On Tue, 9 May 2000, Louis Proyect crossposted from the Baltimore Sun:
> MALNUTRITION IS EPIDEMIC: ROUGHLY HALF OF ALL CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 5
> ARE STUNTED FOR LACK OF FOOD. HUNGER AND A GROSSLY INEFFICIENT AID SYSTEM
> HAVE KEPT VIETNAM'S POVERTY RATE THE HIGHEST IN THE REGION: THE WORLD BANK
> ESTIMATING THAT 51 PERCENT OF PEOPLE IN VIETNAM ARE IMPOVERISHED, COMPARED
> WITH 16 PERCENT IN THAILAND.
Yes, but things were much worse in the pre Doi Moi period, when the
Government simply lied about malnutrition and poverty and pretended
economic problems didn't exist. The economic growth since 1985 is real
enough.
> In Hanoi, the prostitutes work under cover of the city's many parks; in Ho
> Chi Minh City, it's a different story: The prostitutes, driving up and down
> the main drag between the Saigon River and the old cathedral, call out to
> customers from their mopeds.
So you have working women, earning money for themselves, on mopeds -- a
mobile proletariat, as it were. Horrors! As opposed to us brain-workers
on the Net, who are lucky enough to be able to retail our neurons instead
of our reproductive systems. Vietnam remains an intensely patriarchal
society, where violence against women is normal and accepted; many of
those prostitutes were horrifically abused by family members, and going
back to the village, where brutally authoritarian family traditions are
still the norm, is not an option.
The more serious question is this: what *can* the Left offer as a
developmental model to Vietnam? And no, telling them to dye their hair
blond and learn Swedish won't cut it, Sweden had 150 years to assimilate
primitive accumulation and another 100 years to export its way to
metropole status. Vietnam is up against the heavy artillery of Athlons and
Pentiums, Toyotas and Mercedes right here and now: how do they fight
the neocolonial beast?
-- Dennis
