Trotskyism in Vietnam


Trotskyism in Vietnam was represented by those who, in left opposition to the Indochinese Communist Party of Nguyen Ai Quoc, identified with the call by Leon Trotsky to re-found "vanguard parties of proletariat" on principles of "proletarian internationalism" and of "permanent revolution". Active in the 1930s in organising the Saigon waterfront, industry and transport, Trotskyists presented a significant challenge to the Moscow-aligned party in Cochinchina. Following the September 1945 Saigon uprising against the restoration of the French, Vietnamese Trotskyists were systematically hunted down and eliminated by both the French Sûreté and the Communist-front Viet Minh.

The Emergence of Left Opposition

An identifiable Trotskyist tendency among Vietnamese revolutionary circles emerges first in Paris among the student youth of the Annamite Independence Party. Following the bloody suppression of the Yên Bái mutiny, their leader Tạ Thu Thâu expressed their view of the revolution in Indochina in the pages of the Left Opposition La Verité. The revolution would not follow the precedent the Third International had set in supporting the Kuomintang in China. A commitment to a broad nationalist front would betray the revolutionary interests of the anti-colonial struggle. For the colonised the choice was no longer between independence and slavery, but between socialism and nationalism. As "the social enemy of imperialism." the worker and peasant masses would free themselves from oppression under the French overseer only through their own organised action. "Independence is inseparable from proletarian revolution."
For organising protests against the execution of Yên Bái insurgent leaders, in May 1930 Tạ Thu Thâu and eighteen of his compatriots were arrested and deported back to Cochinchina.
In Saigon the deportees found several groups of militants open to the theses of Left Opposition, some within the PCI. In November 1931 dissidents emerging from within the Party formed the October Left Opposition around the clandestine journal Thang Muoi. These included Dao Hung Long who, protesting a leadership of "Moscow trainees," months before had formed the Communist League, the Party's first internal opposition group, and Hồ Hữu Tường. Once considered "the theoretician of the Vietnamese contingent in Moscow," Tường was calling for a new "mass-based" party arising directly "out of the struggle of the real struggle of the proletariat of the cities and countryside."
But in the presence of "the real struggle of the proletariat in the cities and countryside"--in Saigon-Cholon strikes and protests by all sectors of labour and a peasant jacquerie in the surrounding districts--the repression was such that for all factions organisational activity proved near impossible. Between 1930 and the end of 1932, more than 12,000 political prisoners were taken in Cochinchina, of whom 7,000 were sent to the penal colonies. The structures of the Party and of the Left Opposition alike were shattered.

''The Struggle'' and the ''Internationalist League''

In 1933, several factional representatives, including Tạ Thu Thâu, Nguyễn Văn Tạo of the PCI and the anarchist Trinh Hung Ngau, regrouped around charismatic figure of Nguyễn An Ninh, and took the initiative of legally opposing the colonial regime in the Saigon municipal elections of April-May 1933. They put forward a common "Workers's List" and briefly published a newspaper, La Lutte to rally support for it. In spite of the restricted franchise, two of this Struggle group were elected, the independent Tran Van Thach and Nguyễn Văn Tạo.
In 1934 the La Lutte the collaboration was revived on the basis of a formal Party-Oppositionist entente: "struggle oriented against the colonial power and its constitutionalist allies, support of the demands of workers and peasants without regard to which of the two groups they were affiliated with, diffusion of classic Marxist thought, rejection of all attacks against the USSR and against either current." In the March 1935 Cochinchina Colonial Council election candidates supported by La Lutte obtained 17% of the votes, although none were elected. Two months later in the Saigon municipal elections four of six candidates on a joint "Workers's Slate," including Tạ Thu Thâu and Nguyễn Văn Tạo, were elected, although only Tran Van Thach as the ostensible non-communist was allowed his seat.
Unwilling to enter into a further accommodation with the "Stalinists, " the October Group of Hồ Hữu Tường and of Ngô Văn formed the core of the League of Internationalist Communists for the Construction of the Fourth International. The League maintained a "a complete system of clandestine and legal publications" including its own its own weekly “organ of proletarian defence and Marxist combat,” Le Militant, topical pamphlets in both French and Vietnamese and an agitational bulletin, Thay Tho.. After Le Militant was suppressed, from January 1939 the League/the Octobrists began clandestinely publishing Tia Sang.
The title, The Spark, may have been a reference to Tia Sang group in Hanoi, and suggests an organisational connection. In 1937-38, this northern group had put out a weekly, Thoi Dam, with a call to workers and peasants to set up "unified people's committees in the struggle for rice, freedom and democracy.". Octobrists are reported to have been active in labour organising in Hanoi, Haiphong and Vinh.
In Saigon, with a renewed upsurge culminating in the summer of 1937 in general dock and transport strikes, the tide on the left seemed to be running in favour of the Trotskyists. Judging by the frequency of the warnings in the clandestine Communist press against Trotskyism the influence of the oppositionists in the organised unrest was "considerable" if not "preponderant."
Tạ Thu Thâu and Nguyễn Văn Tạo came together for the last time in the April 1937 city council elections, both being elected. Together with the lengthening shadow of the Moscow Trials, growing disagreement over the new PCF-supported Popular Front government in France ensured a split..
The leftward shift in the French national Assembly in Thâu's view had not brought meaningful change. He and his comrades continued to be arrested during labour strikes, and preparations for a popular congress in response to the government's promise of colonial consultation had been suppressed. Colonial Minister Marius Moutet, a Socialist commented that he had sought "a wide consultation with all elements of the popular ," but with "Trotskyist-Communists intervening in the villages to menace and intimidate the peasant part of the population, taking all authority from the public officials," the necessary "formula" had not been found.
Thâu's motion attacking the Popular Front for betraying the promises of reforms in the colonies was rejected by the PCI faction and in June 1937 the Stalinists withdrew from La Lutte

The ''Workers'' vs. the ''Democratic'' Platform

In April 1939, together with the Octobrists, the now wholly Trotskyist La Lutte group celebrated what a reviewer of Ngô Văn's later account describes 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 Tạ Thu Thâu, triumphed over both the Communist Party's Democratic Front and the "bourgeois" Constitutionalists with fully 80 per cent of the vote.
Revolutionary theory had not been the issue for the income-tax-payer electorate. Rather it had been the colonial defence levy that the PCI, in the spirit of Franco-Soviet accord, had felt obliged to support. Nonetheless the contest illustrated the ideological gulf between the Party and the left opposition. The Workers and Peasants platform had been revolutionary and reflected the analysis Tạ Thu Thâu had outlined in La Verité. The "real, organic liaison between the indigenous bourgeoisie and French imperialism" was such that the organisation of "the proletarian and peasant masses" was the only force capable of liberating the country. The question of independence was "bound up with that of the proletarian socialist revolution."
The Democratic platform, with its calls for national unity and relatively modest demands for constitutional change, was presented by a party whose leading cadres "emphasised much more the exterior development of capitalism", "used the word 'imperialism' much more often in their discussions," talked about “nonequivalent exchange,” and of "the continuing feudal nature of Vietnamese society." It was a party for whom the immediate object of anti-colonial struggle was national, not socialist.
At the same time, the Democratic platform had represented a party with a much greater national organisation and presence. The Trotskyists were concentrated in industrial and commercial centres, and in French direct-rule Cochinchina, where it possible to have a keener sense of proximities to France..
The greater resilience of the PCI--their ability to regroup and rebuild in the face of repression--was due to its organisation in the countryside and across Annam and Tonkin in the North. In these "protectorates" the French, under the titular authority of the Bảo Đại had retained traditional elements of rural administration. Their rule had the calculated appearance of being external to a still extant indigenous culture, and allowed greater play to the idea of a national society that might be mobilised against the foreign overseer.
Such as it was, the political opening against the Communist Party closed with the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939. Moscow ordered a return to direct confrontation with the French. In Cochinchina the Party obliged with a disastrous peasant revolt.
Belatedly, the Luttuers, then numbering then perhaps 3000, and the smaller number of Octobrists united as the official section of the newly constituted Fourth International. They formed the International Communist League, or less formally as The Fourth Internationalist Party. But the French law of September 26, 1939, which legally dissolved the French Communist Party, was applied in Indochina to Stalinists and Trotskyists aiike. The Indochinese Communist Party and the Fourth Internationalists were driven underground for the duration of the war.

The North and the Hongai-Camphai Commune

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. There was little intimacy with developments to the north where, in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh and his a new Front for the Independence of Vietnam, the Viet Minh, proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The lack of connection was made "painfully clear" when Ngô Văn and his comrades 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 wages for all types of work, whether manual or intellectual. Later they were to learn that, after three months of revolutionary autonomy, the commune had been forcibly integrated into "the military-police structure" of the new republic.
Tạ Thu Thau had travelled to the North with a small band in April 1945. They were introduced to clandestine meetings of mine workers and peasants by a "fraternal group" publishing the bulletin in Hanoi Chien Dau. Now styling themselves the Socialist Workers Party of Northern Vietnam, their call, as in the South, was for workers' control, land redistribution and for armed resistance to a return of the French. Whether they, or other Trotskyist groups, played any role in the Hongai-Camphai events is unclear. On Ho Chi Minh's orders they were already being rounded up and executed.
Hunted and pursued south by the Viet Minh, Tạ Thu Thâu was captured in early September at Quang Ngai. A year later in Paris, the French socialist Daniel Guerin recalls that when he asked Ho Chi Minh about Tạ Thu Thâu's fate, Ho replied, "with unfeigned emotion,“ that "'Thâu was a great patriot and we mourn him." But he then added, "in a steady voice, 'all those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.'”

The September 1945 Saigon Uprising

On August 24 the Viet Minh declared a provisional administration in Saigon. When, for the declared purpose of disarming the Japanese, the Viet-Minh accommodated the landing and strategic positioning of their wartime "democratic allies", the British, rival political groups turned out in force. The brutality of a French restoration, under the protection of British guns, triggered a general uprising on September 23.
Under the slogan "Land to the Peasants! Factories to the workers!," the ICL called on the population to arm themselves and organise in councils. To co-ordinate these efforts the Internationalists established a Popular Revolutionary Committee, an "embryonic soviet that placed its stamp upon the region of Saigon-Cholon, Gia-dinh and Bien-Hoa." Delegates issued "a declaration in which they affirmed their independence from the political parties and resolutely condemned any attempt to restrict the autonomy of the decisions taken by workers and peasants."
With other League comrades, Ngô Văn joined in arms with streetcar workers. In the "internationalist spirit of the League," the 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." But the militias were hit hard by the French. Ngô Văn records two hundred alone being massacred, October 3rd, at the Thi Nghe bridge.
As they fell back into he countryside, they and other independent formations were caught in the crossfire as the Viet-Minh returned to surround the city.

Vietnamese Trotskyism in Exile

Some may have made a different choice. Renouncing his revolutionary principles, Hồ Hữu Tường took refuge with the French Bảo Đại puppet government ). But "harassed by the Sûreté in the city and denied refuge in a countryside dominated by the two terrors, the French and the Viet-Minh," most survivors appear to be those who, like Ngô Văn, sought exile in France.
In 1946, as many as 500 exiles were reported to be members of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste de Vietnam. They published a paper titled, in the tradition of La Lutte, Tranh Dau.
In what, presumably, was a still smaller exile publication, Thieng Tho, Ngô Văn wrote an opinion piece under the name Dong Vu "Prolétaires et paysans, retournez vos fusils!" . 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. But this clearly, was a minority position.
In line with continued defence of the Soviet Union by Trotskyists internationally as a " workers' state," Vietnamese Trotskyists muted their criticism of the Viet Minh regime. The slogan, adopted as Ngô Văn noted "despite the assassination of almost all their comrades in Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh's hired thugs," was "Defend the government of Ho Chi Minh against the attacks of imperialism."
As the Indochinese war intensified in the late 1940s, the French government began massive deportations of Vietnamese, including about three-quarters of the Trotskyists. The latter "simply disappeared after their return to Vietnam, presumably through capitulation to the Viet Minh Stalinists or liquidation by either the Stalinists or the French." By 1951-52 there were only about 70 Vietnamese ostensible Trotskyists left in France. La Lutte and League supporters combined in the Bolshevik-Leninist Group of Vietnam. This continued to exist, at least in some form, until as late as 1974.
By the early 1980s the history of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement, which in the 1930s may been the most important expression of left opposition in Asia, had been "all but forgotten by the Trotskyists themselves." Robert Alexander suggests two reasons for this.
First, there was "the very thoroughness of the Stalinist extermination of the Trotskyist leadership in Vietnam." This "left no outstanding figure of the movement alive to tell about it outside the country, and to continue to be active in one or another faction of the international Trotskyist movement." Ngô Văn is probably the most commonly cited witness to the story. But Văn's memoirs are prefaced with a repudiation of "Bolshevism-Leninism-Trotskyism." In France, experiences shared with refugees from Spanish Civil War, anarchists and veterans of the POUM, "permanently distanced" Văn from the politics of "so-called 'workers' parties."
The second reason, however, is precisely that which Ngô Văn underscored in his Thieng Tho article. It is what Robert Alexander recounts as "the passion, effort and attention paid by Trotskyists of virtually all countries and all factions to support of the Stalinist side during the long and cruel Vietnam War, which in one form or another went on for thirty years, from 1945 to 1975. With such strong commitment to the 'degenerated workers state' of Ho Chi Minh and his successors any memories of what he had done to fellow Trotskyists had to be at least a source of discomfort if not outright embarrassment to the world Trotskyist movement."

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