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The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a new democratic moment. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in South Korea and China, The Capitalist Unconscious shows how the hegemonic democratic politics of the post-Cold War era (reparation, peace, and human rights) have consigned the rights of migrant laborers—protagonists of transnational Korea—to identity politics, constitutionalism, and cosmopolitanism. Park reveals the riveting capitalist logic of these politics, which underpins legal and policy debates, social activism, and media spectacle. While rethinking the historical trajectory of Cold War industrialism and its subsequent liberal path, this book also probes memories of such key events as the North Korean and Chinese revolutions, which are integral to migrants’ reckoning with capitalist allures and communal possibilities. Casting capitalist democracy within an innovative framework of historical repetition, Park elucidates the form and content of the capitalist unconscious at different historical moments and dissolves the modern opposition among socialism, democracy, and dictatorship. The Capitalist Unconscious astutely explores the neoliberal present’s past and introduces a compelling approach to the question of history and contemporaneity.

This book examines the genesis, mechanisms, and dynamics of forging a network-based economy in China during the crisis and the restructuring act that followed. Through historical analysis of the entire range of communications, from telecommunications to broadband, from wireless networks to digital media, it explores how the state, entangled with market forces and class interests, constructs and realigns its digitalized sector. It argues that corporatization, networking, and investment within the state-dominated realm of communications intensified after the 2008 global economic crisis, to overcome the contradictions generated by the old investment-and-export dependent growth model, on the one hand, and to enhance China’s techno-economic capacities in the renewed global competition for command, on the other. Despite the qualitative changes it brought in communications, this strategy achieved limited results for economic restructuring, because the ensuing spending binges paid little attention to social needs. Ultimately, this book historicizes and theorizes China’s state-led model of digital capitalism, which contends, collaborates, and overlaps with the U.S.-dominated system of global digital capitalism. It reveals so-called cyber nationalism or networked nationalism as neither monolithic nor guaranteed but contingent upon specific political-economic relations. It also predicts the future: While China’s embrace of communications is likely to accelerate the country’s global rise, it is not going to be a simple rise to power but a continual effort to tamp down crises and manage contradictions.