Marx’s theory of economic development is a very popular understanding of economic theory that has often been adopted by potentially capable politicians, and often incapable tyrants, to inspire support for a regime run by their favored network of intelligentsia. In its essence, Marxism views human development through a lens that weighs economic competition within a society as a social ill and economic inefficiency. Marx’s issue is that free-market capitalism is exploitative of the lower class that must labor within the constructs of a society, which in turn allows the upper class to consolidate political and social power through their ownership of the modes of production. Evidently, it cannot be the final stage in the progression of human development in his view.
In its very essence, Marx’s literature attempts to provide a reconcilable narrative of the nature of human cooperation through an analytical framework that views the general welfare of humanity as a common good, something in which society should be structured with the purpose of fulfilling through its economic outputs: its efforts. In practice, the adoption of Marx’s final step of human development into practice requires the centralization of the modes of production within a singular and controllable
apparatus. For a politician that does not want to face electoral challenges or enable any diversion off of the course of a centralized marketplace that must be fine-tuned to serve the general needs of society, communism enables them to centralize power and provide a change in economic conditions for its workers.
In contradiction with Marx’s vision that any society that is bound to reach the final stage must go through the necessary period of industrialization that occurs during the capitalistic stage of development, the Vietnamese intelligentsia were more aligned with the Leninist vision of global revolution that did not require such a long period of capitalistic exploitation to occur under their guidance. In part, the move toward the ideological adoption of Marxist-Leninism made by Ho Chi Minh and his compatriots was a
strategic decision, based in large part on the unwillingness of France to allow Vietnam to sever its colonial subservience and establish an independent economic apparatus that relied upon free trade. (Lawrence 35)
In addition, the fact that no world power (namely the United States) did not force the weakened French to advance beyond their oppressive balance of relations with the Vietnamese meant that any rebellion against the status quo would require the Vietnamese to receive the necessary arms from another world power. Since the Soviet Union was not involved in the exploitation of Vietnam, and had provided a place for Ho Chi Minh to develop as a political force through the Soviet cultivation of this asset in the Comintern, it makes sense why he was willing to cooperate with the rigid version of Stalinism that captivated the post-World War II developing world.
In a sense, political divisions can be viewed through a variety of frames. For instance, tensions in the Middle East and the Balkans often revolve around the religious lens. In Vietnam, there were a variety of different lenses that were used as a rationale for further economic and eventual militaristic engagement. These lenses varied both between countries and within them, in much the same way that the political positions of the Vietnamese differed within the indigenous society. In the Soviet framework, as
in that of Marx, the lens is primarily economic. While the argument could very well be made that the rhetoric of leftism was fully internalized by the decision-makers in Washington, I would argue that the lens was a nationalistic vision of American interests, particularly in the face of the centralized political power the Soviets wielded that drove economic support for the French colonial cause in Vietnam more deeply than the preservation of capitalism itself.
While a dialectical analysis of the difference between the economic and political lenses may be beyond the focus of this particular paper, the point is that the Vietnamese were not particularly more attached to the economic lens than they were to the anti-colonial and nationalistic lens. Since their only opportunity to meet the desired objective of independence was through armed conflict, and those arms could only be proffered from the Soviets, it makes sense that the Vietnamese were willing to adopt the rigid ideological assumptions of the Marxist-Leninist state to provide this opportunity for national renewal
in an independent context, even though they had simply replaced their center of economic opportunity from colonial France to the crypto-imperialism of the eventually overextended Soviet Union that collapsed under the immense pressure of the failed conversion of Afghanistan to a communistic state.
American Political Theorist 