One of the problems that Vietnam faced entering its third Five-Year Plan (1981-1985) had to do with producing enough food to feed the nation (Porter). This is why the Vietnamese Communist Party made solving food production problems a major priority at its 1982 meeting. However, the party at the time reaffirmed its commitment to keeping industry and agriculture combined as far as efforts went, because both were considered foundational to growth of the other, and Vietnam remained committed to developing an economy based on industry (Tan). Interestingly, the whole idea of agricultural development serving as an element of socialist industrialization became called a creative element of the industrialization process (Marr and White). Of course, people who know history at all understand that the agrarian way has been around since the beginning of time, while even in 1981 the idea of industrialization was a new one, at least relatively speaking (Beresford). If you went back just 200 years from 1981, you had a world in which industrialization was largely absent. The steam engine, the burning of coal to generate power and other industrial inventions had not shown up yet to turn the tide of human history, and the agrarian economy was the economy. In many ways, industrialization was the opposite of the agrarian way because it moved people out of the sun and off the land into giant buildings that, at least for the first century of the industrial age, employed people for a dozen hours (or more) a day at paltry wages and churned through workers almost as quickly as they churned through the raw materials necessary to generate product because of the lack of attention to safety in the workplace; after all, the first labor unions were well over a century away, and the worker was definitely under the thumb of the industrialist.
Some other priorities of the Fifth Congress in March 1982 included ways to make agricultural enterprises into the industrialist-socialist present. Some of these steps included integrating both individual and collective sectors into a wider plan for intensive land cultivation and specialization of crops, completing the socialization of agriculture in the southern half of the country, combining forestry, fishery and agriculture with handicrafts and small-scale industry to build an economic structure that would prove workable, and increasing the amount of attention paid to technological and scientific advancements in agriculture, especially in the areas of fertilizer use, applied microbiology, the use of water, the incorporation of mechanization and the development of more sophisticated storage facilities (Nuy). Of these elements, the one that received the most emphasis was encouraging the total cooperativization of the southern parts of Vietnam by the end of the Third Five-Year Plan. While the south had been a part of the country for almost a decade by the start of the Third Five-Year Plan, there were still some areas in which it lagged behind the North as far as bringing socialist measures to bear. It is interesting that, given how reluctant the southern half of Vietnam was to put up a legitimate fight against the north when there were American troops on their soil trying to help them, they would then object to following along with the plans of the northern half ot eh country as far as improving agricultural outcomes went. It is difficult to unify a country in this sort of situation, but the fact that the former occupants of South Vietnam, which had been, if only briefly, a free and democratic state until the larger Communist nations decided that it was time to push all the way south on the Vietnamese peninsula. It may be, of course, that the southern Vietnamese simply wanted reunification with their former countrymen and cared less about economic policy than they did about unity as a country once again.
Even so, the southern half of Vietnam was slow to cooperate in the socialization of agriculture, even as late as 1984, when the south started to take on more pressure from the central government. By the end of 1985, the Vietnamese government claimed that there were 36,457 production collectives and 622 agricultural collectives in the southern parts of Vietnam (Marr and White). These collectives contained 86 percent of peasant homes and 81.3 percent of the acreages under cultivation. There were also 562 inter-production collectives that were supposed to group multiple collectives together in order to meet new targets that might be set up at a later time (Marr and White).
Another element of the Third Five-Year Plan that represented a shift was a prioritization of the “family economy” There was a lot of division in the Party leadership about this issue because of the fear that using smaller enterprises to spur growth would lead to a more capitalist emphasis in their decision making. There was a time that Communist leaders believed that if families banded together with one another to make smaller items and sell them, that capitalism would spontaneously erupt and render Communism paralyzed. Of course, when family members, instead of being productive, decided only to do the work that the planning boards permitted them to do, productivity fell through the floor – and such problems as a lack of food for the families in Vietnam came to the fore. This question of individual initiative is one of the central paradoxes of the Communist way of thinking. After all, if anyone can come up with an idea that could bring economic benefit to himself or others, providing additional money into the system, one would probably see this as a bonus.
However, one of the central tenets of Communism was a belief in the Five-Year Plans, a sense of commitment to the idea that the leadership of the nation could come up with ways for the entire country to prosper together, making initiative unnecessary at the individual level. Of course, once those Five-Year Plans began to take off, it became swiftly clear that the central planning committees were having a difficult time getting the numbers up where they needed to be, then the idea of the “family economy” came more into public acceptance. Even in the capitalist economies of today, this sort of work has become encouraged. When people are working extra hard to put a child into a private college or they simply do not have room for certain things in their budget, they often add to their available income through a “family business” sort of activity. Such businesses as Mary Kay and the It Works! Line of products owe their genesis to the idea that it is possible to turn your personal network of contacts into customers – and into a set of revenue streams. In a place like Vietnam, this sort of initiative would at first receive criticism – at least until it started to work, and that is exactly what happened here.
If one looks at the way that the government began taking produce from the peasant households during this plan, you can see a compromise between a capitalist way of putting money together and the traditional Communist reliance on the five-year plans to provide what people needed was going to have to come together for the country to survive. Even in the Soviet Union and its satellite states to the West, there was a growing casualness toward the incorporation of capitalist ideas and practices into the larger Communist economy. It was becoming increasingly clear that simply relying on Communist principles alone would not bring the country the growth that it needed – instead, the country needed a hybrid. So peasant households would commit to provide a certain amount of produce to the government each year, and if it did not meet the quota, it had to make that up the next year. Which begs, of course, the question of what would happen with a drought, particularly one that spanned two years, as it would become impossible for a household, one would imagine, to make up that deficit if the weather were not cooperating. There is also the area of surplus – if a household was able to produce more than its quota of produce, it could keep it, either to eat as a household or to sell on the private market. This might seem, at first, a contradiction with Communist principles, but it was the sort of deal that could bring Vietnam forward, at long last.
Works Cited
Beresford, Melanie. “The Vietnamese Transition from Plan to Market:
Transformation of the Planning Mechanism.” Unpublished essay, Marquette University, 1988.
Huy, Nguyen. “Taking Agriculture a Step Towards Large-scale Socialist
Production.” NCET 1983 #4: 17-28.
Mar, David & White, Christine. Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas in Socialist
Development. New York: SEAP Publications, 1988.
Porter, Gareth. Vietnam: The Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism. New York:
Cornell University Press, 1993.
Tan, Teng Lang. Economic Debates in Vietnam: Issues and Problems in
Reconstruction and Development (1975-1984). Seoul: Institute of Southweast Asian Development, 1985.
