Trotsky conference MOSCOW (MVD): - A Committee to Study the Legacy of Leon Trotsky was launched at a seminar held here on November 10-12 1994. The meeting attracted over 120 participants from the former USSR, mainly Russian, but also from Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, & 20 guests from the capitalist world. A second conference is planned for December 8-10, 1995 in St. Petersburg. For more information contact: Mikhail Voeykov, Economics Institute, Krasikova 27, 117218, Moscow, fax 01170953107001 Marilyn Voyt-Downey, PO Box 1890, New York, NY 10009, U.S.A. tel/fax (+1)718/636 5446, e-mail [email protected]
International Viewpoint 4263 February 1995 21
VIETNAM
The new war against
Vietnam
THE SOCIAL consequences of market reforms in Vietnam since the mid-1980s are devastating. Health clinics and hospitals have been closed down, up to a quarter of the country's population have experienced local famines, and 3/4 million children have dropped out from the school system. There has been a resurgence of infectious diseases with a trippling of recorded malaria deaths during the first four years of the reforms. Over 40% of state enterprises have been driven into bankrupcy, and over 1.2 employees have been laid off. An agreement reached in Paris in 1993 force Vietnam to recognise the multi-lateral debts of the defunct Saigon regime of General Thieu as a condition for the granting of fresh credit and the lifting of the US embargo. In other words, Hanoi must "compensate" Washington for the costs of the War. The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are undone and erased almost with the stroke of a pen. No Agent orange, no steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social destruction has commenced. The "neutral" and "scientific" tools of macroeconomic policy (under the guidance of the Bretton
VIỆT NAM
U.S.A
Woods Institutions) constitute even "non-violent" instrument and impoverishment affecting millions of people.
an effective and of recolonisation the livelihoods of
Hanoi, 7 February 1994: shopkeeper celebrates
Clinton's lifting of U.S. trade embargo. photo EPA
MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY
THE RE-UNIFICATION of Vietnam after the liberation meant uniting two divergent socio-economic systems. The subsequent reforms in the South were enforced along narrow Central Committee guidelines, with little attention to the social forces involved: small-scale trade in Ho Chi Minh City was suppressed while a hasty process of collectivisation in the Mekong River delta met with strong opposition from the middle peasantry. Political repression affected not only those sectors of society which had ties to the Saigon regime but also many of those who had opposed General Thieu.
The devastation left by the Vietnam War created from the outset an atmosphere of helplessness and inertia.
The outbreak of the Cambodian civil war - fuelled by Washington's covert support to Pol Pot's forces after 1979 - and the Chinese invasion further thwarted the reconstruction of the civilian economy.
More recently. changes in the global market, and the breakdown of the Soviet bloc (Vietnam's main trading partner) have led to disarray in the national economy and a political void in the process of formulating a "national project". The Communist Party leadership has been characterised by profound divisions and shifts of policy have been characteristic of since the early 1980s.
Today, after more than fifty years of struggle against foreign occupation, the history of the Vietnam War is being cautiously rewritten: Neo-liberalism (with the technical support of the Bretton Woods institutions) is now the Communist Party's official doctrine. Bureaucrats and intellectuals are called upon to unreservedly support the new dogma in the name of socialism.
With the adoption in 1986 of "Renovation" (Doi Moi), references to America's brutal role in the war are increasingly considered improper.
Much of the Western media present Vietmam as being propelled into the status of a prospective "Asian tiger" by "free" market mechanisms. Nothing could be further from the truth. The economic reforms launched in 1986 under the guidance of the Bretton Woods institutions have initiated a new historical phase of economic and social devastation. Macro-
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International Viewpoint #263 February 1995