Since most liberals quite haven’t really caught up with the now ancient news that China is today a capitalist country run by a leftover Stalinist dictatorship, I thought it instructive to point out that Vietnam is not a communist country today either, and for the same reasons. Its Communist Party recently has devolved the previous revolution back into a nationalist run, counterrevolutionary capitalist class economy under Vietnamese Communist Party control and direction.
Last year foreign capitalist investment or FDI hit $20 billion, with Ford, WalMart, and other multinational firms now operating much of the economic activity there. The FDI of Vietnam just 10 years ago was less than $5 billion.
One of the tools to evaluate whether ‘communism’ exists or not is to look at the FDI in a country. Communists are people who try to abolish the capitalist class’s control over the working class, not those who invite foreign capitalists into the country to run the economy. Just because the ruling party might still have ‘communist’ in its name does not automatically mean that they are communist leaders any more.
Counterrevolutions often occur inside previously more radical leadership groupings, like the Vietnamese Communist Party leadership that once fought to kick the Japanese, French, and US out of their country was. Vietnam is not now still a communist country even though it at least still remains independent politically from outsider imperialists. The imperialists do have a way of sneaking back in through their capitalist investment, and for that reason, Leon Trotsky and other revolutionary communist theorists of the past correctly observed that communism could not be permanently build in any one country alone. Capitalism was, and remains so, an international economic system.
Hi everyone. I’m new here so I just wanted to say hi
Vietnam was never communist in the first place. The Vietnamese Workers Party of Ho Chi Minh was Stalinist nationalist since its foundation.
Ho was a supporter of Stalin and Mao Zedong and he eliminated the genuine communist movement in Vietnam led by Ta Thu Thau.
The ”Socialist” Republic of Vietnam is not socialist, it never was and it will never be. Not as long that corrupt capitalist ”communist” party rules there.
We’re hopefully not “preaching to the Choir” and a lot of the people who come here wanting to denounce us are quite simply not yet capable of distinguishing between Communist, Stalinist, Trotsky versus Lenin, Socialist, Liberal, or any other person who’s to the left of Vlad the Impaler socially, religiously or politically, any more than they can distinguish between Muslim people, Arabs who are of the Christian faith, Indians, Polynesians, Afghans or for that matter Chasidic Jews.
It’s kind of like “All them thar gooks, towel-heads, nigras, ethnic-group-target-du-jour look alike to me, an’ Ah Hates all of them” in its scope.
We actually get readers from the Klan and Skinheads, so it’s not always somebody who’s educated or open-minded in any way who finds his way to the site.
Some manage to LEAVE a little bit more open-minded and a little less ignorant. It’s a personal choice and there will, of course, always be the Chronic Haters.