[Marxism] Communism and Modernity in Vietnam

["Graham M." <gkmilner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The essay below was written a few years ago, and is intended as a rather
belated contribution to some of the recent discussion that has taken place
on the left internationally about the experience of the Vietnamese struggle
for independence and the nature of Vietnamese Communism.   I have been
influenced in recent years in my thinking on this question by some of the
writings of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party's Mike Karadjis,
particularly his essay in the journal 'Links' (Number 27) contrasting the
Chinese and Vietnamese experiences with market reforms.   The essay below is
possibly too caustic in its presentation of the Vietnamese Communist Party's
'doi moi' orientation.    Nevertheless I am submitting the text more or less
unaltered, as I believe that my conclusions were based on what was then
probably an adequate survey of available opinion.

In solidarity,

Graham Milner



COMMUNISM AND MODERNITY IN VIETNAM


'Modernity' for Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of scientific
Communism, was essentially coterminous with 'the modern bourgeois society' 1
which in their view had emerged from the womb of feudalism.   In the
'Manifesto of the Communist Party' of 1848 the two thinkers wrote what was
possibly the most eulogistic portrait ever penned of the achievements of the
bourgeoisie and the capitalist mode of production.   Those achievements had
given rise, in the view of Marx and Engels, to that condition of modernity
so evident by the mid-19th century in the industrialised nations of Western
Europe and North America.   Many a contemporary bourgeois sociologist or
political economist must have winced at the apparently extravagant paean of
praise to the bourgeoisie and industrial capitalism in the 'Manifesto'.
However, the point is it was only because Marx and Engels had adopted the
standpoint of the oppressed proletariat, a class which in their view would
inherit the benefits of capitalist industrial development after a series of
socialist revolutions, that they could, from that vantage point, observe the
broad sweep of modern history since the Renaissance and the Discoveries in
terms of capitalist triumph.   That triumph would be cut down as the
contradictions of capitalism matured and gave birth to a new socialist
society and a new form of modernity. 2

In the post-World War Two period, sociological and historical discussion of
modernisation and modernity have been a major preoccupation, and these have
been defined in some quarters as the product of a dominant Western discourse
that reflects the experience of capitalist modernisation in the First World.
3   Anki Hoogvelt has situated modernisation theory as a function of the age
of neocolonialism. 4   This view, when applied to the apologetic output of
economic historians such as Johnson administration National Security Affairs
advisor Walt Rostow, 5 has force.   But there is a more sophisticated school
of thought represented by writers such as Barrington Moore, who built up in
his path-breaking 'Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy' a
well-constructed, complex model of the varying roads to modernisation in the
world, including the variant associated with Communism. 6    Although Moore
discussed in his book only the two examples of Russian and Chinese
Communism, the case of Vietnam may, by extension, be included.   In Moore's
perspective, the Western bourgeois-democratic model of development is only
one of several different roads to industrialisation and modernity.

Towards the end of the Gorbachev era, in late 1989, a conference took place
in West Germany to discuss 'the end of Communism'. 7   Commenting on this
meeting, Ernest Mandel pointed out that 'communism' was not synonymous with
the regimes then laying claim to that name, but had originated in the late
18th century with Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals and, as a doctrine
and a movement, had been consolidated by Marx and Engels in the mid-19th
century. 8   The Communism of Marx and Engels considered itself to be in the
vanguard of social and political progress, while the men and women who led
the Russian Marxist socialist movement from the later 19th century, and who
were largely drawn from the revolutionary intelligentsia, believed that
Marxism was the last word in philosophy and social science, developed in and
derived from the modern Western intellectual tradition. 9

The success of the October revolution in Russia in 1917, which brought to
power Lenin's Bolshevik party, began a process that the Bolsheviks
themselves believed would transform the world - remaking it in the image of
the founding fathers of socialism.   The Communist International
(Comintern), founded in 1919, provided an organisational expression for the
hopes of Russian Communism, and indeed for the hopes of millions of workers,
peasants and oppressed people the world over.   In the Comintern's
perspectives the scourges of war, poverty, national and racial oppression,
gender inequality, and cultural deprivation - all associated with
capitalism - were to give way to the socially-planned, egalitarian
commonwealth of international socialism. 10

A major concern of the early Comintern, and one which Lenin did much to
focus attention on, was the issue of imperialist domination by the rich
countries over the colonial and semi-colonial world.   Lenin saw the
centrality of the struggle for national liberation, particularly in the
East, and drafted crucial documents to guide the strategy and tactics of the
nascent Communist movement on these questions.   The 'Preliminary Draft
Theses on the National and Colonial Questions', which were presented for
consideration to the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, marked a
decisive advance over the positions held by the pre-World War One Second
International on the colonial question. 11   A Congress of the Peoples of
the East was held at Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan, in September 1920, to
coordinate revolutionary action in Asia. 12   Communism was soon to become a
major political force in many Asian countries, including China, India, the
Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), Japan, and the French colony of
Indochina (which included Vietnam). 13

Ho Chi Minh, the legendary, and in Eric Hobsbawm's term 'noble', 14 founder
of Indochinese Communism, had been inspired as a young man by Lenin's ideas,
with their emphasis on national independence for the colonial countries and
on the decisive role assigned for the peasantry - a class that constituted
the bulk of the population in Ho's own country of Vietnam and throughout
most of Asia. 15    In 1930 the Vietnamese Communist Party (called then
Indochinese Communist Party) was founded. 16   'Third period' ultra-leftism,
a product of the zig-zag evident in the Comintern's line under Stalin's
hegemony, 17 kept the party isolated throughout the early 1930s, but it
became clear that Ho was able to some extent to stamp his own concept of the
Vietnamese revolution onto the party's perspectives. 18   By World War Two
the Vietminh had been founded to fight the French and later the Japanese
occupiers: Ho's central objective remained Vietnamese independence. 19
After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, and after the re-establishment
of French control over Vietnam, Ho's forces conducted a sustained guerilla
as well as regular military struggle against the French army.   With the aid
of Vo Nguyen Giap's brilliant generalship, the Vietminh decisively defeated
the French colonial forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. 20

The 1954 Geneva Conference that followed the French defeat divided Vietnam
at the 17th Parallel.   Elections scheduled to unite the country were put
off and eventually cancelled, as the Diem regime in the South consolidated
what the leadership of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam)
regarded as a US-installed puppet government. 21

The DRV's model of socialism proved to be not qualitatively different from
the Stalinist style of Communism practised in the USSR, Eastern Europe and
China.   The land reform of the mid-1950s was carried out in a typically
heavy-handed and destructive fashion, although Truong Chinh, the Maoist
ideologue responsible for this failure, was later disciplined and the party
admitted that serious errors had been made. 22   Nevertheless, a similarly
authoritarian style of Stalinist socialism was to be extended to the South
after the defeat of the US-backed Thieu regime in 1975.

The immense prestige of the Soviet Union at the end of World War Two, in the
light of its decisive role in the defeat of the Hitler regime and the
fascist Axis, and the huge impact of and great hopes raised by the Chinese
Communist victory in 1949, which reverberated throughout Asia and the entire
Third World, should not blind us to the repressive and destructive aspects
of Stalinism.   The Vietnamese Communist Party was schooled in the milieu of
the Stalinised Comintern, and its methods of struggle, tactics, and
programme of socialist construction have all been subjected to trenchant
criticism by some revolutionary Marxist theorists, who draw their
inspiration from the peculiarly strong Vietnamese Trotskyist tendency that
existed in the 1930s, and which still had impressive support in the South,
particularly in Saigon, at the time of the August revolution in 1945. 23

The 1975 defeat of the United States and its client regime in South Vietnam
led to the creation of a united Socialist Republic of Vietnam.   How
successful has the Vietnamese Communist Party, as the governing party, been
in improving the situation of the people since unification?   In answering
that question two factors must be borne in mind.   First, the human,
ecological and physical devastation caused by the American war left the
Vietnamese people decimated and their country in ruins. 24   The failure of
the US to honour its pledge to pay reparations, as promised in the Paris
Accords of 1973, left Vietnam bleeding and destitute, without the necessary
wherewithal to fund reconstruction. 25   Second, Washington imposed a
vindictive and punitive economic blockade on the new, united Vietnam. 26
Furthermore, Vietnam's aid to the Cambodian people, by overturning the
genocidal Pol Pot regime in 1979, provoked a destructive invasion by China
of the northern provinces of Vietnam, and led to Vietnam's diplomatic
isolation and further trade boycotts. 27   These material problems must all
be seriously considered when assessing the situation of post-war Vietnam.

Although the non-democratic character of the political structure erected by
the VCP in the South after liberation was the reflection of an
already-existing situation in the North, the moves against landlord and
capitalist property in the period after 1975, although carried through in
the usual heavy-handed fashion, were assessed at the time by non-Stalinist
socialist commentators as a step forward for working people in Vietnam. 28
Others have stressed the repressive character of the forced 're-education'
programme inflicted upon former Thieu regime officials, ARVN (Army of the
Republic of Vietnam) personnel, and others. 29

In 1984 two US socialists visited Vietnam and Kampuchea and reported good
progress in Vietnam in the sphere of women's rights, health, education and
agricultural production, although they glossed over the existence of
political repression. 30   In the mid-1980s there began a sharp shift in
orientation by the VCP leadership.   A new generation of Politburo members
took over and launched the programme of economic and political renovation
known as 'doi moi' - reforms that have been the subject of intense debate
among scholars and political observers.   Although traceable back to 1982,
the major changes began later in the same decade. 31   A degree of political
liberalisation was accompanied by 'market reforms' which opened up the
economy to foreign investment. 32   According to one recent account, this
programme was initiated in the belief that it represented the last word in
'modernity'. 33   Another observer has had no hesitation in describing the
'renovated' policies of the VCP leadership as unadulterated
'neo-liberalism', pointing out their devastating impact on public health,
education and other social programmes and infrastructure in Vietnam. 34   Of
course, the timing of the reforms was not accidental; the impact of the
relative success of the economic reforms in China under Deng Xiaoping, and
of the initial phases of Gorbachev's ill-starred reform programme in the
USSR, preceded them.

Assessments of 'doi-moi' vary - from the bitter denunciations of
revolutionary Marxists who see the reforms as a betrayal of the Vietnamese
struggle, 35 a view also stated eloquently by well-known writers such as
John Pilger 36 and Gabriel Kolko, 37  to the upbeat and sometimes eulogistic
response of authors focusing on the high growth rates achieved in recent
years by the Vietnamese economy. 38   But what does Vietnam's evolution into
what one observer described back in 1992 as 'already a market economy' 39
mean for the Marxist perspectives of world revolution and international
communism invoked by Ho Chi Minh in his testament, read out at his funeral
in 1969? 40

The US commentator Francis Fukuyama announced the death of Communism and the
triumph of liberal democratic capitalism even before the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989, and was in no doubt that capitalist democracy and modernity
are one and the same thing, with fascism and Communism two illegitimate
creeds - doomed competitors of the dominant paradigm. 41   But the new rise
of a powerful movement in opposition to capitalist globalisation, dating
from the Seattle mobilisation against the World Trade Organisation in 1999,
and incorporating earlier movements against neo-liberalism in the Third
World such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, has placed a big question mark
against Fukuyama's glib pronouncements.   Whether the 'Third World' is still
a valid category is open to debate, 42 but there can be no doubt that
underdevelopment, exploitation, poverty, and national and social oppression
still afflict broad sections of the world's population outside the
imperialist 'core' (as well as inside it of course), and the example of
Vietnam in successfully struggling for its independence, dignity and
integrity will surely remain an inspiration to the peoples of the dominated
countries especially, and indeed to the whole of humanity.


FOOTNOTES

1.  Marx and Engels, 'Manifesto of the Communist Party' (Peking, 1965) p.31

2.  For a challenging and insightful collection of essays on the 'Manifesto'
see Geoff Dow and George Lafferty (eds.), 'Everlasting Uncertainty:
Interrogating the Communist Manifesto 1848-1998' (Sydney, 1998)

3.  Nicholas Abercrombie et al. (eds.), 'Penguin Dictionary of Sociology'
(Ringwood, Vic., 1994) pp.227, 71

4.  'Globalisation and the Postcolonial World' (London, 1997) pp.36-37

5.  See "The Take Off into Self-Sustained Growth", 'The Economic Journal'
No. 261 (1956) pp.25-48

6.  'Social Origins of Dictatorship and democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World' (Harmondsworth, 1973).   Compare Moore's
discussion of the concept of 'bourgeois revolution' with the more
classically Marxist presentation of Perry Anderson, "The Notion of Bourgeois
Revolution", 'English Questions' (London, 1992) pp.105-18

7.  See Ernest Mandel, "The Future of Communism", 'International Viewpoint'
(Paris) No. 179 (February 16, 1990) pp.13-16

8.  'Ibid.', p.13

9.  Isaac Deutscher's fine works provide a good understanding of the
intellectual orientation of Russian socialism.   See, for example, 'The
Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967' (Oxford, 1967) ch. 1.   See also
Adam B. Ulam, 'Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political
History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia' (London, 1969) ch. 2

10. Two excellent historical accounts of the Communist International are
Duncan Hallas, 'The Comintern' (London, 1985) and Fernando Claudin, 'The
Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform' (Harmondsworth, 1975).
See also Julius Braunthal, 'History of the International: 1914-1943'
(London, 1967)

11. 'Collected Works' (Moscow, 1960-70) Vol. 31, pp.144-51.   For a good
commentary on Lenin's interpretation of the colonial question, see Neil
Harding, 'Lenin's Political Thought' Vol. 2 "Theory and Practice in the
Socialist Revolution" (London, 1981) ch. 11.   See also the excellent
account in Carlos Rafael Rodrigues, "Lenin and the Colonial Question", 'New
International' (New York) Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall, 1983) pp.93-144

12. For the documents of the proceedings see 'Congress of the Peoples of the
East: Baku September 1920' (London, 1977)

13. A useful documentary survey of Asian Communism may be found in Helene
Carriere de'Encausse and Stuart Schram, 'Marxism and Asia' (London, 1969)

14. 'Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991' (London, 1994)
p.217

15. For Ho's own account of his political formation see 'The Path Which Led
Me to Leninism', Bernard Fall (ed.), 'Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected
Writings 1920-66' (New York, 1968) pp.23-4

16. Douglas Pike's 'History of Vietnamese Communism 1925-1976' (Stanford,
Cal., 1978) is a generally informative account of party history

17. On the 'Third Period' see Hallas, 'The Comintern', ch. 6, and Leon
Trotsky, 'The "Third Period" of the Comintern's Errors', 'Writings: 1930'
(new York, 1975) pp.27-68.   The degeneration marked in the Soviet state and
the Comintern in the post-Lenin era was analysed trenchantly by Trotsky.
See Perry Anderson, "Trotsky's Interpretation of Stalinism", 'New Left
Review' No. 139 (1983) pp.49-58

18. See Jean Lacouture, 'Ho Chi Minh' (Harmondsworth, 1968) for Ho's special
position

19. On the Vietminh in World War Two see Joseph Buttinger, 'Vietnam: A
Political History' (New York, 1968) ch. 9, 10

20. On the French phase of the war see the early chapters of Michael
Maclear, 'Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War' (London, 1982).   The use of
guerilla warfare, a most 'primitive' method of struggle for the 'modern'
objectives of national independence and socialism, is one paradox with
revolution in the Third World.   See Vo Nguyen Giap, 'People's War, People's
Army' (Hanoi, 2nd ed., 1974), William Pomeroy (ed.), 'Guerilla Warfare and
Marxism' (London, 1969) and Robert Taber's incisive 'The War of the Flea: A
Study of Guerilla Warfare Theory and Practice' (New York, 1970)

21. The background to the American phase of the war is illuminated well by
the documentary material in Marvin E. Gettleman (ed.), 'Vietnam: History,
Documents, and Opinions on a Major World Crisis' (Harmondsworth, 1966) Parts
4-7

22. On the land reform excesses of the 1950s see Pike, 'History of
Vietnamese Communism', pp.108-10 and Eric R. Wolf, 'Peasant Wars in the
Twentieth Century' (New York, 1969) pp.190-92.   A good personal account is
Duong Thu Huong, 'Paradise of the Blind' (Harmondsworth, 1993).   Botched
attempts at land reform have occurred elsewhere in the Third World under
similar parties to the VCP: a case in point is the Afghani Popular
Democratic (Communist) Party after 1978, which succeeded in anatgonising and
alienating broad sections of the rural population in Afghanistan.   See
Allen Myers, 'Debate on Afghanistan' (Sydney, 1981) Section 1 A, although
Myers generally presents the PDPA's role in a favourable light.

23. See Pike, 'History of Vietnamese Communism', pp.36-37, for a generally
fair description of the Vietnamese Trotskyists.   The appearance of Pierre
Rousset's study 'Le Parti Communiste Vietnamien' (Paris, 1973) gave rise to
a debate within the main branch of the Fourth International (the world
Trotskyist party) through the pages of the theoretical journal published by
the US Socialist Workers Party.   See George Johnson and Fred Feldman, "On
the Nature of the Vietnamese Communist Party", 'International Socialist
Review' (July-August 1973) Vol. 34, No. 7, pp.4-9, 63-90; Rousset, "The
Vietnamese Revolution and the Role of the Party", 'ibid.' (April 1974) Vol.
35, No. 4, pp.4-25; Johnson and Feldman, "Vietnam, Stalinism, and the
Postwar Socialist Revolutions", 'ibid.' (April, 1974) Vol. 35, No. 4,
pp.26-61.   A view which criticises both sides in this debate, rejecting the
Trotskyist notion of permanent revolution and reasserting the VCP's Leninist
credentials, is developed by Myers, 'The Vietnamese Revolution and Its
Leadership' (Sydney, 1984)

24. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese killed during the American phase
of the war alone range from 1.7 to 3 million.   During the war the US
dropped more than 14 million tons of bombs and explosive shells on Vietnam
and more than 11 million gallons of chemical defoliants.   See Diane Wang
and Steve Clark, 'Report from Vietnam and Kampuchea' (New York, 1984) pp.6-7

25. See John Pilger, 'Hidden Agendas' (London, 1998) pp.566-67

26. 'Ibid.', pp.567-68

27. Rousset, "The War Between China and Vietnam", 'Intercontinental Press'
(New York), Vol. 17, No. 12 (April 2, 1979) pp.320-23

28. Feldman, "New Advances in Vietnam's Course Against Capitalism", 'ibid.',
Vol. 14, No. 39 (October 18, 1976) pp.1478-85; "Hanoi Does Away with
Capitalism in South Vietnam", 'ibid.', Vol. 16, No. 26 (July 3, 1978) pp.
792-4

29. See Nguyen Van Canh, 'Vietnam Under Communism 1975-1982' (Stanford,
Cal., 1983)

30. Wang and Clark, 'Report from Vietnam and Kampuchea', Part One

31. On the chronology of the reforms see Damien Kingsbury, 'Southeast Asia:
Political Profiles' (Melbourne, 2001) p.253

32. See Michael C. Williams, 'Vietnam at the Crossroads' (London, 1992)

33. See Philip Taylor, 'Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity in
Vietnam's South' (Sydney, 2001) pp.62, 65-75

34. Michel Cossudovsky, "The New War Against Vietnam", 'International
Viewpoint' No. 263 (February 1995) p.22

35. 'Ibid.'

36. 'Hidden Agendas', ch. 9

37. 'Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace' (London, 1997)

38. See the collection of essays in William S. Turley and Mark Selden
(eds.), 'Reinventing Vietnamese Socialism: Doi Moi in Comparative
Perspective' (Boulder, Col, 1993) and Kingsbury, 'Southeast Asia', p.254

39. Williams, 'Vietnam at the Crossroads', p.40

40. Cited in Lacouture, 'Ho Chi Minh', p.258

41. "The End of History?", 'The National Interest' (Summer 1989) pp.3-18

42. See the discussion in Hoogvelt, 'Globalisation and the Post-Colonial
World' (London, 1997) ch. 3


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