The central question facing all Vietnamese today is whether Vietnam possesses enough confidence to accept the competition of ideas as a force for development. Marx, after all, was never afraid of contradiction. In every age, it is those who hold power who most fear contradiction.
Hoang Thang Dinh
Ph.D. in Political Science; Fellow of the Caux Round Table
History sometimes produces anomalies – unnecessary inconsistencies and contradictions that become visible only when a political order faces a decisive turning point. A ruling party founded upon Marxism-Leninism may continue to proclaim its loyalty to that doctrine in every official document, while in practice steadily suppressing the very force that Marx regarded as the source of all development. Seen from this perspective, perhaps the greatest paradox in Vietnam today is not that Marxism is feared, but that Marx’s own personal intellectual dialectic is.
This is not merely a play on words. If one sets aside the familiar conventions surrounding revolution, dictatorship, and class struggle, the philosophical core of Marx’s thought revolves around a single question: how does society develop? His answer was clear. Every social order contains contradictions within itself. Change arises from the meeting up of opposing forces and their mutual antagonisms, while absolute uniformity leads not to progress, but to stagnation.
The question, therefore, is not whether contemporary Vietnam continues to invoke Marxism-Leninism as an official doctrine. It plainly does. The more important question is whether a political system can remain faithful to Marx while attempting to remove contradiction, silence competing ideas, and reduce social life to hearing only a single authorized voice.
That contradiction between Marxist dogma and Marx’s philosophy of the natural law bringing about human evolution lies at the heart of Vietnam’s present dilemma.
1. What Did Marx Actually Say About Human Development?
Marx did not invent the social dynamic of dialectics. He inherited it from Hegel and transformed it by shifting its center of gravity from the realm of spirit to the material and social world. Yet whatever differences separated Marx from Hegel, the central proposition remained intact: there can be no movement without addressing contradictions and no development without conflict between what exists and what is struggling to emerge.
Hegel proposed a natural law of change. A fixed logic – the thesis – comes into being. Then, in a fluid ecosystem, a counter-logic appears – the anti-thesis. Next, the thesis and the anti-thesis interact and meld their truths one with the other to create a new logic or truth – the synthesis. And then the cycle repeats itself: the synthesis becomes a new thesis which begets a new anti-thesis, which then combine into a second generation synthesis, which …
Thus, from a Hegelian approach, any contradiction between a thesis and an anti-thesis is only an interim waystation on the road to successful innovation and the future. It is to be welcomed as step forward for humanity.
Hegel’s dialectic conforms nicely to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which holds that any energy state which does not flow degenerates. The isolated system – a thesis – cut off from innovation and new energy flows (anti-theses) succumbs to entropy whereby its internal energy is decomposed and becomes useless chaos. Such an isolated system ultimately loses all productivity and so becomes useless.
For Marx, contradiction was therefore not simply a system defect to be eliminated. It was the driving force of history. Without tension inside the forces and relations of production, there would be no structural transformation of the economy over time. Without conflict between old institutions and new social realities, there would be no political change. Without disagreement between competing interpretations, there would be no advance in human understanding.
Dialectics, in this sense, is not a philosophy of unanimity. It is a philosophy of forward movement generated by differences.
Long before Marx, similar intuitions appeared in the civilizational wisdom of Asia. An old Chinese saying observes that “on the Yangtze River, the waves behind push forward the waves ahead”. The Vietnamese express the same insight more simply: “when old bamboo dies, new shoots rise”. Both images point to a universal law of life. Renewal occurs because the new emerges, challenges the old, and eventually transforms or replaces it.
A river without new waves becomes stagnant water. A society without new ideas gradually loses its vitality.
In fact, the Vietnamese have applied a Hegelian approach to nature for more than 2,000 years as part of their national identity – Truong Ton Dan Toc. Their origin myth brings together a paternal figure – Lac Long Quan – with a maternal figure – Au Co – to meld their different energy orientations and so bring forth a unique new ethnicity.
Separately, the Truong Ton Dan Toc included a sophisticated balancing of different energy flows in the melding of Yang and Yin forces, Yang being the thesis and Yin the anti-thesis, and the 62 normal configurations of both energies constituting a set of differing syntheses.
Modern history offers repeated confirmation of this dialectic. In science, major discoveries often begin with the rejection of what had previously been accepted as truth. In economics, new firms and new technologies continuously displace established models. Joseph Schumpeter later described this process as “creative destruction,” the dynamic through which capitalism renews itself by dismantling obsolete arrangements and creating new ones.
The language differs, but the underlying principle is strikingly similar: without difference, there is no innovation; without challenge, there is no renewal.
This raises an unavoidable question. What happens when a society no longer accepts the existence of opposing forces? What happens when criticism is treated primarily as a political risk, debate is progressively narrowed, and difference itself becomes something to be monitored and controlled?
Under such conditions, social life does not merely become intellectually poorer. The very mechanism of development that Marx regarded as fundamental is disabled. The contradiction between theory and practice becomes even sharper when the political system responsible for suppressing disagreement continues to claim Marx as its ideological foundation.
It is precisely at this point that the anomaly of contemporary Vietnam reveals itself.
A genuinely dialectical society would not fear contradiction. It would institutionalize a process to constructively exploit contradiction, regulate it through law, and transform it into a source of correction and renewal. It would understand that disagreement is not necessarily disloyalty, that criticism is not automatically hostility, and that competing ideas are not enemies of national unity.
By contrast, a system that treats every significant difference as a threat may preserve outward conformity for a time, but it does so by weakening its own capacity to learn and grow stronger. It eliminates not only dissent, but also the warning signals through which errors are detected before they become crises.
This is why the issue reaches far beyond how best to interpret Marx. It concerns the conditions under which any modern society is capable of development. A nation cannot enter the knowledge economy while suppressing the social processes through which knowledge is tested. It cannot call for innovation if it fears intellectual independence. It cannot celebrate dialectics in theory while abolishing contradiction in practice.
The essential question, then, is no longer whether Marxism remains present in official discourse. The question is whether those who speak most frequently in Marx’s name are prepared to accept the principle at the very center of his thought: that development begins when opposing forces are allowed to exist, interact, and generate something new.
2. The Greatest Irony: Governing in Marx’s Name While Abandoning Marx’s Method
If Marx was correct that contradiction is the engine of historical development, then contemporary Vietnam presents a puzzle that deserves careful examination. The issue is not whether Marxism-Leninism continues to occupy a privileged place in official ideology. It clearly does. The more fundamental question is whether the governing method increasingly contradicts the very philosophical principle upon which Marx built his understanding of history. It is here that one encounters perhaps the greatest irony of Vietnam’s contemporary political development.
According to Marx, contradiction was never an unfortunate defect that society should eliminate. Quite the opposite. Contradiction was the source of movement, adaptation, and renewal. Social systems evolve because competing forces interact with one another, exposing weaknesses, correcting errors, and generating new possibilities. Development therefore requires tension—not permanent conflict, but the continuous encounter between different perspectives capable of producing higher forms of organization and understanding.
Measured against that standard, today’s Vietnam appears to be moving along a remarkably different path. Over time, the public space available for intellectual diversity has become progressively narrower. Journalism exercises less independent scrutiny than before. Civic organizations function within carefully defined limits. Scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, and policy specialists have all learned that some questions are best avoided and some conclusions are wiser left unstated. The significance of this trend lies not in any individual case, but in the broader political culture it gradually creates: one in which conformity offers security while intellectual divergence carries increasing uncertainty.
Such a development is not difficult to understand from the perspective of political power. Governments naturally seek stability. They attempt to reduce uncertainty, minimize social disruption, and preserve institutional coherence. These are legitimate objectives of governance. The difficulty begins only when stability gradually becomes indistinguishable from uniformity, and when the absence of disagreement comes to be interpreted as evidence of political success.
At precisely that moment, however, another process quietly unfolds beneath the surface. A political system may become more orderly, yet simultaneously lose part of its capacity for self-correction. Independent criticism becomes rarer. Alternative analyses disappear from public debate. Institutions hear fewer warnings before policy mistakes accumulate into structural weaknesses. What appears externally as consensus may, in reality, conceal a growing decline in the system’s ability to learn from its own experience.
Seen through Marx’s own dialectical framework, this outcome is deeply ironic. What is being reduced is not merely criticism of particular policies, but the social existence of opposing forces themselves. Yet Marx never regarded opposing forces as enemies of development. He regarded them as its indispensable condition. A society that removes contradiction from public life also removes one of the principal mechanisms through which historical progress becomes possible.
The paradox becomes even more striking as Vietnam enters what its leaders describe as a new era of national advancement. Official strategy now emphasizes innovation, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, private enterprise, and global competitiveness. These aspirations are entirely understandable. No country can hope to prosper in the twenty-first century without embracing scientific creativity and technological innovation. Yet history has never produced an innovative economy within an intellectually homogeneous society.
Here lies the paradox within the paradox. Competition is encouraged in markets, but competition among ideas remains far more constrained. Technological innovation is celebrated, while intellectual innovation often encounters institutional hesitation. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to challenge old business models, but society remains considerably less comfortable when citizens challenge established assumptions in public life. The result is an increasingly visible gap between the economic imagination required for modernization and the political imagination permitted within the public sphere.
Eventually, theory and practice begin moving in opposite directions. A nation may continue to invoke Marx as the philosophical foundation of its political legitimacy, while simultaneously narrowing the very conditions under which Marx’s dialectical method could actually operate. In that situation, dialectics survives primarily as doctrine rather than as a living method of understanding reality. Contradiction is praised in textbooks but discouraged in public life.
Perhaps this is the deepest irony confronting Vietnam today. The central issue is no longer whether some citizens criticize Marxism. The more revealing question is whether a political system that continues to govern in Marx’s name remains willing to accept the single principle that gives Marx’s philosophy its enduring intellectual vitality: that societies develop not by eliminating contradiction, but by allowing competing forces to interact, challenge one another, and ultimately produce something better than either could achieve alone.
3. Innovation Begins Where Conformity Ends
One of history’s greatest ironies is that many of civilization’s most transformative revolutions did not begin in royal palaces, government ministries, or the headquarters of powerful institutions. They began in places so ordinary that they seemed almost invisible. A suburban garage. A university laboratory. A rented apartment. A dormitory room. Again and again, history reminds us that the future rarely announces itself from the center of established power. More often, it arrives quietly from its margins.
When Bill Gates imagined that every office and every household would one day possess its own personal computer, the idea struck many observers as wildly unrealistic. When Steve Jobs insisted that technology should become an extension of human creativity rather than merely a calculating machine, established companies saw little reason to take him seriously. Years later, Elon Musk was widely dismissed for arguing that electric vehicles could redefine the automobile industry and that private companies could compete in space exploration. Their proposals often sounded less like business plans than acts of intellectual audacity.
The remarkable fact is not that these individuals encountered skepticism. Every genuinely original idea does. The remarkable fact is that these men lived in societies capable of distinguishing between disagreement and disloyalty. They were free to fail, free to be criticized, and equally free to prove that conventional wisdom had been mistaken. Their greatest protection was not political influence or inherited privilege. It was an institutional environment that accepted intellectual deviation as a normal condition of progress.
This pattern extends far beyond Silicon Valley. Galileo challenged the cosmology of his age. Charles Darwin overturned centuries of established assumptions about the origins of life. Albert Einstein transformed modern physics by questioning concepts that had appeared settled since Newton. Tim Berners-Lee changed the architecture of global communication with an invention whose significance few initially recognized. In every generation, history advances because someone is willing to ask questions that the majority has not yet imagined.
The lesson is remarkably consistent. Innovation is never produced by unanimous agreement. It emerges from continuous competition among ideas. Some fail. Many disappear. A few fundamentally reshape the world. The decisive factor is not whether every new idea is correct, but whether society provides sufficient intellectual space for better ideas to emerge, compete, and eventually replace inferior ones. This process is precisely what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”—the permanent renewal of society through challenge rather than repetition.
This is why the world’s most innovative nations share certain institutional characteristics. Their universities enjoy substantial intellectual autonomy. Their scientific communities encourage rigorous criticism rather than ritual agreement. Their entrepreneurs regularly challenge established industries. Their journalists question those who govern. Their courts protect lawful dissent. None of these institutions exists because disagreement is inherently desirable. They exist because history repeatedly demonstrates that societies capable of correcting themselves invariably outperform societies that merely preserve appearances of consensus.
Vietnam now stands before precisely this historical reality. The country can import advanced technologies, attract foreign investment, construct modern infrastructure, and acquire sophisticated machinery. Yet none of these imports will on their own automatically produce innovation. The most valuable strategic resource of the twenty-first century is neither oil nor rare earth minerals nor financial capital. It is the human capacity to think independently, to imagine alternatives, and to challenge inherited assumptions before circumstances force change from outside.
This reality raises a question far more fundamental than industrial policy or technological strategy. Can a gifted Vietnamese student pursue an unconventional scientific hypothesis without fearing that intellectual independence itself may become a liability? Can a young entrepreneur openly challenge established methods without first calculating the political acceptability of new ideas? Can scholars engage in serious debate over national development without every disagreement being interpreted primarily through the lens of political conformity? These questions reach beyond individual freedoms. They concern the creative capacity of the nation itself.
Perhaps this brings us back, unexpectedly, to Marx. If contradiction constitutes the engine of historical development, then every society aspiring to innovation must ultimately decide whether it views intellectual diversity as a strategic asset or as a political risk. The answer to that question will determine far more than the future of academic debate. It may well determine whether Vietnam succeeds in building a genuine knowledge economy or merely acquires the outward technologies of one.
For nations do not become innovative simply because they purchase advanced machines. They become innovative because they cultivate citizens who are unafraid to think differently. History has rarely rewarded societies that perfected conformity. It has consistently rewarded those confident enough to allow new ideas to challenge old certainties before the rest of the world does it for them.
4. Strong States Do Not Fear Independent Minds
Perhaps the deepest misunderstanding in modern politics is the assumption that political stability demands intellectual conformity; that political stability and intellectual paralysis are essentially one and the same reality. History suggests precisely the opposite. The strongest states have rarely been those that eliminated disagreement. They were the ones that developed institutions capable of absorbing disagreement, learning from it, and transforming it into better public policy.
This distinction is more important than it first appears. Every government seeks stability; no responsible state welcomes chaos. Yet stability achieved through institutional resilience differs fundamentally from stability achieved through intellectual uniformity. The former grows stronger because criticism exposes weaknesses before they become crises. The latter often appears solid until accumulated errors suddenly reveal how little corrective capacity remains beneath the surface.
Modern constitutional government developed precisely from this insight. Independent courts, professional journalism, autonomous universities, competitive elections, civic associations, and open policy debate were never designed simply as expressions of individual liberty. They evolved because societies gradually discovered that governments, like markets, make mistakes. Institutions capable of identifying those mistakes early became one of civilization’s greatest political innovations.
In this respect, political systems resemble living organisms more than mechanical machines. A healthy immune system does not weaken the human body by constantly identifying abnormalities. It protects the body by detecting danger before it becomes irreversible. Public criticism performs a remarkably similar function within political communities. It identifies institutional blind spots, challenges obsolete assumptions, and exposes emerging risks before they mature into national failures. Silence, by contrast, is not always a sign of health. Sometimes it merely indicates that the immune system itself has ceased to function effectively.
This may explain why societies that appear highly stable often prove unexpectedly fragile when confronted with profound change. Systems accustomed to hearing only agreement gradually lose the capacity to recognize reality as it evolves. Information becomes increasingly filtered. Honest feedback becomes progressively rarer. Decision-makers receive reassurance precisely when they most need correction. Under such conditions, crises seldom emerge because criticism was excessive. More often, they emerge because criticism arrived too late.
Vietnam’s long-term challenge therefore extends well beyond economics or technology. The country undoubtedly requires investment, infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and scientific capability. Yet none of these achievements can fully substitute for institutions capable of continuous self-correction. Sustainable national development ultimately depends not only upon the efficiency of government but also upon the quality of feedback available to government itself.
Perhaps this returns us once again to the anomaly with which this essay began. A confident political order does not fear competing ideas because it understands that ideas, unlike conspiracies, become stronger or weaker through open examination. Only weak arguments require permanent protection from criticism. Strong arguments improve precisely because they survive criticism.
The question for a political system is what kind of “order” it should seek and institutionalize. There is a continuum of systems of order – from chaos and anarchy, at one pole, to a paralyzing stasis hugging tight to inertia at the other pole. The most constructive and vital systems of order lie in the middle of the continuum. Finding such fluid but confined systems requires searching for a Middle Way, an Aristotelean Mean or a Daoist Wu-Wei equilibrium.
The American Constitution with its system of checks and balances is just such a Mean in the distribution of power among those who hold different Hegelian Theses and Anti-theses. The Federalist Papers explained how checks and balances worked to produce a system of dynamic order avoiding both anarchy and tyranny through moderate movements taking place within a bounded social setting.
In Federalist Paper #10 we read: “AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. … By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Here James Madison associated “faction” with the seeking of power to dominate others living in the same community.
Factions, he said, arise from separations in the possession of social, economic, and political power. “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties. … It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”
Federalist Paper #51 describes how checks and balances produce equilibrium among factions so that society as a whole benefits from the contributions of each faction: “by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. … Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. … a subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”
Where, in an operative Hegelian dialectic, different theses, anti-theses, and syntheses contend with each other in seeking approval and support, checks and balances are at work bringing about, over time, benefits for the entire society to share and enjoy. The central issue confronting Vietnam, therefore, is not whether intellectual diversity creates temporary discomfort. Every living society experiences disagreement. The more important question is whether the nation’s institutions possess sufficient confidence to transform disagreement into knowledge rather than interpreting it primarily as political risk. The answer to that question will shape far more than the future of public debate. It will determine the adaptive capacity of the Vietnamese state itself in a century defined by technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, and unprecedented rates of change.
For history leaves little room for ambiguity. Strong states are not those that succeed in silencing independent minds. Strong states are those confident enough to govern among them.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the question is no longer whether Vietnam remains faithful to Marxism-Leninism as an official doctrine. The more consequential question is whether it remains faithful to the single principle that gave Marx’s philosophy its enduring intellectual power: that development emerges through contradiction rather than conformity.
History has repeatedly demonstrated that scientific discovery, economic innovation, and political progress all begin with ideas that challenge established certainties. Societies prosper not because they eliminate disagreement, but because they possess the confidence to transform disagreement into knowledge, correction, and renewal.
The paradox confronting Vietnam today is therefore larger than Marx himself. A nation cannot aspire to become an innovation-driven economy while narrowing the intellectual space from which innovation naturally arises. Nor can it cultivate creative citizens while expecting them to think within predetermined boundaries.
The ultimate question is not who still speaks in Marx’s name. It is who still believes in the dialectical spirit that made Marx intellectually significant in the first place.
For Marx never feared contradiction.
History has never feared contradiction.
Innovation has never feared contradiction.
In every age, it is those with power who most fear contradictions.