people of Vietnam who have been able to defend themselves against the ferocious attack, and at the same time take great strides forward toward the socialist society." Chomsky praised the North Vietnamese for their efforts in building material prosperity, social justice, and cultural progress. He also went on to discuss and support the political writing of Lê Duẩn. In his 1973 essay collection For Reasons of State, Chomsky argues that instead of a capitalist system in which people are "wage slaves" or an authoritarian system in which decisions are made by a centralized committee, a society could function with no paid labor. He argues that a nation's populace should be free to pursue jobs of their choosing. People will be free to do as they like, and the work they voluntarily choose will be both "rewarding in itself" and "socially useful." Society would be run under a system of peaceful anarchism, with no state or other authoritarian institutions. Work that was fundamentally distasteful to all, if any existed, would be distributed equally among everyone. Chomsky was always critical of the Soviet Union. In a 2016 interview he said that Mao's revolution in China was responsible for "a huge death toll, in the tens of millions" during the Great Leap Forward; but he also gave the revolution credit for saving 100 million lives between 1949 and 1979 through rural health and development programs. In 1960s, Chomsky noted what he considered to be grassroots elements within both Chinese and Vietnamese communism. In December 1967, during a forum in New York, Chomsky responded to criticisms of the Chinese revolution as follows, "I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable." Chomsky continued: "There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step." He said of Vietnam: "Although there appears to be a high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels, still major planning is highly