OUR REVOLUTIONARY CONTINUITY SWP rewrites history of Vietnamese revolution

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A ballet showing soldiers, workers, and peasants united in struggle 16 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1985 The fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to the People's Army of Vietnam 10 years ago was truly a victory for the workers and peasants of the world. The triumph of the 30-year armed struggle was testimony to the tenacity and courage of the Vietnamese people, and to the determination of the Communist Party of Vietnam to rid the country of foreign domination.

The ultimately socialist character of the Vietnamese Revolution confirmed that national liberation can only be torn from a formidable enemy if the exploited and oppressed classes are mobilized to secure their own social interests-the peasantry to win land, the workers against the boss, and both to overthrow regimes whose true function is to guarantee the profits of foreign and domestic capitalists and landlords.

In other words, the revolutionary process had to combine the solution of "democratic" tasks-true independence, land reform—with the socialist or anti-capitalist revolution. This is the essence of Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, and the central lesson of the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolutions.

Through the "Vietnam Syndrome" the political effect of the Second Indochina War and the ultimate U.S. defeat was to directly impede the ability of the United States to act as policeman for the capitalist worid. The struggles of workers and peasants in Angola, Iran, Grenada, and Nicaragua could draw inspiration from the events in Southeast Asia and give them confidence that their old rulers could be overthrown.

So the workers and peasants of the entire world owe much to the triumphant people of Vietnam.

But it is possible to solidarize and admire the Vietnamese Revolution and to give credit where due to its leadership without turning a blind eye to the weaknesses of that revolution and of the Communist Party of Vietnam (VCP). For only a critical evaluation of an event as momentous as the Vietnamese Revolution can draw out the true lessons of that struggle.

SWP: Uncritical support to the VCP In an article entitled "How the NLF Won" published in the April 29, 1985, issue of the Socialist Workers Party journal Intercontinental Press, Will Reissner correctly points out that the key to victory in Vietnam was the social mobilization of the people.

Yet in giving the impression that success was a foregone conclusion because of the undeviating policies of the VCP, the article amounts to a political endorsement of the VCP even though that party was and remains deeply marked by its Stalinist heritage.

Reissner approvingly quotes General Vo Nguyen Giap that the "Vietnam war has to be understood in terms of the strategy of people's war."

The unwary reader would not suspect that this is a reversal of all previous SWP analysis and that the SWP has historically been opposed to the strategy of protracted rural guerilla war because it is based on mobilizing the peasantry and not the workers as the main axis of struggle.

Sensing this problem, Reissner cites Giap as stating that the key to success was "to mobilize and organize the entire people, particularly... the large mass of peasants under the leadership working class."

But because the strategy of "people's war" assigns only an auxiliary role to the proletariat, "leadership of the working class" boils down simply to VCP leadership. And in the context of Reissner's article, it means that Reissner accepts the identification of the VCP—a party trained in the Stalin school-with the Vietnamese proletariat.

The heritage of Stalinism In drawing out the true lessons of the Vietnamese Revolution, one must begin with the unvarnished facts. Reissner notes that the staying power of the revolution was due to a combination of the two goals which mobilized the Vietnamese people: national independence and land reform.

What Reissner fails to point out is that because of its Stalinist training, the VCP had to reverse its initial conceptions at great cost in order to advance this combination during the struggle itself.

Let us examine the effect of Stalinism on "the two goals which mobilized the Vietnamese people."

The VCP, established in 1930, just as the Communist International was being "The VCP refuses to housebroken to do the bidding of the bureaucratic caste which by then ruled the USSR, could not escape Stalinism's key tenets. These included the concept of defending "socialism in one country,' i.e., limiting socialist revolution exclusively to the USSR.

In the late 1920s, Stalin sought to "defend" the USSR through alliances with the "anti-imperialist" bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders of underdeveloped countries such as China's Chiang Kai Shek. Because he believed that the socialist revolution was impossible in these countries, Stalin advocated a "two-stage" revolution, in which the bourgeois-democratic first stage would be led by the "anti-imperialist" national bourgeoisie. This theory became a fundamental precept for the VCP.

In Vietnam, the first or "national-democratic" revolution would kick out the French, allow Vietnamese "national capital" to develop the country, and after a prolonged period of "new democracy,' set the stage for the second, or anti-capitalist revolution.

But the success of the first revolution required peaceful coexistence between all anti-imperialist forces. Hence, the VCP advocated a "bloc of four classes" which discouraged strife between workers and the "national bourgeoisie" and between the peasant majority and the "nationalist landlords."

Only reforms which were palatable to these allies were to be advanced.

From the mid 1930s, the VCP therefore replaced its demand for the overthrow of the landlords and capitalists with advocating the formation of an "Indochinese Democratic Front" with "patriotic" capitalists and landlords. Similarly, a call for a ceiling on land rents replaced the slogan of "land to the tillers."

By the mid 1930s the conservative bureaucracy which now ruled the USSR sought to "defend" the first workers' state, not through spreading revolution, but through a worldwide "united front against fascism."

Under this schema, the workers would unite with "democratic" capitalists of the United States, France, and Britain against fascist Germany, Japan, and Italy. In Vietnam, this took the form of the VCP subordinating national liberation from France to defeating Japan.

1945: The first revolution undermined The fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940 led to Vietnam being ruled by the pro-German Vichy regime under Japanese protection. The VCP again unfurled the banner of national liberation, although it continued to harbor illusions in the "progressive" Free French movement of Charles de Gaulle. Nevertheless, the party took the initiative in forming the Viet-Minh, an anti-imperialist united front formation against both German-dominated France and Japan.

Despite a program calling for a "democratic" coalition government of all anti-capitalist classes, the Viet Minh had the merit of engaging the Vietnamese people in action against the Japanese. By August 1945, this mass movement had won independence, forming the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with the VCP's Ho Chi Minh as its first president.

The new government carried out important reforms—a literacy drive, legislating the eight-hour day, famine relief after the disastrous floods of 1944-45. Nevertheless, the limitations of the VCP's class-collaborationist program now asserted themselves.

Wed to the two-stage revolution and for this reason unwilling to break with its socially insignificant national bourgeois allies, the party refused to deepen the social revolution. The demands of "land to the tiller" and "workers' control" were not raised, even though in the face of French and Chinese armies of occupation, winning these demands would have cemented further the bonds between the new republic and the worker-peasant majority of the nation.

Further, the VCP still had illusions in the "Big Four" alliance of Britain, France, the United States and the USSR which had just won World War II.

In exchange for the withdrawal of 200,000 Chinese troops and formal recognition of Vietnam's status as one country, believing that "progressives" in the French government would ultimately grant Vietnam independence (the French Communist Party was still in the French cabinet), and faced with a French expeditionary force of 15,000, the VCP opted for "autonomy" within the French Union with full independence to follow within five to 10 years.

It was hard for the newly independent Vietnamese to swallow this line. Demonstrations ensued, led by Trotskyists and nationalist religious sects like the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai. The VCP's response was harsh repression, culminating in the banning and ouster from the government of several nationalist parties, and the murder of opponent leaders including the Trotskyist Ta Tu Thao in 1945.

The compromise was in vain. In late 1946, the French navy fired on Hanoi, killing 20,000 Vietnamese. British imperialist military forces, and later the French army, had been permitted to enter Saigon without a fight and thus were already the masters of Saigon and had occupied the Red River Valley and Hanoi-Haiphong.

The First Indochina War had begun, synchronised with the breakup of the wartime alliance between Anglo-American imperialism and Stalinism and the launching of the Cold War.

The defeat of the French The Vietnamese people had paid heavily for the VCP's illusions. Though the VCP realized that only armed struggle could win national independence, it remained locked into the straitjacket of two-stage revolution and its corollary, the "bloc of four classes" —the Maoist euphemism for class collaboration.

Falling back on guerrilla warfare in the countryside (from bases prudently prepared during the "compromise" period), unity of all classes against the French remained the axis of the VCP's program. Nevertheless, the Lien Viet (successor to the Viet Minh front) won support among the peasantry through such genuine but limited reforms as (continued 17)

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• Vietnamese revolution SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1985 (continued from page 16)

land rent reduction and the distribution of communal and abandoned lands.

Yet the victory of the anti-French struggle was assured only with the launching of a land revolution which turned the poorer sections of the peasantry against the rich peasants and the landlords.

Paradoxically, this anti-capitalist social alignment, which Lenin saw as characterizing the socialist revolution in the countryside, was necessary-in Vietnam as in China-to win the democratic demands of independence and redistribution of the land.

In Vietnam, it was this class struggle within the peasantry that enabled the Viet Minh to make the final push which ended in the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. During the winter of 1953-54, the VCP again launched the slogans "land to the tiller, and "rely on the poor and lower middle peasants, unite with the middie peasants and restrict and finally eliminate the rich peasant enemy... " (Harrison, "The Endless War,' p. 148).

In Vietnam, like in China before it, only a social revolution could galvanize the inner strength of the peasantry against a militarily stronger enemy. And once unleashed, the dragon of social revolution could not be halted at the "national democratic stage."

After they had attained political power, though they hesitated for a time, both the Vietnamese and Chinese Communist parties were forced to eliminate capitalism as the dominant mode of production in the two countries in order to defend that power. The dynamic of these revolutions had posed the necessity of breaking in practice with the concepts of two-stage revolution and the "bloc of four classes."

Sold out at Geneva Having won the entire country on the battlefield, the VCP lost the southern half at the Geneva Conference of 1954. Under strong pressure from the Stalinist leaderships of China and the USSR (who were still trying to achieve "peaceful coexistence" with the West), the VCP agreed to put off reunification until after elections scheduled for 1956.

The United States, which had financed the French war effort, now took direct control, bringing to power Ngo Dinh Diem and cancelling the elections. Diem's dictatorship tried to repress all opposition and succeeded in rolling back many of the gains won by the peasantry under the Viet Minh. But these actions, including the introduction of "strategic hamlets, also rekindled the war of national liberation.

The Second Indochina War begins As the guerrilla war resurfaced, the VCP, which had until then concentrated on "building socialism" in North Vietnam, founded the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. The NLF advanced a program similar to that of the Viet Minh, stressing national independence, moderate agrarian reforms, and calling for a coalition government.

Yet like the Viet Minh before it, and faced with escalating U.S. intervention, the NLF had to go beyond this program, and fight to redistribute the land. For if the dogmas of two-stage revolution and the "bloc of four classes" preached the unity of opposing classes in order to defeat the foreign enemy, the actual struggle dictated that only the self-mobilization of the oppressed and exploited classes around their immediate social interests could release the energy necessary to win national liberation.

By 1965, Nguyen Cao Ky would admit that the South Vietnamese government controlled only 25 percent of the population. Belated land reform programs by the Southern government came "too little, too late."

Although the U.S. would pour in millions of troops and finance the puppet Southern government for the next decade, it would be unable to stop the social revolution in the countryside. This revolution, backed by the People's Army of Vietnam and assisted by a worldwide anti-intervention movement, forced the decisive withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Indochina in 1973. Shorn of this prop, the South Vietnamese government fell to the VCP's "Great Spring Offensive" of 1975.

The weaknesses of people's war Yet for all of its success in the countryside, the VCP discounted the role of the cities and the urban working class in the struggle. The axis of its strategy of "people's war" was the mobilization of the peasantry to wear down the enemy army. Once this was achieved, the countryside would surround and "liberate" the cities.

It is clear, of course, that some form of rural protracted war was imposed on Vietnam by the duration and ferocity of U.S. and French intervention. And one can admire how the VCP utilized peasant war—a millenium-old practice of Asiatic societies—in the interests of national liberation. Yet this does not justify the fact that for the VCP, subordinating workers' aspirations and demands was the flip side of peasant revolution.

In the July-August 1973 issue of the SWP's theoretical journal International Socialist Review, Fred Feldman and George Johnson pointed out the historic Marxist position on "people's war":

"It is impossible, as Lenin and Trotsky taught us, for the proletariat to come to power in countries with large peasant populations without mobilizing the peasantry to do battle against their oppressors."

Nevertheless, they continued:

"The strategy of surrounding the cities and liberating them without the leadership-perhaps even without the participation-of the urban workers carries with it the danger of limiting the mobilization of the Vietnamese masses and unnecessarily isolating the peasant militants."

The cities were not quiescent during the course of the struggle. Diem's dictatorship had alienated many, especially the large Buddhist population. The Buddhists initiated numerous anti-government demonstrations which led ultimately to Diem's fall in a 1963 U.S.-backed coup. Continued Buddhist actions, including the sacking of U.S. offices led to a sharp government crackdown in 1966.

The rapid escalation and terror bombing of the United States led to the The president of a farming cooperative in Vietnam depopulation of rural Vietnam and the swelling of the cities. Vietnam, 80 percent rural in 1964, was 65 percent urban by 1972, thus undermining the popular basis for "people's war."

Meanwhile, mass unemployment, inflation, and corruption in the cities made them ripe for agitation on the basis of democratic and transitional demands.

Yet the NLF discounted this potential. Even the Tet Offensive of 1968, the main extension of the revolution into the cities, was a military action which, although supported by the urban masses, did not actively involve them. The Tet Offensive, in fact, was a classic illustration of the highest form of "people's war, the strategic offensive, in which military action takes precedence over political preparation.

For the SWP to embrace "people's war" and to endorse the VCP's substitution of itself for the working class, is to give up the prospect of proletarian revolution-supported by the peasantry and beginning as a struggle for national liberation and land reform—in the underdeveloped countries.

How the Vietnamese won liberation But given its Stalinist background and program, how did the VCP emerge triumphant? The reasons are several. First, the defeats of the European imperialist powers early in World War II ignited nationalist revolutions throughout the colonial countries, allowing the combative spirit of the Vietnamese people to assert itself.

Second, Vietnam, unlike the Philippines, India, or Indonesia, possessed an extremely weak indigenous capitalist class. Thus the most dangerous features of the VCP's class-collaborationist program were unable to assert themselves, and the party was catapulted to the head of the nationalist movement.

Third, the defeat of Japan left an imperialist vacuum in Asia that could not be easily filled by the victorious imperialist armies.

Finally, and most importantly, the VCP realized it had to break with its program and deepen the peasant revolution.

Yet the VCP remained tenets of Stalinism.

The deformed Vietnamese Revolution With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the long armed struggle ended. The country formally reunified in 1976, renaming itself the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The final assault later began on the capitalist economy of the South. Yet the unified workers' state which emerged continues to be deeply marred by its origins.

Political power in both North and South was won through a peasant war which conquered the cities from without. The working class had little role in its liberation, and had little chance to organize and mobilize itself.

The VCP, enforcing its monopoly of political power, forbade the organizaMarc Riboud tion of competing parties and independent unions. Workers' and peasants' councils did not become the basis of the new state. Peasant committees-without which the peasantry could not be mobilized-could not not retain their autonomy and usefulness to the party once the VCP had achieved power on a national level.

The workers' state which emerged in Vietnam is therefore bureaucratically deformed. Ruled by a party primarily nationalist rather than internationalist, the isolation imposed on Vietnam by imperialism fosters the growth of a parasitic social caste resting on the collectivized economy. The VCP like its Stalinist sister parties still refuses advance the Leninist program of socialist revolution for every country in the world.

Yet for all of its faults, the Vietnamese Revolution solved some of the central problems facing the country. It won liberation from the West and distributed land to the peasantry. In order to safeguard these conquests, it eliminated capitalism and established the potential for Vietnam, in conjunction with the world revolution, to make the transition to socialism.

Meaning of SWP's new line The Socialist Workers Party has apparently chosen to turn a blind eye to the limitations of the Vietnamese Revolution under the Stalinist VCP. Its new position on the Vietnamese Communist Party is the logical extension of its adaptation to the political weaknesses of Castroism.

In its correct impulse to embrace the Cuban Revolution, the SWP leadership adopted the political program of the Castroists. This program, the product of the empirical development of Castroism from nationalism to socialism, never came to grips with the problems of Stalinism and workers' democracy and the Leninist perspective of world socialist revolution.

In embracing this program, the SWP itself gave up its key theoretical weapon against Stalinism, the theory of permanent revolution. And in discarding this concept-which rests on the revolutionary mobilization of the workers and peasants in their own interests throughout the world-the SWP began to equivocate on key questions of revolutionary practice.

From uncritical support of the "anti-imperialist" Khomeini in Iran to refusing to mobilize opposition to the Stalinist suppression of Solidarnosc, it was only a short step to embracing "people's war" in Vietnam. In all of these cases, it was a question of turning away from the proletariat as the only class capable of liberating itself and beginning the march toward socialism.

The SWP's new line on "people's war" and its uncritical support to the Vietnamese Communist Party are a disturbing symptom of its evolution away from revolutionary Marxism.

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ALL RIGAT KD-

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advance program for world revolution."

"It is a reversal of all prior SWP analysis."