53 on grounds of citizens’ status represented by a strong androcentrism as well as with discrimination based on a hierarchy of the sexes; from this perspective, they can be said to actually be in a position of ‘second class people’. Since the establishment of political government, North Korea has defined itself officially as a nation of the working class and as truly belonging to the masses. However, authority was seized by workers and the people not through the actual abolition of classes but through the upward mobility of a small fraction of the working class and the people while the structure of inequality was fully retained. Only the latter, recruited as bureaucrats, became the dominating class by permanently departing from the sites of labour, but for the mass the chances of attaining higher social positions were restricted to moving merely within the confines of a class structure which remained unaltered from the past. The ruling power of the former group retains a clear class character. If capitalist society can be considered as having realised the symbol of class on the basis of ownership, in North Korean society this has been substituted by so-called ‘privileges’, i.e. the appropriation and utilization of resources based on status. In other words, as privileges constitute the means to preserve social status, they have been used as tools to continuously reproduce classes. The privileges of the ruling class have been maintained by using ‘political capital’21 as a fundamental means and by monopolising other forms of capital (cultural capital, social capital, symbolic capital) through hereditary transmission. Therefore, if we want to understand the emergence and reproduction of both the structure of inequality in North Korea and the ‘structure of human rights violations’22, we have to focus on this system of ‘privileges’ which operates through the medium of political capital as well as on discriminatory policies and the structural hierarchy between the sexes which intersect with the former. 21 In socialist systems which disallow private property, political capital designates the power and capacity that grant its proprietors special rights to appropriate and use public assets and services through political privilege or status. For example, this can include special appropriation rights regarding public assets (factory and farm produce, materials and other commodities) and public services (distribution, health, education, housing, etc.). 22 A ‚structure of human rights violations‘ can be said to exist when a particular society lacks the capacity to construct a concept of universal human rights with regard to political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions and to acknowledge and protect such rights in practice.