Vietnam & Trotskyism

The ‘Struggle’ Front

Simon Pirani

Reprinted from Workers Press, December 13, 1986

MAY 22nd, 1930. Paris police broke up a demonstration by Vietnamese students, protesting against the massacre of nationalist insurgents in their country by the French colonial police.

Among those arrested were the Trotskyist student leaders, Ta Thu Thau and Phan Van Chanh, who were deported back to Saigon within a week.

Ta Thu Thau, born in 1906 in a poor but educated family, and active in Vietnamese nationalist circles in Paris from 1925, joined the International Left Opposition in 1929 and formed a Trotskyist group within the Annamite Independence Party.

The rapid growth of Ta Thu Thau’s influence, and of the student paper Vanguard which he edited, was not surprising.

In August 1928, the Sixth Congress of the Communist International had rubber-stamped Stalin’s disastrous policy of unconditional support for the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang in China, even after the massacre of the Chinese Communists at Shanghai and Canton.

Trotsky’s searing criticism of Stalin’s Chinese policy, of the ‘stages theory’ of revolution that had guided it, and of the ‘socialism in one country’ ideology with which it was bound up, was being disseminated by Trotskyists in Europe.

So was the news that, for opposing Stalin, the founder of the Red Army and co-leader of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky, had been deported from Russia in January 1929.

The largest section of the Left Opposition outside Russia sprang into existence in China itself; the Indochinese section was also inspired largely by Trotsky’s writings on the Chinese Revolution.

Ta Thu Thau, and others who returned to Vietnam from Paris as convinced Trotskyists, were soon confronted with the need to develop a Marxist strategy in opposition to the opportunist zig-zags of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).

The 1930-31 revolt

In May 1930 the country erupted. A slump in grain prices had hit the economy.

First came strikes in the textile factories, railways and rubber plantations; then a peasant revolt which rapidly escalated from peaceful protests to violent attacks on municipal buildings and the killing of landlords.

The ICP, led by Nguyen Ai Quoc (later to be known as Ho Chi Minh), acted in accordance with the ultra-left ‘third period’ of Stalinist policy, i.e. the decree from Moscow that struggles for power had to be launched without delay.

As the peasant revolt declined under the hammer-blows of the French colonialists, the Stalinists formed peasant soviets at Nghe-An and Ha Tinh, which they claimed would be the basis for the seizure of power.

This adventuristic project was drowned in blood as the French cracked down. In total 10,000 people were killed and 50,000 deported to Poulo Condor, and other concentration camps.

A year of ‘white terror’ ensued throughout 1932, and the leadership of Stalinist and Trotskyist organisations alike were decimated.

The Trotskyists likened the Indochinese CP’s ultra-left policy to that of the Chinese CP in the 1927 Canton Commune, during which they had made an equally disastrous bid for power on Moscow’s instructions.

Their critique, and their call for the ICP to turn towards Vietnam’s embryonic working class movement instead of organising exclusively among the peasantry, won a sympathetic hearing among rank-and-file Stalinists.

The Trotskyists political strength, and the conditions of brutal colonial suppression, gave rise to an exceptional relationship between Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam during the 1930s.

The ‘Struggle’ Front

A ‘united front’ agreement reached between Ta Thu Thau’s Left Opposition group and the Stalinists, to carry out joint electoral work and publish a joint legal newspaper called Struggle (La Lutte), lasted for four years, 1933-37.

Both sides maintained separate illegal organisations.

The other major Trotskyist tendency, the October Group (Thang Muoi), led by Ho Huu Tuong, rejected such collaboration with the Stalinists and published an independent legal newspaper in Vietnamese, The Spark (Tia Sang).

The first success of the ‘Struggle’ electoral front came in the April 1933 Saigon council elections, when the Stalinist Nguyen Van Tao and the Trotskyist Tran Van Trach were both elected.

In May 1935, they regained their seats while another Trotskyist, Ta Thu Thau, and another Stalinist, Duong Bach Mai, joined the council.

But the Comintern was working to knock the Indochinese CP into line.

A key article in the French CP’s journal indicated the Indochinese CP was at odds with Moscow’s line, and that ‘such action is incompatible with the principle of democratic centralism, with iron discipline, and with the Comintern’ (quoted in Marxism in South East Asia, ed. F. Trager, Stanford University 1960, p. 136).

The implicit message – that joint work with the Trotskyists had to be dropped – was spelled out more clearly in the months that followed.

At this time the Comintern was swinging from the ultra-left policies of the ‘third period’ to the class collaborationist ‘popular front’ line, according to which the danger of fascism was not to be staved off by the independent mobilisation of the working class, but by allying with middle class and bourgeois ‘democratic’ forces.

In France the Communist Party formed a ‘people’s front’ together with the Socialist and Radical Parties, which came to power in June 1936.*

Marius Moutet of the Socialist Party was appointed Minister for the Colonies; in Indochina certain political liberties were granted.

Both Trotskyist groups seized the opportunity provided by these limited freedoms to carry out mass agitation in strike movements, campaigns against colonial repression and for the right to union organisation.

The Trotskyists were active, alongside the Stalinists in more than six hundred ‘action committees’ of labour and peasant organisations set up at this time, and in the ‘Indochinese Congress’, a broad nationalist front.

But with the Comintern breathing down its neck, the ICP was embracing the ‘popular front’ policy – and the French imperialist ‘popular front’ government – wholesale. In July 1936 its central committee formally adopted the ‘popular front’ line.

An article in Communist International warned critically:‘Sectarianism has not been completely eliminated … (There are) too sharp attacks on the Constitutionalists . . . ’ (quoted in Trager, p. 140).

Acceptance of the ‘popular front’ meant abandoning the demand for national liberation, and falling in line with the French Communist Party policy of administrating the French empire.

The justification for this, spelled out by French CP leader Maurice Thorez at the party’s 1937 congress, was a claim that the interests of the colonial people were in a ‘free, trusting and paternal’ unions with ‘democratic’ France; to forge this union was ‘the mission of France all over the world’ (quoted in Trager, p. 142).

In April 1937, the ‘Struggle’ candidates again came top of the Saigon poll.

But the ICP was now set on a course of building a popular front of its own with the Vietnamese bourgeois parties, of conciliation with the colonial authorities, and of a breach with the Trotskyists.

In May 1937, the ICP launched a new paper, Vanguard, attacking the Trotskyists; simultaneously an anti-Trotskyist witch-hunt was instigated by the Popular Front government in Paris.

The ‘Struggle’ Front was finally broken up in June 1937; the Trotskyists took control of the ‘Struggle’ newspaper, and Ta Thu Thau was jailed for two years for writing an editorial on the ‘popular front policy of treason’.

The liberalisation policy of the Paris government disappeared as quickly as it had come a year before.

The police round-ups affected trade unionists, peasant leaders and even rank-and-file Stalinists, as well as the Trotskyists.

Before the War

The climax of Trotskyist activity in Vietnam came in the months before the out-break of the second world war.

Tia Sang was appearing daily, and the Struggle group were also producing a paper in Vietnamese, Tranh Dau.

In April 1939, the Saigon council elections gave an opportunity to test their policy – based on national liberation, land reform, and the struggle for socialism – against that of the ICP, who were calling for a ‘broad national union’ with the bourgeois parties, and support for ‘democratic’ French imperialism against fascist Japan.

In their ‘Action Programme’, the Trotskyists proclaimed opposition to all imperialist war preparations; .direct action to force social legislation in Indochina including collective bargaining, a 40-hour week and a sliding scale of wages; for the formation of action committees against the fascists; unconditional national independence; and ‘alliances of workers, peasants and the middle classes in action committees, in factories, in neighbourhoods, among the peasants and soldiers, to prepare for the workers and peasants government.’ (Struggle, April 14th 1939).

The Trotskyists won over 80 per cent of the votes; the bourgeois parties shared the rest and less than one per cent went to the discredited Stalinists, whose Saigon organisation split.

‘You must be acquainted with the results of the colonial elections’, wrote Phan Van Hum, Tran Van Thach and Ta Thu Thau to Trotsky in Mexico.

‘Despite the shameful coalition of the bourgeoisie of all types and the Stalinists we have won a stunning victory . . .

‘We went to battle, the flag of the Fourth International widely unfurled.

‘Our victory is one of the whole Fourth International over the bourgeoisie, naturally – but above all over their social democratic and Stalinist agents.

‘We have faith in the final victory of the proletariat, that is, in the victory of the Fourth International.’

The letter continued: ‘Today, more than ever, we understand the importance not only of the programme of the FI, but also of your struggle of 1925-28 against the theory and practice of socialism in one country, of your struggle against the Peasants’ International, the Anti-Imperialist League, and other show committees, Amsterdam-Pleyel and others.’

‘We want to say to you that even in this remote corner of the far east, in this backward country, you have friends who agree with you, comrades who struggle for that to which you have devoted your life, for socialism, for communism.’ concluded the letter (Socialist Appeal, paper of the American SWP, 11 Aug. 1939).

Trotsky was equally enthusiastic.

A few weeks later he wrote in his Open Letter to the Workers of India: ‘In a number of colonial and semi-colonial countries, sections of the FI already exist and are making successful progress.

‘First place among them is unquestionably held by our section in French Indochina, which is conducting an irreconcilable struggle against French imperialism and “People’s Front” mystifications.’

After quoting from Struggle, Trotsky went on: ‘Owing to their bold revolutionary politics, the Saigon proletarians, members of the FI, scored a brilliant victory over the bloc of the ruling party and the Stalinists at the elections to the Colonial Council held in April of this year’ (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, p. 33-34, see excerpts reproduced in this volume, pp. 123-5).

Ho Chi Minh, writing at the same time on The Party’s Line in the Period of the Democratic Front, stated:

‘For the time being, the party cannot put forth too high a demand (national independence, parliament etc). To do so is to enter the Japanese fascists’ scheme. It should only claim for democratic rights …

‘To reach this goal, the Party must strive to organise a broad Democratic National Front. This Front does not embrace only Indochinese people but also progressive French residing in Indochina, not only toiling people but also the national bourgeoisie.

The Party must assume a wise, flexible attitude with the bourgeoisie, strive to draw it into the Front, win over the elements that can be won over and neutralise those which can be neutralised. We must by all means avoid leaving them outside the Front, lest they should fall into the hands of the enemy of the revolution and increase the strength of the reactionaries.

‘There cannot be any alliance with or any concession to the Trotskyite group. We must do everything possible to lay bare their faces as henchmen of the fascists and annihilate them politically . . . (quoted in Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam: A Spartacist Pamphlet, p. 12).

The outbreak of war brought blanket repression from the French authorities; both Trotskyist and Stalinist organisations were subject to savage repression. Ho Chi Minh sought refuge in Chiang Kai Shek’s China, from where he organised the guerrilla forces which became the Vietminh.

Ta Thu Thau spent the war imprisoned in Poulo Condor, emerging severely physically disabled in 1945.

In that year, the year of Vietnam’s August Revolution, Ho’s forces annihilated the Trotskyists – not politically, but physically.

* Stalin’s USSR signed a mutual defence pact with France in June 1935. From then onwards the Indochinese CP, despite opposition, stood for the ‘defence of the French colonial administration against Japanese fascism’. They did not take up the slogan of national liberation from French rule until the end of 1939, when Stalin signed a pact with Hitler and ceased bothering about ‘French democracy’. – SP