The Development of Capitalism in Vietnam

Abstract

Only a generation ago, Vietnam's social revolution played a critical role in the revival of the Western Left. Protest movements in every major city in the West not only offered international solidarity but expressed a rekindling of interest in socialist ideas and a renewed capacity for mass political action. It is an important and unfortunate symptom of the generality of the crisis of the Left today that Vietnamese intellectuals, like many of their counterparts in the West, are abandoning the socialist project. Most are doing so not through disillusionment or the (re)discovery of alternative intellectual paradigms alone, but because a commitment to socialism denies access to the material rewards of alignment with, or a non-antagonistic stance towards, the interests of the state and capital. Ultimately this retreat provides the ideological basis for the exercise of state power against the working class in the interests of the new bourgeoisie emerging from within the ranks of incumbent state enterprise managers and the most powerful segments of the party-state bureaucracy. Dismantling the socialist project is central to the agenda of the new policy orthodoxy in Vietnam.