The Kim family does have outsized influence, but the DPRK is not a hereditary monarchy. For example, the position of President, held by Kim Il-Sung, was abolished and split into multiple positions upon his death. This is why he is remembered as the “Eternal President.” As such, both Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un have held different positions. Both have held high positions, for example Kim Jong-Il had the title of General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea, a position held by Kim Jong-Un presently. However, this is not the whole story.

The actual title for a head of state is the Chairman of the State Affairs Commission, held presently by Chong Ryong-Hae. The DPRK has a much more distributed level of power, and the Kim family is both widely supported due to its influence, and yet is not the indisputed top-dog, so to speak. What’s more, the Kim family is so venerated precisely because the legacy of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il is lived memory, imagine if Lenin had survived and raised his children as successors. It would be no wonder that the soviets would have elected his children, but it would not be a monarchy either.

Finally, class. Class is not a level of material wealth, but a relation to production and distribution. The DPRK is overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned, administration is not a distinct class in and of itself but a subset of broader classes, same with intellectuals. What determines class is based on that key aspect, the Kim family does not own capital but instead recieves wages from the state. Kim Jong-Un is largely used as a symbol, one that is democratically elected and directly trained by his father for the position.

This is why it’s important to actually study the real systems at play, rather than coast on pre-formed opinions drilled into us about the DPRK from western media. The Black Panther Party maintained good relations with the DPRK, visiting it and teaching Juche to Americans.

Because of the policy of nuclear deterrence, and the socialist system, the DPRK has managed to recover from historic flooding and the dissolution of the USSR into a poor but socially oriented, rising economy. Pyongyang in particular has been booming with massive expansions, and the 20x10 initiative has steadily been patching up the problem of rural underdevelopment.

I encourage you to try to understand the DPRK from a more sympathetic angle, seeing why it has the structures it does, rather than trying to abstract it out of its essential context and analyze it in a vacuum. Such a trap is metaphysics.