Vietnam & Trotskyism

Statement

National Committee of the Communist League

This book is dedicated to the memory of Ta Thu Thau and the other Vietnamese Trotskyists who were slaughtered by the Stalinists in 1945.

It is also dedicated to those comrades who continue to fight today to build a section of the Fourth International in Vietnam.

As part of its contribution to the rebuilding of the Fourth International, the Communist League is launching a campaign for the rehabilitation of the Vietnamese Trotskyists. In doing this we recognise the inspiration the Vietnamese revolution brought to the group of workers and youth who founded the Socialist Labour League, Australian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

In breaking from the SLL, the Communist League has created the conditions for correcting the grave errors we committed while members of the IC in endorsing the Stalinist slanders against the Vietnamese Trotskyists, errors which led inevitably to the rejection of the perspectives of building a Trotskyist party in Vietnam, and of the political revolution to overthrow the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy.

From its founding, the Trotskyist movement has been under continual pressure from Stalinism, a pressure which in many cases took the form of physical liquidation, but also took the form of liquidating the struggle to build independent Trotskyist parties. This was the significance of the emergence of Pabloism inside the Fourth International in the early 1950s.

The IC correctly took up the fight against Pablo and Mandel on the question, only to capitulate to the bourgeois regimes in Iraq, Libya and Iran and to abandon the struggle for Trotskyist parties in those countries.

In 1979 both the IC and Mandel’s United Secretariat endorsed the expulsion of the Trotskyist Simon Bolivar Brigade from Nicaragua by the Sandinista government, again reflecting this same liquidationist pressure. This capitulation has been taken forward by ex-IC leaders M. Banda and G. Healy, who are now supporters of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, headed by Gorbachev.

Trotsky’s insistence on building sections of the FI arose from his understanding that there is a river of blood between Stalinism and Trotskyism. This was vividly – and tragically – confirmed in Vietnam.

But the Vietnamese comrades wrote an imperishable page in the history of the workers movement and the lessons of their struggle will be taken forward today in the fight to rebuild the Fourth International.

The deepening crisis of the Vietnamese economy as a result of the Stalinist policies of ‘socialism in one country’ and peaceful co-existence with imperialism has given added urgency to the building of a Trotskyist party in Vietnam.

One of the central demands of the political revolution will be the rehabilitation of the murdered Trotskyists as martyrs of the Vietnamese revolution.

* For the rehabilitation of the Vietnamese Trotskyists!
* Forward to the Vietnamese section of the Fourth International!
* Forward to the political revolution in Vietnam!

30.8.1987