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Archaeology of the Korean Social Character Debate II: Exorcising Neocolonial State-Monopoly Capitalism Shin, Hyunjoon In the late-1980s to early-1990s debates on the character of Korean society, the theory of Neo-Colonial State-Monopoly Capitalism (NCSMC), together with the thesis of intensified monopoly and deepened dependency proposed by Yoon So-young, constituted an integrated assemblage produced through systematic mistranslations and misreadings of the theories associated with the so-called “international movement.” While the concept of neocolonialism was widely employed within international Marxist discourse, neocolony never achieved conceptual stabilization in European-language theoretical traditions. As a result, the formulation “South Korea as a neocolony of the United States and Japan” remained a schematic claim lacking theoretical refinement. Moreover, the notion of dependent capitalism found in the documents of the international movement was in fact closely related to specific strands of Latin American dependency theory—precisely those most forcefully criticized by Korean proponents of NCSMC. Likewise, the idea of dependent state-monopoly capitalism was never presented as a completed theoretical formulation in Soviet Marxism. By combining these heterogeneous elements into a non-decomposable, non-modular assemblage, NCSMC foreclosed the possibility of revision and renewal, leading to its collapse from within, independently of changes in external conditions. However, while this article identifies the process through which the problematics developed by Nodari Simonia, Georgi Mirsky, and Kiva Maidanik — developed within the boundaries of official Marxism — were instrumentally appropriated and subsequently discarded within Korean NCSMC theory, the evaluation of these theorists themselves is deferred to a separate inquiry in the history of theory. The present article does not seek to adjudicate the validity of the social-character debate as a whole, nor to determine the correctness of any particular theory. Rather, it undertakes a critical dismantling — an exorcism — of the mode of thought, or non-thought, that organized both the debate and its theories in a determinate direction. colonial, neo-colonial, dependency, capitalism, state-monopoly capitalism, mid-level capitalism
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