Most socialist country

[seanobr]

If our definition of socialism is merely the collective deprivation of a state's population, then the North Korea of today might qualify, since by any metric it has never recovered from the famine that followed Kim Il-sung's death or the songun strategy that helped solidify Kim Jong-il's rule at the expense of any rational economic management.  North Korea is still nominally socialist, in that it has everything you would expect to find in a country that willingly modeled itself after the Soviet Union and didn't undergo the evolution that China and Vietnam have embraced, but that identification is only useful to distinguish North from South and imbue the state with a legitimacy it otherwise would not have.  There is more than one paradox inherent in the D.P.R.K.'s existence, but the most salient is that if it ever were to relinquish its rhetorical commitment to socialism and natural desire to unify the peninsula under Communist control, the North would lose its reason for being.  As long as the Kim family is portrayed as the embodiment of the revolutionary ideal, and that belief is the animating purpose of the state, North Korea has no choice but to remain socialist in self-conception, because any reform would imperil the state's survival.  I want to be careful not to depict the North as immutable, because it has shown pragmatism in the past when trying to advance its national interest, such as Kim Il-sung's infamous meeting with Shin Kanemaru, but even a D.P.R.K. with a formal market economy would find dispensing with its socialist lexicon difficult.

Most people are unaware that, in the period immediately after the Korean War, the North managed to establish a relatively successful command economy, an extraordinary achievement given the devastation inflicted upon it by America's unrelenting aerial bombardment during the conflict.  It weaned itself off of Soviet reconstruction assistance much sooner than the South was able to with its American support; the original Chollima Movement's collectivization was not as disastrous as it might have been given Kim Il-sung's zealousness, although it produced no tangible improvement in the North's standard of living and, since rationing remained in place, was eventually moderated; and the North regularly exceeded its central planning targets, leaving it with a higher GDP per capita than the South into the Ford administration.  Indeed, the North Korean state probably reached its apogee in 1972, when Kim Il-sung, after consolidating his institutional control throughout the preceding decade, made his alteration to the constitution and created the position of President for himself, an arrangement that would remain in place until his death.  The overriding theme since has been one of erosion, at first contained and then abrupt and catastrophic, overwhelming the state's insolvent ideology and ability to compensate.  The collapse of public distribution and the industrial sector inevitably gave rise to a shadow market economy, as much of the populace was forced into trading to survive, and it has proven so integral to the functioning of the state that an order to end market activity during the Kim Jong-il mourning period was retracted almost immediately after its issuance.

In actuality, North Korea is the most stratified society currently in existence, something that is not inconsistent with its claim to be protecting an authentic Korean identity, as Silla's bone rank classification or the Yi Dynasty's caste system would attest to.  Until the famine, one's songbun -- which is frequently rendered into the traditional 'core', 'wavering', and 'hostile' groupings but may be a more diverse continuum with over fifty separate categories -- was supreme, contributing to every facet of an individual's life.  Kim Il-sung's revolutionary colleagues, their descendants, and the students of Mangyongdae Revolutionary School were at the height of privilege and deference, while those who collaborated with the Japanese colonial administration, religious activists, and the yangban who managed to preserve their position after Korea lost its independence suffered tremendously, thus inverting the traditional hereditary elite and, during the state's founding, emboldening Kim Il-sung's immature power base.  An ideal example of the former is Choe Ryong-hae, the son of Choe Hyon, who fought with Kim Il-sung in Manchuria and later became Vice President of the country; Ryong-hae is a party secretary, member of the Central Committee and Central Military Commission, had a personal relationship with Kim Jong-il, and was no doubt incubated in an environment far different from those with only a minutely deficient songbun.  I would not find it surprising if there are areas of the country where the absence of control is total control, those cast down no longer meaningfully participating in any social community and left to survive on their own, their isolation and desperation precluding any sort of meaningful discontent.

However, the introduction of the jangmadang and private commerce, coupled with a tolerance the state has had to adopt in order to endure the famine and its own dysfunction, has mitigated the impact of a negative songbun and is even fundamentally altering the type of individuals who are perceived as desirable and successful.  The absence of a credible central economy has led to a redefinition of the North's society, with a legitimization of the inequality that the North dedicated much of its existence to obscuring and the empowerment of women being the two most notable effects.  It's engendered bureaucratic conflict, with Jang Song-taek and O Kuk-ryol at one time competing against each other to earn foreign exchange, and it's telling that the D.P.R.K.'s equivalent of princelings, the Ponghwajo, are all involved in commerce, overwhelmingly illicit, with Kang Tae Sung and O Se Hyon foremost among this group.  A position with the party or government no longer possesses the prestige it once did, which is both positive and negative; the organic change that has come about as a result of the state's incapacity could eventually flower into something more significant, although I'm quite reluctant to make that argument my own and would not pursue a foreign policy dependent on it.  At the same time, the regime's continued erosion of power, both internally and with respect to the South, will make it even more dependent on its nuclear arsenal to substantiate itself.