Beyond that, what are their plans for the future? How does its government function and what is the general opinion that the DPRK’s people have of their country?
Most importantly, where can I read about this sort of thing myself?
I’ll give you what I’ve learned from reading DPRK resources and watching documentaries.
What is North Korea like?
On the surface, it’s just another third world country under sanctions. Socialism-wise, it’s a pretty solid system. State-planned economy with state ownership of means of production and collectivised agriculture. Pyongyang is very highly developed and a very nice place to live in, and although the other cities look depressing to some because of all the concrete the wealth gap isn’t really that big among people of similar professions.
Pyongyang has a robust public transit system with subways and trolleybuses, and there is lots of traffic at rush hour. I believe most of the other cities besides Chongjin rely mostly on buses and bikes. In general cities are small, all your basic needs are within walking or biking distance.
Under KJU the DPRK has been increasing its electricity output a lot, and most cities can expect electricity to be available, but there are frequent outages as in line with other third-world countries. Water is a bit more iffy, the pumps kind of suck and usually you can expect tap for like three hours a day, but it’s scheduled so you just have to time your showers and bring up water manually other times of the day.
Employment is guaranteed. You apply for a job at the employment office and your workplace will provide housing for you. Under the Taean work system you can elect your managers and make decisions affecting the nearly community, similar to Soviets in the USSR. Healthcare is guaranteed and high quality, but it suffers from sanctions. Medicine from pharmacies is insanely cheap. KJU revived the Public Distribution System, which provides monthly rations of basic groceries such as grain and fruits for a nominal price of about 20 KPW. Your rations are distributed to your home by your squad leader, who is an elected head of your apartment building who handles basic administrative tasks.
The average North Korean makes about 80,000 KPW a month from state jobs, although this can vary based on your profession. Although this is worth about $10 on the black market, it goes a lot further in purchasing power. There’s no income tax; the government funds essential services and government projects by raising prices on non-essential items. But since your basic needs are covered, your salary is basically pocket money. Some groceries like meat, dairy, snacks, and grains beyong your ration will be bought with your salary. Eating out in a restaurant in Pyongyang is pretty pricy, which a full meal probably costing you 1000 to 2000 KPW. Basically, you have to live a bit more frugally but you have more freedom with your money since you don’t really have bills to pay.
Work/life balance is honestly really good. The constitution guarantees an 8-hour workday, with reductions for certain professions like coal miners and women with children. Most factory workers work 9am-7pm with a 2 hour lunch break in between. Weekends are a bit more complicated; Sunday is off, but Saturdays are a “political education day” where people study the Juche idea and participate in their civic duties. The DPRK has 71 national holidays a year, all of which are a day off of work. On top of this you get paid time off and good maternal leave. Foreign companies working with the DPRK often complain that North Koreans have too many days off! Like other socialist countries it’s hard to get fired from your job and if you do, you usually get another job quickly, so there’s no worry of getting sacked for taking too many holidays.
Wages within the workplace are mostly egalitarian, but workers get decent bonuses for fulfilling personal quotas and there is a work-point system where workers are rewarded for small bonunses for working hard, helping coworkers, volunteering for cleaning up, etc.
What are their plans for the future?
Right now the DPRK is mostly focusing on closing the wealth gap throughout the country. Because of industrialization and the Ardous March the countryside often lagged behind a lot in development. When Kim Jong-Un took office it was one of his promises to deal with the urban-rural wealth gap. One of the major contributions to this was restarting the PDS so even the most mountainous regions can have access to basic calories. People in areas like Ryangang are still malnourished, but they’re no longer starving. There has also been a gigantic campaign of developing vollages, with new housing and factories being built.
The country is also continously striving for greater self reliance, especially under sanctions. Some great progress has been made on manufacturing locally-made medical equipment, buses, subway cars, and consumer goods so the country can save hard currency as sanctions continue to get worse. The transition to green energy is still slow due to a lack of raw materials but it’s moving along; solar and wind has gotten more prevalent and hydropower has been doing a good job with dealing with the oil sanctions and increasing electricity availability.
How does their government function?
Here’s a good resource on that: http://www.lalkar.org/article/2654/the-democratic-structure-of-the-dprk
TL;DR: A democratic structure similar to other socialist countries. Universal suffrage at age 17, anyone can run for office. Unlike other socialist nations, parties other than the main vanguard party, the Workers Party of Korea, are legal and hold a sizable minority. Representative democracy functions alongside more local worker-council democracy in the form of the Taean work system.
Despite common belief, Kim Jong-Un is not a dictator. In fact, North Korea doesn’t even have a head of state; the role of president acted as head of state, and that post was abolished with Kim Il-Sung’s death, which is why he was referred to as the “Eternal President”. This also disproves that the DPRK is a monarchy since all 3 Kims held different roles in government, and KIS and KJI’s roles were split up into smaller positions after their death. As the socialist system develops in the DPRK, the collective leadership becomes more distributed and decentralized.
DPRK people’s opinions of their country
The DPRK people have a very strong revolutionary spirit, easily the highest of any AES state. There is a very strong collective spirit within the community as well. They support of the government is a bit harder to gauge, but the WPK, the main vanguard party, holds 88% of the seats in the Supreme People’s Assembly. I can’t find any sources on Kim Jong-Un’s approval rating, but if the 100% figure in elections given by Western media doesn’t even matter really much since KJU’s more of a representation of the country than someone with real political power.
Where can I read about this myself?
Some good sources I recommend are the book a Capitalist in North Korea, which while a bit biased towards capitalism gives a good insight into daily life. YoungPioneerTours also has some good articles on aspects of daily life. Some documentaries I recommend are Boy Boy’s The Haircut, Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, My Brothers and Sisters in the North, and the SAO Documentary North Korea World series. The Youtube channel Phuong DPRK daily has good resources and videos, the Korean Friendship Association has good reading materials, and of course reading the DPRK Constitution, Criminal Code, and their state media is a good resource as well.
I’ve barely scratched the surface about the DPRK, so please, please tell me if you have any more additional questions!
The average North Korean makes about 80,000 KPW a month from state jobs, although this can vary based on your profession.
But since your basic needs are covered, your salary is basically pocket money.
Eating out in a restaurant in Pyongyang is pretty pricy, which a full meal probably costing you 1000 to 2000 KPW.
Doesn’t this mean your average citizen could afford to eat out more than 40 times a month? What the actual fuck? Most Amerikkkans can’t afford to do that. If that is true, that makes North Korea’s economic system ridiculously resilient, and proves that socialism and cooperation just works better.
Well of course, you’re not going to be spending your entire salary on eating out. Consumer goods and other things are going to be pretty expensive, as well as everything else that’s non-essential. For example, a packet of cookies at Daesong Department Store is 750KPW, which adjusted for purchasing power and salary would be equivalent to like 40 dollars for an American middle-class family. Stuff like smartphones which have foreign parts are extremely expensive due to the fact that the KPW doesn’t convert to foreign currency very well.
But I guess due to the lack of landlords leeching unnecessary value off of tenants in the DPRK, people would have a decent amount of spending cash compared to a minimum wage worker in the US.
Also, the 80k figure I gave is based on the most reliable source I could find, which is based on a South Korean study interviewing 1,000 DPRK defectors. However, this study only goes up to 2011 and I don’t know how the currency has changed after that. Wage information on the DPRK is so hard to get because of all the conflicting sources, I see sources going from 5,000 KPW (Generic US Media) to 30,000 KPW (NK News) to 80,000 KPW (The South Korean study).
About pricing, you can learn more about the pricing of some goods by watching the SAO Documentary series or checking out DPRK 360 at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.214181025372400.1073741832.211159445674558, where they eat food in Pyongyang and you can see some pricing labels.
But I guess due to the lack of landlords leeching unnecessary value off of tenants in the DPRK, people would have a decent amount of spending cash compared to a minimum wage worker in the US.
I’m going to guess this is what’s happening. The United States is such an evil country that they basically bribe their populace to not care about the war crimes they commit, but the US capitalists and landlords still can’t resist exploiting its citizens for profit, leading to even the most oppressed and imperialized socialist country having better quality of life, by virtue of them just actually caring about their own population.
I can’t say that’s it’s actually that much better than your average USian, especially because expensive tech goods are super easy to get here in the US compared to most countries, I imagine, but I do think that based on what you described, “saving up” for expensive consumer goods like that is legitimately reasonable in North Korea, as opposed to the United States, where your entire earning is dumped into your landlord’s pockets every month. Of course, actually saving up could still be impossible despite that, given issues like “the amount of money a phone could cost due to sanctions and the cost of international trade is more than a regular person could make in an entire lifetime”, but the fact they’ve put something together like this at all just shows the power of socialism when faced with adversity.
Just a quick tidbit, but although pricing on phones is hard to come buy since foreigners can’t buy them, the Samjiyon tablet (a mid-high range tablet by DPRK standards) costs about 30,000KPW. Pretty expensive, but with some saving up it’s a reasonable price for most Koreans.
Sorry for giving incorrect information, the pricing info I gave was based on images from 2013. In 2014 there was a massive wage reform which increased wages by an insane amount and also rose prices by a lot. As of recently, according to Young Pioneer Tours in a mall food court in Pyongyang you get hotdogs for 5,000KPW, dumplings for 1,000KPW, roasted duck for 8,000KPW, Japanese pancake for 12,000KPW, and a plate of Mandu (dumplings) for 4,000KPW. These are more speciality items, but the point is that eating out is pretty expensive and DPRK citizens can’t eat out 40 times a month.
About wages, 80,000 is an average but there is a decent differential in wages depending on the sector. Industries like textile give wages of about 15,000KPW/month, a cosmetics factory in Sinuiju gives around 80,000-110,000KPW/month, and more demanding professions like heavy industry and coal mining gives 300,000KPW/month.
Any other books?
If you have’t read it yet I highly recommend reading a Capitalist in North Korea, as well as the Understanding Korea series you can find on the KFA website.
This also disproves that the DPRK is a monarchy since all 3 Kims held different roles in government, and KIS and KJI’s roles were split up into smaller positions after their death.
to further demolish that monarchy nonsense, just like to point out that Korea is a confucionist country, i haven’t read much on eastern philosophy to point out how this fits but some trusty comrades said that this “succession” of the kim family is because of that, so KJU has a lot of prestige because this family also did great deeds, his great grandfather (or great great don’t remember) fought a attempt of colonization by statunians, in which he burned their ship, and there is his grandparents that doesn’t need any commentary. imho he is doing a very good job in running the country against impossible odds, not only the insane economic blockade there is also a shit load of ordnance pointed to then
Wow, you made me wanna move there, very cool. It’s really too bad the geopolitical conditions are such that we can’t, say, go there on a working holiday visa.
Yeah, I would love to live there for a bit to see how life functioned, but sadly you can’t get citizenship unless you either do something of great merit to the nation or if you are a persecuted revolutionary seeking asylum. In both of those cases you can submit a petition to the Supreme People’s Assembly.
when and how will the sanctions end?
Only when the US loses its world hegemony will socialist states be free to pursue their own development.
This question has been asked many times here, most recently: “How to disprove the lies about the DPRK? (Totalitarian, monarchy, starvation, execution for petty things, etc.)” I suggest you search “dprk” and “North Korea” on Lemmygrad, and you’ll find many good sources reposted time and time again (like this or this).
These are excellent, thank you very much!
I really like this playlist of Chinese tourists from ~2017. Just one resource for you to check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZZOE_V1LEY&list=PLegd4KP36a0Y775Xl_HI_tvDKB6qoxPrx
“so little information exits” well, there’s some tips:
-http://uriminzokkiri.com/index.php?lang=eng
-http://www.korfilm.com.kp/en/kofilm?type=11
you can use “sites: .pk” in some search engines to find dprk pages…“.pk” is the domain of dprk
Correction: the domain of the DPRK is .kp, .pk is for pakistan.
oops, my bad
