North Korea's hegemonic rule and its collapse

ABSTRACT

Ideological leadership through the Party was at the core of the North Korean leaders’ hegemonic rule over the people, which resulted in the great popularity of Kim Il-sung. Marketisation in the wake of the economic crisis, however, significantly impaired the mechanism for rule by consent, especially by triggering the influx of outside information and undermining the Party's ideological education activities. The economic crisis led the state to adjust the mechanism of consent and coercion in such a way that the state's control over society could be restored by relying more on rule by force, which was demonstrated by the much stricter penal system, bloody purges and, most of all, military-first politics. This, nonetheless, was a temporary measure because, in Guha's terms, ‘dominance without hegemony’ would not be durable in the long term. The regime can sustain itself in the long-term only through the reinstatement of the consent mechanism, which disintegrated owing to the marketisation. However, as the marketisation, being beneficial to those who have power as well as ordinary people, is irreversible in North Korea today, the reestablishment of hegemonic rule would not be attainable.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korea
• Gramsci
• consent
• coercion
• hegemony
• marketisation

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive suggestions, which contributed a lot to improve the original manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As for Soviet Fordism, please refer to Yanowitch (1985) and Kollo (1995).

2. The committee was made up of the committee secretary, the factory manager, engineers, and workers. Regarding the party management committee, please refer to Suh (2005, pp. 868–874).

3. Mostly, the Review Meetings were held once a week, usually every Saturday morning, but there were many exceptions. For example, with respect to the institutions whose members often met foreigners, they held the Review Meetings every other day (B.-L. Kim, 2004, pp. 155–156). As it was held weekly, it was also translated into the Weekly Life Review Session (Lankov, 2015, p. 42).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yong Sub Choi

Yong Sub Choi is a visiting scholar at the University of North Korean Studies. He earned his PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick. His areas of research interests include Gramsci, South Korean political economy, North Korean political economy, and inter-Korean relations. He is the author of Fifteen Things You Sacrificed for Chaebols (in Korean) (Munhakchunchusa, 2012) and ‘Kim Dae-jung and the Persistence of Anti-communist Hegemony in South Korea’, Asian Studies Review (forthcoming Summer 2017).