“North Korea, being a communist country, has a pension system,” reports a special series in The Guardian (links below), and that sounds nice, until you get to the second half of the sentence: “although payouts are only about US 50 cents a month.” Fifty cents goes farther there than here, but it doesn’t go far enough to survive. It used to, though even then surviving as an old person in North Korea meant living in great poverty. Now it doesn’t:

Under Kim Il-sung this was manageable because the elderly also had access to the state’s public distribution system. But now, with the distribution chain largely dysfunctional, old people go to markets to trade for as long as they can. Otherwise they have to rely on their children for survival.

Which works if your child is a member of the ruling elite, but otherwise it doesn’t. The article reports that farmers working on collective farms can only keep a small part of the food they grow and workers earn only the equivalent of $1 to $2 a month.

Classed at Birth

In this society supposedly based on Marx, including his dream of a classless society, people are rigidly defined, at birth, in castes depending on what their paternal ancestors did and what connections their family has. If you’re born into the wrong caste, as most North Koreans are, life will stink. Remember that $1 to $2 a month.

The first thing a newborn gets from the state is its songbun – one of the five social statuses allocated to all North Koreans. Depending on the status of its father, the infant will be classified as either “special”, “nucleus”, “basic”, “complex” or “hostile”.

A policeman will stamp the songbun on the baby’s new file, establishing where this North Korean will be allowed to live, which university it will be able to enter, where it might work and whether it will be able to join the Korean Worker’s party.

But even a rigid system has its flexible points. “North Korean bureaucrats take bribes readily, so bad songbun or poor results can be overcome” by paying off the right people, though there is probably a sharp limit to how much bribery can help someone rise between castes.

If you’re in the lower three castes, and especially if you’re a “hostile” (maybe because your grandfather was the wrong type of Communist), there’s no hope for you. If you’re making just $1 or $2 a month, you won’t have much extra money for bribes anyway, even if they worked.

North Korean school children stand before the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang.

And the Schooling …

When the child gets old enough for school, the subjects he will be taught include detailed knowledge of the official stories — let’s assume there’s some gap between the truth and the official stories — of the country’s founding tyrant, the founding tyrant’s tyrant son, and the founding tyrant’s tyrant son’s tyrant son (Kim Jong-un, currently in power). North Korean children all study

The childhood years of the Beloved and Respected Leader Generalissimo Kim Il-sung, The childhood years of the Great Guide Generalissimo Kim Jong-il, Revolutionary activities of the Beloved and Respected Leader Generalissimo Kim Il-sung, Revolutionary activities of the Great Guide Generalissimo Kim Jong-il, Revolutionary activities of the heroine of the anti-Japanese struggle mother Kim Jong-suk and, more recently, Revolutionary activities the Beloved and Respected Leader Marshal Kim Jong-un.

This doesn’t change even when the child grows up and rises into the privileged castes. Say he becomes a professor. As here, academics must publish, but when they do they have to publish in North Korean journals. Every single article

has to include a quote from one of the Kims introduced by one of the following formulae: “The Great Leader respected comrade Kim Il-sung taught the following…”, “The Great Guide respected comrade Kim Jong-il instructed the following…” or “The Beloved and respected comrade Kim Jong-un said the following…”

This rule is followed in every article, including science subjects and mathematics. First a quote from a Kim and only then may you begin your research.

We’re the Enemy

And finally, such a regime needs enemies to cement its people’s allegiance, because impoverishing and oppressing them can scare them into obedience but it can’t make them feel they need to defend the country to defend themselves. So it has enemies, chief among them “American imperialists, Japanese militarists and the South Korean ‘gang of traitors’. They are to be hated, so one should say not that ‘an American died,’ but rather ‘an American scum kicked the bucket’.”

North Korean soldiers march during a mass military parade at Kim Il-Sung square in Pyongyang.

I hope your feelings aren’t hurt, fellow scum. One final thing before the links to the series, which I recommend reading. The writer mentions in passing that North Korea no longer uses the word “Communist.” Even North Korea isn’t completely behind the times. And it’s a democracy too!

Becoming an adult also means one has a duty to vote. Or rather, to go to the polling station, take a ballot with one name on it, bow to the leaders’ portraits and put the ballot in the box. This is voting in North Korea, and there has never been a single vote against the official candidate since 1958.

 Here are the three parts of the series: 

Life in North Korea: The Early Years

Life in North Korea: Coming of Age

Life in North Korea: The Adult Years

FWIW: The series doesn’t mention religion at all. The regime’s persecution of religious people is one of the saddest things of all. But would-be gods like the country’s tyrants don’t tolerate competition. That may explain why the nation doesn’t use the word “Communist” anymore: as an ideology that demands obedience, it’s another god. Why listen to Marx when you’ve got the Beloved and Respected Leader Marshal Kim Jong-un?