Flag of the Struggle Group.
Trotskyism in Vietnam was represented by those who, in left opposition to the Indochinese Communist Party (PCI) of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), 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 (May and June issues, 1930). 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 ("Sun Yat-sen
ism") 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 (Ta Doi Lap Thang Moui) around the clandestine journal Thang Muoi
(October). These included Dao Hung Long (alias Anh Gia ) who,
protesting a leadership of "Moscow trainees," months before had formed
the Communist League (Lien Minh Cong San Doan), 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 [later to be labour minister in Hanoi] 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 (in French to get
around the political restrictions on Vietnamese), La Lutte
(The Struggle) to rally support for it. In spite of the restricted
franchise, two of this Struggle group were elected (although denied
their seats), the independent (later Trotskyist) 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, [and] 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
(the chronicler of the Trotskyist struggle in later exile) formed the
core of the League of Internationalist Communists for the Construction
of the Fourth International (Chanh Doan Cong San Quoc Te Chu Nghia--Phai Tan Thanh De Tu Quoc). 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 (this carried Lenin's Testament with its warnings and Stalin, and Trotsky's polemics against the Popular Front), topical pamphlets in both French and Vietnamese (including Ngô Văn's denunciation of the Moscow Trials) and an agitational bulletin, Thay Tho (Wage and Salary Workers). After Le Militant was suppressed, from January 1939 the League/the Octobrists began clandestinely publishing Tia Sang (The Spark).
The title, The Spark, may have been a reference to Tia Sang (the Spark) group in Hanoi, and suggests an organisational connection. In 1937-38, this northern group had put out a weekly, Thoi Dam
(Chronicles), 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 (obliging the Party
loyalists to denounce their erstwhile colleagues as "the twin brothers
of fascism"), 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
[will]," 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 (calls for workers control and radical land
re-distribution) 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. (Ho Huu Thuong's vision was of a revolutionary
general strike coordinated with the French proletariat).
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 (central Vietnam) 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 (Vietnam), or less formally as The Fourth Internationalist Party (Trang Cau De Tu Dang).
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 (famine-stricken) 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 (Combat). Now styling themselves the Socialist Workers Party of Northern Vietnam (Dang Tho Thuyen Xa Hoi Viet Bac),
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 (renamed
by the Viet Minh "Workers for National Salvation"). 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 (armed groups of independent nationalists and of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao syncretic sects) 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 (later he became a deputy in the "farcical 'opposition'"
under the military regime of Nguyen Van Thieu)).
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 (GCI — Internationalist Communist Group of Vietnam). They published a paper titled, in the tradition of La Lutte, Tranh Dau (Struggle).
In what, presumably, was a still smaller exile publication, Thieng Tho
(Workers' Voice), Ngô Văn wrote an opinion piece under the name Dong Vu
(October 30, 1951) "Prolétaires et paysans, retournez vos fusils!"
[Workers and Peasants, Turn Your Guns in the Other Direction!]. 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 "(degenerated) 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 (BLGV). 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 (possibly greater in its scope than in China and
in advance of its emergence in India), 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 (The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), "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 (and in his later memorials for fallen friends and comrades).
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."
