In the 1980s, Japan experienced a crisis of disinformation. For years, there had been mysterious disappearances of Japanese people with no known history of mental illness, drug addiction, or gambling debts. All kinds of people — men and women, young and old, just suddenly vanishing without a trace. Many theories were put forward to explain the puzzle (for instance, some believed it was alien abductions), but the most widespread, pernicious, and dangerous view was that North Korea was responsible. There were people who claimed to have actually seen teams of North Korean commandos lurking on beaches, nabbing random passers-by, and bundling them into waiting submersibles just off the coast. This was obviously crazy. Products, no doubt, of atavistic xenophobia and reactionary sentiments. The Japanese media, government, and academic authorities put a lot of effort into refuting this dangerous disinformation throughout the 1980s and 1990s…which made them look real silly when in 2002 Kim Jong-Il issued a formal apology for the abductions and ordered the surviving captives returned to Japan.
Does that sound like good news? It’s actually very bad news.
Before we get to all that, though, let me tell you about this book. The author, Andrei Lankov, knows a lot about North Korea. Lankov grew up in the Soviet Union and attended university during glasnost. But while all his buddies were wearing jeans and doing student exchange programs in Western Europe, Lankov got chosen to study at… *sad trombone* Kim Il-Sung University in Pyongyang. He’s been back many times since then, speaks fluent Korean, chats frequently with North Korean defectors, and now has a teaching position at a university in Seoul. But Lankov has one other very important quality: that peculiar Slavic combination of grim fatalism and bleak humor. An American might get huffy or moralistic writing a book about decades of mass slaughter. It takes a Russian to treat the same topic with a deadpan sense of irony, thereby resulting in a very depressing book that is also very funny.
Lankov starts with a whirlwind tour of the early years of the North Korean state. The official histories all informed me that the Ever-Victorious Generalissimo was born to poor Korean farmers, so I was surprised to learn that actually he was born to a moderately affluent family of schoolteachers, doctors, and Christian activists in Northeastern China. Similarly, my DPRK handlers had always taught me that the Eternal President spent the 1940s leading daring guerrilla raids into Korea (with his pregnant wife) from the holy slopes of Mount Paektu, so I was shocked by Lankov’s claim that he was actually chilling in Russia at a military base near Khabarovsk. Finally, I had always assumed that the Great Leader drove out the Japanese himself via the indomitable Juche spirit of the Korean people, but Lankov has the temerity to suggest that he was installed by the Soviet army instead.
Okay, so maybe Kim Il-Sung had a little bit of foreign assistance… Okay, maybe more than a little, maybe the Sun of the Nation was hand-picked by Soviet officers who also wrote the North Korean constitution, wrote all of the initial laws, and selected the precise geographic and social composition of the nascent North Korean parliament. Who cares, the important thing is that they picked poorly. Kim Il-Sung was dangerously independent, not interested in being a mere puppet, and immediately began triangulating between the Soviets and the Chinese. After all, there were things to admire about both systems — he appreciated the ideological austerity and florid personality cults of Maoism, but loved the Stalinist emphasis on centralization and heavy industry. No matter, he could pick the best aspects of both systems and combine them here, in Korea. He could build paradise.
And he could begin from a wonderful starting point. The North had a fraction of the population of the South, but it was blessed with abundant mineral resources and was quite rich and urbanized by the standards of early 20th-century Asia. Remember that the architects of Japan’s postwar industrial policy had originally been colonial administrators in Manchuria and Korea. Their legacy was a vast capital stock of heavy industry, mines, and factories — later expanded upon by the Soviets. There was more than enough here to deliver on Kim Il-Sung’s promise to the peasantry that they would “eat boiled rice and meat soup, dress in silk, and live in houses with tile roofs.” (...)
This was a pretty nice starting point, and then the Korean War and some subsequent purges enabled Kim to complete what may be the most perfect totalitarianism ever constructed. The model was Stalinism, but without all the dangerous liberality and the other compromises that crept into Soviet government over time. So for instance, in the Soviet Union under Stalin it was legal to buy food at a market. Not so in Korea under Kim, where all food would be distributed via a state rationing system. And while it was expected of Soviet graduates that they would go on to find a job, in the DPRK all jobs would be allocated by the authorities.
Another way in which Stalin was dangerously liberal was his approach to punishing dissent. A curious fact about North Korea is that it has an almost premodern caste system called songbyūn, Songbyūn is inherited via the paternal line, and if you have “good songbyūn” then your life is pretty much made from the day you’re born — you will receive a good education, good work assignments, and extra rations. If you have “bad songbyūn,” on the other hand, you are a despised slave, your life will consist of grinding labor and constant humiliations, and you will live and die with the knowledge that your descendants will suffer this too. What determines if you have good or bad songbyūn? Pretty much just what your male line ancestors were doing in 1945. There are vanishingly few ways to change songbyūn in either direction, but one of those few ways is via acts of disloyalty to the state. So a North Korean tempted to dissent has to reckon with the fact that not only will he likely be condemned to torture and execution, but his descendants will be degraded to the status of human cattle. Not just his children and his grandchildren. All of his descendants. Forever.
Similarly, it’s a well known fact within North Korea that if you commit a crime that gets you sent to a prison camp, your entire family will be sent there as well, which is a good bit stricter than Stalin ever got. (...)
Anyway, while he was building utopia inside of his country, Kim had to reckon with an increasingly hostile world outside. Relations with the Soviet Union got very strained after the death of Stalin. Kim admired Stalin as a great man, even if one marred by sentimentality, but his successors were a dangerous pack of bleeding-hearts. So Kim ordered all student exchanges to be cancelled, all Soviet advisors sent home, and all North Korean husbands to divorce their foreign wives (who were promptly expelled from the country). But just when the “pivot to China” was nearly complete, Mao kicked off the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Kim watched in horror as his neighbor descended into antinomian chaos. Before long, young Chinese Red Guards were openly criticizing Kim as a “neo-feudal ruler” (imagine), and so North Korea expelled the Chinese ambassador in turn.
As a result of all this, North Korea embraced an “equidistance” policy of diplomatic balancing, wherein it used a combination of ambiguity, guile, and blackmail to squeeze escalating economic concessions out of its now mutually-hostile sponsors. The Sino-Soviet split made this strategy extremely effective. Both sides wanted North Korea friendly to them, but above all they wanted it not to be friendly to their opponent. So North Korea was able to maintain a dollar auction where they continuously demanded that each side increase their bribes or else they’d go over to the other side. Over time, these bribes…I’m sorry, this “aid” came to constitute a majority of the North Korean economy. (...)
Everybody looking on expected the North Korean state to collapse, like many communist regimes across Eastern Europe just had. But they did not reckon with the perfect society that Kim Il-Sung, now on his deathbed, had built. Despite all advanced technological inputs vanishing, despite social organization regressing to iron age levels, and despite mass starvation of the kind most of the world hasn’t seen since Norman Borlaug, the state clung on. The sublime machinery of oppression was able to maintain its icy hold even as something close to an apocalypse unfolded. But that isn’t to say that nothing changed. The songbyūn and the prison camps and the Kim family cult all remained the same, but under the surface some big things were happening.
Imagine that you are a North Korean prison guard (that’s some good songbyūn!). For years you’ve been supervising the slave laborers at one of the massive 1930s-style collective farms that grow all the food for the country. Your orders are clear. You need to maintain order, maintain proper veneration of the Dear Leader, maintain physical and spiritual hygiene. But lately the supply of old Soviet fertilizers has run out, and the farm isn’t producing anything. Your orders are clear. It doesn’t matter that scratching at the unyielding ground is now fruitless, the slaves must continue to do it. But…if a few of them, after spending all day pointlessly failing to grow food in your collective farm, then sneak away at night and do a little extracurricular farming up in the mountains, and if they happen to give you some of the food that they produce… Your orders are clear. Maintain order, maintain proper veneration of the Dear Leader, maintain physical and spiritual hygiene. It doesn’t say “stop people from growing unauthorized food in the middle of the night” anywhere. Your orders are clear.
Lankov argues that through the crucible of famine and economic collapse, the world’s most totalitarian society seamlessly transformed into a surreal hybrid of totalitarianism and anarcho-capitalism. The farms are a good example. Approximately all of the food is now grown off-the-books, unauthorized, in the middle of the night and then sold by private dealers. But the truly demented part is that the vast, centralized state-run farms are still there, occupying all the good land, producing nothing, fully-staffed by slave-farmers who go through the motions all day, and then sneak off at night to grow food for sale in their private plots. But those private plots that produce everything are necessarily located in the worst and least productive soil, soil that the state has officially written off.
Or consider the factories. The black market economy that comprises the vast majority of North Korean GDP is dominated by women. This is a curious setup for such a fearsomely patriarchal society. But actually…it’s because the society is fearsomely patriarchal. The men are allocated jobs by the state. Many of those jobs are jobs in the factories. The problem is that the factories don’t actually exist anymore, and the machinery inside them has all been sold off for scrap metal. But the men have been assigned jobs, and the jobs are in the factories. So they sit in the rotting, empty shells of factories that haven’t functioned for decades, and that takes up a lot of their time. But the women, ah, the good North Korean woman is a housewife and a mother and a homemaker, which means she does not have a fake job in a fake factory, which means she can work a real job in a secret workshop in her house producing unauthorized goods, or buying and selling them in an unauthorized market. (...)
This “secret privatization” of the entire North Korean economy has been incredibly thorough. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat. They are actually speedrunning the entire history of primitive accumulation leading to investment leading to the joint stock corporation. Large (secret) transportation companies now exist in North Korea and maintain unofficial roads forming an unofficial transit network. The trucks and buses are smuggled in from abroad, then “donated” to various government agencies, which then lease them back in exchange for kickbacks. In this way, they’ve reinvented the idea of funding government operations through corporate taxation in a hilariously roundabout way. There is a booming private restaurant scene.
The North Korean government occasionally tries to crack down on all of this, and it’s very important to understand why. It’s not, as you might assume, because they’re true-believing hyper-Stalinists who are ideologically offended by the existence of capitalism. No, the reason they don’t like it is because it’s making their society richer and more functional.
Or consider the factories. The black market economy that comprises the vast majority of North Korean GDP is dominated by women. This is a curious setup for such a fearsomely patriarchal society. But actually…it’s because the society is fearsomely patriarchal. The men are allocated jobs by the state. Many of those jobs are jobs in the factories. The problem is that the factories don’t actually exist anymore, and the machinery inside them has all been sold off for scrap metal. But the men have been assigned jobs, and the jobs are in the factories. So they sit in the rotting, empty shells of factories that haven’t functioned for decades, and that takes up a lot of their time. But the women, ah, the good North Korean woman is a housewife and a mother and a homemaker, which means she does not have a fake job in a fake factory, which means she can work a real job in a secret workshop in her house producing unauthorized goods, or buying and selling them in an unauthorized market. (...)
This “secret privatization” of the entire North Korean economy has been incredibly thorough. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat. They are actually speedrunning the entire history of primitive accumulation leading to investment leading to the joint stock corporation. Large (secret) transportation companies now exist in North Korea and maintain unofficial roads forming an unofficial transit network. The trucks and buses are smuggled in from abroad, then “donated” to various government agencies, which then lease them back in exchange for kickbacks. In this way, they’ve reinvented the idea of funding government operations through corporate taxation in a hilariously roundabout way. There is a booming private restaurant scene.
The North Korean government occasionally tries to crack down on all of this, and it’s very important to understand why. It’s not, as you might assume, because they’re true-believing hyper-Stalinists who are ideologically offended by the existence of capitalism. No, the reason they don’t like it is because it’s making their society richer and more functional.
by John Psmith, Mr and Mrs Psmith's Bookshelf | Read more:
Images: uncredited
