Communist writer, educator, creator, and translator Luna Oi (Luna Nguyen) joins us from her home in Vietnam for a conversation that dismantles just about everything the West thinks it knows about her country. Luna has spent six years translating Vietnam's official university Marxism-Leninism curriculum into English — an annotated, diagram-rich series with contributions from Vijay Prashad, Gerald Horne, and Taimur Rahman.
We dig into why dialectical materialism is taught to every Vietnamese college student, how idealism still quietly shapes Western thinking, and why Marxism is the philosophy that teaches you to change the world rather than just interpret it. Luna cuts through the propaganda about life "under communism" — from the myth that Vietnam is striving to exchange its economy for a “free market” to what Vietnam's National Assembly actually looks like — and lays out the country's trajectory: free healthcare and education, a plan to become a high-income socialist nation by 2045, and quiet, decades-long solidarity work with Cuba.
She doesn't dodge the hard stuff either — the agonizing logic of Doi Moi, translated literally as "restoration," the corruption that came with opening the economy, and a deeply personal family story from the 1950s land reforms that ends with Ho Chi Minh weeping and apologizing on national radio.
About Luna Oi
Luna Oi (Luna Nguyen) is a Vietnamese writer, communist educator, and content creator, born in 1991 and raised in Vietnam — under the comprehensive U.S. embargo that shaped her childhood. She studied business administration and worked for years in the corporate world before turning to content creation. What began in 2019 as a travel-and-cooking channel became something else entirely when viewers flooded her with political questions, and she saw the scale of anti-communist misinformation behind them. Today she runs the Luna Oi channel as part of the Non-Compete cooperative alongside her partner EJ, and both rank among the top tier of political creators on the platform
Follow Luna Oi:
Luna’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/LunaOi
EJ’s NonCompete YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/NonCompete/
X/Twitter: https://x.com/LunaOi_VN
Website: https://www.lunaoi.com
Mentioned Books:
Part 1: The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism:
https://www.lunaoi.com/product/ebook-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-marxism-leninism/
Part 2 Historical Materialism:
https://www.lunaoi.com/product/ebook-historical-materialism/
Greg’s Blog: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
Pat’s Substack: https://patcummings.substack.com/
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