Vietnam & Trotskyism

Vietnam and Trotskyism

Simon Pirani

Reprinted from Workers Press, December 6, 1986

APRIL 30, 1975: the National Liberation Front of Vietnam swept in Saigon, renamed it Ho Chi Minh city, and destroyed the last remnants of the imperialist puppet regime of Nguyen Van Thieu.

American imperialism suffered a crushing blow. Its officials and military ‘advisors’ scrambled for places on the helicopters evacuating their Saigon embassy. Since 1954 the US had used more bombs than all sides in the Second World War, chemical and biological warfare, and the ‘strategic hamlet’ policy which turned villages into prison camps – and failed to crush Vietnam.

The struggle did not stop at the expulsion of the imperialists and their puppets. The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) leadership went on to nationalise the banks in the south by the end of 1975, re-unify the country in early 1976, and in March 1978 effectively destroy tile capitalist economy with the ‘anti-capitalist mobilisation’.

Socialists who witnessed the epic Vietnamese struggle may say, from their hearts, that only the most courageous revolutionaries could inflict such a defeat on US imperialism. And certainly there can be no doubt about the inspiring heroism and military ingenuity of the NLF fighters. But having said that, we are still obliged to develop a scientific understanding of the Vietnamese struggle, and a scientific characterisation of its leadership – without which the lessons it contains for the international working class movement will remain concealed.

Such an understanding was never developed in the Trotskyist movement, and remained a factor in fue movement’s crisis throughout the years of the war.

The Vietnamese struggle compelled Trotskyists – who had always characterised Stalinism as ‘the most counter-revolutionary force in the international workers’ movement’ – to explain whether the VCP was an exception to this rule. They had to explain how Vietnam, like China, had apparently taken major steps towards socialism under the leadership of a Stalinist party based on the peasantry. The question for the Vietnamese Trotskyists was literally: ‘to be or not to be?’ – for if the VCP was leading the nation towards socialism, why should they exist at all?

Just a year before the fall of Saigon, this problem was posed point-blank to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International at its Tenth Congress. A letter from the Bolshevik-Leninist Group of Vietnam, based in Paris, asked:

‘Should the International concern itself with a Vietnamese Trotskyist group which remained loyal to the International and which has carried on against great obstacles . . . Should we work towards the creation of a section of the Fourth International in Vietnam?’ (The letter, dated February 5, 1974, was reproduced in Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam: a Spartacist Pamphlet and is reprinted in this volume, p. 129.)

The letter condemned both those who ‘prettied up the VCP to the point of labelling it a revolutionary party’, and those who refused to confront the fact that the Stalinists ‘had successfully led the national liberation struggle’.

‘In the very special historical conditions in Vietnam,’ said the letter, ‘where the enormous weight of the VCP crushes all the organisations to its left, maintaining a Trotskyist group, even a propaganda group, is an extremely difficult task, We have been able to do this during these last years with no help whatsoever from the International or from the Ligue Communiste’ (the USFI’s French section).

In words, this letter was never answered: in practice, the USFI led by Ernest Mandel and with Pierre Rousset as its South East Asia ‘expert’, glorified the Stalinist VCP and did nothing to assist the Vietnamese Trotskyist group, which exists to this day.

The USFI – despite criticism from a group of members of the American Socialist Workers Party – did ‘pretty up the VCP to the point of labelling it as a revolutionary party’, and prettied up the Vietnamese state as ‘socialist’. (For discussion documents, see ‘On the Nature of the Vietnamese CP’, by George Johnson and Fred Feldman, International Socialist Review, July-August 1973; ‘The Vietnamese Revolution and the role of the Party’ by P. Rousset, ISR April 1974; ‘Vietnam, Stalinism and the Post-War Socialist Revolutions’, Johnson and Feldman, ISR, April 1974). Here was a classic case of liquidationism, that trend which denies the need to build the Trotskyist movement, claiming that changes in the camp of Stalinism or bourgeois nationalism enable those forces to carry through socialist tasks.

The events in South East Asia since 1975 are a crushing refutation of this idea: they have underlined on a world scale remains counter-revolutionary, and that only the building of real revolutionary leadership on a world scale can take the working class and its allies in the peasantry forward.

Firstly, the VCP, not through its own ‘stage-ist’ programme but rather with the knife of a ruthless imperialist blockade at the country’s throat – and after the failure of its initial attempts to boost private economy – extended state property to south Vietnam by 1978. Secondly, the Chinese Stalinists (who in their time had been called ‘revolutionary socialists’ by liquidationist voices in the Trotskyist movement) combined with US imperialism to subvert, weaken and (in 1979) militarily attack Vietnam. Thirdly, the degenerate pro-imperialist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia – hailed in 1975 by Moscow and Peking, and even by some Trotskyists, as a workers and peasant’s government – turned on its own people with medieval savagery, and on the Vietnamese workers’ state like a bloodsucking leech. The fearsome beastiality of this regime alone shows the bankruptcy of international Stalinist politics, which has always sought not working class revolution, but manoeuvres with ‘worker-peasant’ parties, ‘national roads to socialism’ and other formulae designed to stifle the revolutionary role of the international working class.

The tasks of Trotskyists were then, and remain today, both the unconditional defence of Vietnam and all deformed workers’ states from imperialism, and the building of the Fourth International in all countries.

But which sections of the world Trotskyist movement fought for this in 1975? Some leaders of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which had split from the USFI in 1953 precisely in order to oppose liquidationism, had just as distorted a view of the Vietnamese Stalinists as Rousset and Mandel.

The principal ‘analysis’ of Vietnam produced by the Wokers Revolutionary Party, the largest ICFI section, admitted that the VCP leaders had ‘seriously imperilled the prospects of victory’ by ‘mistakes arising from their Stalinist training’ – but claimed that ‘in breaking empirically from the dictates of Stalinist peaceful co-existence . . . were able to carry through the revolution.’ (‘Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam’, by S. Johns, Fourth International, Winter 1975, p. 181). Here was reproduced exactly the criminal error made by Pablo, secretary of the Fourth International in the 1950s: the idea that objective developments could induce changes in Stalinist parties which could make them subjectively revolutionary; only while Pablo had taken this reasoning to its logical conclusion and called on Trotskyists to join Stalinist parties, the ICFI ‘resolved’ the problem of leadership by dubbing itself ‘the world party of socialist revolution’ as its forces dwindled.

Unbounded illusions in Ho Chi Minh’s leadership were inspired for years by Mike Banda, second-in-command to ICFI leader Gerry Healy, who claimed that a revolutionary party (i.e. the VCP) inspired General Giap’s ‘People’s War’; that this party was ‘derived from the example of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party after it had been frightfully mutilated by Stalin.’ Here again was the idea the somehow the ‘frightful mutilations’ of Stalinism could be spontaneously overcome, so that the Vietnamese struggle was ‘the struggle of an entire class and its leading organs to assimilate and apply revolutionary theory and enrich revolutionary practice’. (Fourth International, February 1968, p. 3 – these quotations appeared in an editorial, but the next issue carried a note to the effect that they were Banda’s personal opinions).

The most lavish praise of all for the VCP came from the Workers League (US), who now laughably claim to be ‘defending the heritage’ of Trotskyism. Their book, Vietnam and the World Revolution by Martin McLaughlin, never once defines the role of the VCP in class terms, only emphasising their ‘revolutionary’ qualities, claiming not only that the VCP ‘continually resisted the dictates of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow and Peking’, but also that it was ‘always guided by a conception of the world struggle against imperialism’. (Vietnam and the World Revolution, p. 141).

McLaughlin uses an incredible sleight-of-hand to associate the Stalinist Ho Chi Minh with Trotsky: after quoting Ho’s testament – which states that the re-unification of the Vietnamese ‘Fatherland’ will be ‘a worthy contribution to the world national liberation movement’ – McLaughlin claims that: ‘this expresses a profound truth, Vietnam was the most powerful confirmation of Trotsky’s perspective of the Permanent Revolution . . . (ibid, p. 144). According to McLaughlin, objective events (the Vietnamese revolution) magically induce subjective changes (the Stalinist leader Ho ‘expressing a profound truth’), rather than being mirrored by them in the indirect and complex way that happens in real life.

Rousset, Banda, Johns and McLaughlin – all reflecting the liquidationist pressure which fostered illusions in Stalinism and minimised the importance of building the Trotskyist International – excuse (or ignore), in their various ways, the reality: that the VCP was not a revolutionary workers’ party but a predominantly peasant party; that it had not a socialist programme but a petit-bourgeois one infected by Stalinism.

But the biggest problem for all of them is the VCP’s history, and especially its open treachery after the second world war, when, on instructions from Moscow, it sought to carve up Vietnam with the imperialist ‘allies’, and drowned the Trotskyists who opposed it in blood.

The Vietnamese Trotskyists, as these articles will show, won the leadership of the working class in the south from the Stalinists, by rejecting compromise with the ‘popular front’ government of French imperialism in the late 30s. As Japanese imperialist control disintegrated in 1945, they sought to turn the struggle against the ‘allied’ imperialist forces into social revolution by setting up soviet-type organisations, and were slaughtered in their hundreds by the Stalinists, who hoped to conclude a deal with the ‘allies’ in line with the Potsdam agreement between Stalin, Truman and Attlee.

It was only after this physical destruction of the revolutionary leaders of the Vietnamese working class that the struggle took the path not of working class revolution but of ‘people’s war’; and this not because of the Stalinists who had hoped that their deal signed with the French in 1946 would stick, but in spite of them.

The mass murder of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, a counter-revolutionary crime second only to the Moscow Trials, has never been properly understood or faced up to by most Trotskyists. Its implications for Vietnam and for the Fourth International have never been fully grasped. Indeed, it was minimised by Trotskyists who sought to glorify the VCP: Rousset tried to brush over it; Banda and Johns deliberately lied about it, and employed slanders against the Vietnamese Trotskyists – which were repeated by McLaughlin almost word-for-word.

McLaughlin – who if he has a trace of revolutionary or even journalistic integrity will self-critically re-examine his book – lyingly claims that the Vietnamese Trotskyists ‘committed a severe tactical error in pressing ahead with strikes and de-monstrations in Saigon at a point where the revolution was threatened’ in 1945; that their organisation was smashed because they ‘had no base of support in the’ countryside’, In contrast, claims McLaughlin, the Vietminh, who were ‘forced to manoeuvre’ with imperialism, ‘retained its solid base of support among the mass of peasants’, and ‘broke empirically with the Stalinist perspective of permanent collaboration with so-called “democratic” imperialists.’ (ibid, p. 15-19, see excerpt p. 122 in this volume).

In the course of the last year’s break-up of the ICFI, the liquidationist tendency embedded in its leadership has emerged openly, in Banda’s case declaring whole heartedly for Stalinism. Simultaneously, the implicit attacks on the Vietnamese Trotskyists, like McLaughlin’s, have become explicit.

Thus John Spencer, one of Banda’s leading supporters, has issued what purports to be a well-researched statement on the Vietnamese revolution of 1945, in which he justifies Vietminh collaboration with the imperialists, falsely claiming that they ‘tried to save the revolution’ thereby. (Vietnamese Trotskyism and the August Revolution of 1945. Available from the WRP Education Department, and – presumably – from Communist Forum).

Spencer also repeats the old Stalinist lie that the Trotskyists ‘took part in the formation of the United National Front under Japanese auspices’ in order to subvert the Stalinists’ ‘revolutionary administration’.

We will answer these slanders and set the historical record straight. We will raise the demand, overdue by decades, for the rehabilitation of the Vietnamese Trotskyists. Above all, the WRP and its co-thinkers internationally, together with all Trotskyists, must confront the lessons of our Vietnamese comrades’ struggle, and deepen our understanding of the various forms of liquidationism in the Fourth International, which have tried along with Stalinism, to keep these lessons buried.