Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons: Land, Labor, and Politics in the Pajaro Valley.

• Author: Landau, Saul

"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."

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.

As Kolko sees it, Bolshevik authoritarianism and not overreaching utopian policies finally led the Politburo to curtail the social gains of the Revolution. 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. 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. This last is a charge Kolko repeats frequently.

What seems to rankle Kolko above all else is the appearance among the old Leninist faithful of a species of voodoo economics, Marxist style. By March 1989, Party ideologues had concluded that "the private individual, small owner, and private capitalist economic forms are still necessary ... in the structure of the commodity-based economy for the advance toward socialism." 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.

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

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

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 selfinterest, a traditional hatred of "foreign oppressors," and a yearning for independence. 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.

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...