BOOKS:The God That Resigned

...Such a prediction, after the fact, is more easily asserted than proved...

...The charge...

...What seems to rankle Kolko above all else is the appearance among the old Leninist faithful of a species of voodoo economics, Marxist style...

...The goal of achieving socialism has been shelved until more propitious times, but not abandoned, its pulse—however weak—being kept alive by the very existence of the Leninist Party...

...Besides, Kolko argues, based on technical data he cites from a variety of sources, Vietnam's economy was showing steady growth by 1986, under socialist premises, even as the doi moi reforms were being introduced and the embargo lifted by most countries of the world, excluding, of course, the recalcitrant United States...

...This last is a charge Kolko repeats frequently...

...Then, bending to pressures from the IMF and the World Bank, Vietnam's "ruling elite" adopted the "capitalist line" as the most certain means of preserving its own power...

...And naturally for those of us who, with Kolko, recognize the justice of Vietnam's victory, the reading is bound to produce a certain grim satisfaction as we relive the glory days of that grand check to imperial power and world capitalist expansion, whose every step Kolko documents and analyzes with precision...

...Not only does he accuse these cadres of betraying the interests of their own "poor peasant" masses, but also of breaking faith with "far-flung antiwar activists," who, like Kolko, didn't just oppose the war but supported "the Revolution's social goals...

...This is, after all, a monumental work, synthesized from a vast quantity of raw data and ordered within a methodological framework that the historian Marvin Gettleman once described as "plain Marxist"—which might suggest to some a blend of zeal and orthodoxy worthy of John Calvin...

...It is a good question...

...By March 1989, Party ideologues had concluded that "the private individual, small owner, and private capitalist economic forms are still necessary...

...A "rereading" of "Leninist thought" had led to the discovery of "universal laws of commodity production," which, according to then Prime Minister (now Party Secretary) Do Muoi, justified operating the economy on "market principles" that would "help invent new forms of transition" to socialism...

...Kolko has molded a historical epic from the actions, and the motive forces behind them, of the four principal actors of the "American war"—the northern and southern communists, the Americans, and their Vietnamese allies...

...For Kolko, this turnabout represents a grotesque irony because such a system, in his view, might have been "attained, albeit under different rulers, had the Americans been allowed to run South Vietnam as they did other Asian 'tigers' [Taiwan and South Korea, for example...

...This is a low blow, but its sardonic intent underscores Kolko's deep dissatisfaction with a majority of the Politburo members who have governed Vietnam since 1975, leaders he portrays as "lackluster...

...In his "reassessment" of their "entire experience," Kolko argues that the Vietnamese have been stampeded down the capitalist road when they should have—indeed, could have— continued along the path of revolutionary socialism...

...It seems equally plausible to suggest that the impulse to defend the homeland—even where the national idea begins and ends at the commune gate—was as firmly rooted in less material forms of self-interest, a traditional hatred of "foreign oppressors," and a yearning for independence...

...For Kolko to be correct we must conclude, as he does, that the peasants were moved to make those extraordinary sacrifices, without which victory was unthinkable, almost exclusively because of the material advantages offered them through socialist land policies...

...models that Hanoi's leaders openly aspire to emulate...

...Assuming the latter, one might still be struck by, to borrow the phrase Daniel Singer applies to the European scene, "the weakness of the ideological resistance" in Vietnam's capitulation to capitalism...

...Michael Uhl is a Vietnam veteran and, with Tod Ensign, co-founder of Citizen Soldier...

...But the emotion of disillusionment so dominant in the "Postscript" gives the book a schizophrenic quality, though the substance of Kolko's criticisms cannot be ignored simply because they are packaged in the charged rhetoric of "a prophet betrayed...

...The basic idea is: Party + Capitalism = Socialism, a formula Kolko vehemently rejects as an intrinsic impossibility...

...apparatchiks" and "mediocre" old men...

...They spent a month in Vietnam last summer...

...Kolko's prediction is that just the opposite will occur: that Vietnam's new line, based on a tolerance of capitalism's built-in inequities, will lead to far more damaging social and political turmoil and, ultimately, to the fall of the Party...

...and the Eastern Bloc countries...

...This, at least, is the tenor of Kolko's "Postscript," where he charges, unequivocally, that the struggle in Vietnam for "a more rational and humane form of socialism" is being "sacrificed" in favor of what he repeatedly characterizes as a scheme to restore capitalism inspired by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank...

...This "promise . . . destroyed" is for Kolko very much a personal affair...

...Vietnam's economy has indeed been struggling since 1975...

...Fearing a Vietnamese equivalent of Poland's Solidarity or China's Tiananmen Square, the Party, he contends, reduced mass organizations to ceremonial shells and stifled democratic impulses among low-level cadres, veterans, and free-thinking intellectuals...

...A preface for the new edition might have smoothed the transition between the two narratives—that of the 1985 Kolko, full of critical admiration for the Revolution, the Party, and its leadership, and that of the 1994 Kolko...

...in the structure of the commodity-based economy for the advance toward socialism...

...Even under these somewhat cranky circumstances, a new edition of Anatomy of a War is a welcome event...

...Such, at least, is the new line of the Politburo...

...As Kolko sees it, Bolshevik authoritarianism and not overreaching Utopian policies finally led the Politburo to curtail the social gains of the Revolution...

...Anatomy of a War remains the definitive scholarly response to the question posed to the American public by Lyndon Johnson in 1965—but never satisfactorily answered by any of the war's apologists, even at this late date: "Why Vietnam...

...That classic provender of the Far Left—a sellout...

...One could wish that the tone of Kolko's polemic had leaned more toward empathy than accusation...

...Thus, the Soviet-style command economy has been rapidly dismantled, bringing an end to state subsidies in many forms, including significant amounts spent on education and health care...

...Vietnam lost virtually all the foreign aid and protected markets of fraternal communist nations...

...Vietnam's leaders claim to have dismantled their socialist economy from necessity, to avoid descent into the political chaos that beset their former allies...

...Wherever one's individual needle comes to rest on the gauge of political correctness on these questions, it is nonetheless crucial to see Kolko's "Postscript" as something more than a despairing obituary for the demise of socialism in Vietnam...

...As such, the eminent historian aims his polemic well beyond his immediate subject, the dilemmas facing contemporary Vietnam...

...And the Party, in his view, is the only force—when properly reformed—capable of restoring the egalitarian society that Hanoi, under Ho Chi Minh's leadership, was beginning to establish after 1945...

...It is an illusion," the leadership would later conclude, "to wish to advance directly to socialism without going through the stage of capitalist development...

...But also its general failure to increase productivity and wealth through a system of state-owned industry and collectivized agriculture was interpreted to mean that the Party had moved too quickly in its desire to create a classless society...

...Are we presented here, for example, with a choice between principle and opportunism, as Kolko would have us believe...

...The background giving rise to these criticisms can be summed up as follows: In 1975, the Vietnamese leadership, flush with victory and optimism, faced the daunting task of rebuilding a country that had been ideologically divided and subjected to thirty years of savage warfare...

...by Michael Uhl A friend should bear his friend's infirmities, But Brutus makes mine greater than they are Anatomy of a War, published by Pantheon in 1985, has been reissued without apparent revision to the original text, presumably for the sole purpose of showcasing a provocative forty-four-page "Postcript...

...One may legitimately wonder whether Kolko's orthodoxy concerning what socialism can and cannot be applies with equal force to the present and future as it does to the past...

...Beyond that, it's hard to judge whether, or to what degree, his position is right or wrong...

...The ultimate subordination of the Vietnamese economy to "market principles," however, did not really accelerate until after 1989, following the steady disintegration of the U.S.S.R...

...If even "pure" science has its theological dimension, then politics all the more so: Matters of faith are involved...

...A "market system under state management," the Vietnamese call it...

...The many efforts over the next decade to speed Vietnam's newly unified economy toward a socialist transformation were slowed dramatically, however, following a Party Congress in December 1986, when doi moi, the "new thinking," ushered in a series of reforms to combat runaway inflation and widespread corruption among government officials...

...But now, nearly twenty years after that dramatic setback to U.S...

...designs for hegemony over Vietnam, the capitalist fox—if I may turn Hubert Humphrey's anticom-munist barnyard homily on its head—has found economics to be a more effective means for wheedling its way back into the Little Red Hen House...

...He is working on two books, one on the German-American experience and the other, with Carol Brightman, on Vietnam...

...Large tracts of land have been returned to the private sector, where it can now be legally concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, leading—in the short run, at least—to population transfers from the countryside to the cities and a swelling of unemployment and homelessness...

...Or is Vietnam's pragmatism in accepting the market merely another case of that notable flexibility on the part of its leadership that Kolko has so admired under other circumstances...

...An extension of North Vietnam's socialist orientation to the South, more or less in tune with the Soviet model, was a foregone conclusion...

...To test this thesis, Kolko asks whether the same masses can be mobilized to perform similar efforts of a super-human scope on behalf of a form of development under "market principles" that may not only leave them in poverty but also deprive them of the few benefits they had achieved under the conditions prevailing prior to the doi moi reforms...

...The cause of its weakness, however, was not, Kolko insists, the Party's premature drive toward socialism, but rather the protracted hostilities involving its neighbors—hostilities which, in turn, depleted Vietnam's human and financial resources and subjected the nation to an international trade embargo...

...He provides an important working paper for the ongoing debate around socialism's shape and future in a larger world...

...As a theoretical statement, the "Postscript" also contains Kolko's short list of those irreducible principles that distinguish socialism from capitalism, the Left from the Right...

...No economic policy," Kolko writes, "could have transcended the Cambodian war's [1978-1989] huge material effects, and without this tragic affair Vietnam's subsequent economic performance would have been far better, whatever its premises...

...Not only that—had the Vietnamese communists after 1945 "organized the economy and society in the manner Western economists later convinced the Party's leaders was superior" to their socialist alternatives, it "would have led to Vietnam's defeat...

...In it, the post-reunification Vietnamese leadership comes in for a rather depressing tongue-lashing at the hands of their former confidant and sometime champion, the author and historian Gabriel Kolko...

...Such a hybrid—'market-oriented socialism' " rejoins Kolko, "has never existed anywhere...

...Despite a tendency toward repetitive-ness, extending to certain key points and a few stock metaphors (more "vacuums" are created and filled in Kolko's prose than in a high-school physics class), there is a relentless, penetrating intelligence guiding this work from start to finish...