wanderingmeomeo

Yeah, there have been a lot of cases in which the condominiums, especially ones designed for poor folks, catched on fire. They are not sleep boxes by any means, but the fire hazard inherent in cheap housing is not to be underestimated. Lots of people have died because of the lack of infrastructure that could help tenants escape the fire, so I simply could not imgine how such infrasstructure could exist in these places, nor how landlords who build these would ever have the intention of installing one in the first place. It's bewildering to see the sheer length that landlords would be willing to take to avoid having to follow through fire safety regulations just to save a little money for themselves.

And by the way, while these people have to crawl into rat's hut every night, there are still a lot of abandoned apartments that no one lives in,. Capitalism is so fine.

And yeah, paying rent to live in Vans might be the one of the most dystopian shits I've ever heard of,

Very interesting. As far as I know, there is no such slogan that achieved the level of popularity to the point that people would actively chant on street protest, probably because we don't have strong history of organizing protest to push for social changes due to state's strict censroship of political subversion in mainstream media and lack of organizing experience from agitators. I could only think of catchphrases like "Save Tam Đảo"- symbolising the recent movement focusing on opposing selling indigenous forests and lands to corporation to build resorts and golf fields, and "Tôi đồng ý" (I agree) which is the campaign to gather support for the legalization of gay marriages. However, those movements doesn't have popular support and only popular to middle class young people in urban areas. Their impacts are limited on social media space and rarely are people angry enough to bring those issues to the street.

Meanwhile, the most oppressed of people do not have the political power nor resorces like access to progressive Internet space. Their agitation often doesn't have a common catchphrase (as far as I know) other than direct concern about the material conditions in which they are subjected to, like about wages, insurance, legal representatives, justic from scams from banks,... Often time, people who have the power to amplify the struggle of poor people (i.e progressive middle class younglings) do not care and often treat their attempts to destablize the status quo (strikes, protests, smashing factories) as reactionary or due to the influence of American spies. The consequence of this lack of solidarity is that although opressed people movements are most effective to achieve the material goal (states reconsidering compensation for dispossed lands, concession of capitalists to raise wages or add benefits,...), they are often fragmented and do not pose serious challenges to the status quo, while more privileged people are tend to be more moderate in their movement but they have much greater reach and attract far more attention. Both can not do much in the current state. I'm also guilty of this, I'm still not brave enough to address the concern of the opressed enough for fear of, you know, being jailed.

However, I do believe that considering the world and Vietnam is heading to shit, more and more middle class people would regconize our common struggles and effectively fight back the system.

Side note: My knowledge is limited to only modern time, I'm not very aware of how Vietnameses in the colonial time would organize and what slogans they raised. I think that Vietnamese grassroots social movements during that era, albeit heavily limited under to French colonial rule, were much more lively, but more research would be needed :")

Legend??? The green mark indicated the area in which the spikes are installed, the yellow mark indicates the area in which sand pirates operate illegally, and yes, the red mark indicates the location of lands being collapsed to the river

You just read it and you already have better grasps of the geography than I do. I can't read map at all and frankly I don't want to bother.

Oh, I don't think she refers to any famous quote in particular. I think she said it in the heat of moment and to be frank, it sounds really cool “Làng đi thì mình cùng đi. Tù thì tù hết". I think Google Translate messed up this part a bit, it might need a bit of context:

So when she said that so much property has been poured to the river, so if they don't do anything then the entire village (the land, the people) would follow the lost property to the river and there would be nothing left. So it might more more accurate to translate "Làng đi thì mình cùng đi. Tù thì tù hết”" as "If the village is gone then we are also gone. If we are jailed then all of us would be jailed". She might be depicting the reality in which they might lose in all scenarios: if they do nothing they would be gone, as in the village would be gone, but if they do something they would all go to the prison. There is more nuanced to "Tù thì tù hết" however, because in this context in which people are reeled up against injustice, it reflects the anger of the villagers rather than the resignation to the legal system. It might have similar tones to something like "If we die then we die, so what?". Does that make sense?

I think Vietnamese is a fairly emotional language so the effort to closely translate, or even to explain it logically like I just did would bound to fail. She might not think about the meaning of what she said at all, but I do believe what she said is the expression of days and months of frustration with what's happening around her.

I'm not sure myself whether my explaination is correct or not, but that was my best attempt.

Thank you for your response :") I spend a lot of times online and just find it so aggravating when the Western Left keep pointing to Vietnam or China as a ideal model of socialism, while they are enjoying lots of cheap goods and food made from heavily exploited workers in both countries. The most vocal opposition I've seen so far is, well, Vaush, which is not ideal. I personally could not make any video about the topic to counter this kind of narratives sinceI could be jailed for that, while people like Luna Oi is given platform is precisely because she doesn't bother to poke the pitchfork at the government.

Aside from that, I want to express my appriciation for your very prominent presence here in Lemmy ,especially here in !vietnam. It must've been difficult to find information about Vietnam if you are not influent in Vietnamese and I really respect your effort to actively engage with the community. I'm really sorry that I come off as aggressive in my original comment, I was just really tired to see people who are supposed to be allies keep idolizing such an oppressive regime, like they don't really care about us, or to see any attacks on a so called "socialist country" as reactionary.

Keep up the good work, @five, and thank you for what you're doing :") I will try my best on this space too.

Side note: It's kinda funny that I bumped into !vietnam on slrpnk.net of all places, I thought it would be on lemmygrad or something, but I'm really glad that it's here.

Oh my god, Luna Oi is such a propaganda machine for the Vietnamese government, and I say this from the perspective of a Vietnamese leftist.

Well, to be fair, I'm not good at law, but I think anyone with half a brain could see that the law is only good for workers when it could be realistically enforced. Yes, Vietnamese workers have rights, lots of them, but it would be ridiculous to say that words on legal papers alone could arm workers with a powerful arsenal of arguments and resources to fight for their rights. We have to keep in mind the sheer imbalance of power between the workers and the capitalists at all times, since when workers appeal their case to the court, most of them cannot afford the money to hire a good lawyer while the capitalists have legions of legal consultants and lawyers backing them up. It's not uncommon for a worker to represent themselves, and no, Vietnam does not have any system to assign a mandatory public defender for destitute people, which reduces the possibility of workers winning a case drastically. Even if they manage to bring the case to the court collectively, the procedure is still very lengthy and complicated and the cost of going through them is money and time, which most workers don't have. They barely get by with the wages and benefits of the company, asking them to suck it up for a prolonged legal battle that could very well last for 2 years is downright unreasonable.

Strike is another story altogether. Luna said that strikes require permission from the labor union and this is very true. However, let's stop for a second and really think about the fact that workers need permission to strike in the first place, doesn't that sound ridiculous? Why would they have to entrust the right to strike to another body of authority? What if they decided to refuse? The workers should just drop the case and go back to work peacefully then? You might say that the union will not refuse because it's a democratic institution and has to follow the will of the masses. However, in order for that argument to work, labor union have to be independent institution without the influence of both company leadership AND the state, because if the leading party decide to adopt a neoliberal policy, they would have every incentive in the world to mess with the democracy of the labor union and what could be the easier way to do it than subduing all unions under the control of the state? Yes, I'm saying this because all unions in Vietnam belong to the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour, an organ of the Vietnamese Communist Party whose current interest is to develop the economy by accumulating capitalistic wealth, not to protect worker's interests. This makes Vietnamese labor unions very prone to corruption and backstage vote rigging. There's no guarantee that a labor union could really present the interest of the worker. In Vietnam, the union's practical role is not to reel up workers to fight the factoríe, but to extinguish the intensity of their struggle so that Vietnam doesn't become a place that foreign investors would actively avoid.

Luna said something very interesting: most strikes are illegal because Vietnamese workers don't bother to ask for permission, which is debatable. Why doesn't she consider that there is a very real possibility that most strikes are actively declined by the union leaders? Vietnamese workers have been striking since Doi Moi and established a labor struggle history of their own, there must be more structural reasons why wildcat strikes are preferable than just their individual failings to be more knowledgeable about labor law. In fact, the laws are actively making it very difficult for the workers to strike. Aside from asking for permission, they would have to make sure that they are asking for benefits, not rights, striking for rights is illegal, and good luck differentiating the two because the Labor Code doesn't do that for you. Before they could ask for permission to strike, workers must negotiate with their employers in a process called meditation. The employers could sit on their asses for 30 days without going to the negotiation session to prolong the battle with the employees. And like I said earlier, time is of the essence because they have to accept not having any money to live during the entire process.

We have to address the elephant in the room too: Workers in a lot of capitalist countries also have rights, sometimes even more rights than their Vietnamese counterparts. Labor laws in Germany, Finland or more progressive states in America are way more comprehensive and the mechanism through which workers's rights are protected in those countries is way more developed. Vietnamese workers have suffered a lot and it's so disingenuous on Luna's part to present her video in a way that frames American laborers are way more miserable than us. I could not overstate how wrong this is enough when workers in factories throughout Vietnam, especially in special economic zones, have to live through abject working conditions but can not quit their jobs or protest about it. The power dynamic is heavily skewed towards the capitalists because the government is kissing their feet or inviting them to destroy our land. There is a reason why Vietnam is an attractive place for foreign investors and it's absolutely not communism. Vietnam is not a socialist paradise, but just another victim of neo-colonialism like the rest of the Global South.

@Five, I really respect your effort to maintain the vitality of many progressive communities on Lemmy, but you can noy promote Luna Oi if you also support anarchism. The narratives she pumps out are very harmful for the left because her videos are purely dogmatic propaganda that promotes a vision of socialism based on an opressive, authoritarian regime. Vietnam is a capitalist, authoritarian country that have attempted multiple times to attack progressive movements by framing them as reactionary.

It is really, really SAD to see that such instances are so fking rare and the way she was percieved as bold is precisely because Vietnameses parliarment is occupied by neoliberal old farts who love kissing the feet of the "merchant class". No, Vietnanese Communists only have the ideological and moral upperhands, but they don't have the power to overturn the overall neoliberalism in Vietnam and that's fking ironic in a country whose party claim to respresent the working class.