Vietnam’s ‘socialization’ policy and the moral subject in a privatizing economy

Abstract

The Vietnamese term for socialization, xã hội hóa, is grounded in its history of socialist construction, originally referring to the collectivization of property and resources. Since the country shifted to a market economy, yet remaining under the leadership of the Communist Party, the term has come to imply the individualization of responsibilities and the privatization of public goods. As a policy, however, it continues to evoke the idioms of ‘the whole society’ or ‘all the people’ as the basis of wellbeing and development. This paper examines the practices of socialization as part of broader shifts in welfare provision and local dynamics of exemplarity. I show that socialization concerns not only the mobilization of resources, but also the production of a moral subject that is self-optimized and yet sensitized to helping others, self-governed and yet governable by the party state. In a socialist country that is rapidly marketising, this moral subject plays into governing rationalities that blends new-prudentialist logics with socialist genealogies, privatization with a notion of society within which individual actions can be made morally meaningful. While the tension and contestation induced by people’s greater burdens are immanent, the continued reference to collective idioms appeals to people’s moral sensibilities, and thus makes socialization meaningful to some extent, even as they resent the turn away from broad-based structures of wellbeing.