During this watershed year, the effort made by the liberation forces was considerable. Nonetheless, in face of US firepower, the revolutionary wave ebbed. In South Vietnam, the United States held a total monopoly in the sky, as well as a considerable advantage in heavy arms, artillery and armor. Its aircraft carriers cruising offshore were out of reach of any attack. The liberation forces began to retreat. Victory was not yet at hand. It took seven more years and great losses before the revolution finally triumphed.
In the United States, the shock was terrible. Despite the information gathered before the offensive was unleashed, the US command and government were neither able to prevent it nor to foresee its scope. The South Vietnamese regime and the Saigon army cut a pathetic figure. The battles unfolded under the TV cameras. The images of death flashed immediately into people's homes. The anti-war movement in the United States experienced a new upsurge. Anti-war feeling was really becoming a major political factor.
A technologically sophisticated, ruinous war
Worldwide, solidarity with the Vietnamese people was in the ascendant. Radicalized youth in Mexico and in Paris denounced the US intervention. The truth about imperialist domination was revealed starkly by this vast, technologically sophisticated, ruinous war against a poor people fighting for their right to self1. "Tet" is the Vietnamese new year, which falls at the end of January/beginning of February. 2. It should be remembered that from 1954 to 1975, Vietnam was divided in two by a "demarcation line" separating the territory to the north, controlled by the Revolutionary Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) and the area to the south controlled by the Republic of Vietnam, a neo-colonial regime. During this period, US troops succeeded French forces in the souther part of the country.
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determination. The resistance was heroic.
What is more, victory now seemed possible, even if it receded in March. In many countries, Tet 1968 galvanized radicalized and oppositionist sections of youth. A spur was given to the mobilizations that prefigured May 1968 in France. Symptomatically, our demonstrations echoed to the cries of "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh - Che, Che, Che
The Paris talks began between the Vietnamese and the US government. But this was only a diplomatic continuation of the battle that continued on the political and military terrain. The real negotiations got underway a few years later, leading to the 1973 accords and the withdrawal of US
The Tet offensive was one of the biggest political and military events in recent decades, and it was also one of the more complex. For those "disillusioned" with 1968 and Vietnam, as well as for the intellectuals of the new right, what was involved was simply "revolutionary mythology," or even a media creation. If the TV had not been there, Kissinger sighed, the course of the war in Vietnam might have been changed.3
However, in this case the media did not create the event. They could not even play it up; it was intrinsically too important for that. They simply revealed it to the world and to the American people, to the great distress of Washington — a so-called democratic government whose foreign policy depended on its ability to lie freely to the voters. The media did not invent the horror of the imperialist aggression. They probably could never have reflected all that it meant in deeper, real human terms.
If public opinion increasingly turned against the dirty war in Vietnam, this was not because of any artificial agitation kept up by the TV journalists. It was because too many American soldiers were dying. It was because the Tet offensive showed that after years of military intervention, a US victory was further away than ever. This unjust
Far from a myth, the Vietnamese events of 1968 were an eye-opener. In their complexity, they revealed many of the essential features of the contemporary world, far more than we were able to understand 20 years ago, when we mobilized in defence of this exemplary liberation struggle.
We still probably had too superficial a perception of what the 1968 Tet offensive revealed about the limits of US power and about the extraordinary potential of popular resistance. Even in the 1950s, the Vietnamese revolution had checkmated big classical imperialist powers such as France and Great Britain. The victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959 posed a formidable challenge to the capitalist world's new policeman, the United States, which had
68-88 VIETNAM failed to impose its law on the Castro regime just off its coast.
In the 1960s, the Vietnamese revolution was one of the first to feel the full force of the counter-revolutionary war effort mounted by Washington in response to the Cuban challenge. Behind the French involvement, US intervention in Vietnam began quite early, well before 1954. Since 1961, US advisors had been waging their "special war."
Vietnam became a key test for US credibility
But it was in 1965 that the US military escalation really got underway, with a full commitment of air power to the Indochinese theater of war and the landing of an expeditionary force that was soon to reach 550,000 men. In the same year, the world counter-revolution scored some bloody points, from the Dominican Republic to Indonesia.
With all the means at its disposal, Washington undertook a real test of strength in Vietnam. Its aim above all was to reestablish the credibility of US power, which had been badly shaken by the ill-starred landing in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961. For years, the Vietnamese test became a kingpin in the world policy of the United States. It was a failure, foreshadowed precisely by the 1968 Tet offensive.
The failure began in Vietnam. Despite the gravity of the blows dealt to the popular forces, the US war machine did not manage to break the skeletal structure of the resistance — a Communist Party and a liberation movement rooted in the national and social fabric of the country. With the benefit of several decades of experience, the resistance demonstrated its tenacity and its
Continuing its long-drawn-out struggle, the resistance adapted to the new conditions. It held the strategic initiative and regularly retook the tactical initiative in the political, military and soon in the diplomatic arenas. For Washington, no military victory was possible in these conditions.
On the other hand, US imperialism found itself the prisoner of the very means it employed in Vietnam. It needed to protect its expeditionary force and the Saigon army, to cut politically intolerable losses, and at the same time to maintain its control of the territory at the risk of exposing itself to the enemy's blows. The counter-revolutionary army found itself in a stalemate situation.
The US government became increasingly dependent on heavy technology and its support for the corrupt regime, which remained more preoccupied with its internal factional struggles than fighting the communists. Washington sustained a more and more costly war effort and an increasingly artifi3. One of the main architects of US foreign policy during these war years and the chief of the US delegation 23 in the Paris negotiations. May 30, 1988 • #142 International Viewpoint
VIETNAM 68-88 cial South Vietnamese economy. It was a vicious circle. In these conditions, no political victory could be won over the revolu-
Its failure in Vietnam became a setback for the American government at home and abroad. With the Tet offensive, the American bourgeoisie, politicians and the military caste began to realize the limits of their power.4 The resources of the United States were not inexhaustible. Continuation of the war was coming into conflict with the needs of the economy, as the dollar crisis and the end of the period of expansion appeared on the horizon.
Business circles were worried. The concentration of military efforts in Vietnam was dislocating the global deployment of US forces extending from Europe to the Middle East, from the Indian Ocean to the Northern Pacific. Moreover, by straining financial resources, it was holding back the modernization of armaments. When North Korea boarded a US spy ship, Washington could not respond. The Pentagon split. The human cost —in American lives, of course — was becoming unacceptable to the population. In 1970, anti-war feeling reached its peak in the United States. The politi-
On the other hand, the policy of "Vietnamization" adopted after 1968, with the aim of substituting Vietnamese lives for American ones, required massive material investments. Once again, it was a vicious
It took several more years for the realities to catch up with Washington. It had to negotiate, hoping that it could still avoid defeat, but in the knowledge now that victory was impossible. Tet 1968 began to reveal this twofold reality — the limits of the resources of the most powerful of imperialisms, and the great resources that can be commanded by a resistance that is both national and popular.
This truth had been known for a long time, of course, but it had to be updated. The Indochinese peoples were compelled to demonstrate it, and they succeeded at a time when the White House was trying to impose a Pax Americana on the entire world. They paid a very high price for it.
The Tet offensive also revealed this price, and the new difficulties of the revolutionary struggle. This was something that at the time we perceived less clearly. We know that "In the hour of the furnaces, only the light can be seen." Nonetheless, it is important to reflect on the problems of revolutions today, with their obscure aspects and the contradictions that they have to
Tet was to be a turning point in the war
It was in January 1968 that the Political Bureau of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) took the final decision to launch the Tet offensive. It was to be a turning point in the war, qualitatively changing its course. The party leadership prudently maintained quite a wide range of objectives. They ran from a "maximum" (opening up a "breach" that would clear the way for a rapid victory) to a "minimum" (close to what actually happened, with the onset of a political crisis in the United States, accompanied by hard military offensives by Washington, which foreshadowed a combined process of fighting
The result of the Tet offensive was not preordained. The situation had been changing rapidly since 1965, and the real possibilities had to be tested in the fighting itself. The bulk of the regular forces had to remain mobile long enough to evaluate how the battles went. To achieve the maximum effect, uprisings had to be combined with military offensives in the strict sense, and this had to be done in particular in the cities. With this perspective, the role of the underground urban political infrastructure
In Vietnamese military thinking, great importance was accorded to insurrections and to combining all forms of struggle.
This was related to the traditions inherited from the Comintern guerrillas developed later in densely populated areas. Some of Saigon metropolitan revolutionary bastion Problems appeared at the outset of Tet 1968. (The regular forces were not able to move as freely as had been expected in the Saigon region.) Nonetheless, a number of the objectives set were achieved, with the exception of one major goal - there were no insurrectional mobilizations in Saigon. The cost of the offensive was very high. There were heavy losses. The underground political apparatus had come out into the open in order to try to organize the population.
Many surviving cadres had to leave their traditional areas of work when the military retreat started because of the threat of repression. Nonetheless, in the coming months and years, the activists were hit hard by the repression. The Saigon organization, ready limited in 1968, found itself dangerously weakened. More generally, after the offensive, the revolution temporarily lost a part of the territory that it had controlled
In 1968, neither the revolution nor the counter-revolution were really able to take the initiative on a national scale. Both had to reorganize their forces. The final balance sheet of the Tet offensive depended therefore in large part on the way the contending parties readjusted their forces, exploiting their strong points and correcting their weak ones. At the end of 1968, the success or failure of the Tet offensive was not yet really determined. The VCP proved able to assimilate the lessons of the experience most quickly and thereby to regain the initiative. Its politico-military thinking, probably the richest in movements, continued to evolve. The 1972 and 1975 offensives testified to this.
A key victory for the future of the liberation struggle
Tet was of course a victory, and a key one for the future of the liberation struggle. But its price was really very high. The effects of this are still being felt today, in particular the weakening of the apparatus of rooted and experienced cadres. This factor clearly weighed heavily in the processes of bureaucratization that appeared in the wake of the
A debate, at times a sharp one, has gone on within the VCP over whether the same results could have been achieved in 1968 at a lesser cost, for example by calling off the
What were the reasons for the lack of mass mobilization in Saigon in February 1968? The first was the massive bombardment. The US forces used all their arms, without any regard for civilians. Before a military victory of the liberation forces paralyzes the enemy's firepower, how can an insurrectionary mobilization be organized? 4. Gabriel Kolko's last book offers a very rich and interesting analysis of the overall course of the Vietnam war and US policy: Vietnam, Anatomy of a War 19401975, Allen & Unwin, London/Sydney, 1986. 5. It should be noted that in the absence of sufficient documentation a part of this description remains 6. The Cu Chi zone became famous for its extraordinary network of tunnels, which made it possible for the resistance army to operate even behind enemy lines.
Political conditions probably played a role as well. The liberation front's organization in the capital was probably not strong enough to win by itself, when the regular forces could not break through the US defences. Finally, the country was changing socially and politically, torn apart by an increasingly terrible war, deportations of populations, counter-insurgency social measures and economic upsets.
The 1968 Tet offensive was launched at a time when South Vietnam was in the melting pot, before the VP leadership had really grasped the depth of these changes. It seems, in fact, that it did not fully take stock of this problem until well after the 1975 victory. In a country reshaped by a modern war of unprecedented intensity and duration, the social cohesion of the masses in Saigon was being gradually undermined. This made revolutionary mass self-activity more and more problematic, as well as making organizational work more difficult. An extraordinary lesson of revolutionary initiative
As the years went by, this problem was to grow worse. But the experience of Tet 1968 already revealed its scope. Most of us were not able to perceive this at the time. We did of course analyze the history of the Vietnamese Communist Party from an independent standpoint. But we still looked on the revolution with an inexperienced eye. We did not really feel the exhausting nature of this struggle, which had been carried on for decades with such inadequate resources. We had not yet learned sufficiently to look for lessons in the difficulties and setbacks.
With hindsight, because of the questions it raised, Tet and its aftermath emerge as an extraordinary lesson of revolutionary initiative and realism. This body of experiences deserves to be restudied in the light of the dccumentation available today on Vietnam and the lessons of subsequent revolutions. For many of us, it took time to understand the importance of the diplomatic moves opened up by the 1968 offensive.
We knew that US imperialism was going to take advantage of Moscow's bureaucratic flabbiness, as well as of the upsets of the Maoist cultural revolution and the Sino-Soviet conflict, to try to increase the isolation of the Indochinese revolutions. We knew how hard the VCP was striving to preserve its international freedom of action, determined not to find itself again in the subordinate position imposed on it at the time of the 1954 Geneva negotiations?
We recognized the absolute right of those fighting to determine what compromises they may consider necessary. We were able to avoid two major errors. The first was the one that led several components of the solidarity movement to confuse their role with
Some personalities in the US anti-war movement stepped directly into the diplomatic arena, trying to propose compromise formulas acceptable both to Washington and to the Vietnamese, and this was at a time when the Vietnamese did not want to commit themselves concretely, considering that the situation was not yet ripe for that.
We understood that the role of solidarity was something different — to create better conditions for the most rapid and most complete victory possible (except when it was necessary, as at the end of 1972, to respond actively to an appeal from the Vietnamese for support for a concrete diplomatic initiative).
Deciding on compromises (which is at the heart of any negotiation) is in fact the sole responsibility of those who are doing the fighting, since only they can assess the relationship of forces that determines dip-
Likewise, we did not follow the path of those who saw the Vietnamese policy of negotiations as proof of a desire to capitulate, a dangerously wrong view that was defended by a minority of our own movement, on the basis of a profoundly false analysis of the nature of the Communist Party of Vietnam. So we did not see the opening of the Paris talks in 1972-73 as a sign of a retreat, but rather as an advance.
However, we had difficulty in assessing the intrinsic constraints of diplomatic activity in a defensive period. Burned by past painful experiences of the workers' movement, we remained a little ultra-left in this area. We had only very partially studied the seminal experience of the Russian revolution. The Russo-German negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in 1917-18, a resounding negation of all secret diplomacy, blinded us to the problems posed by the Rappalo negotiations in 1922, in which secret diplo-
For many of us, the Vietnamese experience of 1968-1973 was an opportunity for the first time for studying the facts of a struggle in the international arena in all their complexity. This, for example, helped us to understand better the activity of the Sandinistas in this field after the victory of the Nicaraguan revolution. Nonetheless, we were never "ultra-left" in the area of active international solidarity.
Solidarity essential for victory of the revolution
International solidarity and the anti-war movement in the United States were essential to the victory of the Indochinese revolutions. Strengthening them was a duty. The struggle of the Indochinese people, on the other hand, played an exemplary role that promoted the emergence of new revolutionary generations around the world. It also opened up a breach that facilitated the liberation struggles in Nicaragua and of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa.
International solidarity was always inadequate to the needs of the situation, and it can be said that the Indochinese revolutionaries gave the world more through their
68-88 VIETNAM struggle than they got back in international support. Soviet and Chinese aid did, of course, play an important role. But it was never on a scale commensurate with the needs and the stakes involved. Worse still, it was accompanied by unacceptable pressures. The mobilization of the workers' movement in the imperialist countries was too slow in coming and too fragile. The fault for this lays primarily with the reformist leaderships.
Internationalism must be revived today
In France itself, the May explosion broke the continuity of the solidarity mobilizations by focusing everyone's attention on local political and social struggles. The preMay organizations in France, such as the National Vietnam Committee (CVN), for all practical purposes ceased to exist. It was necessary to go against the current and launch a new movement, the Indochina Solidarity Front (FSI) in 1969-70. We were among the first, along with some activist intellectual figures, to provide the necessary push so that this renewal of internationalist activity could get going.
All the time lost in the field of international solidarity, all the criminal delays, all the divisions cost dearly in Indochina in more years of war, destruction and further exhaustion. Those "disillusioned" by Vietthe Sino-Indochinese wars of 1978-79, which had disastrous effects in the region as well as internationally, should not blot out the international lesson that Indochina represented for the 1968 generation of activists. The Vietnamese needed the most dynamic and broadest sort of solidarity, one that could rise above partisan and factional infighting. They clearly let
The National Liberation Front was ready to work with anyone in this field. It needed solidarity without conditions, without strings, without reservations. For us, this was an apprenticeship in a real united-front approach to solidarity, one that went against the current of a lot of organizational sectarianism: "Everything for Vietnam, everything for Indochina."
This was a healthy experience and is still relevant for Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, South Africa and many other struggles. Over and above the cynicism or jaded weariness of many former activists of the 1968 generation, internationalism is a "mood" of the 1960s that deserves to be maintained and revived today. * 7. In 1954, in the negotiations with France, Moscow and Peking imposed a series of grave compromises on the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian revolutionary forces. 8. On the Sino-Indochinese crisis and the period prior to 1975, see "The Sino-Indochinese crisis," a resolution adopted by the XI World Congress of the Fourth International, November 1979; reprinted in a special supplement to Intercontinental Press-Inprecor, January 1980. May 30, 1988 • #142 International Viewpoint
A GENERATION OF
WOMEN BECAME POLITICALLY AWARE LIDIA CIRILLO, a leader of the Italian section of the Fourth International, spoke to Bandiera Rossa about what it was like to be a woman in the Italian student movement and the left in 1968.
OU WERE perhaps the only woman leader in Italy in 1968. If I'm not mistaken, your name appeared in the newspapers...
That's not quite true. In 1968 I had already graduated and left university. I had not been very active in the the UGI (left students' organization). In the internal division of labour within the Communist Party (PCI) and the young communists, this was entrusted to younger comrades. Towards the end of 1967 and beginning of 1968, the centre of political activity was beginning to shift to the university, so I returned and made a few appearances there. Without trying to be big-headed, at Naples I was involved more than anyone in preparing what was to become the 1968 movement. In the first part of the year, I was centrally involved with the discussion, organization and actions of the left in Naples.
As for the press, Espresso once or twice mentioned the work I did in organizing dissidents within the PCI as an "entryist". In fact, I had joined the GCR, then the Fourth International's Italian section. • What relationship was there between what was going on in the Italian CP, in the federation of young communists and in the student movement?
There was a very direct relationship. The leaders of the student radicalization were mainly formed in the parties of the "traditional" left. At the beginning of the 1960s, there had been a big influx of younger, more educated comrades compared to the average members of the PCI. They had a definitely critical attitude, and a certain irreverence towards the leaders.
In 1968 there was a rapid radicalization from which new, young — sometimes very young — vanguards emerged, which were 26 young people found their poiwe of these militant and determined. However these International Viewpoint #142 • May 30, 1988 ence in existing political ideas, and therefore with the groups or leaders with a history on the left in Naples. • What were the criteria that these young people used in making their political choices or choosing their
Contrary to what was suggested by the media, a leader is not simply someone who speaks better than others, who has a tougher skin, or who is unafraid of the microphone and the heckling.
To even manage to get to the microphone in the big student general meetings in 1968 you needed several dozen comrades who would guarantee you access to it! In the second half of 1968 in Naples, the battle for hegemony over the radicalizing youth had been won by the Stalinists. For me, a "Trotskyist", to get to speak was an almost superhuman effort. But I did, creating chaos until I was given the speaking time. When I got to the microphone, all hell
But that made me laugh. There were always so many students who didn't know anything about Stalinism, Trotskyism and all that. They were annoyed about the treatment reserved for me, because I was a woman and because what I said was clearer and less dogmatic.
Almost always, there were students who came to see me afterwards, curious to know what I did, what Trotskyists were and why I was greeted in this fashion. I think some people were convinced that my name was "Cuarta" [Fourth], because when it was my turn to speak the chair announced that the Fourth would speak!
When the high school student movement took shape, with young people who were a lot less politicized and completely disorganized, one had to speak briefly and make clear proposals in their meetings. Even the fierce sectarianism of the first years faded,
"united front" began to be • You said "because I was a woman". But what did it mean to be a woman in
It would be better to start at the beginning and say what it meant to be a woman in the Communist Party in Southern Italy in the 1960s. The women who joined the party were the wives, girlfriends and sisters of comrades. Their presence implied an acthe PCI, the idea that women wanted to be politically active was accepted as a possibility. But it was only one of the possible hypotheses. The others were nearly all based on what you could expect to find in a predominantly masculine atmosphere...
I should add however that, after having proved myself, I was welcomed among the "men" without any other hesitation or difficulty. But they remembered a bit later that I was a woman, when I became an "extremist", a heretic. Insults and slanders were at the time a traditional method of struggle within the PCI. It was even easier against a • On the basis of your experience, would you say that the 1968 movement
1968 was sexist because society as a whole was, and so was the left. I use the past tense, not because I think things have changed profoundly, but because today -particularly on the left — sexism is hidden, ashamed of itself. And also because, deep down, something has really changed.
Feminism began to have its impact later, through the process of an autonomous rise of the only people who could define the problems, contradictions and needs of women: women themselves.
Those who were active in the 1970s will remember the welcome reserved for feminist questions by the left, both the old and the new left. Feminism was generally seen as a diversion from the contradiction between the workers and capitalism. A diversion that would set women against men and divide the party. It was the most politicized women who reacted with the most suspicion. But, at a certain moment, these women themselves realized than a party that could not take into account the specific needs of a factor as decisive as women had no reason to exist.