Class struggle in North Korea

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

– Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

And yet, no place is quite so perfect a laboratory for Marx’s ideas of class struggle and alienation as the state that some neo-Marxists claim as a paradise of socialism, even as others wishfully declare that capitalism is breaking out there. Both views are wrong, of course. North Korea hasn’t been socialist for a long time. Its officials are accomplished profiteers and money launderers. It practices economic totalitarianism because that serves its greater goal of political totalitarianism. One form of economic totalitarianism is as good as the next:

Recent reports suggest that the consumption gap is widening in Pyongyang, increasing tension between North Korean residents and the regime. According to sources inside the country, the newly affluent middle class, known as the donju, are fueling the trend by providing premium high quality products to wealthy customers while offering sub-standard items to ordinary citizens.

“Pyongyang, the heart of the revolution, is becoming a place of severe income disparity – even more so than in a capitalist state. This is because the privileged classes are in control of the Pyongyang Department Store [No.1], the General Markets, and the trading infrastructure,” a source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK on February 27. [Daily NK]

What the report really describes is state capitalism, or crony capitalism, in which most Pyongyang residents rely for their needs on markets that are rigged by a predatory oligarchy that profits from its political connections, not its merits or talents. Party officials, their wives, and their relatives have used those connections to seize control of state stores, markets, and the trade in the goods that fill them. They have a de facto monopoly that excludes all but the highest rungs of North Korea’s political caste system:

What this has resulted in is a situation in which all the prosperous individuals are either direct relatives of officials or those who donate significant loyalty funds to government departments. Having absolute power over trading infrastructure, the donju have taken control of the market in Pyongyang with the authority to import foreign goods freely, and price them however they wish.

Any poli-sci professor at Berkeley could have told you the inevitable outcome of that:

As a result, many residents are feeling alienated from the benefits of marketization, and complaints against the regime are rising. In addition, criticisms are increasingly targeting the wealthy class who are openly squandering their money while maintaining their wealth through the political control of enterprise assets.

Consequently, the report says, “the majority of” Pyongyang residents have come to detest the donju and their conspicuous consumption.

Some of the more opinionated residents are saying that, ‘They (the cadres and donju) should be bumped off first if a war breaks out,'” a source in Pyongyang added.

Marx may or may not have said that (though Douglas Adams said something very much like it). Incidentally, North Korean defectors have told me that “when the war comes” is code talk for revolution. This is the natural result of Kim Jong-un’s policy of enriching the party elites while keeping everyone else just hungry enough to control them efficiently and enslave them profitably. Is there some law against the CIA sowing Marxist agitprop? It is malpractice that our own government’s broadcasts and information operations fail to exploit the timeless and universal appeal of class struggle, given the legitimacy of its basis in the capital of such a dangerous enemy.

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