When peoplehood is separated from the social relations of work and exchange, the social refers to associations among "free" individuals that constitute civil society, which the colonized must learn from the colonizer to be modern. This problem of separating people from their material conditions arises from the practice of privileging written language over other modern experiences. (5)
Although it is important for understanding the new order of people, to attribute the despotic colonial power solely to political and military institutions or the ideology of the imperialization of colonial subjects overlooks the fact that the empire existed only as long as its specific effects were institutionalized in a set of social practices that enabled the colonized to dream their own dreams. The social power implicated the colonized in the immediate social relations of production and exchange. it was through this social power that colonial authorities inserted coercive rule into the dream of the colonized, auto-valorizing the penetration of colonial power into daily life. (162)
The post-cold war era has provided a new opportunity for decolonization. Koreans in China (known as Korean Chinese), as well as Koreans in former socialist countries, have developed new economic and cultural relations with South Korea. It is apt here to consider a thesis of this book: colonialism is not simply a process of imposing a new military, political, and cultural rule on the colonized, all while representing it as a process of enlightenment. Colonialism also integrates the colonized into a global capitalist economy, inducing the commodification of land and labor in the colonies. Decolonization, therefore, requires a substantial change in the global capitalist system. If the cold war era is to be understood as an American project for establishing capitalist hegemony, the post-cold war period does not negate the goals of the cold war establishment. The post-cold war era reconfigures a capitalist order marked by an unprecedented transnational flow of capital and labor and neoliberal economic principles. (234)