Ur-socialist Kolko tries - and fails - to come to grips with
Vietnam's embrace of a market economy. Kolko (formerly of York
Univ., Toronto) goes through hoops trying to explain why Vietnamese
communism hasn't worked. In this weakly argued, tediously written
tract, the author of Anatomy of a War (1986) - a fervidly
anti-American history of the Vietnam War - castigates a disparate
group of socialist enemies, including ignorant, avaricious,
market-loving Vietnamese communist apparatchiks, and officials of
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along
with the capitalist, imperialist Americans who control them. Kolko,
for example, calls Vietnam's Communist Party General Secretary Do
Muoi "an opportunistic, intellectually banal figure." Long-time
Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet is power-hungry, a "consummate cynic."
Kiet's economist Nguyen Xuan Oanh is "a consummate opportunist" and
a "key link with the IMF." World Bank and IMF officials have
blackmailed Vietnam, Kolko claims, offering much-needed loans to
gain the "prize" of "abolishing socialism." In prose that often
reads like a rhetoric-strewn ultraradical political tract, Kolko
concentrates on the economic changes that have come since 1985 with
the introduction of liberalized market-economic reforms (read:
capitalism). Although he calls the American war in Vietnam a
"terrible crime against humanity," Kolko ignores communist
Vietnam's human-rights abuses, both during the war and since. He
seems never to have heard the words "re-education camps" and skips
very lightly over the current Vietnamese government's shortcomings,
including press censorship and a still-strong secret police. An
embarrassing attempt by Kolko - more socialist than Ho Chi Minh -
to explain why his beloved Vietnamese communists have aided and
abetted "the ultimate American victory over socialism." (Kirkus
Reviews)
The author argues in this text, that victory in 1975 caught the
Communists wholly unprepared to cope with the reconstruction of the
war-torn nation. The text looks at the economic programme the
Communist Party has embarked upon since 1986 and describes the
decline of its socialist ideology and transition to nascent
capitalism. Based on research and first-hand experience, the text
offers a portrait of the profound dilemmas the nation confronts
today. Market reforms are producing serious social and economic
difficulties in Vietnam; inequality is creating a class society and
industrial workers are amongst the most exploited in the world. In
the light of these problems, the author outlines how Communists are
failing to cope with the contradictions between daily realities and
their original idealistic aims. He argues that neither a socialist
nor a market strategy has determined recent Vietnamese history and
that in fact, the confused Communist Party has had little control
over economic developments since their victory.
General
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