Short of rebelling, how do powerless peasants under a domineering Stalinist state influence policy? Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet's book offers not only a persuasive answer to this question but also a useful theoretical framework for understanding the power of “everyday politics.”

The book studies the politics of collectivization in North Vietnam from the perspective of ordinary villagers. The bulk of the book (Chapters 3 to 6) follows this state project to transform agriculture from the mid-1950s, with the establishment of the first work exchange groups to the massive campaign in the late 1950s to form cooperatives all over North Vietnam, to various government efforts to shore up these cooperatives in the face of wars, falling agricultural production, rampant corruption, and peasants' widespread discontent in the following two decades. The narrative focuses especially on how peasants expressed, not in words but in behavior at odds with official policy, their ambivalence about, disagreement with, and resistance to collectivization. It was, Kerkvliet argues, due to these surreptitious pressures from peasants that by the late 1970s, various local authorities had secretly allowed cooperatives to contract out farming tasks and land to households. Eventually, central leaders had to legitimize such contracts and abandoned collectivization by the late 1980s. National leaders followed peasants, not the other way around.

Kerkvliet's main theoretical contribution is on the question of why and how everyday politics matters (Chapter 2). He distinguishes three broad types of politics. “Official politics” centers on what authorities do, whereas “advocacy politics” concerns organized efforts to support or oppose authorities directly. In contrast, “everyday politics” involves ordinary people's daily struggle to adjust to or contest norms and rules regarding authority over the production and allocation of resources (p. 22). It may or may not involve resistance to authorities, may or may not convey a political message, and requires little or no organization. By everyday politics, Kerkvliet perhaps seeks to improve on James Scott's concept of “everyday forms of resistance,” which has been criticized as conveying an intentional element not always warranted by such behavior.

While everyday politics may carry no intention to influence policy, Kerkvliet claims that it can feed into advocacy politics and affect official politics. Everyday politics matters for three reasons. First, ordinary people potentially have some power vis-à-vis authorities; peasants in particular have the power of withdrawing their labor. Their power may also be derived from the importance of agriculture in the national economy or from the government's need for rural political support. Second, some governments may be unwilling or unable to force compliance; furthermore, ordinary people's deviant behavior by its nature may be difficult for governments to detect and repress. Finally, everyday politics matters because local officials often deviate from national policy, condone deviant behavior, and help spread such deviations.

Everyday politics clearly has its limits. Kerkvliet concedes that the power of everyday behavior to generate national change depends on whether it is widespread and similar across many communities (p. 30). He notes that everyday politics is especially important in regimes with totalitarian ambitions because official norms cover such a broad range of activities that even everyday behavior may carry political implications (pp. 23–24). Such regimes also maintain a tight leash on their people, making advocacy politics extremely risky (p. 27). Although he suggests that everyday politics may be critical in other contexts, his examples concern all communist regimes, and it is unclear how well his framework would travel beyond these cases.

Kerkvliet also cautions that everyday politics is not the only explanation for the fate of collective farming in Vietnam (p. 33). Other factors at work included foreign aid, Soviet and Chinese influence, wars, and severe economic crises in Vietnam in the late 1970s and 1980s. Because the author does not discuss these factors in detail, one wonders whether his claim for the significance of everyday politics would still hold if they were more fully considered. For example, it may be useful for the book to show how the massive streams of food aid for Vietnam from its communist allies fluctuated over time and may have correlated with certain twists and turns in the collectivization campaign. Furthermore, note that the two decisions to legitimize household contracts in the 1980s were made in contexts when not just collectivization but the very survival of the regime was at stake. A fuller treatment of other factors besides everyday politics may help him identify when everyday politics may have the most impact.

By focusing on everyday politics, Kerkvliet rightly challenges the conventional view that the Vietnamese political system is completely dominated by the state, whose power may sometimes be mediated by state-sponsored mass organizations. His proposed alternative is a “dialogical” model of state–society relations that gives an important role to the “dialogue” between the Communist Party and various sectors of society (p. 36). He wishes to emphasize that state power was much less than often thought, which is true, and he acknowledges that whereas the views of authorities were usually public, those of the masses rarely were. Yet the term “dialogue,” which commonly indicates a two-way conversation between more or less equal partners, obscures more than it reveals. Vietnamese peasants were bombarded daily with official exhortations coming from the “ubiquitous public address system” (p. 20), yet for nearly 30 years, their views expressed in various forms were ignored by state leaders while their livelihood steadily fell below subsistence. The dialogue metaphor simply misses the contentious nature of peasants' struggle for survival and their precarious position vis-à-vis a powerful state as vividly described elsewhere in the book.

Despite these minor quibbles, the persuasiveness of Kerkvliet's general argument and the usefulness of his theoretical framework cannot be doubted. Overall, the book makes significant contributions to the theorizing about peasants' everyday politics and about state–society relations in communist Vietnam. It deserves to be read widely by political scientists and Vietnam specialists alike.