Vietnam & Trotskyism
Introduction
Simon Pirani
The 1917 Russian Revolution opened up the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. It was the first – and seventy years later, still the only – revolution successfully carried through by the urban working class under communist leadership.
After the second world war, capitalist property relations were overturned in eastern Europe – but the working class which rose against capitalism was bureaucratically and militarily suppressed by Stalinism as it extended its control to those states.
In Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba the capitalist property relations were again destroyed. These were historic steps forward for the world working class. But the revolutionary force of that class – which, in the 1917 revolution had been unleashed by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks – was not only strait-jacketed and manipulated, but at certain points bloodily suppressed, by the bureaucratic Stalinists and petit-bourgeois leaderships which came to power in these states.
For Trotskyists, who continued the Leninist strategy of international working class revolution against Stalinist betrayal, an understanding of these bureaucratically malformed workers’ states, and their place in the struggle for international socialism, is a central practical and theoretical problem.
The developments in these countries provoked within the Trotskyist movement a surge of revisionist illusions about the ‘progressive side’ of Stalinism, its ‘ability to take revolutionary actions’. Such ideas corroded the movement to the point of threatening its existence.
While the articles in the pamphlet do not get to grips with the erroneous theoretical conceptions of liquidationist revisionism, they do deal with some of the lies and falsifications with which revisionism has sustained itself: that Stalinist parties like the one in Vietnam somehow ‘empirically broke with Stalinism’; that the Trotskyists there were ‘ultra-lefts’ who ran from revolution, or even Japanese agents.
The articles give a glimpse of the Trotskyist movement as it really was: a powerful force in the working class which was only stopped by physical extermination.
Some readers may not understand why the historical narrative, reprinted from Workers Press, is littered with references to a document by a former Workers Revolutionary Party member, John Spencer, which only ever existed in a few dozen xeroxed copies.
After all, who cares about these few pages written by someone who was on his way out of the Trotskyist movement? The answer is that when the articles were written, a group of former party members led by the ex-party general secretary, Mike Banda, were moving rapidly towards Stalinism – and Spencer’s document could only have helped them along. (Mike Banda’s group of that time, the Communist Forum, has since wound up, with some members joining the British Communist Party, and some quitting politics).
At that time it was important to stress the connection between Spencer’s distortions, and the enthusiasm which Banda had expressed for Vietnamese Stalinism over decades inside the Trotskyist movement itself.
Today Stalinism – in Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR, China and Vietnam – is in a colossal crisis, a crisis inseparable from that of imperialism. The fact that Vietnamese Trotskyism has not been destroyed, and has the potential to play a vital part in working class struggles in the not too distant future, is a source of inspiration to all Trotskyists.
21 February 1987