Vietnam – The last vestiges of “actually existing socialism”

[this article has been reproduced from Battaglia Communista, the Italian affiliate to the Internationalist Communist Tendency] 

Twenty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, only a few things remain of the mythology the official and extra-parliamentary left have sung so many praises about. The bourgeois press now returns to these events, ironically recalling their old illusions, with the aim of attacking the intellectuals of that era. It comes up with a facile equation: the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc signifies the end of communism.

Moreover, it points the finger at the last vestiges of “actually existing socialism”, such as China and Vietnam, who had the open their economy to the free market in order to survive. The game is up: capitalism could be the only system capable of offering democracy and wealth; all of the rest are only pure fantasy and dramatic deception.

That there has been deception is undeniable, but it is a deception that has benefited the international bourgeoisie and those who have consciously left the working class completely disarmed. In fact, in that epoch, those who like us denounced the results, first of Stalinism and then of Maoism (nothing other than state capitalism under the cover of socialism), were insulted and threatened. Since this time, a good number of those who only yesterday falsified the revolution today find themselves with comfortable, well-paid and prestigious jobs and have often passed to the reactionary right: adopting a visceral anti-communism.

Vietnam had been trapped in the gears of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. The two superpowers at the time shared the world between themselves; the first supporting dictators in power, the second relying on the national liberation movements erupting against the old Western colonialism. In April 1975, the North Vietnamese Army, supported by the Soviets, occupied Saigon and victorious put an end to their bloody war against the United States, allies of the South. The economic model that emerged then was a brutal copy of the Soviet Union with collectivisation of industry and of land as well as severe control of civil life through the dictatorship of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

After ten years of defeat, the regime was forced to change. One of the reasons was the worsening of the USSR’s situation; which would soon force its collapse. So, in 1986, Vietnam had to take the plunge and adopt the Chinese model for undertaking a “market socialism.” To compensate for the losses caused by the end of the Eastern Bloc (Comecon used to make up 85% of Vietnam’s exports), Vietnam launched a programme of privatisation and,as a consequence, private property was enshrined in the new Constitution of 1992. The internal market was opened to foreign investment and in 1994, the United States lifted their embargo. It was a period of economic boom, with a 10% rate of annual growth and, during the international speculation rally over the Asian Tigers, one made great turnovers there. Then in 1997, with the collapse of stock markets in the region, capital left Vietnam and economic growth rebounded to a modest 4%.

The conclusion is that Vietnam remains one of the poorest countries on the planet, despite the fact that the “red” bourgeoisie had delivered the proletariat like an Easter lamb to international capital – brutal exploitation for famine wages. Twenty years after a dreadful war marked by the deaths of millions of Vietnamese, here is the result. The new riches, as much in the public sector as in the private sector, all belong to the nomenclature of the party and the corruption of the state bureaucracy is omnipresent.

The crux of the affair is that this war was at the time national and imperialist. The local bourgeoisies clashed for internal supremacy, while the great imperialist powers confronted each other for the division of the world. Historical circumstances placed Moscow on the side of those who had to destroy the old order in order to affirm themselves, which is to say the diverse national liberation fronts (claiming before public opinion that this support was part of a general progressive strategy) against the Washington gang, who supported the most reactionary military dictatorships. But many examples demonstrate that, whether under dictatorship or under the guerillas, almost nothing changes. The goal of anyone at the head of managing capitalist relations of production is to guarantee, at the cost of the worst repression if necessary, the domination and the exploitation of the labour force by capital.

The bourgeoisie pretends that all who belonged to the Soviet camp were form communism and that the proof is that the former Stalinists now abjure their origins and the remaining [Stalinist] regimes. “Actually existing socialism”, including all of the political dregs that it has produced, now returns to the enormous camp of social democracy, as an expression of one of the forms of existence of capital, with the goal of perpetuating the slavery of wage labour.

It is up to revolutionaries to take back the grand narrative of the communist perspective, which alone is capable of forming the working class taking the working class out of a disconcerting stupor, a stupor which is decisively supported by the bourgeois left and its lies about that so-called barracks communism.