Allen Myers, Phnom Penh
Adrian Skerritt ("Write on", GLW #629) is upset that I reported that buildings in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC)are freshly painted and that millions of ordinary people there have motorbikes. He similarly objects to my description of an export processing zone (EPZ), writing: "Special Economic Zones in Mexico and Indonesia are hellish places for workers characterised by slave wages, persecution of labour activists, sickening pollution levels and slum dwellings. Why would this be any different in Vietnam?"
Clearly, I should not have bothered to visit the EPZ (or anything else?) in HCMC. It is enough to know that they are bad in Mexico and Indonesia; I could have condemned the "hellish" EPZ in HCMC without setting foot in Vietnam.
However, I was there, however ill advisedly, and I didn't see any slums in this particular EPZ. There are no dwellings there at all. The workers live in the same housing in the city as other workers.
Nor was there much visible pollution. Of course, it is possible that significant non-visible pollution is occurring. If so, at least it will harm Vietnam's nouveau riche along with the workers: the EPZ is quite close to the Saigon South wealthy residential development.
These two points alone indicate an important difference between Vietnam's EPZs and those in places like Indonesia — they are not isolated from the rest of the country. Hence, it would be extremely difficult in them to impose wages below national norms.
I plead guilty to Skerritt's charge that during my week in HCMC I did not learn Vietnamese and interview labour activists about whether they were persecuted. However, if he is seriously interested in the Vietnamese labour movement, I recommend that he read Michael Karadjis' article in Links #27.
Skerritt obviously considered his question — "Why would this [EPZs] be any different in Vietnam?" as purely rhetorical, and therefore didn't think about it any more. He should have.
The imperialist system is structured so that underdeveloped countries are exploited. While governments can fight to restrict exploitation, it is not a serious option, for example, to refuse to trade on the world market because "the free market destroys lives".
To survive, these countries need access to material wealth, which at this point in history still takes the form of capital. Socialist governments in the West would quickly restore the wealth plundered from them, but until we succeed, the underdeveloped countries have to get access to capital as best they can.
Countries like Vietnam and Cuba, which have gone through socialist revolutions, have proven much better at limiting imperialist exploitation than countries that have not had such revolutions. This is a major reason imperialism tries to prevent or overturn them.
Skerritt belongs to a political group — the Australian International Socialist Organisation — that doesn't believe that socialist revolutions have occurred in Cuba or Vietnam. For him, there's no class difference between the government of Vietnam and the governments of Mexico or Indonesia; therefore he thinks it axiomatic that an EPZ in Vietnam will be as bad as one anywhere else.
If Vietnam's forced opening to the market results in significantly less exploitation of working people than happens in countries at similar levels of development, then that indicates that it is a political mistake to regard the Vietnamese state as qualitatively the same as the Mexican or Indonesian state.
Rather than re-examine his erroneous theory, however, Skerritt wants to shoot the messenger.
Contrary to his assertion, I did not state, or even suggest, that "wealth really does trickle down in Vietnam". In every country, working people create all the wealth, and then a greater or smaller part of it goes elsewhere — mostly to the owners of businesses, but also to government to varying degrees.
It is a matter of considerable importance to working people how much of the wealth they create goes elsewhere, and whether the government's taking is spent on social welfare or capitalist welfare.
Indicators such as rates of maternal and child mortality, poverty and literacy suggest that in Vietnam significantly less of the wealth created by working people trickles (usually flows) upward than is the norm in south-east Asia. The 3 million motorcycles of HCMC residents are similar evidence: Vietnamese workers are hanging on to a good part of what they produce.
Does Skerritt deny the existence of those 3 million motorcycles? If not, he should have another look at his political schema, rather than attacking me for mentioning them.
From Green Left Weekly, July 6, 2005.
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