Metropolitan anti-communist leftists blamed Vietnam’s material collapse on socialism itself

Evidence

When this material devastation brought in its train the inevitable disorientations in the social and political domains, those who believe in the moral grandeur of revolutions but not in the brute reality of the material conditions in which people actually build their lives and their revolutions were thoroughly disillusioned. … Thus it was that Vietnam, the great victor of antiimperialist war, became the showcase not of socialism but of the impossibility of building socialism. This sense of failure was to be repeated, then, in the rest of Indochina, ~n Southern Africa, in Nicaragua, and (so far to a lesser extent, but already visibly) in Cuba. None of the small places where great revolutions had occurred had the space, the time, the material resources, the assistance, the conditions of peace to make possible the correction of the distortions which inevitably arise in the course of collective human projects of such magnitude, undertaken in conditions so very punishing. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 134

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Ahmad project: this is the materialist counter to discourse-first postcolonial readings — revolutions judged by their material constraints, not their ideological purity. — connects to: The metropolitan Left suppressed Soviet-supported revolutions’ material solidarity after the 1980s shift — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 149
• QUESTION: Ahmad attributes Vietnam’s failures to American-imposed material devastation; worth tracing how far the sequestering claim holds versus domestic policy choices in subsequent historiography.