Practical

What is to be done? How do we act on what we have learned, and how do people already act?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

For most participants the practical question is not “how would I run a planned economy” but something closer to home: how should a socialist in an imperialist country relate to the states that claim the socialist name, past and present? With uncritical solidarity? With principled criticism? With a blanket refusal? China’s rise, Vietnam’s reforms, the long shadow of the Indonesian massacres, and the wreckage of the 1989 to 1991 collapse are not settled history; they are argued over in real time, and how the left reads them shapes what it does. This lens gathers those live arguments and asks the room to locate itself in them honestly, rather than adopt a slogan. It ties to the solidarity questions in Imperialism and the Global System.

Anchor questions

• Is China today a socialist project, a capitalist one, or a contradiction still in motion? What follows for us if we decide?
• Vietnam and China both went to market and grew fast. Was that a betrayal, a survival strategy, or a road worth studying?
• How should socialists here relate to these states, with solidarity, criticism, or both at once, and how do you do both without collapsing into one?
• Is “campism,” backing any state the US opposes, solidarity or a substitute for it?
• What does an honest reckoning with the crimes, the 1965 massacres, the purges, the camps, actually require of us?
• Who paid for the transition out of socialism, and what does that teach about how it should never be done?

Materials

All free unless marked otherwise. The set is built to argue with itself; each source’s stance is named.

The China and Vietnam reform debate

• Monthly Review, China archive. An ongoing sympathetic-Marxist argument over whether China is building socialism or restoring capitalism. Free: monthlyreview.org
• “China’s 40 years of reform” (ABC News Australia, 2018). Roughly 10 minutes, about 218,000 views. The Deng reforms, costs and gains. youtube.com/watch?v=hF__EF_yrFA
• Boothroyd and Pham Xuan Nam, Socioeconomic Renovation in Viet Nam (2000). An open-access study weighing Doi Moi’s gains against its new inequalities. Free: idrc-crdi.ca
• “The Miracle Plan That Built Vietnam’s Economy” (Behind Asia, 2023). Roughly 10 minutes, about 102,000 views. A positive framing of Doi Moi; pair with the study above for the costs. youtube.com/watch?v=VxzSXOHU9hY

Relating to the legacy, and the left today

• LeftEast. East European leftists critical of both the state-socialist past and the transition. Free: lefteast.org
• Cosmonaut. Heterodox Marxists who defend the project while naming the democratic deficits. Free: cosmonautmag.com
• The Deprogram. A Marxist-Leninist “campist” show, included as a primary document of one pole, explicitly flagged, not a balanced source. Free: podcasts.apple.com

Reckoning with the crimes

• The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012, 117 min). Indonesia’s 1965 killers reenact their murders; a film on impunity and the victors who still rule. Free on Kanopy with a library card: justwatch.com
• The Look of Silence (Oppenheimer, 2014, 103 min). The victim-family companion piece, on living beside the killers of the left. Free via PBS POV: amdoc.org

The lessons of the collapse

• The Shock Doctrine (Winterbottom and Klein, 2009, 79 min). How the post-Soviet collapse was used to force through privatization, and who profited. youtube.com/watch?v=B3B5qt6gsxY
• Stuckler, King, and McKee, “Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis” (The Lancet, 2009). Rapid privatization linked to a surge in deaths, with the data. Free PDF: mltoday.com
• Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell A. Orenstein, Taking Stock of Shock (2021). Puts the economic data, the survey data, and the ethnography of the transition side by side and finds they disagree: by the aggregates 1989 was a success, and by the lives it was not, with the cost falling on women, the old, and the east. The feminist account of who paid, and the answer to the Shock Doctrine question of what happened to the people afterward. Paywalled: global.oup.com. The authors’ free companion site carries an introduction PDF, the data, and their talks: takingstockofshock.com

A note on method

The trap in this lens is that “what is to be done” becomes “which side are you on,” a loyalty test rather than a practice. Resist it. A useful session ends not with the room agreeing on a verdict about China but with each participant able to state the strongest version of a position they do not hold. Solidarity that cannot criticize and criticism that offers no solidarity are both cheap; the practical skill worth building here is holding the two together under pressure.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially on Laos and Vietnam today, and concrete lessons for organizing in the imperial core. Ghodsee is now here with her free companion site; there is no open-access edition of the book despite what circulates online.