The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
on the walls. His gilt-edged mirrors were door-sized, his furniture was varnished with age, his Turkish rug was intricate, and his parquet floorboards moaned underfoot. All were fitting decor for an eighteenth-century apartment with exposed beams and a ceiling tall enough to circulate the heated air of a hardworking brain.
I nearly forgave him for being a French intellectual when he poured me two fingers of a brand of fifteen-year-old scotch whose name was so Gaelic I could neither spell nor pronounce it. I closed my eyes in appreciation, shivering and swirling the magic potion in my mouth and over my deprived tongue, which had drunk more wine than spirits here in Paris. I happily offered the Maoist the goods, and the generous soul immediately rolled a cigarette with the product and offered to share it with me in communist fraternity.
Although I surmise that you hate the communists, the Maoist PhD added, lighting the cigarette. I was grateful for the aroma, its scent disguising how something was foul here, namely me. Your aunt told me about your experiences in the reeducation camp.
I was back in the role I could not escape, typecast as the anticommunist patriot of South Vietnam that had been my cover as a spy. How I wished to no longer play the role of the reactionary! I could not claim to be a communist, but did that mean I could not be a revolutionary? Just because one revolution failed, was revolution itself dead? I hadn’t wanted to explain myself to my aunt. For her and for most self-proclaimed revolutionaries like me, “revolution” was a magic word, like God, that foreclosed certain avenues of thinking. We believed in revolution, but what was it? Was it, in the end, really nothing? I wanted her to understand nothing, or help me understand nothing, because I did not yet fully understand what it meant, except that it was somehow revolutionary in its own way. For now, a revolutionary without a revolution, I had to create a new story. So, under the influence of a fine scotch and an equally fine hashish, a pairing that I recommend to all, I said, You might be surprised that I do not hate communists. Do I think they are mistaken? Yes. But their impulse toward revolution—well, that I can support.
I cannot tell you how disappointed I am in the outcome of your country’s revolution, the Maoist PhD said. It is the same as what happened under Stalin. A corruption of communist ideals! The Party elevated itself and the state instead of the people. We of the Left, who opposed the American war in your country, hoped that your revolution would destroy the American empire. But the American empire persists and the genuinely communist society has not been created.
Perhaps something is wrong with the theory if it can’t be put into practice, I said.
But it’s never been put into real practice. Unfortunately, conditions are not yet in place for genuine communism. Capitalism has to win globally and become the worst version of itself before communism can subvert it. The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit. See Marx, Capital, volume one.
When will this triumph of capitalism happen?
The Maoist PhD blew a cloud of smoke. Whole swathes of the world still have to fall completely to capitalism before we see a genuine global uprising of the oppressed. Take Africa, for example. Capitalism looted Africa, first for slaves and then for resources. Capitalism will continue to exploit Africa with renewed cruelty. Someone must provide the cheap labor for cheap goods, and then those same workers have to buy the expensive goods imported into their country that have been made from the resources extracted from their country. Ah, the perpetual motion machine of capitalist fantasy! But once that happens, a proletariat is created and then a middle class, and even as some of the poorest are lifted out of absolute poverty, the gap in inequality widens and widens, as the wealthy become wealthier at a much faster rate than the very poor become a little less poor. This inevitable process is built into capitalism, which means that the conditions for revolution are inherent in capitalism itself.
Have you ever lived through a revolution? I said.
May 1968, the Maoist PhD said proudly. I will never forget how we students all over the world almost changed the world, until we encountered what Althusser—my teacher Louis Althusser—called the “Repressive State Apparatus.” I was studying for my doctorate with him but I still manned the barricades here. I admit to throwing a cobblestone or two. Our friend, the future BFD—no one called him just by his initials then—did the same. The police—that is, one part of the Repressive State Apparatus—tear-gassed and beat us. Never will I forget the blow of that baton! That baton taught me as much as theory and philosophy have ever taught me. That baton made real what Benjamin—Walter Benjamin—argued in “Critique of Violence”—that what makes the state legitimate is not the law but violence. The state wants to monopolize violence, the monopoly of violence is named the law, and the law legitimates itself. The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law. That is why one proper response to the blow of the baton is revolution in the streets! And student revolutions in streets around the world, from Tokyo to Mexico City, only echoed the revolutions in Algeria and Vietnam, where the Algerians and the Vietnamese confronted not batons but bullets. The Vietnamese were revolting against the monopoly of violence that was colonization! And by doing so, they revealed how illegitimate colonization actually was. They fought against not only the Repressive State Apparatus but also what Althusser described as the Ideological State Apparatus, which gets us to believe in the laws that are written against our self-interest! Why else would workers believe that capitalism is for them? Why else would the colonized believe in the white man’s superiority? The blow of that baton told me that what Che Guevara called for was true: we will need a hundred more Vietnams to flower across the world.
But at least three million people died during our war, I said slowly, my cloudy brain trying to perform basic mathematical functions. If you multiplied this by one hundred . . . it would equal . . .
At that point my cognitive abilities ended, as my math could not rise to that level of misery. I could not tell whether I wanted to laugh, to cry, to shout, or to commit myself to an asylum. I, too, believed in everything he said, but unlike the Maoist PhD, I had lived through a revolution and its consequences. And it was not just capitalism that created fantasies through these Ideological State Apparatuses and enforced them through Repressive State Apparatuses—so did communism. What was the reeducation camp but a Repressive State Apparatus designed to carry out the work of the Ideological State Apparatus? The reeducation camp’s task was to turn the inmates into people who would swear that they were free even if they were enslaved, proclaim that they had been remade when they had only been broken. Che Guevara and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it up close, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier to say for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own. I suppose the point for a Maoist like the PhD was that you had to see the bottom before you could be inspired to rise up. Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover—our own.
That’s why I needed whiskey or one of its cousins to make life livable, but when I looked at my glass, it was already empty. The Maoist PhD was by now somewhat high and relaxed, unattuned to social niceties, and instead of refilling my barren vessel, he said, Speaking of criminals, I have never met a Vietnamese drug dealer before.
I do like to think of myself as a trendsetter.
Maybe it’s your Eurasian heritage.
It has to be my Eurasian heritage.
The Vietnamese have done incredibly well here.
Tell me about it.
Doctors, lawyers, artists. They have not needed to go into the illicit trades, or perhaps their inclination to obey the law is part of their cultural tendency to pursue the honorable professions. And the Vietnamese are very good at improving the services that they engage in.
It’s in our blood.
Ironically, perhaps it’s because the Vietnamese