Is North Korea truly a communist country?

Question

I'm in a bet right now with a friend who think that it is and I have been finding that it is not.

For instance, CIA - The World Factbook calls it a 'communist state one-man dictatorship' but that sounds more like a description than a clear title for their government.

Everywhere else calls it Juche Socialist Republic and a general dictatorship.

Someone please decide a clear cut, yes or no answer to this question.

Answer 1

You win. It is not a Communist state. Although there is a very small middle class Marxism demands that the state be abolished and decision making come from a dictatorship of the workers. This is clearly not happening. It is a necrocracy (the Head of State, Kim Il Sum is dead).

Answer 2

Tell you what, have a North Korean friend of yours take down the picture of Papa and Baby Il and see what happens.  Better yet, give him a cellphone and tell him to call his long lost relatives in South Korea.

Answer 3

No, it's not communist, and it's not really socialist. It's authoritarian and despotic.

For most socialists, communism (small-c) refers to those forms of socialism which do away with money and paired exchange in favor of free access to goods and unpaired exchange. Marxists expect to create communism during the "withering away of the state." Anarchocommunists propose to create voluntary communism (alongside voluntary collectivism, voluntary mutualism, etc.). By either definition, communism is a stateless society.

As for relatives in the south... The North Korean government would make it hard to use that cell phone. The South Korean and United States governments killed hundreds of thousands of dissidents who fled the north before the Korean War. All three are states. All three are systems of violence.

http://praxeology.net/blog/2008/05/25/an...

"Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million. That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is “very conservative,” said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press."