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Title: Vietnam’s Second Revolution
Author: Burn Shit
Date: January 25, 2013
Language: en
Topics: Vietnam, capitalism
Source: Retrieved on 1st June 2021 from https://kpbsfs.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/vietnams-second-revolution/
Notes: A version of this appeared in the Winter 2013 edition of Fifth Estate www.fifthestate.org

Burn Shit

Vietnam’s Second Revolution

It is, we are told, the dawning of the Asian Century. The global balance

of power is shifting again towards the East. The economic powerhouses of

China and India put recession-hit European and American markets to

shame, with GDP growth rates consistently pushing towards double figures

for the last decade. China has capitalized fully on its vast army of

cheap labour, high rates of saving and investment, and internal

migration from the countryside to burgeoning megacities. An

authoritarian, one-party state keeps a tight lid on its power, paying

lip-service to Marx, Mao and Lenin while simultaneously spreading its

legs for economic liberalization, foreign direct investment, and the

heady world of globalization. As the developed economies in the West

struggle to pay off their international creditors and manage their

structural deficits, the Asian Tigers enjoy a boom. Vietnam’s leaders,

predictably, also want a piece of the pie.

Almost forty years after the withdrawal of US troops from Saigon,

Vietnam’s Communist Party continues along the same path it has pursued

since the doi moi reforms announced in 1986. Comparable in sum and

substance to China’s restructuring towards a “socialist-orientated

market economy,” Vietnam’s doi moi policies amount to an abandonment

(or, as the government says, a temporary hiatus) of some of Marxism’s

core tenets. These include a discarding of the previously unassailable

principle of central planning and collectivization in industry and

agriculture, and instead embracing what was once anathema – private

property, capital and markets. Far from being nominal or abstract, the

reforms manifest themselves in very visible ways.

The highway between Hanoi’s airport and the city centre is edged with

gigantic billboards looming over rice paddies, advertising banks, cars,

and mobile phones. The country’s northern capital has long been at the

mercy of its traffic, but its clogged arteries are increasingly filled

with imported Bentleys, Porches and 4x4s – the vehicles of choice for a

prosperous nouveau riche despite a tariff of 80 percent on automobiles.

Giant hoardings that cover French colonial buildings in the old quarter

are adorned with a Big Brother-esque portrait of Steve Jobs with the

tag-line, “Think Different”. Presumably, the country’s rulers hope the

slogan isn’t taken too literally. In the richer districts, gaudy

communist propaganda is awkwardly juxtaposed with Gucci posters and

designer fashion outlets. This is a truly schizophrenic metropolis.

While the majority pay for public education and healthcare, the

propertied classes send their children to private English language

schools to ensure their relative wealth is protected for their progeny,

entrenching an already rigid class system. Conspicuous consumption is

the order of the day, with a new generation keen to flaunt money and

consumer goods of which their grandparents could only dream. All the

paradoxes of modern capitalism, the inequities, discords and

antagonisms, produce a dissonance as unmistakable in this ostensibly

socialist republic as in any capitalist mecca.

The brazen contradiction between official Party doctrine and its actual

practice is perhaps best encapsulated in the name of Vietnam’s “Ho Chi

Minh Stock Exchange.” Now, the great leader’s near-ubiquitous image has

to compete for space with the Apple logo and the Chelsea FC insignia.

And, as Uncle Ho lies in his air-tight glass coffin, with lines of

backpackers, tourists, and Vietnamese faithful filing past in neat,

reverent succession, how would he interpret the state of his country

today? One suspects he’d be turning in his transparent grave like a

rotisserie chicken. The posters announcing the annual Labor Day

celebrations come complete with a sponsor—Vietcom Bank. Just outside the

city, a private gated community (named Ciputra, after its Indonesian

property-mogul owner) complete with luxury apartments and fast-food

outlets is populated by expats, businessmen, and high-ranking government

officials. Outside a KFC in the city centre, rubbish collectors and

fruit sellers struggle to make a living in a country with an equality

ranking lower than Niger and Tanzania’s.

1976: A year after the withdrawal of US troops from Saigon, and the

newly-unified country is embarking upon a process of forced

collectivization, nationalization, and “re-education-through-labor” for

those Vietnamese who dared to fight for the Southern army and their

American counterparts. An exact figure of 58,220 Americans deaths;

around 1,000,000–3,000,000 Vietnamese deaths (but those are rarely

tabulated). Approximately half a million Cambodian and Laotian deaths

(but again, who’s counting?). Millions dead by any measure, in a proxy

war between competing superpowers. Victims of the geopolitical game that

was the Cold War. One bloc trying to prevent the feared, “domino

effect,” the other trying to provoke the dominos’ fall. In their

rhetoric, each had a seemingly unique orthodox creed, but one that

concealed the real principle both blocs held in common—the pursuit and

perpetuation of their own power.

Some anti-war activists in the US chanted, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!,” as

the North Vietnamese (NVA) tortured prisoners and targeted civilians.

Blighted by the same mentality that leads modern anti-war demonstrators

to cry, “We are all Hezbollah!” and announce their solidarity with some

dictator or religious fanatic, they conclude with the same paralogism;

presuming the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Between the American army

with their Thai, Australian and South Vietnamese allies, and the North

Vietnamese army, with their Russian and Chinese allies, there is no side

to be taken. When faced with two alternatives, always choose the third –

A plague on both their houses.

The Vietnam conflict was a protracted civil war exacerbated by foreign

military intervention. No doubt without the presence of US troops,

Saigon would have quickly been captured by the communists. Similarly,

without the backing of China and the Soviet Union, the communists would

have found it difficult to withstand the onslaught of American

firepower. It was in this sense a surrogate war, a chess board for

nuclear-armed states, for whom a direct conflict with each other meant

mutually assured destruction. Vietnam was their go-between. And, to the

victors belong the spoils. The US military suffered humiliating defeat

for the first time and at the hands of a peasant army. A superpower

ousted by a national liberation movement in full view of the press

corps. Or so the official narrative goes: Vietnam’s national pride and

America’s international embarrassment.

In today’s Vietnam, where three-quarters of the population were born

after 1975, history is manipulated and used as a justification for the

continued rule of a dictatorial elite, parasites on a memory embedded

into the national consciousness, a memory altered and framed a

posteriori, and then proliferated by a ruling class keen on continuing

their dominance into posterity. The memory of war legitimizes them and

consolidates their power. It is their propaganda, their public image,

their raison d’être, but it is hollow, superficial and doesn’t

correspond to reality. Their strategy is to promote incontestable

deference and acclaim for those who fought off imperialist invaders(!)

as they paint themselves red to resemble the rightful heirs of Ho Chi

Minh—The Party that fought off French, Japanese and American occupiers,

and who first established Vietnam as an independent nation, must

certainly know what’s best. Agitprop, full of sound and fury –

signifying nothing. But their time will come. An Asian Spring is near.

The Party’s grip on power depends on their ability to sustain high

growth rates and employment. But as demand for exports dries up, there

are signs of stress in an economy nearing the end of a credit and

property binge. Once this warped social contract is broken – the

trade-off between security, prosperity and liberty – who knows what form

a post-CP Vietnam will take. If 2011 taught us anything, it’s that no

dictator can afford to rest on their laurels.

With hindsight, (and forgive the historical revisionism, it is without

an ounce of glee or triumphalism) if anyone actually “won” the war, it

was the Americans. The US wanted Vietnam, or at least the South, to

remain a capitalist puppet state as a bastion against communism in the

region. Today, Vietnam is a capitalist state in a region of capitalist

states. The socialist experiment failed and now they’re open for

business. When it comes to Vietnam’s territorial disputes with China

(namely over the Spratly islands), America increasingly supports its old

enemy as a buttress against Beijing, its main economic competitor.

The liberal journalist, Will Hutton, former editor of The Observer,

comments that, “Although it did not seem so at the time, and is not

understood even today in these terms... By delaying communist government

in Vietnam, with its Chinese backing, until 1975, the United States had

bought a crucial decade for the Asian economy to begin its growth–led by

exports—and to show, indisputably, that capitalist development was more

successful than communist.”

The victory of the Stalinist CPV didn’t equal emancipation for the

Vietnamese. Nor would an American victory have been much different.

Political opposition is routinely suppressed, human rights campaigners

and bloggers jailed, and liberal reformist organizations such as Viet

Tan labeled as ‘terrorists’. Land evictions are violently resisted by

the local population as the government tries to auction off sites for

new developments, tourist resorts and gated-communities. None of this is

reported in the state-controlled media.Vietnam is a country of such

glaring and unsustainable internal contradictions that it cannot remain

in stasis. There is only so far Confucian values will go in maintaining

total submission and acquiescence. The corruption of Vietnam’s leaders

does not go unnoticed by tech-savvy youths who bypass the block on

social networks and internet forums, nor by rural farmers (comprising a

majority of the population) who can see first hand that the Party line

doesn’t hold water. The nonsense of quasi-Marxist spin is laid bare when

you’re forcibly removed from your home to make way for a golf course. It

shouldn’t be long before localized resistance develops into general

insurrection.