The US left Vietnam in a state of physical ruin. Roads, rail lines, bridges and canals were devastated by bombing. Unexploded shells and landmines littered the countryside, often underwater in the paddy fields where peasants waded. Five million hectares of forest had been stripped of life by high explosives and Agent Orange. The new government reckoned that two-thirds of the villages in the south had been destroyed. In Saigon, the American legacy included packs of orphans roaming the streets and a heroin epidemic. Nationally, the new government estimated it was dealing with 10 million refugees; 1 million war widows; 880,000 orphans; 362,000 war invalids; and 3 million unemployed people.

The economy was in chaos. By the time Liberation Day arrived, inflation was running at up to 900%, and Vietnam – a country full of paddy fields – was having to import rice. In peace talks in Paris, the US had agreed to pay $3.5bn in reconstruction aid to mend the shattered infrastructure. It never paid a cent. Adding insult to penury, the US went on to demand that the communist government repay millions of dollars borrowed by its enemy, the old Saigon regime. Vietnam desperately needed the world to provide the trade and aid that could turnits economy around. The US did its best to make sure it got neither.

As soon as it had lost the war, the US imposed a trade embargo, cutting off the war-wrecked country not only from US exports and imports, but also from those of other nations that bowed to American pressure. In the same way, the US leaned on multilateral bodies including the IMF, the World Bank and Unesco to deny Vietnam aid. The US acknowledged that Agent Orange was likely to cause serious illness and birth defects and paid $2bn compensation – but only to its own veterans. The Vietnamese victims – more than 2 million of them – got nothing.

It is not clear how any economic model could have survived this hostile encirclement. Inevitably, Vietnam’s socialist project began to collapse. It adopted a crude Soviet policy that forced peasant farmers to hand over their crops in exchange for ration cards. With no incentive to produce, output crashed, inflation climbed back towards wartime levels, and the country once again had to import rice. In the early 1980s, the leadership was forced to allow the peasants to start selling surplus produce, and so capitalism began its return. By the late 1980s, the party was officially adopting the idea of “a market economy with socialist orientation”.

Foreign investors were allowed to come in and private businesses were encouraged – free trade, free markets, profits for some, wages for others. Behind the scenes, the government was sending signals of compromise to Washington. It stopped asking for the $3.5bn reconstruction aid or compensation for Agent Orange and war crimes. It even agreed to repay the old Saigon regime’s war debt of $146m. By 1994, the US was appeased and lifted the trade embargo that had been throttling Vietnam for nearly 20 years. The World Bank, the IMF and other donors began to help. The economy started growing by up to 8.4% a year, and Vietnam was soon one of the world’s biggest exporters of rice.

Crucially, throughout the 1990s, there were still strong factions within the Communist party that defended socialism against the new tide of capitalism. In spite of the economic chaos, they had succeeded in engineering a dramatic reduction of poverty. When the war ended, 70% of Vietnam’s people lived below the official poverty line. By 1992, it was 58%. By 2000, it was 32%. At the same time, the government had constructed a network of primary schools in every community, and secondary schools in most; it had also built a basic structure of free healthcare. For a while, the socialist factions still had enough political muscle to direct the new capitalist vehicle. Three times during the late 1990s, the World Bank offered extra loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars if Vietnam would agree to sell its state-owned companies and cut its trade tariffs. Each deal was rejected.

But from 2000, the rate of change accelerated and the political balance shifted. Reflecting persistent pressure from international donors and foreign investors, Vietnam now approved the sale of its state-owned companies. It also struck a trade deal with the US, and finally hit a peak in 2006 when it was given membership of the World Trade Organisation, which meant it could reap yet more foreign investment and aid. Three decades after the communists emerged as victors in the war, it was now a fully integrated member of the globalised capitalist economy. The west had won after all.

Khe was himself part of the revolution. As a student in the early 1970s, he agitated against the Americans and spent three years behind bars. He was a party member for years. He understands why the leadership turned to the tools of capitalism to kickstart the economy, but he has seen the dark side of the neoliberal coin – the corruption and the inequality.

You can see it on the streets. Despite its dark past, Saigon has boomed into a seething mass of commercial activity. But it is, nonetheless, a city in the developing world, with signs of poverty on every side. And then there is Dong Khoi Street – an island of self-indulgent wealth where the new elite can buy a T-shirt from Hermes for $500, a watch from Versace for $15,000, or a dining-room table with four chairs covered in gold-leaf calf skin and stuffed with goose feathers for $65,000. And on the corner, the Continental Hotel sells meals that would cost a week’s pay for a worker, in a restaurant called – with one final slap in Ho Chi Minh’s face – Le Bourgeois.

Khe reckoned that for every $10 assigned to any public project, $7 is going into somebody’s pocket. Really? So 70% of Vietnam’s state budget is being stolen? That would be a theft of staggering proportions. We spoke via a translator. He nodded, and twisted one hand in the air: “Between 50 and 70%.”

Transparency International last year reported that Vietnam is perceived to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, doing worse than 118 others and scoring only 31 out of a possible 100 good points on its index.

Nobody claims that the corruption is new. There is a well-established tradition of public officials in Vietnam selling their influence and favouring their families. But the allegation is that it has hit new levels under the current leadership. People say that the problem was boosted specifically by the privatisation of Vietnam’s huge state-owned companies and the opportunities that provided some politicians and officials to appoint themselves and their families as executives. The British academic Martin Gainsborough, who spent years in Vietnam doing fieldwork for his research on development in south-east Asia, wrote: “Rather than being inspired by reformist ideals, officials have been motivated by much more venal desires … What we often refer to as ‘reform’ is as much about attempts by rival political-business interests to gain control over financial and other resources.”

Despite its earlier track record of spreading economic success quite evenly, Vietnam no longer stands up for the poor as it once did. A 2012 report for the World Bank noted that “inequality is back on the agenda”. Between 2004 and 2010, income for the poorest 10% of the population fell by a fifth, it found, while the richest 5% in Vietnam were now taking nearly a quarter of the income.

The worst of this inequality is in the rural areas. Millions of farmers have been driven off their land to make way for factories or roads. In the early 90s, nearly all rural households (91.8%) owned land. By 2010, nearly a quarter of them (22.5%) were landless. A relentless tide of poor peasants has poured into the cities, where they have been joined by hundreds of thousands of workers who have been made redundant as the private owners of the old state-owned companies set about cutting costs. This wave of men and women has swirled into the “informal sector” – hidden away in sweatshops in private houses or sitting trading on the pavements – and into the sprawling network of new industrial parks and export‑processing zones.

In the informal sector, there is no protection at all. In the industrial areas, protections have become noticeably weaker. Prof Angie Ngoc Tran is a specialist in the study of labour in Vietnam. In her book, Ties That Bind, she explains how the country’s labour code – which was once famously progressive – has been watered down, partly as a result of lobbying by groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce. The state-sponsored unions have been weakened and have never called a strike. Tran concludes: “With the surge of capital entering Vietnam by way of foreign investment and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, the state is becoming less and less of a government acting on behalf of the people. At times, some state organs and institutions are in alliance with the capitalists.”

Every worker is guaranteed a minimum wage. Originally, in 1990, this was set at a level that matched the “living wage” – meaning that it covered the essentials of life. But over the years, for fear of losing foreign capital, the government has allowed it to be cut, frozen and overtaken by inflation, with the result that by April 2013, the government’s own union was protesting that wages now covered only 50% of essential costs. Most city workers, the federation said, were “destitute and physically wasted away … They rent cheap, shabby rooms and cut daily expenses to a minimum … suffer serious malnutrition and other health risks.”

Meanwhile, healthcare and schooling are no longer free. The World Bank report noted that “incomes are beginning to matter more for determining access to basic services”, and that the government was spending considerably more on hospitals for the better off than it was on communal health centres for the poor.

this seems to be a reoccurring theme with socialist countries. they go through a horrible war and are sanctioned into misery which causes them accept some "reforms" to breathe and before you know it capitalism is partially or fully restored.

Synergy posted:

i have this great fear that in a few decades U.S./western imperialism will successfully defeat socialism throughout the globe and we'll have to wait until resources and conditions deteriorate enough for another large wave of resistance

i dont mean to be rude but to me it looks like that already happened barring a few holdouts here and there, although i suppose it depends on your position on china being socialist.

karphead posted:

i'm reading marx. i fucking love that guy.

I've heard good things. Definitely on my to-read list

sovnarkoman posted:

hi guys, does anyone have a pdf of "dimensions of prejudice" by zak cope?

I'm not sure anyone has scanned it into a pdf, ak press/kersplebedeb stuff is often kind of rare and either MIM's prison literature project has it or there's nothing. (they have his Divided World Divided Class but if you've been looking around you probably know that already)

cars posted:

here is a long thread pointing outward to information in cultural areas where I don't know a lot of specifics as an amateur voyeur of ultra-right New Evangelical homeschoolers, such as the bands their kids listen to.

I saw a lot of effects of this during the rare times I mingled with a bunch of the local homeschooling community and took it for granted so much that I haven't really looked into its origins, but mainly what I saw is that kids raised in New Evangelical / fundamentalist homeschooled environments have an entire corporate machine built around convincing them that they will soon live out the Turner Diaries. When I homeschooled and for years after my parents would get stuff in the mail every day trying to convince them to purchase media with that message, but what was creepier was when it was addressed to me personally

this is interesting stuff, would you say that the majority of people who homeschool their kids are right wing or at least culturally conservative?

drwhat posted:

wow, how could they deal with modern society without watching spongebob squarepants. what a loss for their cultural upbringing

This, but unironically. Stuff like that isn't important isolated on its own, but it's usually part of a whole slew of problems. Forest for the trees and all that.

One's cultural upbringing being highly influenced by crazy people, even if they weren't fundie homophobes, is definitely a loss. Fitting in with your peers is extremely important, and kids subconsciously pick up on little cues, like not being able to watch Spongebob, that they piece together to form the collective whole of someone being a weirdo. In the same vein, there's a bunch of studies where kids who aren't allowed to play video games are just as socially maladjusted as kids who play way too many.

toyotathon posted:

Dimashq posted:

I ordered an Ernest Mandel book off Amazon two weeks ago and it still hasn't arrived. seems that the stalinists have infiltrated amazon and intercepted my trot literature.

i finished this book (WW2) last week and could talk here or over PMs about it if you'd like...

i read it via a good scan on libgen. whenever amazon misses a scheduled delivery you can complain and supposedly get 2 months of free prime on bezos' dime. ppl keep it rolling with slips in their optimistically-named same-day shipping if you're into that.

reading Strike One To Educate One Hundred posted here a couple pages ago. what a fantastic read. and look into how a vanguard can inspire resistance in a whole class.

Yea for sure. Also idk how that works if you buy through a third party retailer on amazon which is what I always do cus it’s cheap and im cheap

Petrol posted:

Love too get parenting advice from internet forum

Sneak preview, if you and your kid aren't in a Walden Two homage community, they will score a base 30% for homelessness, 50% for drug abuse, and a whopping 65% for painful divorce, again this is before class modifiers

sovnarkoman posted:

hi guys, does anyone have a pdf of "dimensions of prejudice" by zak cope?

edit: I asked someone to try to rip it from Google Book Preview, here it is. Missing quite a few pages, sadly, but it's more than Google will show you at once, and maybe if someone else gets their hands on the book they'll have less scanning to do.

Edited by wuyong (March 25, 2018 18:39:41)

karphead posted:

i'm reading marx. i fucking love that guy.

so badass...

Bukku_Man posted:

Do any of you fine internet citizens or members of the secret book committee have a PDF (or other sketchy digital version) of Red Sun Rose by Gao Hua? Any other leads might be helpful if you don't have it personally.

here it is http://www.edubridge.com/docs/risingredsun.pdf

swampman posted:

A friend of mine was homeschooled for two years from ages I think 10-11? which allowed them to do things like learn a lot about gardening and radio, they spent all February in Mexico one year, and they were still friends with a bunch of neighbor kids they'd been in elementary school with. Still played sports &c. I don't think most people are doing that. It would be interesting to do a Marxist pedagogy thread, now that there are a couple breeders posting here we oughta tell them how they're fucking up their kids

the lax oversight of the practice in many states has leeway to be exploited for good ends in a very limited way by a very limited group.

The problem with turning it toward revolutionary or radical ends for more people is that the oversight remains lax because the system is mostly exploited by white supremacist property owners so they can indoctrinate their children in a controlled environment while faking their qualifications for university admissions. It's a double win for anti-regulation state politicians, where they can please donors by slashing spending in an area no one cares about except those donors, and, of course, almost none of those parents really intend their kids to become fascist spree killers even when they turn out that way. The parents drive the economics of it and they're the opposite of a threat to the system in most cases.

If, on the other hand, that unregulated area were suddenly exploited as a locus for Marxist or revolutionary pedagogy to such a degree that, say, it made it into the local news, I'm pretty sure the money to regulate what has never been regulated in many states would suddenly appear, carried into town by a parade of cops.