Atlas / Claim checks / Is North Korea communist
Is North Korea communist? The claim, measured
“North Korea is a communist country.”
Measured against Juche and Classical Marxism
Distance is measured across six independent axes, each running from −10 to +10, out of a maximum separation of 49.0. How the scoring works →
Strongest case for the claim
All productive property is state-owned, allocation is by central plan, there is no private capital, and the state was founded by a party in the Marxist-Leninist tradition with Soviet and Chinese backing.
Strongest case against
Power has passed from father to son to grandson. The songbun system assigns life chances by inherited classification. The official doctrine replaced Marxism-Leninism with Juche and removed references to communism from the constitution in 2009. Classical Marxism is internationalist and anti-hereditary by construction.
What the coordinates show. Juche scores −10 on economics, identical to classical Marxism. On membership it scores +10 and Marxism scores −09 — nineteen points apart, the widest gap in the dataset between two entries usually filed under the same word. It is a hereditary monarchy with a Marxist vocabulary, and the coordinates say so on five of six axes.
The six measurements
| Axis | Kimilsungism | Scientific socialism | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC · Economic organisation | −10 | −10 | 0 |
| CU · Social and cultural order | +09 | −06 | 15 |
| AU · Organisation of power | +10 | +02 | 8 |
| SC · Scale of decision | +10 | +04 | 6 |
| ID · Rule of membership | +10 | −09 | 19 |
| CH · Method and tempo | −02 | +08 | 10 |
Both cases are stated because the atlas does not settle arguments by assertion. Where the underlying dispute is conceptual rather than factual, that is said plainly rather than resolved.
Full comparisonCheck it yourself
The interactive atlas holds 319 organisations on six independent axes with the evidence for every score. Paste any claim that equates two political things and it will find them and report the measurement.