I - Introduction: Historical Overview: Vietnam's Past Economic Paths (1954–74)

Summary

From the outset, Vietnam's ideological world view prescribes the boundaries within which all policies may be debated, adopted, implemented and altered. The country's socialist framework forms the unquestioned basis for its leadership to draft economic guidelines to meet the people's needs and wants. In other words, there is consensus among the decision-makers on the fundamental meaning of “socialist development” and basic socialist principles are upheld in economic planning.

Socialism dictates its own directions and goals. The ideology which stems from the objective of ending exploitation of man by man requires, as a first step towards attaining its objectives, the abolition of feudal and bourgeois political and economic power. The latter is to be achieved by expropriation of private property of the former ruling class and transformation into public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Much emphasis is accorded to radically changing the economic structure because, in Marxist theory, the economic structure determines the legal, political and ideological superstructure:

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which correspond definite forms of social consciousness &. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.

Extrapolating from Marxist theory into the Vietnamese context, Party Secretary-General Le Duan wrote:

In order to build socialism, we must build up right from the beginning both new productive forces and new production relations, both a new economic foundation and a new superstructure.

For Vietnam, this ultimate objective is to be achieved through the creation of centrally planned, modern industrial society because, as Lenin has stressed during his time “(the) only possible economic foundation of socialism is large scale machine industry”.