Vietnam & Trotskyism

1945: Vietnam’s August Revolution

Simon Pirani

Reprinted from Workers Press, 20 December 1986

9 AUGUST 1945: The United States opened up the age of nuclear war, dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima; Japan surrendered to the Allies five days later, ending the second world war.

Under US President Truman’s ‘Strategic Order No. 1’, the Japanese forces throughout eastern Asia were to surrender only to authorities designated by the Supreme Allied Commander, US General Douglas Macarthur.

In line with Stalin’s Potsdam agreement with US and British imperialism, the Soviet Union took the Kurile Islands from Japan, and elsewhere the Communist Parties sought to restrain revolutionary and nationalist movements, to enable the imperialists to regain control.

The Indonesian Communist Party called for the return of Dutch imperialism and denounced the bourgeois nationalist leader Sukharno when he first declared independence from the Japanese, only dropping this policy when re-occupation by the Dutch was clearly impossible; the Burmese Stalinists collected in weapons from resistance fighters to ensure the country was re-occupied by British forces; the Stalinist-led Malaya People’s Anti-Japanese Army relinquished its administrative control to the British.

The policy of the Stalinist-led Vietnam Independence League, or Vietminh, at the end of the war, was also worked out in line with Potsdam: it sought to establish a bourgeois national state, with French imperialism re-occupying at least the southern part of the country.

Vietnam: the background

French imperialism had first reached Vietnam in 1867, subjugating the fiercely nationalist population twenty years later with the creation of the Indochinese Union, which remained pan of the French empire until 1941. The taking of Paris by Hitler’s armies was the signal to Japanese imperialism to invade into Indochina, and its forces remained there throughout the war. In March 1945, as the Allied victory neared, the Japanese installed a puppet emperor, Bao Dai.

Japan’s imminent demise, and the impotence of the Vietnamese bourgeois and landowning classes, caused administrative chaos and a devastating famine through the summer. The working class political parties that had gone underground or disappeared during the war re-organised.

In 1945 the Trotskyists pursued a defeatist policy against all foreign imperialisms, calling for national liberation struggle to be combined with social revolution, and basing themselves on the working class centres, particularly Saigon. The Struggle group, which had pursued the united front policy in the 1930s, re-constituted itself in May 1945, its leader Ta Thu Thau who had recently been released from the Poulo Condor island concentration camp travelling north to organise the movement there. The Internationalist Communist League led by Lu Sanh Hanh (author of Some Stages . . . see p. 61 in this pamphlet) issued a manifesto on March 24th calling for struggle against Japan to be combined with the struggle for workers’ power; members of the group led the workers of the Go Yap tram depot near Saigon, who later organised a workers’ militia which played a vital role in the August revolution.

The Stalinist strategy, on the other hand, was to wage guerrilla war against the Japanese, receiving aid first from the Chinese Kuomintang and then from the American imperialists. The Vietminh front was founded in 1941 in Kwangsi, southern China, which was then under Kuomintang control. ‘From the beginning, the Vietminh asked for aid from the Chinese Kuomintang government … The Vietminh offered its services in gathering information in Indochina and creating a local military force for joint action against the Japanese.’ (Marxism in South East Asia, ed. F. Trager, Stanford University, 1946).

Ho collaborated with the American imperialists from 1942 to 1945, giving tactical assistance and intelligence to General Wedemeyer, Head of Southern Command (Chungking), General Gallagher of the Special Command Section, and General William Donovan of the ass (forerunners of the CIA). (Details in Ho Chi Minh, by W. Warbey, pp. 78-80, and Vietnam by Stanley Karnow, pp. 138-9). (Of course revolutionaries have often accepted aid from imperialist powers during war, but it must be remembered that here the policy of the Vietminh was not defeatist, but supported the ‘democratic’ imperialists of China, France and the US against the axis powers.)

The Vietminh sought to avoid confrontation with the French forces, replacing their slogan ‘drive out the Japanese and French’ with ‘drive out the Japanese fascists’. (Quotations from VCP documents, reprinted in Breaking Our Chains, Hanoi 1960, p. 11).

The Vietminh, which was effectively a ‘popular front’, including the property-owning classes, had a programme of national liberation and agrarian reform, but in line with the Stalinist theory of ‘stages’, specifically excluded the establishment of workers’ power. In May 1945, as Japan collapsed, the Stalinists established a ‘liberated zone’ in the six northern provinces. The property of foreigners was taken over, but that of Vietnamese bourgeois and landowners preserved. The Stalinists’ aim was, in their own words:

‘1. To disarm the Japs before the entry of Allied forces into Indochina;
‘2. To wrest the power from the hands of the enemy;
‘3. To be in a position of power when receiving the Allied forces.’
(‘Factual Records of the Vietnam August Revolution’, an official publication, quoted in Trager, p. 151).

While condemning De Gaulle’s intention of re-establishing imperialist control in their propaganda, they simultaneously contacted him for negotiations. One bourgeois historian points out that the ‘Vietminh had even communicated to the French a memorandum which accepted the principle of the temporary re-establishment of French sovereignty in Vietnam.’ (Trager, p. 151).

The August Revolution

A revolutionary situation erupted in Vietnam on 16 August 1945 when the Japanese surrender was announced. In the provinces of Trung Bo, Bac Bo, Sadec and Long Xuyen, resurgent peasants killed their landlords and expropriated the land.

But the centre of the revolution was Saigon. Huge demonstrations demanding national independence, and freedom from all types of oppression, took place: of 300,000 on 21 August, and one million on 25 August. The slogans of the Trotskyists for workers’ power swelled their contingents by thousands.

More than 150 popular committees were set up (this policy was actively fought for by the Trotskyists of the ICL), the first one at Ban Co on 19 August. They took administrative power in many Saigon suburbs, starting with Phu Nuan on 19 August. A conference of the committees issued a programme which insisted ‘that the national bourgeoisie will be completely incapable of playing the role of the revolutionary vanguard, and that only the popular alliance of the industrial workers and rural toilers will be able to free the nation from the domination of foreign capitalists’. (‘Some Stages of the Revolution in the South of Vietnam’, by a Vietnamese Trotskyist from Quatriéme Internationale, Sept. 1947, see pp. 61-72 in this volume).

As in all revolutionary situations, no amount of organisations or publications could satisfy the masses’ thirst for political leadership. Tranh Dau, the paper of the Struggle group, became daily; the ICL at one point issued bulletins every three hours from a newly-established headquarters. Hundreds of Vanguard Youth committees were set up, some under Stalinist leadership, all of whom declared their readiness to die for national liberation. The bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties also proliferated; according to an ICL report no less than 50 new ones sprouted up.

How the Vietminh stepped in

Who was in control of Saigon? The differences between various accounts show how volatile the situation was.

Certainly the United National Front (UNF), which had a programme for national independence and included bourgeois nationalists, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects and the Vanguard Youth, was handed power by the collapsing Bao Dai administration on 14 August, and passed it on to the Vietminh a week later.

John Spencer, a supporter of the anti-Trotskyist Banda group, has recently made the stupid allegation that ‘at least some of the Vietnamese Trotskyists took part in the formation of the UNF under Japanese auspices on August 14th, 1945’, a ‘grouping which was dearly intended as a counter-weight to the Vietminh’. (Vietnamese Trotskyism and the August Revolution of 1945).

Spencer is obviously trying to give some ‘scholarly’ weight to the Stalinist lie, originated by Ho Chi Minh, that the Trotskyists were working for the Japanese. But at least one authoritative account says that the UNF ‘included a small Communist minority’, as well as the Trotskyists of the Struggle group. (Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development, by R. Turner, p. 39). The same account explains how the Vietminh leader Tran Van Giau arranged for the UNF to hand over power to him by negotiation.’*

Secondly, a report from the Struggle group to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (The August Revolution and the Struggle Group, in files of the ISFI, Library of International Contemporary Documentation, Nanterre University, Paris) states that they proposed to the Stalinists a united front on the policy of national independence and agrarian reform, the latter turning it down ‘because they believed that they could count on the aid and compliance of the Allies, to achieve a “democratic republic of Vietnam” through diplomatic means.’ It was after this, and after the Vietminh assumed administrative control, that they took part in meetings with the bourgeois nationalists – at which the Stalinists were also present, accusing the Trotskyists of ‘sabotage’.

A few weeks later, when British troops were welcomed into Saigon by the Vietminh, the Trotskyists certainly found themselves in a de facto alliance with the bourgeois nationalists: both advocated armed resistance to the re-imposition of imperialist control. (Spencer does not express his own opinion on the small matter of the British invasion, relying on quotations from various sources supporting the Stalinist view that opposed those who resisted the British as ‘crazy’, ‘provocateurs’ and ‘ultra-lefts’).

On 22 August, after two weeks of revolutionary turmoil, the Vietminh held a meeting with UNF representatives who agreed to hand over control of the city.

At 5am on 25 August, the day of the million-strong demonstration, the Vietminh occupied all the government buildings and formally set up a ‘Provisional Executive Committee of the Southern Vietnam Republic’.

The policies of this administration were two-fold: to maintain, if possible, the tottering Vietnamese bourgeoisie and land-owning class, and to welcome the allied troops under conditions where a deal would be negotiated with them.

Stalinist leader Tran Van Giau proclaimed that ‘democratic liberties will be secured and guaranteed by the democratic allies.’ (Quoted in ‘Some Stages . . .’ in Quatriéme Internationale).

Another Vietminh official, Nguyen Van Tao, was more explicit: ‘All those who have instigated the peasants to seize the landowners’ property will be severely and pitilessly punished . . . We have not yet made the Communist Revolution, which will solve the agrarian problem. This government is only a democratic government, that is why such a task does not devolve upon it. Our government, I repeat, is a bourgeois-democratic government, even though the Communists are now in power.’ (Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development, p. 43).

Historian Phillipe Devilliers recounts that Vietminh leader Duong Bach Mai spoke of ‘calming the tempestuous ardour of rank-and-file militants, in showing them that the task of the moment was not to make a proletarian revolution but to smash “colonialism” by calling on all the people to struggle against it.’ (History of Vietnam 1940-52, by P. Devilliers, p. 181).

Buttinger says that the Vietminh government in Saigon ‘went so far as to decree the death penalty for attacks on private property.’ (Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, J. Buttinger, vol. 1, p. 347).

Spencer, attempting to ‘place into context’ the slaughter of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, claims they were ‘unambiguously hostile’ to the Vietminh’s ‘revolutionary administration’. In fact this administration was counter-revolutionary, i.e. determined to prevent property take-overs at all costs, even when popular committees and peasant uprisings had already implemented them on a large scale.In the North

Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla force was able to take power in Hanoi by walking into a political vacuum which followed the Japanese surrender.

A bourgeois writer says: ‘A genuine popular revolution took place that surpassed that of the wildest calculations of the Vietminh, though they alone were prepared for the events as an organised force with a definite programme. Claiming the support of the Allied powers and pointing to their previous activity, the Vietminh won acceptance by the people, particularly in North Vietnam. The Japanese authorities looked on benignly while Vietminh partisans occupied the public buildings in Hanoi. They also turned over local stocks of arms to the Vietminh.’ (Trager, p. 152).

Spencer, and other pro-Stalinists anxious to prove that the Trotskyists worked with Japan, please note.

On 22 August, Emperor Bao Dai was ready to ask the Vietminh to form a government, but instead abdicated on receipt of a telegram from the Hanoi General Association of Students, which passed a motion put by former Trotskyist Ho Huu Thuong calling on the Vietminh to form a government of national independence and oust Bao Dai. Thuong was condemned by other Trotskyists who claimed this was a capitulation to the Vietminh. The Vietminh formed a provisional government and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September.

There is little historical evidence concerning the Vietminh’s relationship with the workers’ movement in the north. But one report in the files of the ISFI says that after the Japanese surrender, a workers’ government was set up in the large mining town of Hon Gay. (A “Moscow Trial” in Ho Chi Minh’s Maquis, ISFI files in Paris). The imperialist administration was dismantled, and its officials arrested along with factory bosses, and socialist measures including equal wages and workers’ control of all industries passed.

The report states that the workers’ administration was broken up by Vietminh militia who arrived in December, after the defeat of the Saigon revolution and the internment of non-Stalinist militants in Hanoi.

From their own accounts, it is clear that the Stalinists stressed the ‘democratic’ nature of their administration (the declaration of independence was based on the American one of 1778), and concentrated on preventing clashes between workers and Kuomintang units who came into Vietnam in early September to disarm Japanese soldiers.

The Allies move into Saigon

By the beginning of September, the Saigon working class was agitated. Fearing the return of the hated French imperialists, they demanded guns. The Stalinists called on them to welcome the ‘democratic’ allies and attacked the Trotskyists in increasingly frenzied tones.

On 1 September, the Vietminh’s Nam Bo (southern Vietnam) propaganda commission sent loudspeaker cars into the streets calling on people to welcome the Allies. The response was a demonstration of 400,000 people: many were armed with bamboo spikes; the Struggle group called for an armed demonstration and weapons were carried among its 18,000-strong contingent.

As the march passed Saigon Cathedral, right-wing French colonialists opened fire on it, killing 40 and wounding 150. Armed Struggle supporters, led by veteran tram workers’ leader Le Van Long, arrested the provocateurs, planting the flag of the Fourth International on the roof from which they had fired. The assassins were handed over to the Vietminh police, who released them almost immediately. (This account taken from The August Revolution and the Struggle Group, ISFI files, Paris).

As the British invasion grew nearer, conflict sharpened between the Stalinists and all those who were ready to take up arms against the Allies. On 7 September Tran Van Giau ordered the disarming of all non-governmental organisations.

Three days later, the British troops came in, with French aircraft overhead. The Trotskyists of the ICL issued a statement denouncing Stalinist collaboration with the Allies and calling for armed resistance to the imperialist armies.

The Stalinists responded by arresting popular committee delegates as they met in conference on September 14th; the ICL-dominated conference, although armed, gave themselves up peacefully, perhaps underestimating the readiness of the Vietminh to carry through their bloody threats.

On 16 September the Stalinists announced their readiness to negotiate with the Allies about Vietnam, or part of it, becoming part of the French Union. But General Gracey, the British commander, was not interested. Instructions had come from the Foreign Office to tolerate no Vietnamese power: Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had concluded a secret deal with France, whereby the French would get south Vietnam back but would stay out of Syria and the Lebanon. (See Ho Chi Minh, by W. Warbey, pp. 47-54). It was this agreement, and not simply Gracey’s imperial arrogance, that gave impetus to the Allied occupation of Saigon and sunk the Vietminh’s hopes of doing a deal.

The British, aided by French troops and remnants of the Japanese army which came under Allied command according to the terms of Japan’s surrender, took over Saigon city centre and all administrative buildings. Encouraged by the passivity of the Vietminh, the French re-occupied the barracks of the Second Colonial Infantry, the airport, the arsenal, the port and other strategic positions.

The General Secretary of the Saigon-Cholon regional council, Trotskyist Le Van Vung, was assassinated: Phan Van Hum, another leader of the Struggle group, called for the evacuation of non-combatants from the city centre. A bitter struggle ensued between the Allies and revolutionary workers, who were joined by deserters from the Japanese army.

‘In the struggles, the workers and peasants did their duty, alongside the Trotskyist militants who proudly flew the flag of the Fourth International’, the Struggle report to the ISFI stated. ‘But those who fought these early battles fought alone. Tran Van Giau refused to replenish their provisions, or to supply arms or ammunition.

‘In the Thi Nghe sector, of 214 combatants, all Trotskyists, 210 were cut down. On the third day of the struggle, Tran Van Giau issued leaflets calling for the arrest and disarming of the Struggle fighters, who had fought without orders from his government, which had been preparing itself to welcome the “liberating Allies”!

‘In spite of their superior weaponry, there were insufficient numbers of French soldiers, and they often had to turn back before resistance detachments, whose weapons were hopelessly inferior but who had decided to die in the fight against French imperialism.’

Of course this was neither the first nor the last time that the imperialists would encounter such stubborn heroism in Vietnam. But in this case, when imperialism world-wide was threatened with revolutionary movements and was at its weakest, the Stalinists acted to ensure that a movement outside their control was physically destroyed.

John Spencer claims that the Vietminh did not contest the British order to disarm, ‘though they clearly had no intention of obeying it themselves’. The above quotation from the Struggle group answers this nonsense, which is proffered in an attempt to give the Stalinists ‘revolutionary’ credentials.

The Struggle report contains another piece of evidence to answer those who claim that the Trotskyists collaborated with the Japanese against the ‘revolutionary’ Vietminh. It states that following a meeting in which the Stalinists specifically accused the Trotskyists of ‘sabotage’, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao peasant-based religious sects (the former armed with 900 rifles and four 45mm cannons which they had received from the Japanese) offered to join the Struggle group to fight the Vietminh – but the Trotskyists rejected an alliance with such unreliable forces, not being prepared to ‘lead them to a slaughter.’

* Neither the Trotskyists nor the Stalinists signed the founding programme of the UNF, in fact. – S.P., see page 54-55.