POWER OF THE WHOLE OPPOSING WORLD SYSTEM WAS A THREAT TO THE WHOLE CAPITALIST WORLD SYSTEM. Furthermore, the main economic resource that the capitalists needed was human labor power to exploit. Viet Nam would be another huge workforce off limits for exploitation, and a material base and model for other countries to remove their populations from the capitalist world labor pool.
The U.S. had attacked Korea earlier to prevent the liberation of its workforce from capitalist domination in anticipation of the Korean economic"tiger" that was exploited years later.
These are the more general and very economic (and political economic) motivations for the U.S. war on Viet Nam. In 1960, the capitalists did not at all think that communism was going to collapse in Europe, The Chinese Revolution had just won in 1948. Communism was growing by leaps, especially in Asia.
Charles Brown
Detroit
Workers of the West, it's our turn.
>>> James Devine <jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu> 08/27 10:29 AM >>>
Brad writes: >There was a time during the 1960s when people thought that
the continental shelf immediately offshore from Vietnam must be filled with
oil--because U.S. stubbornness in Vietnam was inconceivable unless someone
stood to profit immensely from the defeat of Ho Chi Minh. Yet that oil was
never found... And were it to be found, the Vietnamese government would
(judging by its behavior toward Nike) give Chevron more advantageous terms
from extracting it than perhaps any other government on earth.<
This kind of simplistic economic-determinist theory of _any_ country's foreign policy is almost guaranteed to be wrong (even though it is popular). After all, there are a lot of other fractions of the US capitalist class than the oil companies, while there are various intramural conflicts within the capitalist class (auto likes cheap oil, while oil likes expensive oil, etc., etc.) All of these "special interests" use their abundant purchasing power to try to win a hearing among the foreign policy elite their particular points of view.
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It's much too simplistic to explain US aggression by simple economic goals. Though the Dulles brothers' connection with United Fruit _helped to_ motivate their attacks on Guatemala's Arbenz in 1954, it was only one part of a larger geopolitical story. It had to be balanced against the goals of the other big players and justified in terms of a larger world view.
Specifically on Viet Nam, it's pretty clear that Ho Chi Minh wanted totally friendly relations with the US after WW2 (and thus would likely have been friendly toward Chevron -- though probably with more nationalist controls on investment than are currently encouraged by the World Bank/IMF oligarchy). The leaders of Viet Nam didn't want to be a "satellite" of either China or the USSR (or the US, for that matter), so that Ho mimicked the US Declaration of Independence at a time when the US still had an anti-colonial reputation (anti-_other_ countries' colonialism, of course).
But the US rejected these appeals because of its "political" aims -- fighting and winning the "Cold" war against the USSR (wanting France's support against the godless Reds) and also preventing any kind of populist or nationalist revolutions in the third world that would shake things up, e.g., by imposing more nationalistic controls than are currently encouraged by the World Bank/IMF oligarchy. The US wanted _control_. A lot of the US
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