effect of agricultural privatization on communist political legitimacy in vietnam, The

INTRODUCTION

In 1954, communist revolutionaries came to power in North Vietnam with grand plans of transforming a poor, agrarian society into a socialist, industrialized nation by collectivizing agriculture. Agricultural collectivization was viewed as:

necessary, not only for the development of agriculture and the steady improvement of the peasants' living conditions, but also for the consolidation of the worker-peasant alliance on a new basis.1

Collectivization did not improve rural living conditions nor did it permit the state to cheaply acquire surplus capital from agriculture for investment in industry; instead, collectivization became a synonym for institutionalized hunger and economic stagnation. Few studies explore the relationship between farmers' preference for the greater individual rewards of private production and its effects on the power of the state in Vietnam, and none has analyzed the success of the VCP's agricultural policies in terms of their political legitimacy. Adam Fforde, for example, acknowledges that Vietnamese farmers were faced with a "lack of incentives to participate in state and collective activity," but he does not explain why or how they "succeeded in subverting much of the system" of collectivized agriculture in the late 1970s. Fforde concludes that '"peasants' attitudes toward the various types of cooperative cannot really be judged...[and] views are little more than conjectures" because of a lack of data.2

Andrew Vickerman admits that the Vietnamese peasantry had a "marked preference" for a system of household production because of the lower incentives of collectivized agriculture but asserts that the "passive" nature of peasant opposition to collectivization was not strong enough to induce policy reforms. Vickerman claims that the VCP abandoned collectivized agricultural production only after several other factors intervened in the late 1970s, such as Vietnam's almost total dependence on Comecon countries for trade at a time when "Soviet aid switched from grants to loans on harder terms," bad harvests "resulting from poor climatic conditions," and the "increasing pressure of 'reformist' planners."3

This paper argues that because Vietnamese farmers preferred the higher payoffs of private household-based agricultural production, they regarded collectivization as politically illegitimate. For this reason, Vietnamese farmers resisted the state's policies, and this resistance was strong enough to end collectivization in the late 1980s. Furthermore, although farmers overwhelmingly supported the VCP's subsequent privatization of agriculture, interviews Vietnamese suggest that the policy of privatization did not translate into greater levels of political legitimacy for the VCP regime. In 1996, I interviewed 23 rural Vietnamese farmers in villages near Hanoi. All interviews were conducted in Vietnamese without the assistance of an interpreter and without the prior permission of government authorities. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 8 individuals, while 3 were interviewed a third time. Farmers were asked about their attitudes toward collectivization and private agricultural production during Doi Moi, and their responses were recorded by means of contemporaneous note-taking. Identities of interview subjects have been omitted from this paper to protect their anonymity. Additional data on the attitudes of farmers toward agricultural privatization was collected by means of a survey of over 1,500 rural Vietnamese.

THE CLASSICAL COMMUNIST SYSTEM

Janos Kornai has modeled the classical communist political economy as a web of bureaucratic coordination, controlled from above by administrative coercion and from below by competition to receive scarce rewards granted by superiors and by the urge to avoid penalties for noncompliance. Though the system suffered from internal problems, the interlocking hierarchies of sub- and super-ordination in the communist system provided enough feedback to reinforce its stability, making it "a coherent entity...capable of operating for an appreciable period."4

Prices in the communist economy were determined by the state rather than by the market, and the state-owned firms that dominated the economy were subsidized by the state regardless of profitability. With no need for profit, state firms were unconstrained by prices and could constantly increase their demand for labor and materials, and even though this created a chronic and pervasive shortage of goods, communist economies often grew at spectacular rates. From 1971 to 1980, for example, Romania's average annual GNP economic growth rate was more than double that of the United States. A diagram of the shortage economy that occurs in the classical communist system is shown in Figure 1.

Through the collectivization of agriculture, the leadership of the VCP tried to bind farmers - who formed the majority of the population as well as the largest sector of the economy when the VCP came to power in northern Vietnam in 1954 - to the same bureaucratic control mechanisms outlined by Kornai. To fuel the expansion of industrial production in state firms, collectivized farmers were directed to produce regardless of costs and required to transfer their harvests to the state regardless of price.