ABSTRACT
This study argues that the so-called New Management System of the mid-1970s was essentially an attempt to reinforce the managerial structures of the agricultural producer cooperatives that were the intended vehicle of socialist transformation in North Vietnam. By that time, it was clear that there was a widespread and spontaneous tendency for the cooperatives to become “nominalized” and therefore far less important and powerful than intended. Many peasant-cooperators were deeply dissatisfied with the operation of the fully collectivized agrarian system. This confronted the Vietnamese Communist leadership with an evident and profound failure in their overall strategy. As Marxist-Leninists, they had argued that the combination of National Liberation and socialist forms of social organization were both inseparable and historically correct: they were the only logical and moral course possible for Vietnam and the Vietnamese. Thus the nonimplementability of their rural policies had immense and destructive implications for their arguments, and therefore for their own positions. And, as will be seen, they reaffirmed the correctness of these policies after national reunification in 1975, as they attempted to extend agricultural collectives and the other elements of the socialist revolution to the South.
