Corporatism as a Process of Working-class Containment and Roll-back: The Recent Experiences of South Africa and South Korea

Abstract

In this article we argue that recent debates in the corporatist literature about whether corporatism is best understood as a process of structured interest representation or political dialogue miss the point as to corporatism's central task — the shift of material resources and power away from the working class to the capitalist class, in which two processes are evident — containment and roll-back. We discuss these processes in the context of successive waves of corporatism in Western Europe from the 1940s to the 1990s before moving on to an analysis of the contrasting fortunes of corporatism in South Africa and South Korea during democratic transition. We conclude that the ability of corporatism to carry out the processes of containment and roll back in these two cases have been dependent on the existence (or absence) of supportive prior political relationships between organized labour and the state.