Ngo Van


Ngô Văn Xuyết, alias Ngô Văn was a Vietnamese revolutionary who chronicled labour and peasant insurrections caught "in the crossfire" between the French and the Indochinese Communist Party of Nguyễn Ái Quốc. As a Trotskyist militant in the 1930s, Ngô Văn helped organise Saigon's waterfront and factories in defiance of the Party's "Moscow line" which sought to engage indigenous employers and landowners in a nationalist front and the French in an "anti-fascist", anti-Japanese, alliance. When, after 1945, further challenges to the Party met with a policy of targeted assassination, Ngô Văn went into exile. In Paris experiences shared with anarchist and Poumista refugees from the Spanish Civil War suggested "
new radical perspectives." Drawn into the Council Communist circles of Maximilien Rubel and Henri Simon, Ngô Văn "permanently distanced" himself from the model of "the so-called workers's party."

Trotskyist militant, Saigon 1927-1940

Ngô Văn left his village at the age of 14 to work in a metallurgical works in Saigon. He soon became involved in labour strikes and in demonstrations in support of freedom of assembly, of the press, and of education. A high-school educated workmate provided him introduction to French literature, to the journalism of Nguyen An Ninh, and, eventually, to Ho Huu Tuong. Once considered "the theoretician of the Vietnamese contingent in Moscow," Ho Huu Tuong had become a leading light in the Left-Opposition group Thang Muoi. Opposed to the general line of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and in particular to the nationalist-front policy of Nguyễn Ái Quốc, Thang Muoi called on activists to "bond" with rank-and-file urban workers and build a "mass-based" party.
In 1936 Ngô Văn parted with comrades willing to continue cooperation with "Stalinists" around the weekly, La Lutte and in the presentation of a common "Workers' List" in Saigon municipal, and Cochinchina council, elections. With Ho Huu Tuong he joined the League of Internationalist Communists for the Construction of the Fourth International. This produced a weekly Le Militant and an agitational bulletin, Thay Tho.
Committed to the notorious Maison Centrale in Saigon, Ngô Văn was disturbed by the case of Nguyen Trung Nguyet, the longest serving female prisoner. As understood by Van, Nguyet had been implicated in the Party's execution of a young comrade. His "crime" was a love affair that compromised "total devotion to the revolution." For Văn it was an illustration of "how readily a party of professional revolutionaries can end up imposing authoritarian control over every aspect of life."
Between arrests, Ngô Văn engaged in support of the major dock and railway strikes of 1937. Judging by the frequency of the warnings in the clandestine Communist press against Trotskyism the influence of the oppositionists in the labour unrest was "considerable" if not "preponderant." He also produced pamphlets in Vietnamese condemning the Moscow trials and exploring the dynamics of syndicalism.
In April 1939 he was back out on the streets, able to celebrate what a later reviewer of his history described as "the only instance prior to 1945 in which the politics of 'permanent revolution' oriented to worker and peasant opposition to colonialism won out, however ephemerally, against Stalinist 'stage theory' in a public arena." In elections to the colonial Cochinchina Council a "United Workers and Peasants" slate, led by Ta Thu Thau of the now wholly Trotskyist La Lutte grouping, triumphed alike over the Communist Party's Democratic Front and the "bourgeois" Constitutionalists. As understood by Van, however, the partisans of the Fourth International succeeded at the ballot box for reasons relatively mundane. The election had been primarily a tax protest, a rejection of the new French Indochina defence levy that the Communist Party, in the spirit of Franco-Soviet accord, had felt obliged to support. Governor General Brévié indeed had praise for the defeated the Stalinists who, in contrast to the Trotskyists, "understood that the interests of the Annamese masses bring them closer to France."
The political opening against the Communist Party, such as it was, closed with the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939. Moscow ordered a return to direct confrontation with the French. The Party obliged, triggering a peasant revolt in south to whose bloody suppression Ngô Văn, having been exiled to the Mekong Delta, was witness.

The September 1945 Saigon Uprising

Opportunity for open political struggle returned with the formal surrender of the occupying Japanese in August 1945. But events then moved rapidly to demonstrate the Trotskyists' relative isolation in Saigon. Văn and his comrades had little intimacy with developments to the north where, in Hanoi, on September 2, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The lack of connection was made "painfully clear" when they found they had "no way of finding out what was happening" following reports that in the Hongai-Camphai coal region north of Haiphong 30,000 workers had elected councils to run mines, public services and transport, and were applying the principle of equal pay..
In Saigon itself, the initiative lay with the Communist-front Viet-Minh. Only when, for the declared purpose of disarming the Japanese, the Viet-Minh accommodated the landing and strategic positioning of British troops, did rival political forces turn out in force. The brutality of a French restoration, under the protection of British guns, triggered a general uprising.
Under the slogan "Land to the Peasants! Factories to the workers!," Ngô Văn and his comrades joined residents in popular councils and in a "Workers' Militia." In the "internationalist spirit of the League," streetcar workers had broken with their union, General Confederation of Labour. Refusing the yellow star of the Viet-Minh, they mustered under the unadorned red flag "of their own class emancipation." Like other independent formations, these were soon caught in the crossfire as the Viet-Minh returned to engage the French.
As Ngô Văn's Militia group fell back from the city, they reached out to local peasants: "we explained to them that we were fighting not only to 'drive out the French' but also to get rid of the indigenous landlords, to end the forced labour in the rice fields, and to liberate the coolies." But for a timely rescue, Ngô Văn, captured on reconnaissance, would likely have been executed by Viet-Minh alongside a surveyor condemned for having helped peasants divide expropriated land.
"Harassed by the Sûreté in the city and denied refuge in a countryside dominated by the two terrors, the French and the Viet-Minh," and suffering from tuberculosis, in the spring of 1948 Ngô Văn took the decision to board a merchant ship bound for Marseilles.

"New radical perspectives" from exile

In France, Ngô Văn found "new allies in the factories and elsewhere, among French people, colonised people, and refugees from the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939--anarchists and Poumistas who had gone through a parallel experience to ours. In Vietnam, as in Spain, we had been engaged in a simultaneous battle on two fronts: against a reactionary power and against a Stalinist party struggling for power."
To these "encounters" Ngô Văn credits "new radical perspectives." These "permanently distanced" him from "Bolshevism-Leninism-Trotskyism." Once in power "so-called 'workers' parties'" form "the nucleus of a new ruling class and bring about nothing more than a new system of exploitation."
Ngô Văn's first political home in France was the Union Ouvrière Internationale . Having split with the Trotskyist Parti Communist Internationale over their "defence of the USSR" as a "degenerated workers’ state," the UOI supported Văn in taking issue with his exile community. "Despite the assassination of almost all their comrades in Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh's hired thugs," the Vietnamese Trotskyists had adopted the slogan "Defend the government of Ho Chi Minh against the attacks of imperialism"
In "Prolétaires et paysans, retournez vos fusils!" , an opinion piece appearing under the name Dong Vu in the Trotskyist paper Tieng Tho , Ngô Văn argued that if Ho Chi Minh won out over the French-puppet Bảo Đại government, workers and peasants would simply have changed masters. Those with guns in their hands should fight for their own emancipation, following the example of the Russian workers, peasants and soldiers who formed soviets in 1917, or the German worker's and soldiers' councils of 1918-1919.
In 1952 Ngô Văn and his partner Sophie Moen joined a less formal group around the "marxologist" Maximilien Rubel. Rubel inspired a re-reading of Marx as a "theoretician of anarchism". He also introduced Văn to other of Marx's contemporaries, such as Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, who had espoused "new sets of values, new reasons for living, new norms for acting, a new ethic." Văn recalled that Nietzsche had strongly influenced Nguyen An Ninh, the radical journalist and publicist whose celebrity had first awakened his own political consciousness in the late 1920s.
In 1958 Ngô Văn's study and discussion circle—which later adopted the name Council Communist Group—began to cooperate closely with the Henri Simon in the ICO. The project sought to bring together workers in different companies who "no longer had any confidence in the traditional working-class organisations." A distinct nucleus, Regroupement Interenterprises, was set up, and Văn was one of those involved. The meetings organised were small, usually between 10 and 20, but they slowly began to grow in the run-up to 1968.

Paris, May 1968

In a wave of such labour actions across France, in May 1968 Ngô Văn joined in the occupation of his workplace, the Jeumont-Schneider factory in electrical engineering plant in Paris. From the outset he noted that CGT union officials sought to keep the workers isolated within the factory. They turned away students and other curious visitors. When the officials insisted that the red flag workers had mounted on the gate be paired with the tricolour, Van took it as a signal that he would, again, be witness to a sacrifice of class interests to national party-political ambition. It was a concern he believed was borne out by the unions' acceptance of relatively minor concessions in the national Grenelle Agreements.
Văn acknowledges, however, that in his factory the discussion of more radical demands was desultory at best. Worker self-management was mentioned but his colleagues "thought themselves incapable of carrying out such a task effectively." The nature of the modern economy was such that democratic management presented "a worldwide problem," not something they believed "could not be carried out within an individual factory, or even within a single country." In general "the workers had little to say."

Writing and Reflections

Ngô Văn retired in 1978. He devoted his remaining years to researching and relaying the history of popular struggle in Vietnam, reflecting upon his own experience, and memorialising his fallen friends and comrades.
He covered the years of his own engagement both in a substantial history, Việt Nam 1920-1945, révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale , and in a personal memoir, Au pays de la cloche fêlée : Tribulations d'un cochinchinois à l'époque coloniale . Together with notes for a second autobiographical volume, this is published in English as In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary.
Le joueur de flute et l'oncle Ho - Vietnam 1945-2005 covers the decades since his exile. It is the story of the Communist Party's consolidation of power in "the long war" and, with reference to strikes and other signs of revolt, of the opening of the new economy to foreign capital.
Ngô Văn's last completed work, written in 2004 when he was 91 years old, was an introduction to the history of peasant revolts in China, with special emphasis on their Taoist origins and utopian and libertarian inspirations. With Hélène Fleury he also brought out a collection of Vietnamese folk tales for children.
In 1998 for the first time since 1948, Ngô Văn was able to visit his homeland. But for all the evidence he would have witnessed of a preceding half century of social and economic change, the now Socialist Republic of Vietnam remained for Ngô Văn, first and foremost, a society in which producers "still do not enjoy collective ownership of the means of production, nor time for reflection, nor the possibility of making their own decisions, nor means of expression." Asked why he so "stubbornly" persisted in bearing witness to past history, Văn replied "Because the world hasn't changed."