eunification will be more rapid in the branches managed by the state. " (Le Monde, May 8, 1975.) Considered as a stage in the reunification, the April 25 elections aid in on examination of the progress and present problems of the Vietnamese revolution. There is still no overall figure providing a precise estimation of the existing relations among the various economic sectors in southern Vietnam. A series of revolutionary measures were faken just after the seizure of power (nationalization of enterprises abandoned by their former owners, monopoly of the banking system, control of foreign trade) and in September 1975 (fiscal measures and the campaign against the "compradores"). (See INPRECOR, No.42, January 22, 1976. But the absence of a comprehensive economic plan, which was then in preparation, and the urgency of reinitiating
5 14259/251 production were reflected in the diversity of situations and the relative empiricism of decisions. In agriculture, the condition of the agrarion reform, extended and deepened just after the liberation, varies considerably occording to region. In the zones that had been liberated previously the preconditions for a voluntary transition to cooperatives were gradually assembled. In the villages most recently liberated, notably inhabited by Catholic refugees, the agrarian reform is only taking its first steps (distribution of land to poor peasants and the formation of "mutual aid teams"). This is the case, for example, in the village of Thai Lac, where the former parliamentary deputy, a landed proprietor, took flight. (See Courier du Vietnam, No.44.) State farms are to be established in the large-scale plantations and in the "new economic zones." These latter zones are those that suffered most from the war. They were razed, and their soil has become difficult to cultivate because of the extensive use of defoliants. (The United States army used 71 million liters of defoliants against the liberated zones of southern Vietnam, a territory as large as northern IrelandI) These "new economic zones" have been completely overhauled, with the aid of unemployed citizers. In one of them, located in the province of Cu Chi in the old "iron triangle" of the resistance, near Saigon, each citizen receives a straw hut, 1,000 square meters of land, a rice allocation for an indefinite period, and financial aid. In the future, these new farmers will become workers in state forms in a rubber plantation. They will continue to work their land as individval plots. (P. De Beer, Le Monde, May 14, 1976) In industry, the extreme dependence of the old productive apparatus on imperialist supplies (raw materials, spare parts, energy) continues to slow down the economic upturn. While the bulk of the enterprises seem to have undertaken production again, on the eve of the April 25 elections they were producing at only 50-60 percent of capacity as a whole. Exhaustion of stocks is a constant threat. The objective is to reconvert the sources of supply by taking odvantage of national re-
sources; but this can be carried out only in the medium term. The handicrafts sector continues to produce a great part of industrial goods, and the private capitalist sector accounts for perhaps 30 percent of production. The state sector remains weak, but already controls supplies and trode channels and sets down the orientation of production. For Nguyen Huu The, "the development (of the state sector), which will play a leading role in the two zones, will aid in regularizing activities and in the development of other sectors in the South, fully utilizing their positive aspects, while limiting their negative ones with a view toward orienting their activIties in conformity with the national plan. " (Le Monde, May 8, 1976) Likewise, Hoc Tap, the party's theoretical review, has written that "in the immediate period ahead, we must utilize, guide, encourage, and aid the private economic network in order to develop production and the enterprises in the general interest ... because the socialist elements are still very weak, " (Le Monde, May 15, 1976.) The social measures Progressive socialization of the economy and relaunching of production through an NEP-type policy require the adherence of the workers. This is also true in agriculture, in regard to which Nguyen Huu Tho has noted that "we are not yet engaging in agrarian collectivization in the South. What is necessary is that the peasants see this as being in their own interest and in that of the state." It is therefore necessary for the improvement in the living conditions of the population to be constant, despite the enormous difficulties faced by the new regime.
In the countryside the end of the war and the collapse of the puppet forces had immediate consequences: end of usury and high rent, distribution of land, peace and the end of the bombing, reestablishment of the market.
Even though the work remains difficult (especially because of the lack of mechanization) and life is austere, the endemic poverty and permanent danger have come to an end. In industry a few examples may be cited to indicate the road that has been traveled. In the Hai
Vueng refrigerator company, managed by the PRG, a medical center has been installed, two months maternity leave has been introduced (90 percent of the workers are women), and a free canteen has been organized.
In addition, there are free complementary educational courses, and the hourly wage system has been abolished in favor of a general monthly salary, which has allowed working hours to be reduced. (Bulletin d'Information du GRP, No.49.) In the Cotylen factory, which manufactures synthetic textiles and is also under the control of the PRG, wages are no longer paid by the hour, but by the day (one dong per day, or about USS. 60). The workers get one free meal per day and are given coupons for the purchase of 9 kilograms (about twenty pounds) of rice at controlled prices. Health insurance now exists, but monthly salaries are rare and a worker may be fired after three reprimands. (The proletariat in this factory is also composed of women, often Catholics.) (P. De Beer, Le Monde, May 15, 1976.) In the nationalized Vikyno factory, which assembles tracfors and produces water pumps, the wage scale approaches that of the North: The lowest salary is 40 dongs a month, the average is 60, and the highest, that of an engineer, is 180. The factory manager receives a salary of only 40 dongs a month, but he gets free rent, water, electricity, and food, and has an automobile and chauffeur. (Le Monde, May 15, 1976) In a private paint company the wages of the workers were increased 20 percent and the salaries of the boss and the managers were reduced 50 percent. (Libération, May 4, 1976.) It is this totality of economic and social measures that has made it possible to hold general elections for reunification only one year after the victory of April 30, 1975. They also account for the complete political hegemony that has been established throughout the country by the Vietnamese Communist party (the Workers party of Vietnam). Reaction's low profile The social and political situation is certainly not completely stabilized. Less than 500, 000 inhabitants of Saigon, most of them refugees, had returned to the countryside as of the eve of the elections. (This is less than the number hoped for by the VCP leadership.) Unemployment remains massive and the number of opponents of the regime is high. Saigon is being decongested only very slowly. From this stand point, the results of the elections in the Saigon region - where Madame Binh headed the list with 97 percent of the vote, 98 percent of the population having voted - do not accurately reflect the present difficulties and sociopolitical problems. The elections took the form of a plebiscite on the regime.
The pre-electoral campaign was intensive, and it appears that the voter card is to become both the identity card and the supply card. This means that refusal to vote, an act of political opposition, will be recorded on identity papers. The incentive to vote was therefore great, which partially explains the rate of participation in the South (95 percenf). Nevertheless, this would mean that there are about 500, 000 people who did not go to the ballot boxes (overall figures have not yet been published).
The reactionary opposition was taken apart through the arrest of persons linked to the Thieu regime. There are probably more than 200,000 people still in "re-education camps": officers, high functionaries, and politicians and agents of the Thieu regime, half of whom come from Saigon. But nearly a million others - rank- and-File soldiers and functionaries - were released after several-day-long periods of "reeducation" organized in their living quarters, and the great majority of them were granted the right to vote. There seem to have been no executions by the PRG, not even among the highest ranks of the puppet army. Finally, the officers and functionaries now in the "reeducation camps"
VIETNAM seem no worse off than the average among the population. They take political reeducation courses, work in the fields or at handicrafts jobs, and are required to carry out household tasks for people who had previously been their servants. (P. De Beer, Le Monde, May 12, 1976.) But all this is not enough to explain the electoral plebiscite on the regime. It was also a reflection of the depth of the American defeat and of the scope of the victory of the revolutionary forces. The atfitude of the Catholic hierarchy, both North and South, is significant here. In 1954, just after the Geneva accords, the hierarchy had engaged in a virulent anticommunist campaign that ended with the exodus of several hundred thousand Catholics from the North to the South, fleeing the Antichrist. After that period, the Catholic hierarchy remained the backbone of the puppet regime. The hope of a victory by the Christian West has now disappeared. The church in the North (with about 1,200,000 members) marked the event just after the liberation of Saigon. For the first time, Monsignor Khue, archbishop of Hanoi, paid an official visit to the authorities, "for before, " he said, "we were not sure that the Communists could win. Now we are." (Hugues Tertiais, Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1975.) In the South, several months after the liberation the Catholic hierarchy has in its turn recognized the revolutionary victory: Monsignor Binh, archbishop of Saigon, has disavowed the action of small counterrevolufionary groups and has published a personal pastoral letter hailing reunification. Although reaction preserves some means by which to act and has not been completely disarmed, it declined to make the elections a test of strength by calling for a boycott or a blank vote. But while high party officials were often elected with more than 90 percent of the vote, Reverend Father Chan Tin, who had fled south from the north, was the only one of the seven former members of the "third force" who ran in the elections not to be elected. Of the fifteen women candidates, six were elected. The Communist party's political monopoly The April 25 election was a plebiscite in more than one respect. During the electoral campaign there was no debate on orientation as regards the pace of reunification and socialization, the content of the coming constitution, or the nature of the Communist party's relations with the masses. There were single lists of candidates, even though they contained more names than there were seats; they were presented on the motion of rank-and-file organizations by the NLF and the Alliance of Democratic Forces of the South. The candidates did not have the right to carry on individual campaigns. The members of the former third force in Saigon ran as personalities and not as representatives of political organizations. The program on which the candidates were elected was extremely general: recognition of the hegemony of the VCP and approval of the process of socialist 28 reunification of the country now under way. The discussions on orientation remained the exclusive province of the upper reaches of the party. In Saigon, Madame Ngo Ba Than, a personality of the former third force, explained the particularities of the electoral decree-law in these terms: "What we consider extremely original, as a demonstration of genuine democracy, is that the candidates in the elections must be presented by the revolutionary mass organizations. That is a necessary guarantee. For under the present conditions in southern Vietnam, the population, barely liberated from the fascist regime of the American puppets, is still subject to the influences of the fraudulent elections of the past and needs to be guided by the intermediary of this guarantee of the majority bloc." (Bulletin du GRP, No. 50.) It would be hard to find a sharper expression of the party's substitutionist role in regard to the masses! The bureaucratic weight We have seen the gravity of the problems posed by the sociopolitical structure of Saigon, shaken by fifteen years of the multiform American war (see INPRECOR No. 42, January 22, 1976.) Unfortunately, however, the problem is much more vast. Indeed, in the North, where the workers state was established twenty years ago, the form of power, the party's monopoly over the political life of the country, does not differ very much from what prevails in the South today. Here again, the choices have been made by the upper reaches of the party, the elections ratify the decisions that have been made, and the discussions among the rank and file are aimed only at studying the application of these decisions, In Hanoi the legislative elections had this plebiscitary character: 99,82 percent voted, and 99.76 percent of the votes cast went to Political Bureau member Le Duan. In Saigon the VCP's monopoly over political life is not challenged by the publication of independent Catholic journals such as the weekly Cong Jiao Va Dan Toc and the monthly Dong Day. This monopoly over national political life exercised by the Vietnamese Communist party is combined with a genuine taking in charge of local problems by the masses and, very probably, with an advance in class consciousness in the cities of southern Vietnam since the liberation. The "administrative committees" have not been elected, but provisionally appointed (in reality by the VCP). The composition of the management committees in the factories varies. In the Vikyno factory the committee includes the new director, two engineers, the trade-union leader (normally elected by the membership), and one assistant member, the secretary of the party cell. In the Qué Hong foundry, composed of an association of several local capitalists and merchants, the administrative committee includes: the former owners of the associated workshops, the merchants who own stock, and the workers, who are also stockholders. (Le Monde, May 15, 1976.) In general, however, according to the available testimony, the mass organizations have experienced a qualitative growth. In the
GET MAN TRONG T workshop, the factory, and the village, problems of production, of the organization of labor, and of living conditions are discussed collectively. The direct intervention of the masses in the management of local affairs has never been so great, even though it is lacking on the national scale. At bottom, this paradoxical feature of the Vietnamese revolution reflects the inexistence of a soviet system of power, which enables the direct representation of local mass committees up through the highest levels to be assured and the discussions on the choices of orientation throughout the whole society to be centralized. The nature of the April 25 elections, which assured neither the direct representation of the committees nor the confrontation of possible different programs for development, thus reflect the existence of a bureaucratically deformed workers state in Vietnam. It is within this gap between the mass mobilization and the mediation of the party in power that the bureaucratic phenomena, nurtured by the economic poverty of the country, have taken root. The scope of the bureaucratic weight comes through in the official statements of Pham Van Dong, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, for whom "bureaucratic, red-tape, and authoritarian phenomena are constant and sometimes serious at all levels in some of the state services, thus violating the rights of the people, who are masters of the collectivity." (Le Monde, April 22, 1976.) "It is regrettable, " wrote the theoretical magozine Hoc Tap, "that some cadres and militants have committed errors... in the domain of respect for the democratic rights of the masses. " (Le Monde, May 23, 1976) The Saigon newspaper Giai Phong declared in a caustic attack on those "who act like Mandarins": "Now that they are in power, they are beginning to detach themselves from the people." (Libération, May 4, 1976.) A certain malaise seems to exist in the South between the cadres coming out of the resistance and those coming from the North, who are accustomed to advantages and seniority benefits. In fact, the problem of the payment of cadres and functionaries has still not been settled. For this reason they do not yet receive salaries, but instead an indemnity and subsidies. In the North bureaucratic behavior seems to be crystallized in a layer of intermediary cadres between a population that is little prepared to accept them (and which makes them the leading figure in clown shows) and a political leadership concerned about their possible consequences, not only politically but also in terms of the management of the economy. In the North it was decided to constitute a corps of "popular inspectors" elected by the rank and file, which would oversee production and would have extensive powers of inquiry into bureaucratic behavior. In the South, the apparatus is supposed to control itself, under the pressure of the mass organizations, In any event, the institutional problem is not posed. The victory of April 30, 1975, and the depth of the socioeconomic upheaval that has occurred since then demonstrate the vigor of the Vietnamese revolution. But the elections of April 25, 1976, confirm that these victories have not been sufficient to modify the character of the political and institutional relations established between the party and the masses. The question of soviets, of workers councils, is decisive at bottom, because only soviets can guarantee the direct participation of the masses in the leadership of the state, the democratic confrontation of development orientations in the framework of socialism, the control of cadres and functionaries and the elimination of bureaucratic phenomena, the elaboration of an economic plan that takes precise account of the requirements of the population, and the permanent raising of the class consciousness of the workers. This question was absent from the preparatory discussions around the elections, The soviet conception of the state, in fact, is too foreign to the orientation of the VCP, the previous forms of mobilization of the population, and the world context born of the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR to be spontaneously reborn in Vietnam today. It can be imposed only on the basis of a new experience of the Vietnamese proletariat in the framework of the socialist industrialization of the country, this may be aided by developments of the socialist revolufion in West Europe and Japan as well as by the political revolution in the USSR and China. The soviet conception of the state will thus be born of a combination of political and social conflicts and not of a simple odvance in the consciousness of the party apparatus os it exists today. Indeed, the soviet conception of the state is one of the unresolved questions of the Vietnamese revolution, one of the decisive stakes in the new stage opened by the final victory over imperialism. May 20, 1976
21
BRAZIL ERNESTO GEISEL For a C