Economic Reforms--The Failures

Economic Reforms--The Failures

By Van Nguyen

A major problem that posed toParty Secretary-general Le Duan when he seized fult  power following the Party Congress of December 14,  1976 was how to transform Vietnan  into  a socialist state. There had been until then no ideological theory or model for transition for a country that aspires to advance from a small scale production economy to a fuul scale productions one. A self-confident rhetorician himself, the Secretary-general conceived that the advancement to socialism, first and most, was conditioned by the laws of developments in each country. The economic transformation in South Vietnam should, first and foremost, adapt itself to the models of economic development in the socialist North. The northernization of the South should be preceded in association with the unification of the country; it is, thereby, a necessary imposition.  In the area of agricultural development, for instance, the cooperatives systems should be applied in the South as well as in 500 districts in the whole country so that, within five years, the agriculture in the whole would develop at the same level. Along with the development of economy modeled on the economic systems in the North, the Party Secretary invented a new political principle for the people’s democracy whereby the Party is the leader, the State, the manager, and the people, the master.  Until the present time, quite a few theorists of the party could understand what he really means.

The objectives for economic reforms proved to be plain rhetoric. Programs for heavy industry light industry and agriculture only exist on paper, in the speeches of the Party leadership, and on the slogans of the State propaganda machinery. Plans and measures to build up a centralization economy within the framework of national unified structures, promotion of coordination in the administration systems in association with the forces and means of production remained futile. By the Decision 245 following the Central Party Congress of September 20, 1977, the Politburo incorporated 60 cities and provinces in the whole countries into 29 provinces and 4 cities. Province and city Party Committees were vested with full authority to make decisions on matters of regional economic self-sufficiency, creating units of economic planning to regulate at the highest levels all needs and pushing forward the production. Energetic party members and cadressuch as the ones at Quynh Luu District, Nghe An Province determinedly vied with the Creator in overcoming obstacles to achieve  great works “to make rice out of rock and pebble.” required on   Districts and villages modeled on the Chinese-style communes sprang up transfiguring the economic life of the citizens. Making an individual trade or doing a small business were attributed to as doing business illegally. Whoever has with him or her a kg of meat, 5 kgs of rice, or a couple of bottles of fish sauce is charged with crimes of contraband goods smuggling. He/she has to pay fines; otherwise the contraband goods are confiscated. All along the highway from Saigon to My Thuan Bridge in Can Tho Province, for instance, local tax collection checkpoints mushroomed. Contraband goods confiscated could then be found at some local poem market instead of State customs warehouses. Corruption spread, and the central economy never becomes a reality.   

Meanwhile, the change of currency, trade and industry restructuration along with the on-going agrarian reforms were equally unmanageable. As with the change of currency, the Party’s aim was to seize all the financial resources of the country. Artful tricks nevertheless failed to kick off the economy. It executed the change of money bills. It defined the values of the new money bills on its whims and wishes, regardless of the fact that the new currency had nothing in but the face value. Prices soared. Crises arose. It created problems, upsetting the economy and endangering social disability. The lack of economic objectivity nullified the Party leadership's efforts for economic self-production and self-sufficiency and eroded its prestige severely. The new currency crumpled, and inflation galloped.  After a few years of reform, the development of the new forces of production and the establishment and perfection of new modes of production conceived by it proved to be unreal. The economy in the South collapsed, causing grave damages to the national economy. Cities and townships throughout the country became derelict.  The inhabitants in the Mekong delta, which was known as the granary of Indochina, survived on horse-feeding grains. They could not afford rice for food. They had to survive on rotten rice.

The consequences of the trade and industry restructuration were disastrous. The old cupid petty bourgeois and exploiting classes were eliminated, but the new terrible new oppressive class came into being. Through the strict control of the State, it carried on outrageously vile tricks to pillage the national resources and exploit the people’s labor. Nationalized plants, factories small and large and small private enterprises, handicraft productions turned into State companies fell into pseudo-interests groups. Cooperatives were managed by ruse and gradually degraded and became inoperative. The waste of the means of production was another factor that brought the economy to the dead end. Road and bridge construction materials and equipment were left unused and became ruined in store warehouses due to poor management and lack of expertise. Experts of the old regime were sent to reeducation camps, and “experts” from the North had little or no knowledge of western modern technology. The elimination of the middle class bourgeois and exploiting classes brought in nests results.  After a few years of trade and industry reforms with less productive forces of production and inefficacious modes of production, the economy increasingly deteriorated. State industry plants, and State business enterprises were at a halt.   

As regards the intelligence property, the Party and State was successful in expropriating the entirety of wealth and properties of the landowning bourgeoisie and actually transferred their ownership to the State. The Party never expropriates their expertise in the management of land properties and the experiences in the working operations of the economy. These intelligence properties were really incorporated in their projects, expertise, and experience. The hidden wealth and properties of the "capitalist bourgeoisie" and their expertise and experience which it needed to reconstruct the economy. Worse still, its methods of management were rough, ruthless, and unduly, Along with harsh measure, agrarian reforms pushing the peasantry to the death end that eventually led them to resist and oppose the regime. During the land reform, the Party, in practice, seized the entirety of land and means of production of rich landowners and transferred their rights to ownership to "the People." The Party could in no way expropriate their techniques and methods of management. As for the peasantry, these measures were to them were only a way of deprivation of land property the Party cunningly executed in the name of the "Revolution" and the People." As new methods of management  unfolded, the peasantry came to realize that they were exploited even more mercilessly under the People's Democracy than under imperialism previously, even though they were then "the master" of the country. As a result, they showed resistance. They opposed the State in silence and furthered non-cooperation, carrying out its orders just as a matter of formality.

The same decadence is true with the agrarian reforms.  The Party seized the entirety of land and means of production of rich landowners and transferred their ownership to the Party. However, it failed to expropriate their techniques and methods of management. As for the peasantry, these measures were to them only a change of hands. The exploitation of the peasantry under communism was even crueler, although they were "masters of the community" and worked for the "building of the Socialist Fatherland."  As a result, the peasants were indignant at the Party; and they either opposed the Party or carried out its orders just as a matter of formality. They were grouped and worked udder rules and regulations for agricultural cooperatives. Those who refused to join were considered anti-revolutionaries. This mode of agricultural collective production really began in April 1959 following the grain reforms in the North (1956-1958) and was applied in the South following the takeover of the South in terms of the 1976-1980 economic plans. “Cooperation’” was, in reality was “coercion.” Having transferred their ownership of properties to the State---land, cattle, and implements-- the peasants became barehanded.  Everything is under control of the agricultural cooperatives and the commune, from irrigation works to daily activities.               

Upon the completion of the land distribution, the State seized all modes of agricultural productions in the South, but failed to promote a central economy as promised. Mismanagement of labor forces was among the grave major errors. The peasantry resisted to join all forms of cooperatives and stood on their own in cultivating, managing traditional modes of production, and preserving rights to ownership of their lands. The State failed to establish agricultural communes and cooperatives as it had in the North the 1960’s. In Vinh Loi District, Bac Lieu Province, for instance, the peasants refused to register with the agricultural commune and to do business with agricultural cooperatives. Village and district agricultural cadres failed to control all modes of production. They had to go from one village to another to negotiate in business with the peasants; they even had to make deals in exchanging goods and commodities for rice from individual peasants.

There were stories about the masses' punishments on the cadres who reported to Party authorities about the masses' resistance to the Party's policy. For instance, the Party's policy stipulated that to achieve the state five-year economic plan (1975-1980), the growing of rice was compulsory, and the peasants could only grow rice. Those who grew crops other than rice would suffer heavy taxes. The Communist authorities usually squeezed out even the last penny, and the peasants would be exploited to the point they could hardly survive. Nevertheless, the peasants in many areas decided to grow tobacco since the crop often brought them good interests and thus helped them make ends meet. A vile cadre would be punished if he ventured to report the situation to higher authorities. A secret hand would hide his crop, and he authorities would never find out who the culprit was. That was the will of the masses. The Vietnamese Communist Party's monopoly of power, in the long run, could not stand. It would only cause political opposition and economic disorder.

In the following years, being aware of popular discontent, it has loosened its control on the peasantry's modes of production and eased the people's economic life by allowing a form of market economy.  However, it still holds on to its political monopoly of power, using it as leverage for political difficulties. The Democratic Party and the Social Party that were created by the Vietnamese Communist Party and that existed nominally were disbanded. The leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party were afraid that the other two parties would grow up and eventually replace the Communist Party in the leadership.  As the world movement progressed rapidly towards democracy, the Vietnamese Communist Party increasingly worried about an unpredictable change. It found enemies everywhere. Anyone could be its enemy. It was the fear of a man who rides on a tiger's back.

With the motto’ “Glory is Labor,” the Vanguard Youths Forces came into force under the sponsorship of Party deputy-secretary of Ho Chi Minh City Vo Van Kiet. Tens of thousands of youths including elements whose parents were “pirates” were mobilized to engage in “socialist production.”  The Vanguard Youths were vested with the mission set up a “pilot program “for clearance of waste lands. The Party deputy-secretary said approvingly that the City “is in need of a vanguard force.”  The Vanguards Youths of Ho Chi Minh City was officially entitled to organization and was supported in all intents by the Party City Committee.  He further explained that “there is a need to create an environment where all youths to participate in labor production so that they will be able to think actively and be truly being proud of them.” Thousands of vanguard youths with  picks and shovrls marched throughout the streets of Saigon in the parade of show of force on March 28 1976.   

The development of agriculture along the path of farming proved to be futile “Kolkhoz” failed to take shape, however, Plans to expand farm lands with agricultural farms in flooded areas of Gia Dinh, Dinh Tuong, the Plain of Rush in Dong Thap, in the lower land along the plains of the Bassac River were all aborted due to lack of practical knowledge of irrigation methods and techniques. Groups after groups of the “Vanguard Youth” were equipped with hand rails and picks were sent to labor on irrigation works all the year round but brought no results. Intellectuals, workers, and city-dwellers were picked in teams to waddle flooded areas in Thai My, Cu Chi, and Nguyen Van Coi swamps to dig canals, to drain the lands with only their bare hands. They had to go across the flooded areas for hours to come to designated place. Without training and practice works, they could only look at the sky, at the water, and at themselves and waddle back to the city. They were nevertheless recognized as “progressive elements” that had participated in “socialist productions. Some intellectuals were recruited to be State employees. Common city-dwellers and family members of the “puppet government” were exempted from resettling in the economic zones.     

Agrarian Reforms

Agrarian Reforms

by Van Nguyen



      The Background

      The Russian Experience--Collectivization

 Liberation in the economy brought about a turnabout in the Soviet Union. By 1927, both industrial and agricultural productions were nearly back to pre-war levels. The regime in these years was undergoing great uncertainty of its leadership. This already had been apparent before Lenin died in 1924, but the removal of a man whose acknowledged ascendancy had kept forces within it in balance opened a period of evolution and debate in the Bolshevik leadership. It was not about the centralized autocratic nature of the regime which had emerged from the 1917 revolution, for one of the protagonists considered that political liberalization was conceivable or that the use of secret police and the party’s dictatorship could be suspended within a world of hostile capitalist states. But they could disagree about economic policy and tactics and personal rivalry sometimes gave extra edge to this.

 Broadly speaking, two viewpoints emerged. One emphasized that the revolution depended on the good will of the mass of Russians, the peasants, they had first been allowed to take the land authorized by attempts to feed the cities at their expense, then recon ciliated again by the liberalization of the economy and what was known as “NEP,” the New Economic Policy which Lenin had approved as an expedient. Under it, the peasants had been able to make profits for themselves and had begun to grow more food and sell it to the cities. The other viewpoint showed the same facts in a longer prospective. To conciliate the peasants who would slow down industrialization, which Russia needed to survive in a hostile world, the party’s proper course, which argued against those who took this view, promoted the theory that somewhat relies upon the revolutionary militants of the cities and to exploit the still-non Bolshevized peasants in their interest while pressing on with industrialization and the production of revolution abroad.

The Communist under Trotsky took this view. What happened was roughly that Trotsky was shouldered aside, but his view prevailed. From the intricate politics of the party there emerged eventually the ascendancy of a number of its bureaucracy, Joseph Stalin, a man far less attractive intellectually than either Lenin or Trotsky, equally ruthless, and of greater historical importance,  Gradually arming himself with a power which he used against former colleagues and Bolsheviks as willingly as against his enemies, he carried out the real Russian revolution to which the Bolshevik seizure of power had paved the way and created the a new elite on which a new Russia was to be based. For him, industrialization was paramount. The road to it  lay through finding a way for forcing the peasant to pay for it by supplying the grain he would rather have  eaten if not offered a good profit. Two five-year plans’ carried out industrialization program from 1926 onwards, and their roots lay in the collectivization of agriculture. The Party now, for the first time, conquered the countryside. In a new civil war, millions of peasants were killed on transported communes, and grain levies brought back famine. But the towns were fed, through the police apparatus kept consumption down to the minimum. There was a fall in real wages. By 1937, 80 per cent of Russian industrial output came from the plant built since 1928. Russia was again a great power and the effects of this alone would assure Stalin a place in history.

The price in suffering was enormous. The enforcement of collectivization was only made possible by brutality on a scale far greater than anything else under the tsars and it made Russia a totalitarian state far more effective than the autocracy had been. Stalin, though himself a Georgian, looks a Russian figure, a despot whose ruthlessness of power is anticipated by an Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. He was also a somewhat paradoxical claimant to Marxist orthodoxy, which taught that the economic structure of society determined politics. Stalin precisely invented this; he demonstrated if the will to use political power there, the economic structure could be revolutionized by force (J. M. Roberts, History of the World. Oxford University Press. New York, pp. 226-27).   

    

Agrarian Reforms in Vietnam

 As soon as the Communist Party of Indochina was founded (1930), it proclaimed its fundamental tasks as to abolish feudalism and French imperialism and to gain full independence. In support of theses, the Party carried out such slogans as “to requisition all lands belonging to foreign and local landowners and to the Church and to give them to middle and poor peasants. Campaigns for land reforms were practically carried out in the early years of the 1950’s, not only expropriating the lands and properties of the exploiting classes but also annihilating traditional religious beliefs, abolishing old values, and establishing a new social order instituted on codes of behavior determined through systems of party cells and its affiliated organizations throughout the county. In 1939, The Communist Party of Indochina, in seeking support from national parties and soothing all social layers in the country, encouraged the confiscation of the possessions of the French imperialists and Vietnamese traitors, the reduction of rents and rates of interest, and the redistribution of communal lands to the peasants (Tran Phuong, The Land Reform 19651965:187-168).

       Agrarian Reforms in North Vietnam

General Le Thiet Hung of the People’s Army reported in the magazine Cuu Chien Binh (Veteran Fighters) in September 1991 that it was Ho Chi Minh who initiated and executed the campaigns for crimes revelations and denunciations of landlords in the beginning of kind reforms of 1953-56. He applied all the experiences he had learned from Stalin during his stay in the Soviet Union and the maneuvers for crimes revelations and denunciations from Mao in Hunan during the years 1924-1927 when he served as a secret agent for China. The consequences were disastrous. In the provinces in the Red River Delta, the masses revolted against the local administrations. In the Center, the Party leadership had to rely on the army to quench the uprising of the peasantry. During November 1956, the Party press conceded that a popular uprising took place in the Quynh Luu Distract, Nghe An Province. Approximately 20,000 peasants armed with only coarse farm implement and staffs fought against the 315 Division. Western observers claimed that about 1,000 peasants were killed or wounded between November 10 and 20, 1956. Seven thousand people were arrested and deported. Before that, on November 1, 1956, the government announced the release of 12,000 people from prison and labor camps. It is generally believed that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed, and 50,000 to 100,000 were deported and imprisoned.

.The government nationalized all agricultural land and vested ownership rights in the land taken from “reactionary “landlords in agricultural communes, which, in principle, it could relocate land for families who needed most. This appeared to be a sensible marriage Communist orthodoxy with colonial traditions. However, doing the land reform campaign 1953-1956, a separate organization was established to appropriate and redistribute the land of the “landlords” and “rich peasants” categories of population whose definition, to a considerable extent, dependent on the whims and wishes of local party officials. This campaign caused major problems in rural areas and was not successful in effacing inequalities in access to land and other assets in rural areas. What the agrarian reforms failed to accomplish was to satisfy the need for land. It was only able to give 1.5 million landless and poor peasant’s family’s slightly more than one acre each. These gifts were not enough to turn the poor peasants into enthusiastic supporters of the regime. On the contrary, the injustices and atrocities produced widespread resentment, unrest, and eventually rebellion (Joseph Buttinger. The Smaller Dragon, 1968:428).

By sheer energy, persistence, and ruthlessness, the Labor Party, by successive programs of agrarian reforms, was successful in eliminating the land-owing peasantry, establishing government control the agricultural sector of the country.  However, Fforde noted that “the land reform was modified in “the early 1960’s to one which sought to establish cooperatives that would, in turn, incorporate it into full scale agricultural collectives. At the same time, the government was implementing neo-Stalinist development policy at the macroeconomic level. Emphasizing the rapid development of heavy industry, and, of course, waging an increasingly costly war the American-backed government in the South. Only massive aid from CMEA countries allowed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to continue these policies, to the point where their armies could invade the South and inflict a humiliating defeat on the American and South Vietnamese armies. By any objective standard, the economy of North Vietnam in 1975 was at a very low level of economic development (Adam Fforde. The Agrarian Question of North Vietnam.  1989:14)    

      Agrarian Reforms in South Vietnam

After the "liberation" of the South, when the wounds if the war were yet to heal, along  with political discrimination and hatred, repression, and  corrupt practices  emerged en masse and spread everywhere. Common personnel of the old regime were brought to stand trial in sessions of meeting in local street wards or village hamlets for avowals of crimes. Suspected reactionaries were subject to interrogation, arrest, and reeducation. Households of the petty bourgeoisie and family members of officers and officials of the old regime were forced or encouraged to leave the city and returned to their home villages. Thousands of people were still seeking means to leave the country, by boat across the sea or on foot to the neighboring countries. Executions of the personnel of the Republic of Vietnam were extending to the villages of the south most of South Vietnam, Ben Tre, Moc Hoa, Chuong Thien, Bac Lieu, Ca Mau, and  Rach Gia. For months, fear of a bloodbath like the sickle of Damocles hanged overhead these “blood debtors of the people.”

Agrarian reforms in the South were carried out without “splitting and sky-rocketing campaigns’ as they had been in the early years of the 1960’s in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Reminiscences of the days of revelations of crimes and scenes of reactionaries being brought to stand trials before the People’s Court, nevertheless, resurged in the minds of the refugees from the North in 1954. Still, the population in the South well obsessed with the bloodiest Tet massacre merciless in the spring of 1968, rockets shelling into schools, markets, and hospitals in Cai Lay, Dinh Thong, Saigon, Binh Long, Quang Tri, Ban Me Thuot, and so on following the cease-fire 1973. The land repartitions in the rural areas proceeded peacefully in silence while campaigns for expropriating the bourgeoisie’s properties in the cities. Was in full swing in the cities, thousands of workers found no jobs, and hundreds of thousands of city-dwellers were resettled in the new economic z ones for socialist productions.

Unlike the campaigns for land reforms in the North, the peasantry under the People’s Democracy in the South played no role in this agricultural economic transition. The land distributions  were solely vested in the authority in politics and party cadres of South Vietnam origin who freshly returned to their homes and authorities from the North who had little and no knowledge about the economy of the South, and even worse, the opportunities called as “the revolutionaries of April 30(1975). Land redistribution was preceded on the whims and wishers of these “mandarin of the Revolution.” Lands expropriated with redemptions under the Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu Thieu governments were, again, expropriated and distributed to the peasants. Lands and properties belonging to the “puppet” exploiting class or “counterrevolutionaries were divided among authorities, the local cadres, households of war martyrs of war heroes, and those who achieve great deeds or contribute to the service of the “Revolution.” In the Cu Chi, Thai My, Dong Thap (Plain of Rush), and the plains of Bassac River, the same lands distributed to the peasants during the Vietnam War by the Privy Government of South Vietnam were, again, distributed to them!