisis inspired by the rich.

The importance of this kind of undertaking was underlined by discussions around a statement for South Africa’s ‘Conference of the Democratic Left’; a politically diverse but numerically small grouping of social movement activists and left academics. Everyone was agreed on the need to denounce capitalism and support local struggles, but what was the relationship between these two concerns? It is not immediately apparent that there is a connection between insurgency in Siyathemba and the global crisis. Indeed, our research found no evidence of a direct link between Siyathemba and similar ‘service delivery protests’ that have occurred all over South Africa. Moreover, for the rebellion generally, findings point towards the importance of parochial injustice – uneven distribution of resources within a municipality, a corrupt councillor, local jobs going to people from another part of the country, and so forth. There is likely to be an association between the level of demands that are raised and the capacity to mobilise in support of those demands, but inability to articulate linkages to national policies makes it easier to contain the rebellion and increases the likelihood of reactionary counter-currents, such as xenophobic violence. This South African predicament can be read as a microcosm of a bigger and broader challenge.

The paper builds on earlier research examining the scale and dynamics of what we termed South Africa’s rebellion of the poor (Alexander 2010). The movement is massive. The police recorded an average of nearly two ‘unrest-related’ gatherings a day in the four years to the end of March 2008, and the spread and intensity of the protests has increased significantly over the two years since. Whereas previous work presented an overview, here we start with one incident in Siyathemba and move outwards. Who was responsible for the looting and burning, why did they do it, and what was the response of other members of the community? What lay behind the demand for internet connections? What are the cleavages and commonalities - class, age, education, gender, etc. - that explain the dynamics of the struggle, and how have these been shaped by wider economic and political processes? Why had the nearby Canadian-owned mine, which complained about a lack of local skills, or the national state, committed to better education, not found the minimal resources required for an internet connection in the six months following the 2009 uprising? To what extent has the state been constrained by lack of resources and different priorities, what is the mine’s responsibility for local social development, and how have these changed in the wake of the meltdown?

The paper is not an exercise in chaos theory, linking the failure of a particular sub-prime investment in one part of the world to a protest somewhere else, but, rather, it is interested in adding new layers of explanation to our understanding of a substantial rebellion. In this it is propelled by a recognition that ‘think global, act local’ is limiting as well as liberating, and that major changes to a political economy that consign millions of people to desperate poverty require a clearer grasp of the relationship between local suffering and global solutions.