The Vietnamese Revolution and the Fourth International

[p004] The Vietnamese Revolution and the Fourth International AFTER TWO DECADES of valiant sacrifice and ruthless struggle the Vietnamese people, led by Ho Chi Minh, today stand on the threshold of what certainly promises to be one of the most outstanding and crucial victories of the anti- imperialist and socialist revolution. No Marxist worthy of the name can refuse to support unreservedly the Vietnamese people in securing this well-deserved and unprecedented triumph of arms. “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished’ and fought for. Members and supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International in par- ticular can take a special and justifiable pride in the achievements of the Vietnamese resist- ance and the North Vietnamese Army since the sections of the International Committee were —and are—in the forefront of all those who fight uncompromisingly for the complete and un- conditional independence and victory of the Vietnamese people and the utter defeat of US imperialism. In contrast to the Stalinists and their revision- ist aliies in the United Secretariat as well as the State Capitalist groups, the international Trotskyist movement does not hesitate to ad- vance the slogan ‘Victory to the Vietnamese workers and peasants!’ because such a victory will constitute an irreparable blow to the whole of world Imperialism and will thus facilitate the construction of the Fourth International and the overthrow of Imperialism in its metropolitan centres. Vietnam today demonstrates clearly and tan- gibly the utter fallacy of the revisionist method and perspective. Their division of the capitalist world into independent and unrelated sectors and their attempts to impose factitious ‘epi- centres’ of struggle based solely on the national liberation movements in the colonial countries is being revealed, more and more as a criminal evasion of responsibility for revolutionary leader- ship in the advanced countries. What is worse, such a schema is a distortion of the unity and interdependence of all sectors of world economy as well as a denial of the universality of the crisis of world imperialism. It is but a slightly refurbished version of the epigone theory of ‘Socialism in a single country’ which constitutes the greatest obstacle to the political advance of the working class. That is why both Stalinism and revisionism collide headlong with the real historic interests of the Vietnamese and European workers at a time like this. And that, incidentally, is the reason for the crisis and decline of the revisionist anti-war movement in the United States and in Europe as we saw recently in the collapse of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, an offshoot of the Russell War Crimes Tribunal. Of course the revisionists today—after months of sterile pacifistic agitation—unashamedly flaunt NLF badges and carry Vietnamese flags around the streets and they will on occasion even shout ‘Victory to the NLF’. This however should not -blind us to their inherent opportunism and un- conscionable treachery to the working class. If today they jump on the Vietnam bandwagon and frighten all Bohemia with their revolution- ary slogans it is only because they wish to pre- vent workers in the West from learning and generalizing the real lessons of the Vietnam Re- volution; because they hope to drown the voice of revolutionary Marxism in an orgy of pacifistic moralizing and sentimental slobbering. But they shall not pass. Trotskyists must consider it their revolution- ary duty to expose, to combat and to hurl back and destroy the malicious distortions of Marxism and the worthless fallacies put out by these 1

[p005] insidious agencies of imperialism, whether they come from Moscow, Havana or Brussels. One of the most dangerous and spurious ‘theories’ now being circulated by this rotten alliance is the thesis of Havana: that Vietnam and Cuba prove the validity of armed struggle and the irrelevance of a scientific theory of class struggle and a party based on such a theory. This has rapidly become the stock-in-trade, the ultimate rationalization of every petty- bourgeois adventurer and intellectual carpet- bagger in Western Europe. The Robin Black- burns, the Millibands, the Hobsbawms, the Mandels and even the Monty Johnsons not to mention an entire regiment of fellow travellers who don’t know a flat trajectory from a safety catch have all discovered the historic importance of ‘armed struggle’. Thanks to Fidel Castro they have discovered the light after groping in the dark for so many years! For these worshippers of the fait accompli the ‘guerrilleros’, the elite in the jungle, the ‘dirty dozen’ of the Sierra, have displaced the non-revolutionary proletariat (a la Franz Fanon) - as the most revolutionary force in the world, as the protagonist of history. A truly remarkable discovery! There has been nothing like it since the Russian Narodniks! Vietnam however is a powerful and irrefutable example of something totally different and com- pletely opposed to this specious theorizing. It demonstrates the transcendental power and re- siience of a protracted people’s war led and organized by a party based on the working class and the poor peasantry and inspired by the example of the October Revolution. No other movement, no other kind of war could have survived twenty years of bitter and bloody struggle against an enemy whose fire- power and logistics was vastly superior to that of the Vietnamese. In this sense there is no comparison between the Cuban rebellion of 1959 and the titanic struggle going on in Vietnam. Vietnam is the revolution in permanence: Cuba is the revolution aborted. That is why, right up to the moment of writing, US imperialism continues to maintain a strategic foothold in Guantanamo naval base— in the so-called free territory of Cuba—with impunity while in Vietnam every US base is under aitack from the NLF. It is indeed a revealing contrast. For those, like Mandel, who place armed struggle above party and programme Guan- tanamo should prove an exciting paradox and a real test of their skill at apologetics. The leadership of the Vietnam Communist Party, as anyone who has bothered to read the history of the party knows, did not begin its revolutionary activities by accumulating arsenals of weapons, even though they understood the value of arms. On the contrary they placed their greatest reliance on the doubly exploited work- ers and dispossessed peasants of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China whom they rigorously indoc- trinated and trained for political struggle in the early thirties. Even today ideas and politics come first and foremost as a recent capitalist survey of the NLF attests: . Mao did not conceive of guerrilla operations as an independent form of warfare but simply as one aspect of the revolutionary struggle. There were, he said, three types of political activities: those toward the enemy (largely efforts of proselyte), those toward the people (agit-prop work), and those toward the guerrilla forces and supporters (organizational and in- doctrinational). Within this framework came his three stages of revolutionary warfare. It can be argued that Giap outlined five stages rather than three, or that he used the three stages but pre- ceded them with two preliminary ones. In the first, which might be called the psychological warfare stage, a base is established among the people, using propaganda and political warfare; discontent among the people is converted into channelled activity; cells are formed; most activity is on the individual level and of course is clandestine. In the second preparatory phase, which might be called the small-unit phase, comes the basic organizational work: the forma- tion of vertical and horizontal associations and Fourth International, February 1968

[p006] the creation of armed propaganda guerrilla companies, agit-prop teams with guns who fight only to defend themselves and whose chief tasks are organization and agit-prop work; Giap said these companies prepared the ground, and only when their work was well done could the three stages actually begin. Basically developmental, the three stages are categories expressed mainly in offence-defence, static- dynamic, military-political terms with respect to both the revolutionary and his enemy.* Without a party, without centralized organi- zation and firm discipline, without a programme and policy to meet the needs of the masses and without the organs of popular power and control there could be no protracted war. Only defeat and extermination. It is indisputably true to say that, on the basis of the Vietnam experience, guns combined with the courage and endurance of individual guer- rillas would have meant little or nothing if Ho Chi Minh and the other leaders were unable to analyse the principal and secondary contradic- tions within Vietnam as well as between Viet- nam and imperialism and on that basis outline a strategy for the conquest of power. As Lenin once wrote: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’. The idea of the revolutionary party was not Ho Chi Minh’s creation. It was derived from the example of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party after it had been frightfully mutilated by Stalin. The theory of the ‘Protracted War’ on the other hand was not a unique contribution of General Giap. It too was derived, after some modification, from the works of Mao Tse Tung and the experiences of the Chinese Red Army in fighting Chiang Kai Shek and the Japanese. Only hopeless idealists and incurable pedants would attribute the successes of the Vietnamese to the organizing skill of a Ho or the intuitive genius of a Giap. Marxists who value the role of individual leaders, however, see this victory as the collec- tive effort and struggle of an entire class and its leading organs to assimilate and apply revolu- Editorial tionary theory and enrich revolutionary practice. It is only in this context that we can understand and appreciate the role of individual leaders. It is no accident that Castro has not yet written an original and scientific treatise on the laws of guerrilla war as applied to Latin America. The only attempt so far has been that of Regis Debray. And that is so full of contradic- tions, plagiarisms and platitudes as to be worth- less. The fact that its author and his patron fell into the hands of the Bolivian military is sufficient reason for skepticism on that score. Theoretically speaking, the Castroite move- meni is bankrupt because it is a middle-class movement which has not been able to raise itself above the provincialism and Philistinism of the colonial middle-class. Consequently it gravitates between opportunism and adventurism. It is a movement without any future. It is hardly surprising that in such a movement leaders are exalted and ideas and theories and the struggle for a higher level of consciousness is belittled. The foremost exponent of ‘guerrilla struggle’ today is not Castro or Che Guevara but Mao Tse Tung who led the longest and most exten- sive revolutionary war in modern times. In his most important work on war—‘Protracted War’ -—Mao characteristically devotes a whole chap- ter to the role of consciousness. For the benefit of the starry-eyed lyricists of Castro as well as those who still imagine that a gun is better than a theory it is worth repeating: ‘Conscious activity is man’s characteristic. This characteristic is most strongly manifested in man at war. Victory or defeat in a war of course is decided by the military, political, economic and geographical conditions, by the character of the war and of the international support on both sides, but not by these alone; these alone constitute only the possibility of victory and defeat, and do not in themselves * Vietcong by Douglas. Pike, MIT Press, USA, 1966.

[p007] decide the issue. To decide the issue, efforts must be added, efforts in directing and waging the war, i.e., man’s conscious activity in war.’ Hence what arises from a study of any revolu- tionary war is the indispensable necessity to en- rich and develop class consciousness through a struggle to develop the theory and practice of the revolutionary movement. This cannot be done except through the struggle to build the party and the International which Lenin once described as ‘consciousness at its highest level’. Thus the Vietnam Revolution, far from uniting all tendencies in a welter of confusion, is in fact laying the basis for a decisive onslaught upon revisionism in all its forms and a major step forward of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The death agony a capitalism and ihe tasks of the Ath intarvational B LOSEALIST 5. ABSUR phasue 5 aitsor FAMPBLE This is the basic programmatic document of the world movement founded by Leon Trotsky and his comrades. By 1938 the revolutionary Marxists had found it necessary to lay the foundations of the Fourth International in order to restore working-class leadership after the defeats prepared by the Stalinist bureaucracy in control of the Third (Communist) International. The defeat of the German Revolution in 1923, of the British General Strike in 1926, and of the Chinese Revolution in 1927, followed by Hitler’s victory over the German working class in 1933, finally ruled out the perspective of transforming the Communist International by internal opposition. 60 pages, 1/- NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD., 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST., LONDON, S.W.4 Fourth International, February 1968