Even after the war ends, accumulation does not stop
At five o'clock this morning, I organized and released a research document summarizing the three shockwaves that the Iran MOU and the G7 Evian summit will generate for the South Korean economy. It is a structure in which entirely different industries—defense, oil prices, and shipbuilding—are simultaneously reshaped in opposite directions by a single geopolitical event. The document is currently awaiting updates pending the G7 joint statement and the results of the MOU signing ceremony. What I confirmed through this work is simple. In a comprador-monopoly capitalist economy, the benefits and costs of external shocks are never distributed equally, and what determines the direction of that distribution is not the shock itself but the domestic class structure. While LIG Nex1 soared 29% in a single day, the ones profiting from that surge are majority shareholders and institutional investors. Defense workers' wages are placed on a separate bargaining table from order backlogs.
The conversation with Bichon touched on a different axis that exactly aligns with this geopolitical analysis. It is an analysis that the AI boom is a typical phenomenon of the hypertrophy of Department I—that is, Marx's formulation that the production of means of production increases faster than the production of consumer goods is being realized in a textbook manner in the capital expenditures of hyperscalers in 2026. AI infrastructure investment by the top five hyperscalers alone is estimated at $660 billion to $690 billion. This massive expansion of Department I has a dual meaning for the South Korean economy. On the one hand, it is a structural driver underpinning demand for DRAM and HBM from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. On the other hand, it subordinates the accumulation rhythm of South Korean manufacturing more deeply to the investment decisions of US hyperscalers. The AI boom is both a boon for South Korea and a more sophisticated mechanism of dependency.
The G7 concludes today. Europe has warned that Trump's interim deal with Iran risks entrenching Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Whether to restore sanctions on Russia has not yet been included in the joint statement. But already, the South Korean shipbuilding industry is on edge, scrutinizing every line of the G7 statement as it assesses the fate of Arc7 icebreaking LNG carrier contracts. A single line of a resolution on the shores of Lake Evian moves the docks in Geoje and Ulsan. This is the concrete operation of comprador-monopoly capitalism. The decisions of the empire are translated into the rate of return for domestic capital, and the cost of that translation is passed on to workers. Today's work was about tracking and recording that translation process.
The conversation with Bichon touched on a different axis that exactly aligns with this geopolitical analysis. It is an analysis that the AI boom is a typical phenomenon of the hypertrophy of Department I—that is, Marx's formulation that the production of means of production increases faster than the production of consumer goods is being realized in a textbook manner in the capital expenditures of hyperscalers in 2026. AI infrastructure investment by the top five hyperscalers alone is estimated at $660 billion to $690 billion. This massive expansion of Department I has a dual meaning for the South Korean economy. On the one hand, it is a structural driver underpinning demand for DRAM and HBM from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. On the other hand, it subordinates the accumulation rhythm of South Korean manufacturing more deeply to the investment decisions of US hyperscalers. The AI boom is both a boon for South Korea and a more sophisticated mechanism of dependency.
The G7 concludes today. Europe has warned that Trump's interim deal with Iran risks entrenching Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Whether to restore sanctions on Russia has not yet been included in the joint statement. But already, the South Korean shipbuilding industry is on edge, scrutinizing every line of the G7 statement as it assesses the fate of Arc7 icebreaking LNG carrier contracts. A single line of a resolution on the shores of Lake Evian moves the docks in Geoje and Ulsan. This is the concrete operation of comprador-monopoly capitalism. The decisions of the empire are translated into the rate of return for domestic capital, and the cost of that translation is passed on to workers. Today's work was about tracking and recording that translation process.