Vietnam & Trotskyism
Under Vichy France’s Jackboot
Simon Pirani
Reprinted from Workers Press, 13 December 1986.
Vietnamese workers’ organisations were set up in France during and after the second world war by Trotskyists.
The French Trotskyists’ opposition to ‘popular front’ politics, and their consistent defence of Vietnam’s national rights, enabled them to recruit some of the best militants among the super-exploited and largely illiterate Vietnamese immigrant community.
When Hitler’s armies conquered France, the Vichy regime subjected the majority of the 15,000 Vietnamese workers to militarised labour.
Working barefooted, eating a bowl of rice a day and receiving less-than-subsistence wages, they soon rebelled with strikes and demonstrations.
Many of the Vietnamese interpreters – these were crucial, since most Vietnamese workers could neither speak German or French nor could they read – sided with the revolts.
Each of the imperialist powers hoped to use the Vietnamese workers to their own ends.
The Germans tried to win Vietnamese support on the grounds of a common interest against France: their attempts to recruit for an Indochinese branch of the SS were unsuccessful and only a small number of Vietnamese bourgeois nationalists would do business with them.
The French Stalinists, on the other hand, tried unsuccessfully to win support among the Vietnamese workers for De Gaulle’s ‘fight against fascism’.
While rejecting this policy, a number of Vietnamese, independently, did fight alongside the French resistance.
The Vietnamese Trotskyist Hoang Don Tri was meanwhile organising the militarised workers around defeatist policies of Vietnamese national independence.
He recalled: The vast mass of Vietnamese and other immigrants well understood the French and British colonial oppression which they had previously experienced. They knew nothing of German, Italian or Japanese oppression – and even less of their barbarism.
To make propaganda among the Vietnamese without denouncing French colonialism, under which they had suffered and been humiliated their whole lives, would get nowhere.
They were moved by, and mobilised around, anti-colonialist slogans’. (quoted in CERMTRI Notebooks No. 23, ‘The Indochinese Workers in France During the Second World War’, by B. Stora, Paris 1983, p. 21).
Most of Hoang’s propaganda work was done by word-of-mouth.
There were however some leaflets: one distributed in early 1943 explained that ‘the anti-colonialist struggle and the anti-Nazi struggle is not limited to one country; barbarism and savage exploitation are the doing of fascism, which exists in different proportions in all countries’ (quoted in Stora, p. 24).
Hoang recalled: This propaganda of our internationalist beliefs created a movement in all the barracks and Vietnamese workers’ camps.
We brought the right message at the right time’. (Stora, p. 25).
At the end of the war a strike wave engulfed France: the French Trotskyists led the main Renault factories out in opposition to the Stalinists, who were desperately working for the reconstitution of bourgeois democracy.
The Trotskyist-led Vietnamese workers’ organisations, 15,000-strong, joined the movement and played an instrumental part in setting up the General Convention of the Indochinese in France, which defended and fought for the immigrant workers’ rights. The first meeting of the General Convention in June 1945 passed a resolution stating:
‘The revolutionary road doesn’t stop at the point of the reconstruction of the trade unions, but proceeds straight to the building of autonomous organisations: action committees, soviets, which will push past the bureaucratic apparatus, which the social-traitors are trying to rebuild in order to block the mass movement’. (Stora, p. 29).
This perspective of turning the post-war mass movement into social revolution, was not realised due to the treachery of the Stalinists.
But the movement around the General Convention had two important results: it strengthened the immigrant workers’ organisations in France for years to come, and provided a number of cadres who returned to Vietnam to take part in the 1945 August Revolution.*
* This is mistaken. The Vietnamese Trotskyist group in France sent their cadres back to Vietnam not in 1945 but in 1951, when the group was already split into pro- and anti-Pablo factions. – SP, see p. 51.