Vietnam & Trotskyism

The Fourth International and the Stalinist Ho Chi Minh

Simon Pirani

Reprinted from Workers Press, 24 January 1987.

“In so far as capitalism has created a world market, a world division of labour and world productive forces, it has also prepared world economy as a whole for socialist transformation,” wrote Leon Trotsky, attacking Stalin’s reactionary fraud of ‘socialism in one country’, in 1929.

“Different countries will go through this process at different tempos. Backward countries may, under certain conditions, arrive at the dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced countries, but they will come later than the latter to socialism.” (The Permanent Revolution, New Park edn, p. 155, see excerpt pp. 105-109 in this volume).

Fifty-seven years later, the contradiction between the struggle and sacrifice of backward countries on the one hand, and the unresolved crisis of international working class leadership and the delay of the socialist revolution world-wide on the other, remains a central feature of the class struggle.

In Vietnam, a peasant army, organised under a Communist Party imbued with reactionary Stalinist ideology, achieved a crushing victory over the mightiest imperialist power of all.

Today the state founded on that victory faces hostility from imperialism on the one side, from the reactionary Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy on another, from the crushing backwardness of its own war-weary rural economy on a third – and finally from the narrow nationalist and bureaucratic outlook of its own Stalinist rulers.

The problems faced by the Vietnamese workers – like those of workers in other countries – can only be considered as part of the problems of the world working class.

Their struggle is part of the permanent, international revolutionary process.

The only tendency which approached Vietnamese problems in this way was Trotskyism.

The Aftermath of 1945 and the War with France

It was the refusal of the Saigon workers and their Trotskyist leaders to compromise with the French-British-Vietminh carve-up of Vietnam in September 1945 that led those forces to turn on them.

The Vietminh executed Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau and hundreds of Trotskyist cadres.

Trotskyist and nationalist forces, who had resisted the French when they had re-entered Saigon, were driven into the countryside where they fought a guerrilla war against the French, British-officered Gurkhas and the Vietminh.

Ho Chi Minh, the Stalinist leader, went to Paris and negotiated with the French, signed an initial agreement which recognised the French presence in the south on 6 March 1946.

Despite being decimated by the massacre, the Saigon Trotskyists re-organised in the International Communist Group (Union des Communistes Internationalistes), and in October 1946 issued a leaflet condemning the agreement signed by Ho, which ‘offered nothing but advantages for French imperialism: the restoration of French control, economic, financial and customs, and reparations for the French’.

The leaflet called on workers to maintain their political independence from the bourgeoisie, organise trades unions and fight for workers’ liberties.’ (For a Revolutionary Trade Union Organisation, leaflet in the files of the ISFI, Paris).

In the north, where the Stalinists had set up the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), initial progress by Trotskyists of the Struggle group was cut short by ruthless persecution.

A report in the Fourth International’s journal states that at first the DRV had tolerated the thriving Trotskyist movement, which won wide support, and met particular success in organising women.

At one point DRV speakers had even attended Trotskyist meetings.

But after a particularly successful Trotskyist rally at Bach Mai, ‘having realised the popularity of working class policies, and dreading their growing influence, Ho Chi Minh gave a secret order to arrest T., the leader of the group, and other members of the Fourth International.

‘But, despite this they could not prevent the clandestine publication of The Struggle, and participation of Fourth Internationalists in the resistance. (Quatriéme Internationale, Jan.-Feb. 1948).

While ensuring the destruction of his Trotskyist opponents at home, Ho returned to Paris for more talks with the French, which dragged on from May to September 1946 . . . while French troops swarmed across Vietnam, ready to renew open hostilities against the DRV.

Ho’s policy of trying to negotiate crashed to the ground on 23 November 1946, when French ships bombarded Haiphong harbour in the north, killing thousands and signalling the start of Vietnam’s bloody seven-year war with France.

There is no record of what privations and repressions the Saigon Trotskyists faced as war engulfed the country.

But a manifesto issued by their provisional central committee stated:

‘To those who believe that the national liberation of Vietnam can be achieved by negotiations with French imperialism, with or without mediation by other imperialists, we say: we will not achieve liberation without a concerted struggle of the working people and peasants of Vietnam, together with the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan countries, hand in hand with the other oppressed peoples’.

The statement, dated 8 July 1947, recognised that the crisis of the colonial peoples could only be resolved with the progress of the world revolution as a whole.

It called on Vietnamese workers not to place their fate in the hands of the national bourgeoisie but to prolong their resistance struggle ‘to accentuate the over-all crisis of France.’ (Our Position, manifesto in ISFI flies).

Contact with the Chinese Section

The relentless advance of Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, and the disintegration of the Kuomintang forces in 1948-49 must have filled every worker and revolutionary in Asia with hope.

The international significance of the Chinese revolution was clear to the Vietnamese Trotskyists, who sent one of their leading members to contact the Chinese Trotskyists in February 1949, eight months before Mao’s victory.

This delegate attended a conference of the Revolutionary Communist Party of China, which not only discussed at length the Chinese political situation, but also resolved to establish, jointly with the Vietnamese comrades, a Far Eastern secretariat of the Fourth International, and to set up a joint cadre school.

But Mao Tse Tung’s victory in October 1949 heralded another chapter of Stalinist repression.

Many Chinese Trotskyists suffered, at his hands, the same deadly fate that Ho had meted out in Vietnam four years earlier.

The Chinese RCP moved its head office to Hong Kong, but the British colonial authorities were no more ‘democratic’ than the Maoists.

RCP leaders P’eng Shu-tse and Liu Chia-liang then moved to Vietnam, at the end of January 1950.

‘Hardly a few months passed however, before misfortune struck again’, wrote P’eng’s wife, Ch’en Pi-Ian. (Looking Back over my Years with P’eng Shu-tse, introduction to The Chinese Communist Party in Power, P’eng).

‘Two leading Vietnamese Trotskyists were invited to participate in a conference in the zone controlled by the Vietminh.

‘We had been assured that the conference was being organised by Trotskyist elements inside the Vietminh, among them being the Chief of Staff of the army in control of this zone.

‘The conference was scheduled to discuss the military situation and organisation problems of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement. Unfortunately, the Stalinists had prepared a trap.

‘When the conference came to an end, all the Vietnamese Trotskyists, and our comrade Liu Chia-Liang . . . were arrested’.

Liu, a veteran of the 1926-7 Chinese revolution, who joined the Trotskyists in 1931 and served several sentences under the Kuomintang, died shortly afterwards in the Vietminh jail.

When Ch’en and P’eng left Vietnam fearing for their own lives, their Vietnamese comrades were still imprisoned but alive. Nothing further is known of them.

Vietnam and the Split in the Fourth International

How did the Trotskyist movement internationally – itself subject to massive repression by Stalinism and fascism alike – react to the Stalinist crimes against the sections in the East?

News of the 1945 Saigon massacre reached Paris nearly a year afterwards, whereupon Trotskyists there publicised it, and publicly demanded of Ho Chi Minh – who was in Paris talking to the French government – an answer for this crime.

On the other hand, Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova (who in later years opposed the Fourth International and the defence of the USSR, condemning it as an exploitative class society), was in 1947 accusing the FI leaders of relaxing the fight against Stalinism.

In a criticism of the international leadership, written together with Benjamin Peret and Grandizo Munis, she stated that the Indochinese section had been ‘forgotten for so long’, that ‘even to demand who assassinated Ta Thu Thau has been forgotten, in order to support, without serious criticism, the Stalinist government of Ho Chi Minh, greetings from whom were so warmly hailed by The Militant and La Verite.’ (FI Internal Bulletin, 1947).

A full discussion on the Fl’s politics in 1947-8 is beyond the scope of this article.* But, in the period immediately following, there is a clearer picture.

Without doubt, the Fl leadership under Pablo, which revised Trotsky’s fundamental theses on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism following the Communist Party’s coming to power in Yugoslavia and China in 1949, capitulated to Stalinism to the extent that it deliberately covered up and minimised the repression of Trotskyists.

When the Fl split in 1953, with the International Cornmittee (ICFI) forming around JP Cannon’s Open Letter in opposition to Pablo’s liquidationism, a letter from the Chinese Trotskyist P’eng to Cannon accused Pablo of trying to stifle discussion on Stalinism in the Far East Commission of the FI’s Third Congress in 1951; refusing to distribute information on the wholesale arrest and murder of Chinese Trotskyists by Mao; and concealing for four months, May to September 1953, an appeal from the Chinese Trotskyists on behalf of imprisoned comrades.

P’eng states that, with regard to Vietnam, Pablo’s entryism of a special type’, actually meant sending Trotskyists from France back to their own country, with instructions to join the Vietminh, and without a clear understanding of the extent of Stalinist repression.

‘When the Vietnamese comrades were ready to return to their country to apply the “entryist policy”, and called a meeting in which I was invited to make a speech, the chairman of this meeting made a request of me not to mention before the comrades the recent persecutions experienced by the Chinese comrades.

‘I knew quite well that it was an instruction or suggestion from Pablo,’ wrote P’eng.

‘Although I observed the request of the chairman, I still warned him personally that the “ostrich policy” was the most dangerous.’ (Towards a History of the FI, Part 3, Vol. 3, p 170-1, published by the Socialist Workers Party (US), Education for Socialists series.).

The Trotskyist group referred to was built among Vietnamese workers in France during and after the war.

When it returned to Vietnam in the early 1950s, this group was split – a majority faction supporting the Pablo leadership, and a minority supporting the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) who had opposed Pablo.

This minority voted against the resolutions of the FI Third Congress along with the PCI.

We have pointed out (see article reprinted from Workers Press of 20 December above) that while the ICFI was formed on the basis of opposing Pablo’s adaptation to Stalinism and his attempts to liquidate independent Trotskyist organisation, that in later years the Healy-Banda leadership in the IC had itself manifested liqudationism with regard to Vietnam.

But the French PCI, which founded the IC together with the SLL-WRP and the American SWP, did continue to pay attention to Vietnamese Trotskyism, running classes on its history throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.

A well-known incident in the late 1960s, while proving nothing in itself, is illustrative: members of the United Secretariat of the FI on a Vietnam solidarity march in Paris chanted ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ – and were robustly answered ‘Ta, Ta, Ta Thu Thau’ by a PCI contingent.

Vietnamese Trotskyism Today

We know that, haunted by at least some knowledge of earlier repressions, and no doubt affected by the split in the FI, some Trotskyists carried on activity throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in Saigon.

In 1954, when Ho signed the Geneva Accords which left the south in the hands of the imperialist puppet Ngo Dinh Diem, a Trotskyist manifesto condemned his secret diplomacy.

It called for workers in north Vietnam to demand expropriation of property and imperialist enterprises, agrarian reform, workers’ and peasants’ control over production and consumption, and democracy for workers and peasants.

In the south the Trotskyists advocated the expulsion of imperialism, the advance of trade unionism, and unity around slogans of national liberation, agrarian reform and democracy. (The Geneva Accords are a Treacherous Betrayal, July 1954 leaflet in ISFI files).

It is known that when the Vietminh reached Saigon 21 years later, in 1975, they freed from jail some Trotskyists who had led Saigon’s railway workers against the pro-American regime.

But soon afterwards, some of these comrades were re-arrested by the Stalinists. In the 1970s, with the Vietnamese struggle occupying a central place in international events, Vietnamese Trotskyists in France organised a group attached to the USFI.

Having appealed in vain for guidance to the USFI Eighth Congress in 1975 (see article pp. 21-25 reprinted from Workers Press, 6 December, and letter reproduced on pp. 129-130), they proceeded to issue a manifesto calling on Vietnamese workers to carry through a political revolution.

This group of older comrades began, at the end of last year, producing a new magazine, Chroniques Vietnamiennes, aimed at the younger Vietnamese generation in France.

The first issue contained three letters signed by Ho Chi Minh in 1939, which prove that he personally initiated the slander that the Trotskyists were ‘Japanese agents’ (See pp. 123-128 in this volume).

This quarterly French-language magazine is available from Chroniques Vietnamiennes, 2 rue Richard Lenoir, 93108 Montreuil Cedex, near Paris, France. An annual overseas subscription is 85 francs.

Today we have no direct knowledge of Trotskyist activity in Vietnam itself. But the world revolution – in which movements are growing not only in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but in China and indeed an upsurge against state bureaucracy in Vietnam itself – contains great possibility for the building of our movement.

* Even without entering into such discussion, one fact jumps out of the documents of the FI second world Congress in 1948: the fate of the Vietnamese section, one of the most important in a colonial country is not mentioned. This was an omission for which the Fl paid heavily. – SP. see also letters pp. 75-90.