war comes to long an, jeffrey race (1972)

(40): key to the resistance to the French had been the economic revolution -- what it had meant for peasants, in daily life

(42): in 1956, gov't advantages: (1) operate openly; (2) military force; (3) foreign resources; (4) nationalist heritage vs. Party advantages: (1) strong local organization, based resolutely in broad social base

(52): elections too dangerous because communists would win , 1957-1961

(55-60): imp--failure of gov't sponsored land reform, 1956-1968 (compare with Taiwan/Japan!). high threshold, very little implementation, etc.

(70): revolutionaries' land reform much more impressive -- distribute it 'fairly'

(98): not advocating 'collectivization', but property

(99): 1959 marked the darkest period in Long An, after serious repression (but this, he argues, actually laid the foundation for their revival)

(109-110): an armed struggle did not mean guerilla warfare--its principal purpose was to make politics possible, in essence [this is helpful, in guarding against some elementary peacenik criticisms of 'violence']

(112): Mao on fireflies

(119): against adventurism -- being careful with the new policy, calling for a general uprising can be 'speculative adventurism'

(121, 125): important--need for a national front was a product of careful strategic thinking and historical reflection (on the Nghe An soviets, from the 1930s). a need to form temporary alliances with intermediate classes. the Party as brain, Army as muscle, and Front the way of fracturing the society...

(128): the National Democratic Revolution -- demands were, as befit the balance of forces, more moderate in the South than in the North

(133): 1961-1963 reprieve for gov't

(140): by 1965, though, the revolutionary forces had won

(141): three kinds of differences, between communists and the Gov't

1. (141-159) strategic -- because they saw revolution as a stage-by-stage process, involving the (a) concept of class (society founded on classes); (b) concept of contradiction (classes fight); (c) concept of force (need to muster willing base, that is willing not b/c it's coerced); (d) concept of balance of forces (be wary of adventurism/reformism; (e) concept of security (sympathetic environment is critical); (f) concept of victory (through overwhelming balance of forces). the sum total of this is that a purely military strategy is unworkable. critical: Party's strategy was preemptive (i.e., a line that prevented the gov't from coopting other classes--the crux of this is the Front, which seeks not to alienate middle/rich peasants--see p. 157), and thus entailed a social strategy, while gov'ts strategy was reinforcement-based (a military defense of the existing distribution of 'values'). the take-away is that--had the gov't been communist!--they might not have lost]
   
2. (159-165) organizational -- the gov't's polcies were (1) conflict-aggravating; (2) based on numerical weakness; (3) critical: implemented through highly centralized bodies. revolutionaries were the opposite.
   
3. (165-174) policy -- revolutionaries pushed policy that (1) redistributed wealth; (2) redistriubted status/power; (3) provoked gov't, protected people (?)
   

(174-176): critically (what he calls another way of thinking about the above, through three summary themes: (1) contingent incentives -- people would only have access to certain benefits (land, upward mobility) that depended upon their participation in the movement. the gov't, through its idiocy, produced this contingency (because the only way to have land was to join the revolution).

(177-178): (2) assimilation of forces -- rural Vietnam as decisive area, broad social base of support

(179-180): (3) building nationalism through 'communalism'/local -- it was through harnessing the local interests of the population that the Party succeeded in building a larger organization.

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[1] the framing of the counterfactual -- had the gov't been communist! -- belies his own approach to social classes/social conflict. groups work from their interests. not terribly important, but worth noting (see p. 159, p. 267)

[2] take-home: organizations are not superior by virtue of 'organizing better' in some abstract sense, but because--in a definite social context--they speak to the individual interest of those that they are trying to organize. this is why, I think, Olson's account was so unhelpful. without some understanding of who you're trying to organize and the context in which you're operating, you can say very little about what is likely to make 'free-riders' contributors, etc. (see p. 165)