North Korean capitalism?

"Bureau 39: Kim´s Cash Machine" is a 2019/2021 documentary made by the German public broadcaster DW. On YouTube, it´s been retitled "How does North Korea finance a nuclear weapons program?". However, the production says relatively little about this. Rather, it deals in a more general manner with the North Korean regime´s ways of rounding the UN-imposed sanctions on the country. A humorous detail is that the documentary sounds "leftist", denouncing the DPRK as "capitalist", "aristocratic" and "exploitative", ruled  by a "rich elite", and so on. Probably all true, but whatever happened to the standard "Commie gooks with breadlines" angle? 

Bureau 39 (also called Office 39) is a secretive North Korean agency, charged with obtaining foreign currency for the Kim regime by essentially any means necessary. DW claims that Western fashion brands make us of North Korean sweatshop and concentration camp labor through Chinese middlemen. Further, over 100,000 North Korean workers are employed all around the world, mostly in Russia and China. Their earnings are confiscated by the North Korean authorities. The film crew managed to interview a North Korean guestworker in Poland! Their compound was guarded by DPRK secret service. 

There is also a global network of North Korean bars and restaurants, staffed by North Korean citizens, who work for free, while the revenue stream goes to the regime back home in Pyongyang. The DW team visited one such restaurant in Cambodia, which catered primarily to Western tourists. 

North Korean ships sail around the world under false flags. DW claims that this fleet is used to provide Assad´s military in Syria with the necessary ingredients to make chemical weapons. Bureau 39 is also into arms smuggling and large-scale computer hacking. 

The border between China and North Korea seems extremely porous. During the famine of the 1990´s, a huge black market emerged in North Korea, a market for smuggled Chinese goods. Kim Jong-un´s regime has decided not to stop this trade, but rather to capitalize on it. The smugglers have evolved into an entirely new class, known as "Masters of Money", and are allowed to thrive in North Korea, even being allowed to live in the closed city of Pyongyang. They even work for Office 39! The regime has also legalized some of the black markets for Chinese goods, In return, the NEPmen must pay protection money to the Communist authorities...

It´s obvious that China is North Korea´s main beneficiary, and couldn´t care less about the UN sanctions. Every day, huge trucks drive through on the bridge across the Yalu River (the border). As already noted, many North Koreans work in China. What is less obvious is the Western complicity, but it must be there. Not just the greed of some French fashion house, but some  kind of geopolitical, or perhaps purely economic, calculation that North Korea is better (for capitalism) under an authoritarian regime, despite its nuclear weapons. Trump presumably tried to "turn" Kim Jong-un and make him more friendly to the United States, perhaps on account of the large and largely untapped mineral resources of North Korea?  

As for Communism and capitalism, I agree that North Korea isn´t "socialist" or "communist" in the sense expected by Marx, but that still begs the question of whether Marx´ visions were realistic or not as actually stated. North Korea could have been authoritarian and statist anyway, "Marxism" simply being a convenient cover. It´s frankly amazing why some leftists still today support North Korea (or China for that matter), since nothing in the trajectory of these nations indicate that they are moving closer to the classless and moneyless goal associated with classical Marxism. 

With that little reflection, I end my review of "Bureau 39: Kim´s Cash Machine".