Capitalist Trajectories in Mekong Southeast Asia

Abstract

Recent scholarship on labour and development in the global South has renewed critiques of modernisation theory along two main lines. The first has highlighted the unsuccessful transition of peasant smallholders into wage workers, whose incomes and employment benefits, it was once argued, would both satisfy their social reproduction needs and allow for expanded consumption. As a consequence of this apparently ‘stalled transition’ a contradiction has emerged between modernisation theory’s valorisation of wage labour/full employment, and the precarious reality of work and un/underemployment in contemporary capitalism. The second critique to emerge has focused on the failure of numerous late industrialising economies to transition from low to high value-added manufacturing. In the face of this latter failure of themodernisation project, governments and non-governmental advisers have sought to adapt their strategies to more effectively regulate growth in low value-added accumulation. Among the more prominent illustrations of such adaptive responses, international financial institutions and development think-tanks have advocated expanded forms of spatially regulated industrialisation—including export processing zones, industrial corridors and integrated subregions, of which the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) is a prominent example. There is, however, limited evidence to date that the promise of well-remunerated wage labour is likely to be realised anytime soon. The evident contradiction between the promise and the reality of contemporary development strategies has led to disillusionment with industrial and other forms of waged and non-waged work. As a result, growing frictions at the point of production and beyond have emerged, exposing tensions and fissures in development models across the Mekong region.