In reaction to what became a permanent loss of reliable provision of food and basic goods from the state, the reiteration of coping reactions of the population reconstituted the economic system from the bottom up. In military-first era North Korea, markets became the primary source of supply of goods, including food, for most of the population. Marketisation was an uneven and unpredictable process as not all had access to market opportunities and those that did were not always able to take advantage of them, yet market transformation in North Korea was notable for its visible feminisation. Women's participation in market activities was not viewed as primarily commercially motivated but as providing for the family. In the face of a government that remained fundamentally hostile to liberal capitalism, women's participation in markets was not undertstood as a direct challenge to the economic organisation of the DPRK.

Marketisation was a social phenomenon and an economic process and also had political consequences. The daily practices of local Party of ficials promoted, legitimised and valorised market dynamics and had the unintended effect of contradicting central state messages, all of which were founded on the pretence that the state could control and direct economic and political life as it had in the Kim Il Sung era. Marketisation generated incentives for poorly paid officials to waive and reduce penalties such that the legal system became more porous and less of an absolute bulwark of state repression. The Party became the driver and de facto legitimator of marketisation and in so doing ceased to act as a well-functioning, reliable transmission belt for ideological education and revolutionary discipline. Marketisation brought new ideas along with goods imported from abroad. The continued inability of the government to deliver decent consumer goods and to provide a decent standard of living contrasted with what the population knew about the living standards of their neighbours in China and South Korea. The result was to diminish the authority and legitimacy of the leadership.