Characterizing Asian capitalists

For a long time, developments in South and Southeast Asia have inspired scholars to invent a terminology specific to the region because they believed that the processes studied did not seem to fit into the existing type of classification. Marx's ‘Asiatic mode of production’, Furnivall's ‘plural society’ and Boeke's ‘dual economy’ are perhaps the most well- known concepts that were conceived in colonial times to analyse South and Southeast Asian societies. In the last few decades, several new concepts have been employed to analyse the present-day developments in South and Southeast Asia. The South Asian economy in general and that of India in particular has been characterized in terms of a ‘semi- feudal mode of production’ (Bhaduri 1973; Chandra 1974; Sau 1975), a ‘semi-colonial semi-feudal mode of production’ (Sen Gupta 1977), a ‘dual mode of production’ (Lin 1980), a ‘constrained type of merchant capitalism’ (Harriss 1981), an ‘intermediate form of capitalist development’ (Harriss 1982) and a socio-economic structure dominated by ‘commercialism’ (Van der Veen 1976; Streefkerk 1985). The terms ‘rent capitalism’ (Fegan 1981), ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ (Robison 1986), ‘statist capitalism’ (Jomo 1988), ‘dependent capitalism’ and ‘ersatz capitalism’ (Yoshihara 1988) have been employed to analyse Southeast Asian economies, such as those of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

What all these concepts have in common is the insistence that the characteristics of South and Southeast Asian developments are so specific that they merit a terminology specific to the region. The relations of production in these societies are held to be of a mixed nature. Capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production are intertwined without any tendency of capitalist relations becoming more dominant. Merchant or financial capital is powerfully developed at the expense of productive capital; capital circulation instead of capital accumulation is the dominant tendency in South and Southeast Asia. Development of South and Southeast Asian capitalism has been largely confined to the tertiary sector: commerce, trade and services.