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261 C H A P T E R 9 Theoretical Reflections The past century has witnessed violent turns in the encounter between capitalist imperialism and the social formations of agrarian societies at the periphery of the capitalist world system. The emerging social formations at the periphery, which are built on the basis of noncapitalist principles in many cases, have also been fundamentally restructured in the past half a century. In many respects the dynamics of this encounter and subsequent restructuring are epitomized in the Vietnamese revolution . The Vietnamese transformation has influenced important theoretical models embedded in the major traditions of contemporary Western social theory represented by John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim. In the following analysis of their relative strengths and weaknesses, I seek to make a small contribution to their refinement on the basis of empirical data on the Vietnamese revolution and the village of Sơn-Dương in particular. More specifically, I suggest that the revolutionary processes in modern Vietnam cannot be understood primarily in terms of a material cost-benefit analysis of historical agents. Rather, these processes must be situated with regard to both the structure of capitalist imperialism and the local indigenous framework. A major problem of the rational-choice framework (Popkin 1979; Olson 1965) remains how to incorporate historically and socioculturally specific values into its model of revolutionary processes. Without such an incorporation, the framework simply projects Western utilitarian ideology onto a radically different sociocultural landscape, where it encounters numerous empirical anomalies. For example, on which matrix of material costs and benefits did a large number of young Sơn-Dương villagers from different social strata volunteer for the Vietminh armed forces in the 1946–1950 period, when Vietminh troops faced an enemy of overwhelming technological superiority and before the poor recruits could foresee any substantial socioeconomic reforms in their favor? On which universal grid of values did one-half to two million northern Vietnamese peasants 262 Market Economy and Local Dynamics accept starvation in the spring of 1945 instead of revolting spontaneously and seizing the rice that would have given them a chance of survival? It would likewise be an oversimplification to explain Sơn-Dương villagers’ redirection of labor input to their household garden plots in the 1978–1981 period exclusively in terms of the diminishing returns from cooperative work. In the 1965–1975 period the cooperative labor input had remained high in spite of the diminishing returns to cooperative members. These low returns had resulted from the cooperative’s low-priced paddy sale to the state as a part of its contribution to the war effort. To label irrational such behavioral choices on the Vietnamese political landscape is to explain them away in the face of the inadequacy of the theoretical model. I do not deny the significance of material costs and benefits in the analysis of human action. Many behavioral choices in the course of the Vietnamese revolution are amenable to such a “rational -choice” analysis, most notably the suspension of active resistance to French colonialism and Sơn-Dương villagers’ instrumental, short-termed conversion to Catholicism in the 1930s in the hope of gaining the release of their politically active family members. Similarly, the strengthened support among the poorer social strata for the Vietminh in the 1950–1954 period can be explained within the rational-choice framework: the Vietminh had placed greater emphasis on the socioeconomic revolution at that time to the advantage of poorer peasants. However, the needs for survival, sexual reproduction, and material well-being are always refracted to a certain extent by a historically situated and socioculturally constructed matrix of meanings. To reduce the rich texture of the native system of rules and meanings to a supposedly universal grid of material costs and benefits is to fail to explain a wide range of historical events and human acts. While appropriately stressing the dynamics of collective action in the revolutionary processes, the rational-choice framework has focused on agency at the expense of structures—structures that constrain human action both through external sanctions and through actors’ acceptance of certain ideological premises constitutive of these structures (cf. Elliott 2003:5–6, 17). Through its close attention to the dynamics of capitalism, the Marxist approach has enhanced our understanding of the encounter between world capitalism and local indigenous systems. However, because it pays limited attention to the active role of indigenous precapitalist traditions in revolutionary processes, the approach is not without its share of...

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