A Revolutionary Party?
The history of the Vietnamese Communist Party cannot be understood simply in terms of the favourable objective conditions that the development of Vietnamese communism has enjoyed.* These have obviously played a role, but other Asian or colonial countries—for example, Indonesia—have had just as favourable conditions and yet the revolutionary process has been aborted. Moreover, other factors have had a negative effect on the Vietnamese revolution (limited population and geographical area, etc.). Above all, imperialist policy has done much to purge the Vietnamese revolution of what might have resulted from its specifically national characteristics. In China, imperialism was unable to intervene directly, on the morrow of World War Two, to prevent or postpone the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. In [Cuba] the American strategists did not understand what was happening until it was too late. But in Vietnam, no such historical ‘breach’ existed for any length of time. On three occasions the Vietnamese Communist Party was on the very verge of taking power over the whole of the national territory, under analogous conditions: in 1945, 1954 and 1964. On all three occasions, imperialism reacted—in 1945 by sending in the Anglo-French expeditionary corps, in 1954 through the mechanism of peaceful coexistence (the Geneva Agreement), in 1964 by initiating the US assault. Even the Russian revolution did not have to face such a military onslaught (though it did have to suffer even greater isolation). Never has a revolution had to develop under such apparently unequal conditions: the Vietnamese people against all-powerful America! The basis for the success of the Vietnamese revolution is certainly to be sought in the nature of the political parties involved and the politics that the Vietnamese Communist Party has developed. To understand the specific character of the Vietnamese Communist Party, we must take a look at the conditions which constitute the context of the Vietnamese revolution—conditions which profoundly differ from those of the developed capitalist countries.
The Nature of the Revolutionary Crisis
In the advanced capitalist countries, revolutionary crises—in which the question of power is posed in the most concrete way and a dual power situation opposes bourgeoisie and proletariat in practice—have so far proved to be of very brief duration. A few months at the most, whether in [Vietnam or elsewhere]; however, dual power has existed almost uninterruptedly for thirty years. For socio-economic conditions are radically different there.
The society in which the revolutionary process began to develop was marked by the super-imposition of French colonization on a traditional Asiatic society. The result was a deep and continuing social disequilibrium. The metropolitan country brutally imposed its economic interests. Production was diverted away from the internal market and economic development and towards the export of raw materials and the world market. As far as possible, Vietnam's unity was broken. Inter-regional exchanges between South, Centre and North decreased and were replaced by direct relations with France. Investment was tightly controlled by French capital. The French presence was maintained by the Army, the Administration and the Church. Compulsory sales of alcohol and opium did the rest. Colonization destroyed the ancient equilibrium of Vietnamese society. All elements involved in the running of the country before the arrival of the French were either decimated and removed from the administration after the ‘Scholars’ Revolt’, or discredited in the eyes of the population. But colonization proved incapable of establishing a new equilibrium. The new, extremely weak, Vietnamese bourgeoisie, the new administration, the new notables, the Court at Hue—all these were patently foreign creations. Once Vietnam’s organic economic development was arrested, its social development too suffered a deep rupture that the French bourgeoisie neither could—nor wanted to—overcome. This phenomenon—common to all under-developed countries—took on exemplary proportions in Vietnam. Unlike the British, the French never attempted to strengthen the authority of upper layers of the indigenous population, so that it could base its power upon them. According to Le Chau,¹ the national bourgeoisie controlled only 3% of private capital and that mainly in the low-profit agricultural sector. As a result, it never played more than a marginal role either politically or economically—a fact which gave considerable room for manoeuvre to the Vietnamese communists. Having broken Vietnam's organic development, the French bourgeoisie could never make use of the instrument which, at home, had repeatedly allowed it to take advantage of the errors and hesitations of the workers’ movement to put an end to dangerous, pre-revolutionary situations: i.e. the presence of a ‘national’ bourgeoisie, supported by a political apparatus formed over a long period and having considerable economic power at its disposal. This is the first factor which explains why dual power has existed over such a long period in Indo-china.
The second factor relates to the Vietnamese social structure. The chronic instability of the French colony provided the necessary condition for a protracted period of dual power: no ‘national’ force succeeded in winning acceptance by the population. The sufficient conditions were provided by the coming together of three elements. First, a part of the intelligentsia—mobilized against colonialism by the Scholars’ Revolt and awakened to Marxist ideas through contact with the West and the young Soviet Republic. Second, a proletariat, few in numbers but already highly concentrated and beginning to become organized, which still preserved many links with the peasantry. Third, a vast peasant mass, pauperized, semi-proletarianized, suffering from the reverberations of the 1929 world crisis. The coming together of these three elements made it possible to solve both the problem of the leadership of the revolution—the emergence of a communist vanguard—and that of the military survival of [the revolution]. We must never forget that in Vietnam the social weight of the peasantry was immense. How could a revolution be made without the participation of 95% of the population (two thirds of which are landless peasants)? The view of the Vietnamese communists was to be that the solution of the national question means first and foremost a solution of the agrarian question. A people's war means above all a peasant war under the political leadership of the proletariat.
Vietnam is not just an under-developed country, but an ‘extremely backward country’ (Giap) even compared with other under-developed countries. The Vietnamese communists have discovered how to make a strength out of this weakness. Vu Can explains this when he describes the conditions which made possible the second—anti-American—Resistance: ‘The South Vietnamese countryside, where some ten million peasants live in a more or less natural economy, is hardly subject at all to the power of the towns. The Saigon regime has never managed to exercise any really tight control over it, in particular because the legacy of the first Resistance has been considerable there and the memory of popular democratic power has not been erased. Economic as much as political factors explain the Saigon administration’s vulnerability in the rural communes, which are the weakest link of the system.’² By contrast, revolutionary war will find the bases there of a ‘resistance economy’ for a protracted war, by basing itself on the autarky of the countryside.
Tradition and Revolution
The Vietnamese Communist Party's task was to comprehend this situation and find a way of taking the leadership of the struggles. For its understanding of the nature and strategic role of revolutionary war, the Party could draw on two experiences: that of the Chinese Red Army—some years ahead of the future Viet Minh—and the previous struggles of the Vietnamese people. Ho Chi Minh is a symbol of these experiences. A short time before the launching of the Viet Minh he spent eight months in China, in the Communist Eighth Route Army. In addition, his family had participated in the Scholars’ Revolt; through which the Vietnamese for years opposed French colonization.
Although the experience of the Chinese Communists was certainly rich in lessons for the Vietnamese Party, it is nevertheless important to understand the fact that, in an attempt to link tradition and revolution, they drew just as much upon the history of the Vietnamese people. For the Vietnamese tradition is profoundly marked by experiences of popular armed struggle. The following quotations, taken from reports made by French administrators between 1885 and 1895,³ bear witness to this. Here is what the Nam-Dinh Resident wrote on 20 December 1885, after a tour of his province: ‘The leaders of the rebellion disseminate certain propaganda in the areas they occupy. . . . The rank-and-file soldiers of this army are provided by all the villages of the region indiscriminately, which the leaders hold in a state of terror. If a French column arrives, the band, organized for the main purpose of spreading trouble across the country and keeping our soldiers on the move, hardly resists at all—just a little for appearance’s sake. The known leaders and their henchmen disappear, leaving the bulk of the army and the lesser leaders, who are simply the peasants that we meet every day. We are faced with a kind of latent organization, which, in the presence of our troops, simply melts away into nothing and merges with the rest of the population. But this army only melts away and remains invisible as long as our troops are active on a permanent basis.’ What we see here is the principle of the People’s Army.
This army develops as the war intensifies. Here is what a French Resident wrote five years later: ‘Very numerous and well armed with rapid-firing guns, guided and given information by Vietnamese deserters whose contact with us has led them to lose their salutary fear of the European, these bands are now bold enough to ambush our columns—and not without success, alas! . . . The bands which, at this time, infest the borders of our Delta provinces are stronger than ever, more cohesive than before and capable of orderly manoeuvres. They have grown from numerous little bands who previously operated in isolation; from malcontents who do not like the changes our occupation has brought about and have been unable to adapt to it; and from people oppressed by an unfair taxation system, which has been made still more heavy and odious by all kinds of abuses for which it serves as a pretext. These bands seem to follow common aims and a common leadership; in my view, this is proved by the relations which exist between them, by the support they give each other and by the extent of their field of operations, which is no longer as in the past restricted to a single district from which they seldom ventured out, but which now spreads over several provinces. They no longer live by plundering but are taking on the appearance of regular troops. Their leaders allege that the French are responsible for all the ills of the country. . . . The Bang-Y pirates did not massacre all the prisoners, wounded or not, as is the custom. Instead, they beheaded the native NCOs, cut the Pho Quan (superior officer) to pieces, but gave the ordinary soldiers food and sent them back, since they did not consider them responsible. Maybe we can still call this piracy, but if we do not put a stop to it, it will soon be a rebellion. What makes it worse is that these bandits are as well armed as we are, are numerically superior to our soldiers, are supported by the local inhabitants and are fighting on a terrain which they know intimately—with the peculiar mobility of Asiatic troops who live off the land and are not burdened by baggage trains.’
The Scholars’ Revolt had its own intrinsic limits. Looking back to the past and led by representatives of the old ruling classes, it was not historically capable of breaking the political and military war machine of colonialism. Nonetheless, the movement did provide many tactical and strategic lessons. What was necessary was to reinterpret these lessons in the light of Marxism, link them to an analysis of imperialism and discover how to weld together tradition and revolution, the struggles for national independence and for social liberation.
It is here that the protracted, repeated nature of revolutionary crises in countries like Vietnam, and the armed dual power which can exist for long periods in such countries in view of their peasant character, play a fundamental role. We have seen that the Vietnamese Communist Party was not born fully armed with its pure theory. There were still ambiguities about the nature of the coming revolution. The strategy of revolutionary war was not yet worked out. From 1936 to 1939, the Vietnamese Party, to say the least, put on ice the two motor slogans of the coming revolution: national independence and radical agrarian reform. It then had to raise the former afresh before it could launch the armed struggle. But the time-scale within which the Vietnamese Communists work is not the same as for European revolutionary organizations—still confused or with little implantation—when a revolutionary situation breaks out. The dynamic of permanent revolution that national or democratic struggles contain in countries like Vietnam can bring the whole of its weight to bear—if only the organization which leads the revolutionary process knows how to analyse its lessons in function of the historical interests of the proletariat. The ‘empirical’ character of the Vietnamese Communist Party lies in the fact that its political thinking has progressed—through a series of readjustments, rediscoveries, self-criticisms—in response to the concrete problems which have come up in the course of the class struggle, rather than as the result of any reappraisal of the theoretical debate which shook the world communist movement at the time of the Stalinization of the Bolshevik Party.
The agrarian question is exemplary in this respect. Dominating the whole of the revolutionary process, it imposes its law on revolutionaries. At the outset, the Vietnamese Party benefited from the lessons of the Russian revolution and the analysis made of the Vietnamese situation. As a result its first objective was: The land to those who work it. The Party’s history led it to develop, over a long period, the opportunist perspective of a ‘flexible agrarian reform’. But we have seen, with Giap, how the needs created by the revolutionary war itself imposed a return to the line of a radical agrarian reform. This took place in 1953. Without that turn, Dien Bien Phu could not have happened. No advance was possible along the road of national liberation if the class struggle continued to be under-estimated. The power of the big landowners had to be destroyed.
But matters did not rest there. ‘The land to those who work it’ was still in the historical framework of the bourgeois revolution. In the epoch of decadent imperialism, however, a revolution cannot remain at this stage without regressing. ‘The agrarian reform carried out between 1953 and 1956 abolished the feudal relations of production by overthrowing the class of big landowners. . . . Its consequences, however, although in the right direction, were limited. Agricultural production reached a ceiling, because of the small size of the plots. Property, petty individual peasant production and the layer of rich peasants who employ labour were left intact. Favourable conditions were created for a free development of petty commodity production, which opens up the road to the spontaneous development of capitalism in the countryside. And in fact, around 1957 differentiations between the various peasant strata began to come to the surface. Numerous poor and small peasants, as a result of sickness, floods or drought, were forced to sell the land, house or livestock they had received through the agrarian reform to rich peasants, who started once again to make usurious loans. Urban traders speculated in agricultural products, disorganizing the market at the expense of the working masses. To go forward, a more advanced mode of production—agricultural cooperation in other words—had to be introduced. Otherwise the peasants would have faced pauperization and a return to the past with all the misery and suffering that that meant.’⁴ Agriculture thus embarked on the socialist phase of its development.
We should note that in the sphere of agricultural production too, the Vietnamese Communists based themselves on tradition, invoking the aid of the ancient organization of the village community to launch the policy of peasant mutual aid, which was a prelude to collectivization.
A similar progress in the thinking of the Vietnamese Communists, when faced by the problems of their revolutionary practice, can be seen in every sphere, including that of the conception of People’s War. ‘When the hostilities spread to the whole country, our Party launched the slogan: Wage a war of total, popular resistance. This is the fundamental content of People’s War. This content has been more and more enriched and concretized in practice during the years of resistance, especially after the launching of the guerrilla war and from the time when the peasant question was accorded its due place in the national question.’
We can clearly see the conditions under which the Vietnamese Communist Party has hammered out its analyses and the course it has followed in doing so. On several occasions, to be sure, this has meant that the Party has been slow to find solutions where it has been confronted with new tasks. But the important thing is that it has reacted to such new tasks and, little by little, opened its eyes to strategic truths that Stalinism had vainly sought to bury.
Moreover, there was nothing inevitable or predetermined about such an evolution. A reformist party does not allow its hand to be forced by history. A party is not revolutionary and reformist in turns. It can degenerate, but the opposite is unfortunately not possible. The Vietnamese Communist Party has been able to correct its course. The French Communist Party could never do that.
Political Continuity
Political continuity is extremely important for any revolutionary organization. If its best cadres are scattered, if its orientation is abruptly changed from top to bottom several times, if a split takes place in the organization, it may take months or even years to renew the broken political and organizational threads. Hence the importance of the fact that the Vietnamese Communist Party has been characterized by exceptional continuity. At least three factors bear witness to this.
In the first place, the Party's leading personnel has obviously undergone important changes. Certain key figures have disappeared—like Tran Phu, second General Secretary of the Party, who died in 1931 after being tortured during the repression following the Nghe-Tinh Soviets. But these changes did not affect the existence of a stable nucleus of leading cadres, which has dominated the whole history of Vietnamese Communism. This was formed, around Ho Chi Minh, during the first years of struggle, and included Pham Van Dong, Vo Nguyen Giap, Hoang Quoc Vet, Truong Chinh and others. This group was not a monolithic body, since differences did exist and can be clearly seen at every difficult stage in the Party’s growth. But it was a leadership team with shared responsibilities, which suffered neither from a ‘personality cult’ nor from purges of the Stalin type. Its presence has certainly played no small part in the evolution of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
Secondly, after a period of zigzags, the Party from 1939 onwards experienced a real continuity of orientation. Continuity does not mean identity; we have seen how important later stages—such as that of 1953—were in the definition of the Party's policies. But these transformations appear more as corrections and a continued progression than as ruptures and reversals of policy. This political unity has doubtless been greatly strengthened by the fact that, throughout its long history, the Vietnamese Communist Party has been faced by the problem of revolutionary [war; illegible].
Finally, it is true that the Vietnamese Communist Party has experienced a number of organizational transformations. From 1930 to 1945 (except for a short period when it bore the name Vietnamese Communist Party) it was called the Indochinese Communist Party. The Vietnamese militants demonstrated in this way their fidelity to the policies of the Comintern, which based its organizational structures on those of French colonization and attached little importance to the Vietnamese national question. However, after 1941, the Indochinese Communist Party stimulated the creation of the Viet Minh, a specifically Vietnamese organization to which the Communists committed all their forces. Officially dissolved from 1945 to 1953, the Party maintained itself in a voluntary ‘clandestinity’ for the sake of its frontist politics. From 1953 to the present day, under the name of Workers’ Party of Vietnam (Lao Dong), its authority has been extended to all Vietnamese Communists, despite the partition of the country after 1954. In 1962, however, it decided to establish the People’s Revolutionary Party (in effect, the Communist Party of South Vietnam), in order to adapt its structures to the complex relations and different rhythms of the revolutionary process in the North and South of the country. Nevertheless, in spite of this tortuous history, the organizational unity of the Communist Party has been fundamentally maintained. This is true—at least since 1939: in other words after the 1931 repression, which terribly weakened the Party, and after the split which shook the Saigon organization following the break with the Trotskyists. In fact, since that time, it does not seem to have passed through any period of extreme weakness nor any important split, in spite of the political upheavals it has experienced—in 1956-7, for example. Today the Communist Party benefits from the activity of thousands of cadres, educated by years of revolutionary struggles, and from the support of a population likewise formed by thirty years of war.
The present uniqueness of the Vietnamese Communist Party soon appears if it is compared to other parties: to the Soviet Party, with the whole of the Bolshevik old guard decimated by Stalin; to the Chinese Communist Party, after the Cultural Revolution and the successive purges it has undergone from Liu Shao Chi to Lin Piao; to the new Cuban Communist Party which in a sense was brought to power before it was really formed; to the international revolutionary Marxist vanguard, now being reborn after the blows dealt it by imperialism and Stalinism, which has such great difficulty in binding the threads of its present and its past together again. This unique continuity of the Vietnamese Party is a very precious quality.
Keystone of the International Situation
We have seen how the Vietnamese Communist Party has proved its international stature and its theoretical originality. This demonstration has certainly been made progressively, ‘empirically’—though it would be wrong to forget the legacy of the Third International, without which the whole process of development can hardly be understood. Such empiricism was, of course, a fertile breeding-ground for national deviations. Yet the Indochinese revolution would not have attained such depth, had the Vietnamese Communist Party in fact succumbed to such deviations. The Palestinian resistance is there to give us a new, and tragic, negative proof of this.
The international situation of the Vietnamese revolution probably has been—and remains—the most profound factor for progressive evolution of the Vietnamese Communists. It has brought them directly up against the international forces of revolution and counter-revolution, with all the lessons that such an experience involves. This also explains the contagion of the Vietnamese revolution. As Giap reminded the Chinese,⁵ it has served as a pole of orientation, allowing the forces of colonial revolution a breathing-space while the latter was marking time and allowing the forces of proletarian revolution in the developed capitalist countries and of political revolution in the bureaucratized workers’ states to be recomposed. It has prevented imperialism from taking advantage of temporary successes to go onto the counter-offensive. ‘Cutting edge of the world revolutionary upsurge, highest point of the common struggle of the working masses’, as Le Duan describes it,⁶ the Vietnamese revolution has become exemplary. Giap explains this as early as 1964, i.e. before the beginning of the local war and of escalation: ‘South Vietnam is the shock-troop of the national liberation movement of our time (Giap’s italics)... The international significance of our Southern compatriots’ war of liberation is that they have shown how a small and weak people can fight and defeat the American imperialists, giving another proof of the universality of the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism as far as the national democratic revolution in the colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries is concerned, and helping to extirpate the noxious influence of modern revisionism in the national liberation movement.’ (Giap’s italics).
It is in Vietnam that the revolution has been being made for the last thirty years. It is in Vietnam that imperialism’s strategic weakness has been brought into the full light of day. But the effects of the Vietnamese revolution are not restricted to preventing the stabilization of imperialist power. As a living and constant refutation of peaceful coexistence, that revolution also undermines the power of the workers’ bureaucracies. It has become one of the major elements in the crisis of Stalinism, favouring the emergence throughout the world of a revolutionary generation which, thanks to it, has learnt to ‘strategically scorn’ imperialism, and which recognizes itself in the Vietnamese struggle. So much is this the case, the Vietnamese Communists are today once again brought face to face with those whom they have often denounced—as if in passing and without ever giving any real explanation—the Trotskyists. As consistent revolutionary Marxists, the latter alone, apart from a number of isolated individuals, have always made the defence of the Vietnamese revolution a permanent objective of their activity. In the United States, they offered their organizational abilities, their sense for mass work, their determination, to an anti-war movement which was a prey to electoralist and spontaneist influences. They participated in the Russell Tribunal. In France, they played an important role in launching the National Vietnam Committee, and subsequently the Indochina Solidarity Front, offering all forces which claimed to be socialist a united front in defence of the Indochinese people. The interest which the representatives of the Indochinese fighters have shown in the development of this support activity is the best answer which can be given to the lies of the Stalinists.
The Vietnamese revolution is at the heart of the world revolutionary wave and one of the main elements furthering its development, it remains nonetheless dependent on the extremely uneven development of the world revolution. ‘Create two, three, many Vietnams, that is our slogan’, Che wrote to the Tricontinental Conference, shortly before paying with his life for putting his revolutionary convictions into practice. The Pueblo Affair⁷ showed the correctness of his perspective: imperialism would not have been able to open a new revolutionary front without considerably loosening its grip on Indochina. But the same conditions for the growth of a new revolution did not exist anywhere else. The revolution in the colonial world still lacked leadership, while in the developed countries and bureaucratized workers’ states the damage wrought by the betrayals of reformist leaderships after the war was only just beginning to be repaired. If a new revolutionary generation has been born, for the most part it remains extremely confused, and revolutionary Marxists are still too few in number. The Indochinese fighters remain ‘tragically alone’ (Che) and the very fact of the US war of destruction makes more than one militant in the world hesitate when faced by the sacrifices which revolution imposes.
The Vietnamese Communist Party belongs to that generation of communist parties which, before and after the Second World War, broke in practice with the Soviet bureaucracy’s international policies. In Greece, Yugoslavia, China and Vietnam, they existed uneasily in the contradiction between their membership of the Stalinized Comintern and their involvement in the class struggle of their countries. They chose the road of revolution. Of all these parties, the Vietnamese has travelled furthest in the direction of a rediscovery of the principles of Marxism. But it represents an exception today, for the time when such developments were possible in parties linked to the Kremlin has passed. Moreover, because the advances made by the Vietnamese Communist Party have not been accompanied by any reappraisal of the conflict between the Left Opposition in the USSR and Stalinism on the [Soviet question], theoretical clarification has not reached the stage of a precise understanding of the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy. But the international situation in which the Vietnamese revolution finds itself has contradictory effects on its political vanguard: on the one hand, given the international policies of the USSR and China, it encourages Vietnamese communism to become increasingly independent, on the other hand, the isolation in which the latter remains plunged, the absence of a sufficiently strong, consistent revolutionary Marxist pole in the international arena, makes it that much harder for it to overcome its ideological limitations.
The Vietnamese Communist Party has developed its own orientation. It has given more than adequate proof of its exceptional abilities to lead the revolutionary struggle for the seizure of power. This struggle has still not ended today; nevertheless, the experience gathered since 1945 makes it possible for us to try and tackle the question of the future, after victory. To begin with, we must seek to clarify the root of the political debate: the question of Stalinism.
The Question of Stalinism
To understand the present orientation of the Vietnamese leadership, we must take into account not just the difficulties created by the objective situation, but also subjective weaknesses, of which probably the most important is its failure to understand the nature, causes and history of Stalinism. Ho Chi Minh lived in the USSR at the time of the conflict between the Left Opposition and rising Stalinism. He does not seem to have taken part in the debates, appearing to those protagonists who met him as an ‘empiricist’.⁸ Here too, the Party seems to be formed in the image of its master. This weakness is probably shown most emphatically when we consider the problem of bureaucratization. The Vietnamese have come up against this problem from two angles: on the international level, through confrontation with the politics of peaceful coexistence; domestically, through the permanent presence of tendencies to bureaucratization.
The Struggle against Bureaucracy
This was the case as early as 1945: ‘Before the August revolution, our Party existed illegally and worked underground. But since then, it has become a ruling party... [which] has encouraged certain of them [cadres and party members] to lapse into bureaucratism and authoritarianism, to become detached from the masses.’⁹ In October 1945, Ho Chi Minh addressed a document to ‘the popular committees in North, South and Central Vietnam, to all province, district and commune committees’.¹⁰ He denounced the errors committed by some cadres, listing them as follows: 1. violation of legality; 2. abuse of power; 3. moral corruption; 4. favouritism; 5. factional spirit; 6. arrogance—concluding with a bald ‘I hope you will improve’. In 1947, he takes up these charges again in three documents: ‘Letter to the comrades of Bac Bo’, ‘Letter to the Trung Bo comrades’ and the pamphlet ‘Improve our style of work’.
The ‘errors’ in the implementation of the agrarian reform in 1956 illustrate the scope of the problem on the morrow of the victory over the French. Le Chau describes this period in detail and the wave of criticism and self-criticism that developed. One instance of such criticism, formulated by a ‘congressman well-known in North Vietnamese political circles, Maître Nguyen Manh-Tuong’ is particularly significant: ‘If the revolution brought us light and happiness, why do some people worry about it and indeed suffer because of it? These people are not enemies of the revolution. After the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, after the Berlin and Poznan insurrections and those of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, we can clearly see how these problems arise, because the revolution suffers from a serious illness, "isolation from the people", and is not sufficiently democratic. It is more and more deeply entrenched in bureaucratism and authoritarianism; it is imprisoned in a narrow attitude of authoritarian—and sometimes even dictatorial—leadership.’¹¹
Further evidence of tendential bureaucratization of the state was, paradoxically, provided in 1965 precisely by the democratization imposed by the renewed bombing of the North. In this respect, Nguyen Xuan Lai’s remark is very symbolic: ‘The new orientation imposed by the war implies a whole range of socio-economic measures, and notably improved management of the cooperatives; more specifically, it implies the introduction of democratic and collective management, and of a more democratic, fair and rational division of tasks and retributive system—a development which serves as a powerful weapon against bureaucratization’. But the waging of a revolutionary war could not in itself resolve the problem. Of course, it favoured a broad democratization at the base (shown in the way the People’s Army functioned), but it also implied a maximum centralization at the highest levels of decision, leaving little scope for the establishment of a broad, participatory structure for the whole of the State's population from base to summit. Here is what the Party History Commission wrote for the year 1968: ‘The Central Committee estimated, however, that the results obtained were still inadequate and did not correspond to the strategic intention of the Party at the present stage. Our success was limited by numerous failures and inadequacies, such as the tendency to make use of the state of war to encroach upon or weaken the collective economy, to steal public property, or to indulge in speculation and profiteering. Some cadres and party members were still guilty of bureaucratism and authoritarianism, still violated the people’s democratic rights and even, to some extent, socialist legality... . Since 1968 the Party has set itself the task of strengthening its leadership in the economic sphere, of struggling against inefficient management, and of instilling in the masses awareness that they are the collective master of the country.’¹²
Confronted for a long time with the problem of bureaucratization, the Vietnamese leaders have tried to respond to it. Their documents are strewn with notes of this kind: ‘To carry out this general line, our Party advocates on the one hand, a strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat against the enemies of the people, repression of counter-revolutionaries and the maintenance of law and order and security; on the other hand the development of democracy among the people, the realization of the people's democratic rights, the establishment and gradual perfection of socialist legislation and the creation of conditions allowing the people to participate effectively in the running of the State.’¹³
The importance given to this problem appears clearly in Giap’s writings on the organization of the revolutionary army: ‘In the building of our army, our Party has always made democratic centralism its organizing principle; it has thus attempted to give the army an effective internal democracy, while maintaining at the same time the strictest—though freely agreed to—discipline. Quite unlike the armies of every sort of exploiting class, ours has, since its foundation, practised a regime of internal democracy. . . . During the years of the Resistance, the so-called system of "the three great democracies" has taken shape and led to good results. Political democracy . . . Military democracy . . . Economic democracy . . . It is on the basis of the realization of the democratic regime that our army applies the strictest—but freely consented to—discipline. . . . The realization of internal democracy and strengthening of freely agreed discipline involve a whole process of struggle against deviations which have shown themselves through two diametrically opposed tendencies. The first dwelt excessively on discipline, while neglecting democracy, . . . The second—"dispersalism"—did not take the strengthening of discipline into account. . . . These two wrong tendencies are both manifestations of non-proletarian ideologies. The first reflects the influence of bourgeois ideology in the running of the army; the second reflects the influence of peasant and petty-bourgeois ideology favouring dispersal, in other words of the layers from which the bulk of the cadres and soldiers of our army have come. This is why the fundamental problem for the correct implementation of a democratic regime and the strengthening of a strict discipline freely consented to, consists in ceaselessly educating the army in proletarian ideology, in order to eliminate all non-proletarian ideology existing among our troops.’¹⁴ This concern for internal democracy and freely consented to discipline in the army appears equally clearly in the speeches quoted by Burchett in Why the Vietcong will win.
Fight for Soviet Democracy
But simply to underline the dangers of bureaucratization does not suffice to secure oneself against it. We must study the means adopted to struggle for socialist democracy. Truong Chinh’s book, quoted above, deserves closer study. ‘We are firmly convinced that in a socialist system, no matter when or where, any imprecise ideas on the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, any slackness or weakening by whatever means of this dictatorship, will lead inevitably to an attempt by counter-revolutionaries to raise their heads and to the degeneration of socialism. History has given us three successive forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the Paris Commune, the Russian Soviets and People’s Democracy in a number of Asian and East European countries. The dictatorship of the proletariat takes on the form of people's democracy in our country... If the dictatorship of the proletariat is born and develops under different forms, it is because of the concrete historical conditions, the level of economic development, the relationship of forces between the classes, the national peculiarities and the traditions of development of the regime in each country and also, partly, because of the political conjuncture and the relationship of forces in the world as a whole.’¹⁵
The functioning of the Vietnamese state does indeed differ greatly both from the schema described by Lenin in State and Revolution and from the soviet system organized during the first years of the Russian revolution by the Bolshevik Party. North Vietnam is a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state. Even if the one-party theory is not explicitly developed, in practice the leading State functions are the preserve of a single party.¹⁶ Moreover, obviously it is not the mass of workers who are grouped together inside the Party, but only a vanguard minority. There is no separation of Party and State, even if there is formally a systematic differentiation of Party and State responsibilities. Similarly, although democratic centralism is universally proclaimed to be the operative principle, governing—through all the various modalities of its application—the functioning of the State, the Army and [the mass organizations, only a limited] right of tendency is recognized in the latter. Above all, [where their interests diverge, the leaders] clearly accord pre-eminence to the former. Moreover, there exists no soviet system, with workers’ councils making up the backbone of the State from top to bottom.
The point here is not to reproach the Vietnamese Communist Party for not having been able to establish the socialist democracy of our dreams. Nothing is more difficult, and certainly the extremely hard conditions in which the Vietnamese revolution has had to be made have not helped at all. The USSR of Lenin and Trotsky was a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state in 1920. But the problem is not so much the extent to which soviet democracy has been actually realized as the aims that the Vietnamese leaders set themselves in this field. The disturbing part of Truong Chinh’s analysis, which contents itself with identifying the ‘three forms’ that the dictatorship of the proletariat has assumed, is that nowhere does it make the establishment of a soviet system of power a goal, as the Bolshevik Party did prior to Stalinization.
Our attachment as Trotskyists to socialist democracy of a soviet type is neither the consequence of a dogmatic attachment to ‘ideal norms’ created by great ancestors nor the fruit of utopian dreams. Soviet democracy is the best way to struggle against bureaucratization, because it alone realizes permanent control by the masses and the base over the functionaries and the cadres. Soviet democracy is the best guarantee of the elaboration of a realistic economic development plan. For only it can determine what rhythms are acceptable to the workers. The 1956 ‘errors’ are a proof a contrario of this. Finally, soviet democracy is the best means simultaneously to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat by the continual raising of the ideological level of the masses and to begin the withering away of the state as the population increasingly takes charge of its own tasks; in other words, simultaneously to strengthen the ability of the transitional workers’ state to guard against any counter-revolution and to prepare the transcending of that state in the framework of a socialist society.
Whatever the rhythms, delays, difficulties in implementation, this remains one of the key problems, whose resolution during the transitional period guarantees the onward march to socialism. Like the use of Stalino-Maoist terminology, the apparent ‘under-estimation’ of the role of soviet democracy implies a failure to understand the nature and roots of Stalinism or, therefore, how to struggle against inevitable tendencies towards bureaucratization. This is confirmed by the Vietnamese Communist Party's attitude to the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Radio Hanoi supported it. Only once, and unobtrusively, but it did support it. It is unlikely that this was simply an ‘opportunist’ statement for Kremlin consumption. Silence would have been enough had condemnation been impossible. In fact, the Vietnamese reaction was of a similar kind to that of the Cubans. Czechoslovakia was taking the Yugoslav road, and of all the countries of the ‘socialist camp’, it is Yugoslavia which has most openly abandoned support for the revolutions of the third world. A military intervention was a small price to pay for halting this process. But, of course, what this view fails to understand is that Brezhnev is not to the left of Dubcek; that Soviet intervention served the cause of Stalinism, but in no way that of socialism!
The International Dimension
The Vietnamese Communist Party understands clearly the existence of a rightist and opportunist current inside the ‘international communist movement’. An article in Nhan Dan can be cited to confirm this, if confirmation is needed.¹⁷ In summer 1971, a conference of so-called ‘non-aligned’ countries was held in Georgetown. The PRG and the GRUNK won a diplomatic victory by obtaining admission with full rights. On this occasion, Nhan Dan (17 August 1972) published an article on the situation of ‘third world peoples’ taking charge of ‘their own destinies’ and opposing all attempts by US imperialism to regulate international problems with other countries, without taking into account their interests and aspirations [i.e. those of the ‘third world’]. This article says that the Georgetown conference, ‘a victory for the revolutionary tendency . . . unequivocally expresses a new tendency of the period: one whereby small countries rise up to take charge of their own destinies, despite the diabolical plots of imperialism and despite manifestations of rightism and unprincipled compromises. The successes of the national liberation movement and the Georgetown conference are real setbacks for the Nixon Doctrine. They also constitute a severe rebuke to those who move away from the great, invincible revolutionary thoughts of the epoch; those who become wretchedly bogged down in the darkness and mire of the road to compromise’ [italics in the original]. Further on, it is written that ‘Those who persevere in the revolution and who remain faithful to Marxism-Leninism have been able successively to demonstrate the weakness and failure of opportunist attempts of all colours, including those of forces which for a long time laid down the law.’ Further on again, with respect to the ‘Nixon Doctrine’: ‘This strategy makes use of the balance of forces between the big powers and the divisions between the socialist countries as a shield, the better to dam up, forcibly and without impediment, the national liberation movements.’ And in conclusion: ‘A country’s revolution is an integral part of the world revolution and national revolutions push each other forward and support each other. The victory of a revolution in one country is not the end but the beginning of a long struggle leading to world communism. Socialism and communism are thousands and thousands of times better than feudalism and capitalism. Proletarian internationalism cannot be compared to bourgeois nationalism or to national egoism [italics added—PR], so great are the distances between them. The revolution is a road of flowers and perfume. Opportunism is a stinking cesspit.’
The Vietnamese leaders have not adopted the simplistic Maoist analysis of a return to capitalism in the USSR. This theory cannot explain the nature of the help the latter has given Vietnam. But neither have they adopted our analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy. It is probable that they hope—although we must be particularly prudent here in analysis and exegesis of texts—once the opportunism of the present leaderships is defeated, for a regeneration of the world communist movement. It is likely that, in this respect, one of the key passages of Ho Chi Minh’s testament is more than simply tactical: ‘On the subject of the world communist movement—Having dedicated my whole life to the service of the revolution, the more I swell with pride to see the international communist and workers’ movement grow, the more I grieve at the present misunderstanding between our brother parties! I hope that our Party will work with all its strength and contribute effectively to the re-establishment of unity between the fraternal parties on the basis of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, in accordance with the dictates of reason and of the heart. I am fully convinced that the fraternal parties and fraternal countries will surely reunite once more.’¹⁸
Numerous factors allow us to understand this orientation of the Vietnamese Communist Party: the repulsive nature of the ‘model’ presented by the state system of the USSR, the heritage of the formation received within the Third International; the very existence of bureaucratic deformations of the North Vietnamese transitional workers’ state, which have marked the consciousness of the party and state cadres; the international situation of the Indochinese revolution, at the same time dependent on, and in conflict with, the ‘socialist camp’. Still more complex factors, linked to Vietnam’s history, to the development before colonization of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ and a Confucian philosophical thought, are perhaps also involved, if only to the extent that these philosophical traditions offered a moral interpretation of the struggle against bureaucratization. Nguyen Khac Vien noted, in a very interesting article, the relationships woven between traditional Confucianism and Vietnamese Marxism. If Confucianism prepared the way for the development of Marxism ‘by centring man's thoughts on political and social problems’, it also coloured it with moralism. ‘One can easily recognize’, wrote Nguyen Khac Vien, ‘Confucian moralism in these texts [Ho Chi Minh’s]. . . . They are not lessons in morality, in the sense understood in a college or lycée. Rather, they are directives for "rectification" campaigns . . . Criticism and self-criticism, beginning from the given political situation, often lead to very profound moral analyses. . . . One can even say that in Vietnam (and China) Confucianism often prevails over Marxism. In Confucian territory, morality often tends to supplant the idea of historical development. Marxism being at the same time "explanation and edification", the latter function often tends to predominate. Within the great family of Communist Parties, the Vietnamese Party (like the Chinese) certainly contributes a more pronounced moralizing note than parties which operate in countries where the bourgeoisie has already exercised ideological leadership for a long time.’¹⁹ (Note that Nguyen Khac Vien adds that ‘Here [in countries with a long bourgeois tradition] it is bourgeois amoralism which sometimes influences Marxist militants, who therefore have a tendency to neglect problems of individual morality.’)
If the factors influencing the ideological and programmatic development of the Vietnamese Communist Party are numerous, the same is true of those which will shape the future of the Vietnamese revolution.
By way of a provisional conclusion
[Boxed epigraph:] ‘In a country where the proletariat has [taken] power... the [dictatorship and socialism] depend in the last analysis, not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as upon the development of the international socialist revolution.’ Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, ‘Basic Postulates’
The difficulties of a socialist revolution do not come to an end with the overthrow of the bourgeois state. The degeneration of the USSR, and the evolution of China and Cuba after the revolutionary seizure of power, have proved that the dangers of bureaucratic deformation of workers’ states, flowing from the delay of the revolution in the developed countries, were not just the fruit of fertile Trotskyist imaginations. The objective factors favouring such a development are in fact considerable, especially in the ex-colonial and semi-colonial countries. The survival, throughout the transition period, of scarcity, of a mode of distribution inherited from capitalism and of forms of delegation of power linked to the too-weak ideological (and social) development of the proletariat, are powerful factors leading to a ‘separation of the Party and State apparatus from the masses’, prelude to a deeper bureaucratization.
Vietnam has experienced, and will experience on the morrow of the seizure of power, a particularly difficult situation. The tasks of reconstruction will be huge in a country which, less than any other, given its geographical smallness, can hope for an autarkic development. The tendencies to bureaucratization will find fertile ground in these objective conditions, just as their development will be favoured by the programmatic limitations of the current orientation of the Vietnamese Communist Party. But it would be false and politically dangerous to draw from this the conclusion of an inevitable bureaucratization.
Today the continuation of the revolutionary struggle is the main factor opposing these tendencies. For this struggle prevents the crystallization of a privileged bureaucratic caste, escaping from the masses’ control and tending to determine state policy in function of its own interests. The history of the Indochinese revolution is itself an a posteriori demonstration of this. Had North Vietnam experienced such a bureaucratic degeneration, it would never have become involved, as it is today, at the side of the Southern masses. In 1959-60, the Vietnamese Workers’ Party would not have made the turn to relaunching the armed struggle. In 1965, after the beginning of the US escalation which challenged the very existence of the North Vietnamese workers’ state, it would have quickly abandoned aid to the South, on the grounds of the unfavourable relationship of forces. For, let us repeat, it is not true that the North Vietnamese state or the Vietnamese Communist Party were compelled to take up the struggle again. The alternative was not one of either enduring the US escalation without reacting, or re-engaging in the revolutionary struggle. By placing itself within the sphere of Soviet influence—and at the price of abandoning the Southern masses—North Vietnam could certainly have obtained, at this time, both a consistent political and [economic support against] escalation. And it is not every bureaucrat who understands that the best defence of the workers’ states is the extension of the revolution! If a crystallized bureaucratic caste had existed in 1960 in North Vietnam, it would have given its allegiance to Moscow and submitted to the political imperatives of peaceful co-existence. The struggle in the South would have been resumed against the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, and the unity of Vietnam would have been broken as surely as that of the Communist Party.
And tomorrow? Tomorrow, once victory is won over [imperialism], the Vietnamese people will have a lot of cards in their favour. In the first place, a theory and an experience of economic and social development which does not reproduce Stalinist ‘simplifications’. In the second place, extremely advanced social achievements, which will not merely revolutionize the agrarian structure and the condition of the working class, but allow solutions to be found for the problems of female inequality and the oppression of ethnic minorities. But most important of all, it will have a population and a party educated and forged by the fire of thirty years uninterrupted revolutionary struggle, both political and military.
Two examples allow us to understand what such a situation implies. First, the 1956 crisis mentioned earlier is very revealing. The region which experienced the widest opposition movements was Nghe An, with a very strong revolutionary tradition going back to the 1930 ‘soviets’. Moreover, of all the countries of the ‘socialist’ camp, it was Vietnam where the wave of criticism and self-criticism seems to have been deepest. In the second place, the history of the years 1957-60 in South Vietnam is also rich in lessons. The attitude of the communist cadres towards the uprising of the Kor tribes shows both the extremely developed sense of discipline of the members of the Vietnamese Communist Party and their ability to take responsibility when they think that the future of the revolution is at stake.
The fifteen years of revolutionary warfare of the second Indochinese war have qualitatively increased this political capital. To understand the factors which will determine the future of the Vietnamese revolution after the seizure of power, we must recognize how, in the course of such a struggle, a population and its militants become conscious of their rights and their duties, their strength and their responsibility.
This process has been all the more powerful in Vietnam because the duration and intensity of struggle have been without comparison with what took place in China or Cuba and because the revolution has already spread beyond the Vietnamese frontiers to Cambodia and Laos. Only the physical exhaustion of the Vietnamese people could threaten this major gain of the revolution; and the science of people's war seems to exclude this possibility today, despite the scale of the attempt at genocide perpetrated by the USA.
But that is perhaps not the most important consideration. Much depends on the future evolution of the international situation: whether a new revolutionary front is opened in the world, which would loosen imperialism’s grip; whether the Asian revolution experiences new developments and the dependence of Vietnam on the bureaucratized workers’ states is lessened; whether the forces of world revolution are strengthened and the Vietnamese revolution can be supported by a more consistent revolutionary Marxist left. Certainly, if the Vietnamese revolution remains isolated, too far in advance of the world revolution, the tendencies to bureaucratization will sooner or later become irreversible. Moreover, this day would come all the quicker insofar as the Vietnamese [revolution failed to establish a ‘socialist democracy’]. But although it is not so probable, because of the crisis of leadership of the revolutionary movement, that a qualitative leap forward of the world revolution will take place in the immediate future, nothing on the other hand shows that we are about to enter a phase of prolonged stagnation of struggle. Imperialism’s inability to stabilize its power in the ‘under-developed’ countries in a lasting way, the worsening crisis of the Stalinist movement throughout the world, the new rise of workers’ struggles in Western Europe—all these clearly show that we are on the eve of a new intensification of the class struggle on an international scale. Indochina will remain for some time an ‘advanced detachment of the world proletariat’; but, beyond the immediate effects of the policy of peaceful coexistence carried out by Russia and China, it is upon this new intensification of struggle that the Vietnamese revolution must count.
Trotskyist militants are neither neutral nor passive in this situation. Solidarity actions now being carried out tend to create the best international conditions not only for victory against imperialism, but also for the future development of the Indochinese workers’ states. The practical criticism that we make of the Soviet and Chinese leaderships’ policy of peaceful coexistence helps, not just to loosen the vice of present diplomatic pressures, but also to weaken the pressure that international Stalinism will [bring] tomorrow upon the Indochinese peoples.
Moreover, by our actions we do not merely act on the objective framework in which the Vietnamese and Indochinese revolutions develop, thus fulfilling the first of our international duties, to the extent that our forces allow. We also give a practical demonstration of the programmatic orientations that we think important. The development of support activity as a mass activity allows us both to demonstrate what our political conception of [workers’ democracy is—that] the only choice is not between an international centralism within the fold of China or the USSR and some kind of ‘left polycentrism’—and to deepen our concrete critique [of Stalinism, and by linking our solidarity to concrete] struggles throughout the world, begin to show in concrete terms what we mean by our conception of workers’ democracy [and] on the differences of orientation which divide us from the [Stalinist leaderships, bringing the ideological] discussion to a practical confrontation of experience.
It is because we hold the Indochinese revolutionaries in very high esteem, because we are conscious of the special role that the Indochinese and Vietnamese revolutions have played and will play in the world, because we are conscious of the urgent internationalist duties which commit every anti-imperialist militant to the defence of these revolutions, because we recognize the weight that the international situation brings to bear—and will continue to bring to bear—on their victory and their future, because we are deeply convinced that their victory will also be ours and that their difficulties are also ours, that we call for the strengthening of political and militant solidarity with the Indochinese revolution until final victory!
* This article was originally published as the final three chapters of Pierre Rousset's book Le parti communiste vietnamien, Maspéro 1973. Completed in November 1972, the book was thus written prior to the ‘ceasefire’ agreements and the rundown of the great US military intervention in Vietnam. Subsequently, Rousset's analysis has provoked a far-ranging discussion within the Fourth International, notably in International Socialist [Review], July/August 1973 and April 1974.
¹ Le Chau, Le Viet-Nam socialiste, une économie de transition [illegible].
² Vu Can, ‘Du FNL au GRP’, Études Vietnamiennes No 23.
³ C. Fourniau, ‘Les traditions de lutte nationale au Vietnam: l’insurrection des lettrés’, in Tradition et révolution au Vietnam, pp. 94-5.
⁴ Nguyen Xuan Lai, ‘L’agriculture nord-vietnamienne’, Partisans No 40, January-February 1968, p. 40.
⁵ Vo Nguyen Giap, Guerre du peuple, armée du peuple, Maspéro 1967, p. 91.
⁶ Le Duan, ‘La révolution vietnamienne à la lumière du marxisme-léninisme’, Partisans No 40, January-February 1968, p. 13.
⁷ Giap, Le peuple du Sud-Vietnam..., Hanoi 1965, pp. 67-8. On 23 January 1968, North Korean naval forces captured a US spy ship, the Pueblo, fitted with ultra-modern [electronic equipment]. The Korean government stated that it intended to put the crew on trial. According to good imperialist ‘logic’, the American government should have reacted very sharply. But nothing happened. ‘The necessary forces to lead [an attack] (fighters and bombers, fresh troops, etc.) [were] not available in sufficient numbers. Even in the USA itself, the number of [aircraft was] reduced below the [minimum deemed necessary for security]. Everything [illegible]... (chapter 16).
⁸ See Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh, Editions du Seuil, and [P.] Rageau, Ho Chi Minh, Editions universitaires.
⁹ Brève histoire du PTV, Hanoi 1970, p. 58.
¹⁰ Ho Chi Minh, Écrits (1920-69), Hanoi 1971, p. 57.
¹¹ Le Chau, op. cit., pp. 141-7.
¹² Brève histoire du PTV, op. cit., pp. 128-9.
¹³ Truong Chinh, Sur la voie tracée par Karl Marx, Hanoi 1969, p. 50.
¹⁷ Quoted in Le Courrier du Vietnam No 4, (new series), September 1972.
¹⁸ Ho Chi Minh, op. cit., p. 372.
¹⁹ Nguyen Khac Vien, ‘Confucianisme et marxisme au Vietnam’, in Tradition et révolution au Vietnam, pp. 35-6.