How come taxes were abolished in North Korea? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

I've only seen the tax thing in passing, unfortunately! You're right that it's tough to get highly-detailed information on government revenue and internal policy in North Korea; they haven't historically been interested in discussing any of this with outsiders.

North Korea did indeed levy taxes on its citizens between its "founding" (more or less August/September 1945) and 1974. However, it would probably be more accurate to say that taxation started whenever the Soviet-led transitional government actually got a bureaucracy in place to enable it. Sadly, I don't know when that happened.

There's an interesting passage about the less-than-popular tax regime in Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader:

Another (official) dissected Kim’s economic policies: “Farmers compose 80 percent of the population. … After Liberation they were offered a good opportunity for a better life but they remain very poor. The government’s taxation policy is incorrect. Instead of 25 to 27 percent tax they took more than 50 percent from the farmers. Such a policy continues to this day. It is not necessary to recount the methods used in 1954–1955 to gather taxes. Tax gathering was accompanied by beatings, murders and arrests. The party’s activities are based on violence, not persuasion. The (agricultural) co-operative movement is based on violence.”

This was pretty consistent with policies that Kim il-Sung and his fellows had implemented when they were running around as anti-Japanese guerrillas in northeastern China before World War II. It was less taxation than the notion that property was meant to be shared and that the state should own both the means and the results of production. In his memoirs about the years in Manchuria, Kim relates a story about an irritated villager objecting to spoons and chopsticks' becoming communal property, and you could call that an early sign of later and more concerted resistance to what was seen as state intrusion and greed. An internal revolt against tax policy by the so-called Yan'an (or Yenan) faction, a group of Chinese-Koreans, prompted one of Kim il-Sung's increasingly effective purges in the late 1950s.

So how'd we get this information? Via the ever-helpful Soviets, who may not have been hugely interested in publicizing the many issues they had with the Kim regime during the Cold War, but quietly recorded them all the same. The Russian state archives hold a collection of interviews and transcripts between Soviet and North Korean officials that come to us via Andrei Lankov. The NK officials who disagreed with Kim's policies often complained privately to their Soviet counterparts in the hopes of getting the Soviets to exert some measure of control over what Kim was doing. Not only did they not succeed -- Kim quite successfully consolidated power in the wake of the Korean War -- but the vast majority of them (both Soviet-Koreans and Chinese-Koreans alike) were subsequently forced to leave North Korea, or else deposited into the camps that Kim was then building to hold his political enemies.

What school of thought influenced them? This is touchy. I'm not sure that we could really distill it to any one branch of political philosophy or economic school. The initial impulse behind the communalization of property was at least nominally Marxist. However, North Korea was (and remains) a witch's brew of Stalinism, Marxism, Confucianism, reactionary geopolitics, and (increasingly) naked self-interest on the part of Kim il-Sung. It's not for nothing that a few commenters simply despair of assigning it to any one category and simply refer to it as kimilsungism.

Anyway, taxes were abolished in North Korea for two reasons:

Propaganda value: As you quote here, they were (publicly) seen as the "remnants of an antiquated society," something that cruel capitalist nations did to forcibly extract wealth from its poorest citizens to be directed to the aims of the wealthy and powerful. In a state where citizens were the masters of production and everyone pooled their labor and wealth to be distributed fairly, taxation was simply superfluous. North Koreans' needs were provided for by the state, and workers were allotted small salaries to be used for hobbies or entertainment at their discretion. (Or at least, that's how it was supposed to work, but never really did.)
The pointlessness of taxing a population that was effectively enslaved: Well, "enslaved" is probably a strong word for it, but NK's society was so highly restricted that it's not that far off the mark. The results and/or value of your labor was absorbed by the state and then returned to you in the form of food, clothing, and housing. However, NK had constant issues providing food sufficiency, the quality of the clothing was generally low, and there was a constant lack of quality housing. This was a pretty far cry from Kim il-Sung's stated desire for the people to "wear silk clothing, live in houses with tiled roofs, and eat rice with meat soup every day." By his own metric, he failed abysmally at doing this.

From a certain perspective, you could make the argument that North Korean citizens never actually stopped being "taxed" -- it was just that the state was absorbing something like 95% of their productivity, and a bureaucracy developed around managing that rather than collecting and processing taxes. To be honest, someone who dabbles more in economic history could probably explain this part a lot better than I can.

Do we have any information about how the population reacted to the abolition of taxes? I'm not sure. Our information on how the average North Korean really thought through societal events or cultural shifts is very limited, and only started to improve with the 1994-1998 famine and subsequent surge in the number of defectors. We know what the North Korean state SAID about their reactions -- namely, that everyone was unanimously behind Kim il-Sung's decisions -- but that's about it. I don't think I've seen defector commentary on the abolishment of taxes, but I'd love to find one.