Barely forty years later the Vietnamese regime signed off on the US-Japanese dominated Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement (TPFTA), which essentially converted Vietnam into a vassal state.
Vietnam has gone full circle: From a neo-colony ruled by puppet dictators backed by an American occupation army involving 500,000 troops from 1955-1975, to its current ‘Communist’ rulers who have turned-over its markets, industries, ports, resources and labor to the 500 largest Western and Asian multi-national corporations.
Contrasting Historical Moments: 1975 and 2015
In 1975, the revolutionary government closed all US military bases and expelled all US military personnel. Today the Vietnam ‘vassal regime’ allows US naval visits and signs military agreements to tighten the imperialist military encirclement of China.
In 1975, the revolutionary leaders promised to end imperial exploitation of plantation and factory labor; today the vassal rulers offer the imperial states cheap labor, at wages less than half that paid to Chinese workers to ‘entice’ multi-nationals.
In 1975, the government intervened in favor of workers, taking over plantations and factories; today the vassal state savagely represses striking workers and outlaws class-based unions.
In 1975, the revolutionary government declared its solidarity with workers’ and peasants’ struggles around the world; today the vassals declare their unconditional support of all of the major imperial organizations – from the World Trade Organization to the Trans-Pacific Treaty organization.
What explains this total reversal of politics and allegiances? What accounts for the transformation from revolutionary vanguard to submissive vassal of imperial powers? What factors led to the degeneration and decay of a revolutionary movement of millions and the ascendancy of a corrupt and servile political and socio-economic elite? Why did this counter-revolution occur without any major mass popular upheaval?
Stages and Circumstances of Vietnam’s Degeneration
Liberated Vietnam facing Military Siege
Internal and external events and forces played a major role in undermining the promise of social transformation proclaimed by the Vietnamese revolutionaries.
Beginning with the US destruction of the economy and Washington’s subsequent refusal to pay reparations and vindictive policy of post-war boycott and sanctions, the Vietnamese faced monumental tasks with few financial resources.
The US ground and air war devastated the infrastructure and productive enterprises of the country. Napalm and chemical warfare (Agent Orange) devastated villages and poisoned the rice fields, water and soil. Millions of cluster bombs maimed scores of thousands of peasants.
The US secretly supported the
Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian terror regime, in its war on liberated
Vietnam. This further damaged Vietnam’s shattered economy and diverted
scarce resources needed for peacetime reconstruction to military
operations.
China launched a
border war on Vietnam’s northern frontier, increasing the burden on the
depleted resources of the Vietnamese state.
The Difficult Transition
The Vietnamese revolutionary
government, during the first decade of its existence, struggled to make
the transition from a war to a peace economy.
Given the scarcity of resources,
skilled manpower and revenues, and under stress to protect its borders,
the Vietnamese government attempted to ‘socialize’ the economy with few
personnel and limited external support from the Soviet Union and its
allies.
Power was concentrated,
political militants and loyalists took command, although many lacked
experience or expertise in economic development. Economic recovery was
understandably dictated by political and military priorities. Politics
was in command – trained orthodox economists were in retreat. The
choice was ‘red’ over ‘expert’.
After decades of deprivation and
sacrifice, many cadres sought and obtained access to scarce resources. A
privileged elite emerged, especially in South Vietnam, where the US
military occupation had spawned a huge black-market economy, and a large
stratum of wealthy ‘middlemen’ who acted as ‘brokers’ with wealthy
overseas Chinese businesspeople, especially in Hong Kong and beyond.
The Vietnamese defeated the Pol Pot terrorist regime at a heavy cost and backed a friendly client regime.
By 1980, China began its
transition to capitalism and showed no interest in providing aid or
investment to hasten Vietnam’s socialist reconstruction. By the mid
1980’s, with the ascendance of Gorbachev, Russia cut off its economic
assistance to Vietnamese state enterprises, denigrated socialist
planning and backed ‘market solutions’.
External ‘Allies’ Promote Internal EnemiesIn sum, Vietnam’s external allies were moving in a direction, which favored Vietnamese technocrats and ‘capitalist holdovers’ from the colonial and neo-colonial period.
The ‘new rich’, including privileged sectors of the revolutionary regime, took advantage of the ‘shortage of capital flows’ and the years of shortages and sacrifices to advocate an ‘opening to the market’ and to promote the entry of foreign capital. This was accompanied by the privatization of public enterprises (dubbed ‘joint ventures’) and ‘incentives’ (high profits) to manufacturers, especially from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.
Internal Factions and the Victory of the Capitalist Technocrats
By the late 1980’s, four tendencies competed for influence in the Communist Party:
(1) A revolutionary faction, including some of the historic leaders of the Liberation struggle.
(2) A centrist or reformist faction of
privileged officials who sought to protect and promote state enterprises
– a source of their own enrichment. They supported the “partnership” with foreign private capital supposedly as a supplement to the so-called “socialist sector”’
(3) A third faction of technocrats, who
favored the gradual conversion to a private capitalist economy, except
in some ill-defined ‘strategic sectors’.
(4) A fourth faction, composed of Western educated
and connected economists, who sought and secured submission to overseas
capitalist and international financial institutions. They joined
forces with the technocrats and privileged, corrupt Party elite and
became the eventual rulers of Vietnam.
The Counter-revolutionary ‘Unholy’ Alliance
In the course of the following decade, an alliance
of technocrats, corrupt and enriched officials (with their families),
who had become business partners, and pre-revolutionary elites took
control of the economy. By the middle of the 1990’s, Vietnam could no
longer ‘balance’ between the USSR and China on the one-hand and Western
capitalists on the other. The USSR had disappeared. Russia was in
chaos. China was in headlong pursuit of capitalist growth at any cost,
through any means, especially via the privatization of major enterprises
and stripping workers of all labor and welfare rights.
The Vietnam revolutionaries were
‘retired’ or relegated to the historical museum as respected but
impotent figureheads. They were trotted out on special ‘national’
occasions.
The ‘statists’-the
Party CEOs fought rearguard struggles trying to retain lucrative
fiefdoms in public enterprises, but lacked any strategic allies abroad
or internally. They had immobilized the working class and had
themselves embraced the privileges of power, luxury and corruption –
(with few notable exceptions).
By the turn of the millennium,
the technocrats and capitalist ideologues had taken full command of
economic decision-making. They embraced the politics and economics of ‘globalization’
and the insertion of Vietnam into the World Trade Organization (WTO).
They cited Vietnam’s rapid growth, lauding its abundant disciplined,
cheap labor, kept in line by the centralized Party. Communist Party
leaders exhibited all the features of the authoritarian personality:
arrogant and abusive to the workers under them, submissive and servile
to the foreign investors above them.
The Party had become the instrument for repressing outbreaks of industrial strikes, rural protests and public disaffection.Many of the corrupt officials embraced the ‘free market’ to legitimate their corrupt appropriation of public goods and the laundering of illicit earning.
The ideology “getting rich is good” pervaded the top and middle echelons of the Party, which was ‘Communist’ in name only.
The party-state lost its legitimacy along with its revolutionary legacy. The former colonial enemies, Japan, the US and their allies were eagerly courted as the Vietnamese elite’s new ‘partners’ and mentors for the upwardly mobile technocrats and economists who served them.
With the signing of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), US imperialism easily secured in luxury
conference rooms what they had failed to achieve in twenty years on the
battlefield: Total access to all of Vietnam’s major economic sectors, a
captive labor force without rights or protection and a ruling elite
willing to serve as an accomplice to its militarist policy of
encircling China.
Imperial Dominance by Invitation
The US political-economic
conquest of Vietnam was accomplished by the invitation and complicity of
the Vietnamese ruling Communist Party and not by the force of arms, not by a puppet ruler or a bought and bound ‘Generalissimo’.
The main beneficiaries of its
vassalage are the Vietnamese collaborators, intermediaries, importers,
exporters and labor contractors, who receive legal and illicit
commissions for selling out the nation’s wealth. This includes a small
army of ‘service operators’, embedded in IT start-ups,
Chinese-Vietnamese business associates of Hong Kong sweatshop
manufacturers, new university graduates turned business consultants and
public officials who ‘sign-off’ on tax exemptions,and fabricate
compliance with labor and environmental protection laws. These are the
ones who grow rich in the new ‘market economy’.
As the major US, Japanese and overseas Chinese corporations take
control of Vietnam’s manufacturing, banking, retail and wholesale
sectors and local and overseas trade, small-scale local businesspeople
will go bankrupt. State enterprise will be sold or closed. Small
farmers and peasants will a lose access to credit while cheap imported
rice will flood the market and bankrupt local farmers.Vietnamese workers and peasants, once heralded as the vanguard of the liberation struggle, will be savagely exploited by the Communist – capitalist ‘partnership’. They are now among the poorest of the poor in all of Asia.
Conclusion
The ascendancy of a pro-imperialist collaborator elite in Vietnam was not inevitable; it was a relatively gradual process, in which the negative external environment gradually eroded the will and capacity of Vietnam’s heroic and historic leaders to combine the revolutionary reconstruction with popular democratic institutions following the defeat of the US military. In a repeat of the Imperial Roman scorched and salted earth policy, the US took revenge for its humiliating defeat by leaving a devastated country, refusing reparations and imposing vindictive economic sanctions on the Vietnamese people and nation. The demise of the USSR and China’s turn to capitalism forced Vietnam to look for alternative sources of external finance.
Added to these harsh external
conditions, difficult internal problems complicated the transition:
Vietnam’s revolutionary leaders, who were magnificent and victorious
strategists of politico-military struggle, were mediocre economic
strategists. They turned to the pre-revolutionary Chinese-Vietnamese
business elite, linked to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland business
families, to navigate the economy.
The young, educated
post-revolutionary generation was drawn heavily from privileged
families, especially from Saigon; they inexorably adapted and imposed
their neo-liberal ideology on the regime.
The marriage of corrupt repressive statist officials to the traditional privileged clans and classes brought the new post-revolutionary educated technocrats to power.
The authoritarian Party elite ensured the de-radicalization of the workers and peasants, the exclusion and repression of leftwing activists and the unhindered application of neo-liberal, pro-imperial economic policies.
The Vietnam experience provides us with several important historical lessons:
The first lesson is the importance of democratizing
and socializing production, distribution and culture following national
liberation to check against the post-revolutionary seizure of power by
Party and military leaders and to limit the advance of the old
privileged classes.
Secondly, the educated classes
must serve the interests of the revolutionary masses, and admission to
institutes of higher education should favor the sons and daughters of
the working class, not the children of the traditional comprador elite.
University students should be
integrated into democratic class organization to further and deepen
their links to the past and present revolutionary heritage
Public resources should be
concentrated on economic and social programs that improve the lives of
wage and salaried workers and local producers. The presence of private,
local and foreign investors should be rigorously controlled via time-
bound agreements.
The administration and decision-making in cooperative, self-managed and local enterprises should be decentralized.
Political education should be
based on egalitarian ethics. Anti-corruption, disciplinary committees,
elected by workers, peasants, employees, accountants, consumers and
environmentalists should be established throughout the economy.
State expenditures on social and private consumption should be balanced with emphasis on public transport, health, education and leisure facilities.Solidarity and support for on-going liberation struggles around the world should be the rule. Social practice in everyday life should be combined with individual and collective learning of technical, historical, social and literary subjects, which enrich and deepen understanding of the revolutionary roots of contemporary society.
The state should combat the tendency of organized local ethnic groups to serve as agents loyal to foreign regimes. Material and symbolic rewards for excellence should be combined and lifetime accomplishments recognized. Those guilty of illicit economic and social activities, especially those related to nepotism or kin/clan enrichment, should be marginalized and punished.
The post-liberation defeat and reversal of Vietnam’s revolutionary gains was not inevitable. Negative lessons should be studied and serve as guidelines for future revolutions. There are grounds to believe that the Vietnamese revolutionary legacy is not dead. The revolutionary grandparents in ‘retirement’ can and will transmit their vision and experience of an alternative class struggle to their grandchildren, who are going to suffer savage exploitation, dispossession and de-nationalization following Vietnam’s entry into the imperialist Transpacific Partnership Agreement.
Leaders, who have grown rich from the TPP, will face anger and revolt by the Vietnamese masses who are destined to pay heavily for their leaders’ sell-out.
The Vietnam’s leaders have
embraced the aggressive US-Japanese militarist policy against China;
this betrayal of the people’s struggle will have long-lasting negative
consequences.
Once against external and
domestic developments will converge – hopefully, this time ushering in a
new phase of revolutionary change.
Copyright © Prof. James Petras, Global Research, 2015
Become a Member of Global Research
No comments:
Post a Comment