Communist Wealth

From Yahoo:

"North Korea's caste system faces power of wealth"

 For more than a half-century, a mysterious caste system has shadowed the life of every North Korean. It can decide whether they will live in the gated compounds of the minuscule elite, or in mountain villages where farmers hack at rocky soil with handmade tools. It can help determine what hospital will take them if they fall sick, whether they go to college and, very often, whom they will marry. It is called songbun. And officially, it does not exist at all. The power of caste remains potent, exiles and scholars say, generations after it was permanently branded onto every family based on their supposed ideological purity. But today it is also quietly fraying, weakened by the growing importance of something that barely existed until recently in socialist North Korea: wealth. Like almost all change in North Korea's deeply opaque society, where so much is hidden to outsiders, the shift is happening slowly and often silently. But in the contest for power within the closed world that Pyongyang has created, defectors, analysts and activists say money is now competing with the domination of political caste. Songbun, a word that translates as "ingredient" but effectively means "background," first took shape in the 1950s and '60s. It was a time when North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, was forging one of the world's most repressive states and seeking ways to reward supporters and isolate potential enemies. Historians say songbun was partially modeled on Soviet class divisions, and echoes a similar system that China abandoned in the 1980s amid the growth of the market economy there. In Korea, songbun turned a fiercely hierarchical society upside down, pushing peasants to the top of the caste ladder; aristocrats and landlords toward the bottom. The very top was reserved for those closest to Kim: his relatives and guerrillas who had fought with him against Korea's Japanese occupiers. Very quickly, though, songbun became a professional hierarchy. The low caste became farmers and miners. The high caste filled the powerful bureaucracies. And children grew up and stepped into their parents' roles. Certainly, few ordinary North Koreans understand the staggering and sometimes shifting complexities of songbun, which at its core divided the entire population into three main categories — "core," ''wavering" and "hostile" classes — and subdivided those into some four dozen subcategories. North Koreans with songbun good enough for the top jobs will still likely get minimal salaries, but perks for the elite could include a good apartment in Pyongyang, regular electricity, access to quality medical clinics and easier admission to top schools for their children. In a culture where parents have immense influence over the choice of their children's spouses, high-songbun partners are prized. But to be caught at the bottom, defectors say, is to be lost in a nightmare of bloodline and bureaucracy. But while North Korea is often portrayed as a Soviet throwback stranded in the 1950s, a reputation it earned with decades of isolation and single-family rule, strains of change do ripple beneath its Stalinist exterior. That has created a complex and uneasy relationship between songbun and wealth. Most North Koreans have never met a foreigner, seen the Internet, or earned more than a couple hundred dollars a month — but those in a growing economic elite now fly to Beijing and Singapore to shop. It's a country where human rights groups say well over 100,000 political prisoners are held in a series of isolated prison camps, but where an exclusive European firm, Kempinski, hopes to be running a hotel soon. The market economy first took hold during the rule of Kim Jong Il, the son of the nation's founder, who ran the country from the 1990s until his death in late 2011, when his son then took control. In the mid-1990s, poor harvests and the end of Soviet assistance lead to widespread famine. Official controls relaxed as hunger tore at the country. Reluctantly, the government allowed the establishment of informal markets, with ordinary people setting up stalls to sell food, clothes or cheap consumer goods. Since then, the government has alternately allowed the markets to flourish and cracked down on them, leaving many people working in legally gray areas. At the same time, state-sanctioned trade has also blossomed, much of it mineral exports to China.

^ .I love learning about these Communist hypocrisy. On paper, Communism seems ideal, but it has never worked in practice. Every "classless" Communist society (the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and North Korea) has several classes inside it's borders. They all have the same thing in common - take from everyone and give to a few friends and family. When I was in Russia I saw a store that used to be a Beriozka (Берёзка in Russian) store where foreigners and the Communist elite could buy Western products for hard currency - things that the ordinary Soviet citizen could only dream about seeing, much less owning.  It seems North Korea (like the rest of the world) is now run - not by ideology, but by money. Hopefully, that will bring positive changes for everyone there and not simply a few Communists. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/north-koreas-caste-system-faces-power-wealth-132110225.html;_