Post #517740

2026-03-04 12:48 UTC

You’re no doubt well-informed on the theoretical systems of those countries but you can’t just look at the theory and say “that’s exactly how it works in real life”. It’s a fact that leadership in the DPRK has passed on from father to son for 3 generations now - any country that does that is a hereditary monarchy, not a people’s republic. Kim Jong Un was never part of the working class. He was raised in palaces and sent to an elite college in Switzerland. You don’t even need to trust any Western media on this - just watch a few minutes of North Korean TV and you’ll hear how the leaders are basically treated as gods. Many people who threatened or spoke out against their rule, including those in the “royal” family like Kim Jong Nam, have been murdered or disappeared.

Replies (4)

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2026-03-04 13:05

The Kim family does have outsized influence, but the DPRK is not a hereditary monarchy. For example, the position of President, held by Kim Il-Sung, was abolished and split into multiple positions upon his death. This is why he is remembered as the “Eternal President.” As such, both Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un have held different positions. Both have held high positions, for example Kim Jong-Il had the title of General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea, a position held by Kim Jong-Un presently. However, this is not the whole story. The actual title for a head of state is the President of the State Affairs Commission, held presently by Chong Ryong-Hae. The DPRK has a much more distributed level of power, and the Kim family is both widely supported due to its influence, and yet is not the indisputed top-dog, so to speak. What’s more, the Kim family is so venerated precisely because the legacy of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il is lived memory, imagine if Lenin had survived and raised his children as successors. It would be no wonder that the soviets would have elected his children, but it would not be a monarchy either. Finally, class. Class is not a level of material wealth, but a relation to production and distribution. The DPRK is overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned, administration is not a distinct class in and of itself but a subset of broader classes, same with intellectuals. What determines class is based on that key aspect, the Kim family does not own capital but instead recieves wages from the state. This is why it’s important to actually study the real systems at play, rather than coast on pre-formed opinions drilled into us about the DPRK from western media. The Black Panther Party maintained good relations with the DPRK, visiting it and teaching Juche to Americans. I encourage you to try to understand the DPRK from a more sympathetic angle, seeing why it has the structures it does, rather than trying to abstract it out of its essential context and analyze it in a vacuum. Such a trap is metaphysics.

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@AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml 2026-03-04 13:21

A hereditary monarchy is still not an oligarchy 🤷 But anyway, you’re only talking about the head of state. They have an entire system running there

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@QinShiHuangsShlong__dup_67153@lemmy.ml 2026-03-04 14:03

Elevating Kim Jong Nam as some poor detefector who was killed for speaking out is kind of funny given he was a CIA asset. And on all those who “disappear” for speaking out you wouldn’t happen to have a source? Ideally one that avoids the ROK defector industrial complex, ROK tabloids or RFA. “It is known” isn’t really enough to assert claims like that

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@eldavi@lemmy.ml 2026-03-04 15:32

www.tiktok.com/…/7610963982198770975

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