Reading Ho Chi Minh

Onto a lighter note, a good friend recently gave me a collection of Vietnamese liberation leader Ho Chi Minh's speeches, and I thought I'd comment on parts of them.

By 1922 Ho was engaging with both the French Communist movement and that of his own country, obviously still under occupation, and he pointed to the role racism on the part of the French and suspicion on the part of the Vietnamese played in inhibiting collaboration between the two movements. The Vietnamese colonial government was plainly terrified of something like this happening- going so far as to ban (enforced with prison time) the circulation, possession, or reading of the French political press in Vietnam. In the light of current resistance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, this familiar concern is worth repeating: Capitalism creates pressure to find new markets, sources of labor and materials, and this means that jobs are increasingly done in colonized regions where lower levels of development and regulation enable business to rely on what amounts to slave labor or indentured servitude. It seems to me that businesses engage in something of a “prisoner's dilemma” in which their profits are maximized if they have no employees anywhere that requires a living wage or basic human rights, but only if the people in those countries have enough resources to keep buying their products. It seems then that the ideal circumstance for a business would be to be the only one using cheaper labor than its competitors, but since this can't be done, the entire world is now in a race to the bottom. Ho would tell us to recognize all the victims of this system- the slaves in the new sweatshops as well as those condemned to poverty and often incarceration by the amputation of the means of production from the workers who previously serviced them, and to try to work together. This seems particularly relevant in light of rising Islamophobia, deployed to keep us from empathizing with Arabs or Southeast-Asians, frustrating any effort to build a political movement with these comrades in the struggle.

Ho goes on in later speeches to recount colonialist atrocities which, then as now- from British troops raping their charges on peacekeeping missions to the US torture regime in prison camps at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib- escape all accountability. He lists the Belgian regime in the Congo as slaughtering 2/3 of its people, as well as the crimes perpetrated by my ancestral homeland, Germany in our occupation of Namibia- 2 entire tribes with unique cultures were entirely exterminated, going on to say more of the massive death tolls inflicted in French-controlled areas. Domination by foreign powers, be they states, companies, or supra-state organizations, has consistently led to meddling in agriculture and attendant famines, repression of local control, environmental degradation, and gross abuses of human rights. In a time in which we're asked to support further invasions abroad, further ceding of power to corporations, and the forced sale of public assets to private actors, it's always useful to rehash this litany of abuse.

Ho mentions the increased development of a working class in Vietnam as a result of increased capitalization of the economy: this is a typical Leninist perception of the pattern- when people are concentrated in labor intensive enterprises, they become more cognizant of common experiences and the systems which produce them. At this point in Vietnamese history a vanguard party formed- Leninist concept to compensate for the fact that full-time employment is not the most conducive state to political activity and observation, requiring an oppressed people to fund a general staff of political leaders to serve in the vanguard, as it were, of the movement. The concept seems reasonable enough to me. I'll be reading more Lenin next- if I can get through the extensive sections that are just insults of rival movements, I'll try to post a follow-up review of some of his work.

On Patriotism, Ho seems to describe the dangers of nationalism- he holds that love of the state and country has proven necessary to repulse attacks on Socialist development before, a kind of safe patriotism that motivates loyalty rather than xenophobia. This still disturbs me, primarily because I don't think we can point to any successful examples. Even in the Soviet Union, there were significant drawbacks to being any ethnicity other than Rus, and nationalistic loyalty seems to blind us to faults of the group in question, but some sort of union with the forces of nationalism seems to be necessary for anto-colonial Red movements.

There's an interesting response to Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's excesses and the institution of the cult of personality, in which Ho declares his support for Khrushchev's attempts to return the party to prominence over any individual leader (for more details see my thesis part 3), and warning of the danger in any system that recognizes individuals more than systems. This is particularly interesting as an early sign of Ho's preference for the Soviet Union over the People's Republic of China, which was outraged by Khrushchev's deviation from Stalin's example.

Ho mentions the dangers of individualism, and as one who has sparred with more than her share of post-modernists, I found his insights particularly satisfying. Ho points out that showing off knowledge without using it to solve practical problems is an individualistic indulgence that doesn't help anyone.

I'm especially interested in what agricultural reforms were pursued- perhaps someone who knows more could explain this to me, or I'll find the time to seek more detailed history- if Ho is to be believed (and I want corroborating sources) Vietnam seems to have pulled off a successful collectivization with increased productivity, even amid a war with mass defoliation and destruction of Vietnamese crops. I'd love to know how they did it- how to go from a feudal agriculture system to a centrally or regionally planned modern one without allowing in exploitative foreign corporations or enduring severe shortages is quite a feat.

As for Ho's commentaries on constitution design, some fairly standard stuff, much of which I agree with, especially how rights are only available to all in a socialist society- sensible enough. Equality before the law is nigh unattainable in a society with class divisions to say nothing of the racial and gendered hierarchies that intersect with and sustain them. From Ho's public statements, we can see considerable rhetorical caution against Stalinist excesses, while acknowledging the overzealousness of some land reformers.

It all seems quite impressive, and I'm very grateful to Genosse Sam for the gift. I'd love to find some more information especially on the nuts and bolts of Vietnamese land reform and the Party's approach to it at all levels.

Solidarität, Genossinnen und Genossen