International Viewpoint 24 February 1986 movement', the recovery of would have line of the twenties
Chi-Minh and only the the price of
'communist silence any in other words
It would have
Provisional
Government sol to produce without the anti-Stalinist
Trotsky, the struggle embodied
Soviet Left Opposition and the Fourth
If we take just the
"Trotskyist' political campaigns that led to their expulsion from the CPSU and the IC: the denunciation of the danger of the Kulaks' strike of grain a separate party?
deliveries and the incessant campaign for a stepped-up industrialisation of the USSR; the agitation against the demning suppression of the state monopoly of foreign trade; its agitation in favour of dregs. Thus, the military political independby
Alan ence of the Chinese CP from the
Kuomintang, we can see that they were decisive contributions for saving
1984 the Soviet state and against sufficient to justify, in these given justified,
'excesses' organisational existence of the Trot-
'During this waters down into a
'abstract ideas or practice themselves in a bloody, merciless civil war carried vented against international and Soviet comall responmunists. Nearly all the cadres demonstration
Lenin's party in the USSR, all the slowly gained example,
Polish CP leadership, the whole leada huge ership of the Korean CP and a good national."
part of the
Yugoslav and German sympathetic to leadership, in all a million communists, assassinated during this civil
Percy the Marxist owes us a materialist explanation of this bloody conan flict. Was it a simple conflict between committees different 'communist currents' guilty of 'sectarian
Land to was it a social conflict between a privileged bureaucratic caste and ment!"
to drink the
Vietnamese
The of the
Trotskyists regrets its we are perilous have outdone a sectarian,
"unfurled the
International they carried
Long live the live the front! People's
For the
Nationalise
21
"This grab bag of demands (which incidentally, jumbled together bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks!) represented nothing but dangerous and self-contradictory ultraleft posturing. (p 46)
'And it is not difficult to understand that events like the following, described with evident approbation by a "Vietnamese Trotskyist eyewitness" would have driven other layers into the arms of the imperialists: "The peasants of the province of Sadec pillaged a dozen of the magnificent villas of their masters on August 19. They also set fire to a large number of granaries overflowing with rIce. Many notables and functionaries were arrested by the peasants and a number of them were immediately shot The former servants of the French and Japanese governments, labeled en bloc as enemies of the people, saw all their property go up in flames."
'The hatred of the peasants for the wealthy landowners and the colonial apparatus is understandable. But a revolutionary party is required precisely because revolutions are defeated when the masses' hatred strikes out blindly instead of being focused against the main enemy (p 47)
"The severe setbacks resulting from the Committee of the South's adventurism greatly weakened the Hanoi government's hand in its negotiations with the French.
But the Trotskyist provocations did not stop there. Feldman and Johnson report that the Trotskyists "responded to the imminent landing of British troops by holding meetings that demanded arms for the people. Under Trotskyist influence, the People's Committees issued a manifesto denouncing the treason of the Stalinists in allowing the British to land. The Stalinists responded with repressive campaign against the Trotskyists In their press and on September 14 sent troops to disarm the Trotskyists." (pp 47-48)
'As a result of the ultraleftism and excesses that the Communist Party tried but was unable to prevent, the returning French forces and their British allies made extremely serious inroads in the South. On September 24, there were riots in which Vietnamese broke into the European quarter of Saigon and massacred 150 people. General Gracey used this as a pretext for suppressing the nationalist movement in Saigon and driving Viet Minh units out of the suburbs. (17) French and British troops then struck outside the city, occupying a number of delta towns and provincial capitals. The 20,000 poorly armed and hastily recruited Viet Minh forces proved unable to 22 do more than slow the imperialist advance and were forced to retreat into inaccessible rural areas. It was at this time that leaders of the Trotand of the bourgeois petty-bourgeois executed. According to most sources, executions were ordered by Tran Van Giau.
"The Trotskyists and their nationalist allies had made a major contribution to the near-destruction of the revolution in the South. Preventing further repression, was imperative. It appears, however, that the violence in coping with the situation.' (p 48. Our emphasis).
The political positions expressed by Alan Meyers, one of the Australian SWP leaders, reveals in the clearest possible way all the disastrous consequences of this party's rejection of the strategy of the permanent revolu-
'mix' of democratic agitation between May and October
Just go and pamphlet The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It and try and show that it only contains bourgeois demo. cratic demands! In any case 90 per cent of Saigon's factories were imperialist property; the call for nationalisawas therefore essentially anti-
Meyers proposes that the peasantworker alliance must be achieved mobilising the big landowners and the repressive agents of imperialism. We would like him to show us how that works in practice! The alliance with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists against imperialism is to be achieved without giving free rein to national demands, beginning with the independence of Vietnam. If need be, shoot the nationalists for their nationalist 'excesses', all in the name of the 'national democratic stage' of the revolution!
This line of reasoning is topped off with the classical argument of all reformists: the intervention of the counter-revolution is 'caused' by the
17. This commentary is particularly scandalous since it does not mention that the explosion of popular anger on September 24, 1945, described by Meyers, was in reality a fightback against a prior coup d'etat by General Gracey and the French colonel Cedile, which banned all the VietHELENE press, disarmed the Vietminh security forces killed hundreds if thousands Vietnamese including Thus in the name 'the national democratic stage' it is not only forbidden to conduct the autonomous class struggle of the workers and poor peasants. It is even ruled out to fight back against counter-revolutionary imperialist violence.
"provocations' of the obvious; why hasn't anybody thought about it before? It is also obviously stupid. The fall of Saigon was caused by the landing of British and French imperialist troops. This landing was in response to the Vietminh's declaraindependence, 'extremists' excesses. The imperialists also landed troops in Hanoi, where 'excesses' were certainlv not. committed. These troops cleared out the Vietminh despite all their efforts at negotiation. They landed in Indonesia and Malaysia, where there were no "Trotskyist provacateurs' whatsoever. (18)
This whole line of argument repeats word for word that of the Mensheviks in the Russian revolution, the Chinese Stalinists in 1927 and Stalinists in 1972-73. Can one imagine
'denouncing' peasants who landowners' 'prematurely'? Look through all the thousands of pages written by Lenin, in 1905-6 and in 1917 and try to find a trace of any such logic'!
We do not know all the details of the policies at the time of the
Trotskyists, who were into several groups. certainly possible they made some
It is possible that the mistakes. That should be the subject of a serious historical study - still
The fact that the Vietnamese CP won the revolutionary war six years later in the North and thirty years later in the South is in no way an argument against the hypothesis that it committed serious oppor tunist errors in 1945. (19.) In the same way, having the Trotskyist 'label' is not a guarantee that no sectarian or ultra-left errors were committed in Saigon while attempting to implement correctly the strategy of permanent
But two things are certain. Assassinating Trotskyist and nationalist leaders was a crime, an indefensible means of caused immense damage to the anti-imperialist and communist struggle in South Vietnam. Comrade Ta-Tu-Tau, the main Trotskyist figure in Saigon
18. In a later letter - replying to the polemics raised by tne Meyers' pamphlet at the 12th World Congress Lorimer states that the Australian SWP leaders justify only the disarming of the Vietnamese Trotskyists and nothing more But the Meyers' text says what it says. It has never been publicly retracted.
19. One of the main leaders of the Vietnamese CP, Vo Nguyen Giap, has lately made a rather sharp criticism of the line followed by his party from the end of the 1930s until the end of the 1940s. There is therefore clearly room for critical analysis, which the SWP leaders seem to rule out for the sole reason that the Vietnamese CP finally took power. International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986 who was elected to parliament in a united front with the CP in 1937, was anything but a sectarian. He was assassinated when the defeat of Saigon was already complete and whilst going north to again offer a united front to the CP. He was one of the main, well-known spokespersons of the Saigon proletarian masses. The debate on socialist democracy takes on very concrete content in the context of Alan Meyers' positions. Backsliding to national communism
The Australian SWP's split the Fourth International condemns this party to operate from now on outside any organised international sation which Percy and Lorimer can
So organisationally ourselves faced with a characteristic withdrawal into a national framework. Lorimer finds this a little awkward, and so he tries to calm down the worries felt by SWP members and sympathisers on this:
'Does this mean we are turning away from internationalism? Such a view could only be made by those who confuse a particular form of international organisation with internationalism. Our conception of internationalism involves developing international collaboration. It involves the fraternal exchange of views and experiences among revolutionaries based on a willingness to learn from others, while thinking for ourselves. The forms through which this occurs are totally secondary.
*Far from turning away from internationalism by leaving the Fourth International, we are turning toward a more real internationalism, toward international collaboration with those revolutionary forces that are really extending the world socialist revolu-
(The SWP and the Fourth International, p 54).