in a short while all differences among peasant classes will be wiped out and the boundary between the poor class and the middle class will be removed. At that time, the cooperative members will no doubt differ in their living standard but this difference will be due to work capability, to the quantity and quality of work rather than class affiliation.

78

Progress toward achievement of the goal was taken in two phases: (1) agrarian reform, i.e., land distribution, and (2) cooperativization. In 1964 Thanh reviewed progress toward the goal:

After the agrarian reform, peasants became much more interested in production. That was a big step in agriculture. Production however still had to rely on a "little-peasant" economy . . . the little peasant system constituted the basic obstacle to the advancement toward socialization .

The situation is now essentially different. The rural area is not a sea of individual peasants as it was five or six years ago. There are now almost thirty thousand cooperatives capable of a completely new production system."

And again:

It is important to give everybody the idea of big enterprise, develop the collective mind in the peasants so they discover the new way in production. We must devote serious effort to thinking and organization, actively favor determination in thinking and in action and combat any residual tendency toward the outmoded small-peasant system characterized by scattering and dividing of effort, satisfaction with small results, hesitation, conservatism.80

Thanh reported that "The cooperativization of our agriculture has been basically completed for over three years," but regretted that the cooperatives "belong to the low-level category" and need an "emolument policy that will encourage work . . . preserve the internal solidarity... spur techniques and tools to further improvements, heighten labor efficiency, and develop production in a new direction." si

The long-familiar problem of reconciling the peasants' deeprooted urge to produce under individual incentive, on one hand, with socialization of agriculture, on the other hand, appears now in North Vietnam as socialization advances. Thanh describes the attempt to keep a balance between peasant plots and cooperativization:

We are opposed to all stifling of the subsidiary economy through not giving or giving less than 5 percent land to the cooperative member and not allowing him to do things that the cooperative is as yet unable or deems unnecessary to do. To be unaware how important the 5 percent plot is to the livelihood of the member is to be estranged from the reality of the situation in Vietnam.

The plots became the sole supplier of pig manure essential to deep plowing and productivity. But on the negative side Thanh warned of the "straying tendencies of the subsidiary economy.'

What is worse is that leadership is nonexistent or drifting in many cases. allowing the subsidiary economy to grow so inordinately as to nibble at and encroach upon the collective economy-all of which means serious hindrances to the cooperativization movement in the areas concerned." 2

Thus the strategy and tactics of North Vietnamese leadership toward peasant land tenure follow patterns familiar from Russian antecedents or Chinese, or both, and programs face familiar problems. The entire unfolding drama rings familiarly.

Ibid., p. 6.

79 Ibid., p. 9.
so Ibid., pp. 13-14.

81 Ibid., p. 22.

82 Ibid., pp. 27-28.

Conclusion

The lineage of the strategy and tactics of employing peasant dissatisfaction over conditions of land tenure for revolutionary ends is strong across the half-century of practical politics since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Witt fogel says:

Peasant support played a decisive role in assuring the two greatest victories of Leninist Communism-the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the Communist conquest of the Chinese mainland after World War II. No wonder, therefore, that the Communists demonstratively woo the peasants in the agrarian countries of non-Communist Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and even in such non-Communist countries of Europe as Italy and France.

In view of this global tendency, any serious student of Moscow-rooted MarxistLeninist Communism must familiarize himself with the peasant policy of the Communists, the propagandistic promises they make, the ideas ("theories") that guide their actions and, of course, these actions themselves."

Strategy varies from country to country and from time to time, as do tactics. While there is constancy of aim-to achieve power-there is flexibility while working towards it. In Russia the urban proletariat furnished the "revolutionary force." In China the peasantry furnished it. In Vietnam the experience of China rather than that of Russia furnishes the guide.

The lineage that Witt fogel paints in world-wide brush strokes, can be traced in fine lines directly to the insurgency of today in South Vietnam. George A. Carver writes:

The present insurgency is but the latest phase in the 40-year campaign which the leadership of the Indochinese Communist Party has waged to acquire complete political control over all of Vietnam, hegemony over Laos and some form of suzerainty over Cambodia. This campaign has been carried on relentlessly, ruthlessly and with great tactical flexibility. It has been waged through a protean variety of organizational forms and has made extensive, effective use of successive "front" devices-the Viet Minh League, the Lien Viet, the Fatherland Front and, currently, the "National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam" Bernard Fall carries the lineage (and its flexible application) clear down to the ground action. In 1958 he wrote:

Guerrilla activities in South Viet-nam during 1957 and 1958 no longer represent a last-ditch fight of dispersed sect or Communist rebel remnants. On the contrary, they have taken on a pattern of their own (including) gradual “insulation" of the central authorities from direct contact with the grass roots.

In sharp contrast to these views stressing prolonged continuity of purpose, of strategy and tactics in making use of peasant disaffection over conditions of land tenure, some critics have argued recently that land reform is not a burning issue in South Vietnam. However, the House Committee on Government Operations recommended in a March 1968 report to Congress that the United States help Vietnam "to proceed at once with the formulation of an aggressive new program of land and rent reform" 86 in Vietnam.

83 Wittfogel, Karl A. The Peasants. In Joseph M. Bochenski and Gerhart Niemeyer, Handbook on Communism. New York, 1962. p. 347.

84 Carver, George A. Jr. The Real Revolution in South Viet Nam. Foreign Affairs, April 1965. p. 404.

85 Fall, Bernard B. The Second Indochina War. International Affairs, January 1965. p. 65.

86 U.S. Congress. House Committee on Government Operations. Land Reform in Vietnam. Washington, 1968. p. vi.

Critics of the report cited a Rand Corporation study by Edward J. Mitchell. The study appears in three versions; with slight variations each of these contains the following striking passage:

The ideal province from the point of view of government control is one in which population density is high, cross-country mobility is low, few peasants operate their own land, the distribution of farms by size is unequal, large estates (formerly French-owned and now primarily GVN run) exist, and no land redistribution has taken place."

87

It is an unexplained if curious fact that in one, but only in one of the three versions, did the author state his scholarly caution against drawing policy inferences from his study. In one version only he followed his conclusion that "Greater inequality implies greater control" with the immediate warning:

This does not mean, however, that a policy of increasing inequality would increase control, or that a policy of reducing inequality would reduce control. Since these results were derived from an essentially static model, one must be cautious in drawing dynamic inferences. The final outcome of a program of land reform could not be determined from this study alone.

And again:

A precise interpretation of the empirical findings, however, cannot be made without a careful study in the field.88

The critics of the House Committee on Government Operations report apparently did not see the version of Mitchell's study in which the author disavowed its use for drawing policy inferences of precisely the kind that they drew. Spokesmen for the Committee's recommendation said they were well aware of the Rand Corp. study and had completely rejected it.

"We discovered that the author of this study had never been in Vietnam," said Congressman John E. Moss (D.-Calif.), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information, and Congressman Ogden Reid, (R.-N.Y.) ranking Republican. Then they proceeded to point out that the aim of policy is not satisfied by the mere maintenance of "government control." They said:

We strongly believe it is morally wrong to deliberately keep the people of any nation weak and dependent in order to control them-whatever the end. Such a Machiavellian policy, if adopted, could only serve as a device to delay and dilute necessary reforms. If our aim is to build the foundations for a free society in South Vietnam, we cannot do it by keeping the peasants in economic serfdom.8

Intelligent concern with peasant disaffection over conditions of land tenure is not less important to those who seek to found a stable free society upon social justice than to those who seek to use the same disaffection to achieve social revolution. The argument founded on Mitchell is really irrelevant to the problem in hand. The present problem is not whether "control" by the Government of Vietnam coexists with a conservative society marked by great economic inequality. The problem is how to regain control which has been lost during the expanding progress of a revolutionary conflagration fed by peasants' desire for diminished inequality, and how to check further losses.

87 Mitchell, Edward J. The Significance of Land Tenure in the Vietnamese Insurgency. Asian Survey v. VII. p. 580. Mitchell, Inequality and Insurgency; A Statistical Study of South Vietnam. Rand Corporation, 1967. p. 23. Mitchell, Land Tenure and Rebellion: A Statistical Analysis of Factors Affecting Government Control in South Vietnam, Rand Corporation. Memorandum RM-5181-ARPA, 1967. p. 31.

88 Mitchell. Land Tenure and Rebellion, op. cit., pp. iii and 31.

89 Land Reform in Vietnam, op. cit., p. 22.

Folk songs often are true reflectors of deep feelings and longendured burdens. The Vietnamese peasant song which runs: "I am always bathed in sweat, and of my torn garments only the collar survives" appears to furnish faithful testimony. In guerrilla warfare, writes Douglas Pike, "morale counts for almost all." 90

It is not surprising that long ago Communist leadership began to tap this smouldering peasant dissatisfaction, and upon occasion to ignite it. It is natural that land tenure-the relation of man to landis recognized as a vulnerable area.

In the uncertainties whether at any particular moment the problems of land tenure represent a "burning issue," it is easy, but hazardous, to overlook the fact that in peasant societies the enduring problems identify "gut" issues. Vietnam does not stand alone.

90 Pike, op. cit., p. 65.