THE POLITICS OF DEPENDENT CAPITALISM 41
groups' provide the entry points for political and economic influence within the periphery. The military and political elite of the Rightist regimes of South-East Asia form these social groups. They man the top institutions in the newly emerging state and have access to power and privilege. For cementing the relationships with interlocking classes—'national/bureaucratic/foreign/corporate'—the ideal organisational structure is provided by the 'export processing zone*. Manufacture is confined to 'moments' in the industrial process—a kind of fragmented industrialisation which envelopes not all stages of manufacture but one of several stages—component production or the final process only in the form of assembly units. This fragmentation of the industrial process makes external support for the completion of the manufacturing process a necessity and binds the national bour-geosie in the Third World states with foreign capitalist classes in an interlocking relationship.
Maintaining this class alliance on firm foundations and widening its political base become an important consideration for imperial capital. Here the political leverage of a widely based 'intermediate strata' is significant. Class formation in Third World societies tends to be fluid and volatile, not definite as in developed social structures where class formation is based largely on production relations. In Third World societies there is a very large base of 'intermediate strata' rooted in the state structure. These are the functionaries that man the state bureaucratic and military structure. They do not own property and do not form the land-owning classes. Neither do they merely form a wage earning class selling their labour power to the state. Their class origins are not based on production relations. Since they are not firmly rooted in the class structure, their class allegiances tend to be volatile—veering towards the external imperialist centres for support, occasionally even veering towards the working classes when there is a mass upsurge. Standing to gain much more power and privilege with external support, the class alliance gets firmly interlocked in metropolitan-biased alliances. These should not appear too externally-oriented. For national legitimacy considerations, control must appear to lie with the Third World state.
The political form shaping the supportive state structure lies behind its apparent economic success. For the success of the E P Z experiment, the Third World state must be fashioned so that the institutional make-up and the interplay of class relationships within the state facilitate access to imperial capital.
Under such conditions the military emerges as the most suited political form.3 It represents force, stability, repression—ingredients capital requires for successful exploitation of the Third World state. Labour must be repressed and prevented from effective mobilisation so that it provides the best terms for metropolitan capital. In Chile the military junta went so far as to offer to pay part of the otherwise