1

Vietnam: Workers Revolution and National Independence

Al Richardson (ed.), Vietnam: Workers Revolution and National Independence

(Revolutionary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn 1990).

Contents

Editorial

Simon Pirani: The Fourth International in Vietnam

Daniel Hemery: La Lutte and the Vietnamese Trotskyists

Ngo Van Xuyet: On Vietnam

Ngo Van Xuyet: Ta Thu Thau Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader

A Letter to Trotsky (from leaders of La Lutte)

Comrade P: My First Steps Towards the Permanent Revolution

Ngo Van Xuyet: A Moscow Trial in Ho Chi Minhs Guerilla Movement

ICL (Vietnamese Section of the FI): Our Position, 8 July 47

Lu Sanh Hanh: Some Stages in the Revolution in the South of Vietnam

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The Fourth International in Vietnam: Why Study It, and What to Read

Simon Pirani

A good overall introduction to the history of the movement is the Spartacist pamphlet

Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam, New York 1978, which collects articles from

Workers Vanguard. Upon this is based Stig Erikssons Stalinismo y trotskismo en Viet-nam,

no.15 in the Cuadernos rojas series, published in Stockholm for the Spanish Trotskyists.

A number of other general accounts exist, both original and secondary, of varying value. Of

the first hand sources, pride of place go to that by An Indo-Chinese Comrade appearing in

Quatrime Internationale (new series, nos.22/23/24, September/October/November

1945, pp15-17) which was translated in Fourth International (SWP, USA), Volume 7 no.1,

January 1946, pp.16-17, and to the full length discussion by Anh Van (Hoang Don Tri) and

Jacqueline Roussel (Marguerite Bonnet), Mouvements nationaux et Lutte de Classes au

Vietnam, Paris 1947, which was translated into English by Simon Pirani and published as

National Movements and Class Struggle in Vietnam, London 1987. Richard Stephensons

Vietnam: Stalinism v. Revolutionary Socialism (Socialist Charter, 1972), which was drawn

upon by Gerry Downing, Vietnam and Trotskyism (Workers Press, 7 June 1986), is based

largely upon Anh Van and Roussel, along with Ngo Van Xuyets description of the Saigon

events of 1945, and is therefore largely outmoded.

Of other secondary sources, Milton Sacks essay, Marxism in Viet Nam, contributed to

Marxism in Southeast Asia (Stanford UP, 1960, pp.02-58) is a good general survey, as is

Bob Potters Vietnam: Whose Victory? (Solidarity Pamphlet no.43). The description From

the Vietminh to the Vietcong (Class Struggle/Lutte de Classe, new series no.14, April 1968,

pp.7-16), whilst valuable in its day, is probably too general to be of much assistance now.

The discussion of the history of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement among the

Trotskyist organisations has been wide and illuminating. Apart from the references given

in our prefaces to Ngo Van Xuyets Life of Ta Thu Thau and A Moscow Trial in Ho Chi

Minhs Guerilla Movement below, the following should not escape the attention of the

serious reader: George Johnson and Fred Feldman, On the Nature of the Vietnamese

Communist Party (International Socialist Review, Volume 34 no.7, July/August 1973, pp.4-

9, 63-90) and Vietnam, Stalinism and the Postwar Socialist Revolutions (International

Socialist Review, Volume 35 no.4, April 1974, pp.26-61); Henry Platsky, The History of

Vietnamese Trotskyism: What it Means (Class Struggle (USA), July 1973) and The

Vietnamese Revolution and Pabloism (Class Struggle, August 1974), and Vietnam: Ten

Years On and Trotskyism and Stalinism (Socialist Organiser, no.232, 12 June 1985). Apart

from Al Richardson, More on the Vietnamese Trotskyists (Workers Press, 21 June 1986)

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and Simon Pirani, Campaign for Vietnamese Trotskyists (Workers Press, 25 February 1989:

for the text of the actual appeal, cf. the issue of 11 March) all the documents pertaining to

the recent discussion of the history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists are to be found in

Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987, along with much other crucial material including

all Trotskys essays on the subject.

An interesting by-product of the betrayal of the Vietnamese uprising by the French

Communist Party through its deputies in the chamber was the recruitment of practically

the whole of the Vietnamese working class community in France to the Trotskyist

movement, in which the leading part was played by Anh Van (Hoang Don Tri). This is dealt

with in Benjamin Stora, Les travailleurs indochinois en France pendant la seconde guerre

mondiale (Les Cahiers du CERMTRI, no.28, April 1983) and Anh Van, Les travailleurs

vietnamiens en France, 1939-1950 (Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.40, December 1989, pp5-19).

*****************

The history of the Fourth International in Vietnam has a direct bearing on many important

disputes which persist among tendencies claiming to be Trotskyist.

Has history rendered the building of the Fourth International superfluous, or does it have

to be rebuilt? Are there countries where it has become unnecessary, because the Stalinist

party has proved able to give the revolutionary leadership to which the Trotskyists aspire?

Was its foundation in 1938 divorced from the real movement of the working class, and

thus an empty gesture, as Isaac Deutscher and many other after him believed?

Vietnamese history is important to these disputes for two reasons. Firstly, because

between 1947 and 1975 the nationalist movement there dominated politically by the

Stalinists waged war against, and inflicted crushing defeats on, French and then US

imperialism. This gave sustenance to those Trotskyists who claimed that Stalinism, far

from being a counter-revolutionary agency of imperialism within the workers movement

as Trotsky stated, had given birth to tendencies which had found a way to become

revolutionary in spite of being Stalinist. The Stalinists had de facto taken the helm; the

Trotskyists had, it appeared, been found wanting.

Secondly, the Vietnamese Trotskyists had led decisive sections of the working class in the

1930s, but no longer did by the time of the French and American wars and this simply

confirmed, to those who wanted to believe it, that they were marginalised by history.

This false view rested on ignorance, or distortion, of the history of the revolutionary

situation which arose in Vietnam in 1945. When Japans wartime administration collapsed,

workers under the Fourth Internationals leadership vied for power in Saigon with the

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Stalinist provisional government headed by Tran Van Giu, which, in line with Stalins

post-war agreement with the Allies, wanted to return the south of the country to French

imperialist control.

During this little-known revolution, soviet-type councils of workers and peasants, and (on

a small scale) workers military organisations took shape in Asia for the first time since the

Canton commune was crushed by the Guomindang in 1927. In Canton, Stalinism betrayed

the revolutionary workers; in Saigon, it connived with imperialism to ensure a bloody

defeat and pursued their Trotskyist vanguard into the countryside, where they were

invariably killed if caught. The foremost victim was the Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau,

biographical material about whom appears for the first time in English in this issue of

Revolutionary History.

The Stalinists have tried to bury the truth about this revolution and nearly got away with

it because Trotskyists, bending under Stalinist pressure, concealed it from themselves.

(For example, the two single-volume histories of the Fourth International in English, The

Fourth International by Pierre Frank, London 1973, and The Death Agony of the Fourth

International by Workers Power/Irish Workers Group, have between them not one single

word to say on the Vietnamese experience!)

Without understanding the 1945 revolution, the working class will never understand what

happened in Vietnam, or what the records of Stalinism and Trotskyism really were.

Is it not exaggerating to say that the history of the 1945 revolution was concealed? Look at

it from the viewpoint of the thousands of Europeans who joined the various organisations

claiming to be Trotskyist during Vietnams war against the USA, in the 1960s and 1970s.

How would they have come to learn about the 1945 revolution, or indeed about the fact

that there was such a thing as Vietnamese Trotskyism at all?

They would have searched the various journals and newspapers of their organisations in

vain. They might have picked up a copy of the libertarian Marxist journal

Solidarity(Volume 5 no.5, 1968) which contained the article The Saigon Insurrection by

Ngo Van Xuyet, translated from the duplicated sheet Information-Correspondance

Ouvrires. (This eye-witness account is part of a longer, unpublished work, Sur le Vietnam

[On Vietnam], from which we publish extracts below.)

Other pamphlets published at that time were in similarly tiny numbers. From authors

claiming adherence to Trotskyism came, in English: Vietnam: Stalinism vs. Revolutionary

Socialism by Richard Stephenson (a Chartist International Publication, 1972); Trotskyism

and Stalinism in Vietnam by Stig Eriksson, Vietnam: What About the Workers (Workers

Voice, Volume 2 no.7); Vietnam: An Unfavourable Terrain for the Guerilla Fight of the Far

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Left Against the French Communist Party and From the Vietminh to the Vietcong in Class

Struggle, new series no 14, April 1968, pp1-16.

Little

The large organisations claiming to be Trotskyist had little to say on the issue of the

Vietnamese movement.

The French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), led by Pierre Lambert, ran

educational classes on the Vietnamese movement's history. When supporters of the

United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) raised, on anti-Vietnam war marches

in Paris, the shout Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, OCI members answered Ta, Ta, Ta Thu Thau;

but the OCI never published anything about the Vietnamese Trotskyists. Neither did the

Socialist Labour League until 1975, and then only in order to denigrate them.

In 1973 Pierre Rousset, a leading member of the USFI, published Le parti communiste

vietnamien, Franois Maspero, Paris, 1973. (I believe only one chapter was translated into

English: this appears in the anthology The Stalinist Legacy, 1976, edited by Tariq Ali.) This

book set out to show how the Vietnamese Stalinist party had, under the pressure of

events, become revolutionary, and followed the path of Permanent Revolution sketched

out by Trotsky.

It sparked off a controversy in the USFIs English-language journal, International Socialist

Review (July-August 1973, April 1974, February 1975). Against Roussets contention that

the Stalinists had become a revolutionary leadership, George Johnson and Fred Feldman

of the Socialist Workers Party (US) laid out detailed evidence from the Vietnamese

Stalinists history.

One aspect of this argument, concerning the assassination of the Vietnamese Trotskyists

in 1945, is particularly interesting. Ho had told the French historian Daniel Guerin in 1946

that Ta Thu Than was killed because he didnt follow the line I laid down (Aux services

des colonises by Daniel Guerin, Editions Minuit, p22). Rousset quoted Guerin but

maintained that while Ho and the Stalinist leaders bore clear political responsibility for

the Trotskyists murder, it was difficult to establish who was immediately responsible;

here the Stalinist partys position was ambiguous. Feldman and Johnson pointed out

that there was no ambiguity, and that Rousset had pretended it merely to perpetuate

the illusion of the Stalinists revolutionary potential.

The two Americans also pointed out that the most important job for Trotskyist students of

Vietnamese history is the one Rousset didnt do: a re-examination of the 1945 events and

the Trotskyists struggle at that time for leadership against the Stalinists. A start could be

6

made with contemporary material published by the Fourth International (with caution as

to its accuracy on some factual points). This consists of: the most comprehensive account,

Quelques tapes de la Revolution au Nam-B du Vietnam (Some Stages in the revolution in

Nam-B, Vietnam) by Lu Sanh Hanh (Quatrime Internationale, September 1947); Qui a

tue Ta Thu Thau? (Who killed Ta Thu Tha?) by Rodolphe Prager, (La Verit, 19 July 1946);

Indochina Assassinat de Ta Thu Thau (Indochina: The Killing of Ta Thu Than), Quatrime

Internationale, August-September 1946; and Nouvelle etape de la contra-revolution et de

loffensive imperialiste en Indochine (The New Stage of the Counter-revolution and

Imperialist Offensive in Indochina) by the Central Committee of the Vietnamese

International Communist Group in France, Quatrime Internationale, early 1947. There is

a reference to the Vietnam experience in The Fl in Danger by Benjamin Peret, Grandizo

Munis and Natalia Trotsky (Revolutionary Communist Party, Internal Bulletin, 27 June

1947). (There were further articles in Quatrime Internationale about the French invasion

of Indochina, English-language translations of which appeared in Fourth International of

January 1946 and April 1947, but these mention the Fourth Internationals own section in

Vietnam only in passing.)

The American Socialist Appeal, Volume 3 no.58, 11 August 1939, published the letter from

Phan Van Hum, Tran Van Thach and Ta Thu Than to L.D. Trotsky, informing him of their

brilliant victory over the Stalinists in the Saigon colonial council elections in March of

that year (which we reproduce below).

Source

In their polemic with Rousset, Feldman and Johnson suggested he could do a real

service to Marxism, and to scholarship in general, by investigating the key 1945 events

further. They suggested interviewing Vietnamese and Chinese Trotskyist exiles in Paris:

there is no evidence that Rousset did this. Another vital source of information, which the

two Americans did not know about, is the International Secretariat of the Fourth

Internationals (ISFI) file of correspondence from Vietnam for 1945-55 which as a leading

USFI member Rousset could surely have checked. Some doubt is cast on his honesty (let

alone his Trotskyist credentials) by his failure to refer to it.

The file, now held in the Bibliothque Internationale de Documentation Contemporaire

(BIDC) at Nanterre University, is the most important primary source on the Trotskyists

part in the 1945 revolution. It includes reports on the 1945 events from the two Trotskyist

groups in Vietnam: Dans le Sud du Vietnam: La Revolution d Aut 1945 et la Groupe de

La Lutte (In South Vietnam: The August Revolution and the Struggle group); and the less

informative La Lutte de la Ligue Communiste Internationaliste du Vietnam (The struggle

of the Internationalist Communist League of Vetnam). There are reports from individual

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Trotskyists, principally the two published here in Revolutionary History for the first time:

Un proces de Moscou dans le maquis de Ho Chi Minh (A Moscow Trial in Ho Chi Minhs

Maquis) by N Van, and the unsigned essay Mes premiers pas vers la Revolution

Permanente (My first steps towards the permanent revolution). The file also includes

letters, theses and proclamations by the Vietnamese Trotskyists; its most recent items are

a 15-page letter from Saigon dated May 1955 and some programmatic theses drafted in

the same year. The ISFI file of correspondence from China should also be consulted, as it

contains a two-page report, dated August 1951, on the fate of Liu Chia-Liang, a Chinese

Trotskyist who was killed by the Stalinists while working in Vietnam.

This material could form the basis for a serious study of the Trotskyists record in the 1945

revolution, which would be of great benefit to the movement.

No such study was carried out in the Fourth International in the years following 1945. In

fact the attention paid to the Vietnamese section was, to put it mildly, scant. Mention is

made of it in The Chinese Experience with Pabloite Revisionism and Bureaucratism by Peng

Shuzi, in Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 3, Volume 3, pp.170-71,

Education for Socialists Series of the American SWP; and Looking Back Over My Years With

Peng Shu-tse by Chen Pilan (Introduction to The Chinese CP in Power by Peng, Monad,

New York 1980). Unpublished, but in a private collection, is a Resolution sur le Travail

Indochinois de la Commission Coloniale (Resolution on the Indochinese Work of the

Colonial Commission) from the late 1940s.

Now for the material on the Vietnamese Trotskyists published recently (since the mid-

1970s) by organisations and authors claiming to be Trotskyist.

First, there are writings which repeat the Stalinists misrepresentations and distortions

about the Vietnamese Trotskyists. To the forefront here are Stalinism and the Liberation

of Vietnam by Stephen Johns, in Fourth International, Autumn 1975 and Winter 1975 (he

says the Trotskyists had never been able to build a base amongst the peasantry and

totally underestimated the rle of the revolutionary guerilla war); and Vietnam and the

World Revolution by Martin McLaughlin (Labor Publications, Detroit 1985). In terms of

historical research, these items are almost worthless; however, they throw light on their

authors politics.

Secondly, there are various attempts to add to research on the Vietnamese Trotskyists

history, and comment on it: principally, Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam, a Spartacist

pamphlet (1975); and Vietnam and Trotskyism (a Communist League of Australia

pamphlet, 1987) which republished a series of articles by myself from Workers Press

(December 1986-January 1987). This latter pamphlet also included the first English

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publication of the above-mentioned report Some Stages in the Revolution in Nam-b,

Vietnam, and the Declaration of the Indochinese Oppositionists (1930), which was the

basis of an important discussion between the Vietnamese section and L.D. Trotsky.

The duplicated sheet The Vietnamese Trotskyists and the August Revolution of 1945, by

John Spencer, is written from an anti-Trotskyist viewpoint, but refers to the conflicts

among Trotskyists over the Vietnam issue.

Important material on Vietnamese Trotskyist history can be found in Chroniques

Vietnamiennes, the French-language journal of the Groupe Trotskyste Vietnamien

(Vietnamese members of the USFI). Chroniques no.1 (November 1986) contained three

letters to Ho Chi Minh, dated to 1939, which effectively ended the argument about his

attitude to the slaughter of the Trotskyists. He encouraged it.

Despite these efforts, a properly researched history of the 1945 revolution, and the

Trotskyists part in it, has still to be written.

The Trotskyist activity in Vietnam before the Second World War is much better

documented. Apart from many references in works mentioned above, there is in English,

firstly, National Movements and Class Struggle in Vietnam, by Anh Van and Jacqueline

Roussel, New Park, 1988, a historical/ analytical pamphlet, first published by the Fourth

International in French in 1947.

References by L.D. Trotsky to his Vietnamese comrades are as follows: On the Declaration

of the Indochinese Oppositionists (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1930-31, Pathfinder, pp.29-

33); in India Faced with Imperialist War: An Open Letter to the Workers of India of 25 July

1939 (the English translation appears in Trotskys Writings on Britain, New Park, 1974,

Volume 3, pp.188-195), and in The Kremlin in World Politics (Writings of Leon Trotsky

1938-39, Pathfinder, p.368); in Trotskyism and the PSOP, (Leon Trotsky on France,

p.241).

In French there is the recent Cahiers Lon Trotsky, no 40, Revolutionnaires dIndochine,

the principal item in which is Le mouvement IV Internationale en Indochine 1930-39 (The

Fourth Internationalist Movement in Indochina 1930-39) by N. Van. A second article by N.

Van, Le Mouvement IV Internationale en Indochine 1940-45, is due for publication in the

Cahiers this year. Most works by non-Trotskyist authors are listed separately below, but a

special mention is needed for Rvolutionnaries Vietnamiens et Pouvoir Colonial en

Indochine (Vietnamese Revolutionaries and Colonial Power in Indochina), by Daniel

Hmery, Maspero, 1975, an exhaustive 500-page study of the relations of Stalinists,

Trotskyists and nationalists in Saigon 1932-37. The Centre dEtudes et de Recherches sur

les Mouvements Trotskyste et Mvolutionnaires Internationaux (Centre for Study and

9

Research on international Trotskyist and revolutionary movements) in Paris has an

incomplete but useful file of Vietnamese Trotskyist publications from the 1930s, including

Le Militant, La Lutte and Thang Muoi (The Spark); also an unpublished typescript on

Vietnam, Le Communisme de 1920 a 1935.

In Italian there is I Giornale La Lutte e i Trotskysti di Saigon 1934-39 by Stelio Marchese in

Storia a Politica, Volume 16 no.4, 1977.

In addition to these, there are Vietnamese Trotskyist pamphlets which have not yet been

translated into a European language or even, as far as I know, become available in any

European library. These include Tu de nhat den de to quoc te (From the First to the

Fourth International) by Ta Thu Thau, Van hoa tho xa, Collection Hieu biet moi (New

Knowledge), Saigon 1937; and Ta Thu Thau: Tu quoc gia den quoc te (Ta Thu Thau: From

nationalism to internationalism), by Nguyen Van Dinh, Sang, Saigon 1938.

An important aspect of the Fourth Internationals history concerns the struggles of

Vietnamese workers in France, both during the Second World War when they were

confined to labour camps, and after the war. Their leaders and organisers were

Trotskyists. This is dealt with fully in Les travailleurs indochinois en France pendant la

seconde guerre mondiale (Indochinese workers in France during the Second World War),

by Benjamin Stora, Cahiers du CERMTRI, no.28, April 1983. There are also references to it

in Chroniques Vietnamiennes, no.4, and I understand one of the comrades involved has

written a lengthy unpublished memoir in Vietnamese. Also unpublished is a Bref

Historique de Group Bolshevik-Leniniste Indochinoise, a copy of which is in the Centro

Studi Pietro Tresso in Foligno, Italy.

Now to material by bourgeois and non-Trotskyist writers on Vietnamese history. Those

which include the most detail about the Trotskyists are: Marxism in Vietnam by I. Milton

Sacks, part of Marxism in Southeast Asia: A Study of Four Countries, edited by Frank N.

Trager, Stanford University Press, 1960; Vietnamese Communism 1925-45 by Huynh Kim

Khanh, Cornell University Press. The Section d'Outre-Mer des Archives Nationales

(Overseas Section of the National Archives) in Paris, where vast quantities of reports on

the revolutionary movement by the French colonial administration of the 1930s are

stored, is an essential source for more detailed research.

On the 1945 revolution, The Failure of the Independent Political Movement in Vietnam

1946-46 by K. Colton, an unpublished thesis in the library of the School of Oriental and

African Studies in London, is exceptionally useful. Also interesting is Political Alignments

of Vietnamese Nationalists, US State Department Division of Research for the Far East,

Office of Intelligence Research Report No 3708, 1 October 1949.

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There is, of course, material in Vietnamese (see for example the bibliography of Huynh

Kim Khanhs Vietnamese Communism). Obvious priorities for translation are Nha Cach

Mang Ta Thu Thau 1906-1945 by Ba Phuong Lan, Khai Tri, Saigon 1973 (a biography of Ta

Thu Thau); Ta Thu Thau by Huan Phong, articles in Hoa Dong nos.44-52, Saigon 1965-66;

and Ngoi to kham Ion (In Central Prison) by Phan Van Hum (one of the Trotskyist leaders),

Saigon 1957.

Other works with more than a passing mention of the Trotskyists are: History of

Vietnamese Communism 1925-76 by Douglas Pike; Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, two

volumes, by Joseph Buttinger, London, 1967; The Struggle for Indochina 1940-55 by Ellen

Hammer, Stanford University Press, 1955. In French, there are the Histoire du Vietnam de

1940 1952 by Phillippe Devillers; Ho Chi Minh: a political biography by Jean Lacouture

(Allen Lane, London 1968); and La Liberation: Les Revolutionnaries pendant la Second

Guerre Mondiale 1944-47 (The Liberation: Revolutionaries During the Second World

War 1944-47) by Yvan Craipeau.

I have found no references to the Trotskyists in the Vietnamese Stalinists official

European-language versions of their own history. The origins of their lying slanders that

the Trotskyists were Japanese agents are the above mentioned letters from Ho Chi

Minh. This was subsequently repeated in the Vietnamese-language Party Writings,

Volume 2 (1930-45), Central Commission for the Study of Party History, Hanoi, 1977, and

most recently in the Observations on the steps of the Partys struggle against the counter-

revolutionary Trotskyist bands by The Tap, in Tap Chi Cong San (Communist Review),

No.2, February 1983, which comrades of the Chroniques Vietnamiennes group have

usefully taken the trouble to translate into French. Whether new material will be

uncovered, as a result of the appeal launched by those comrades for the Stalinists

archives on the 1930s to be opened, or the winds of glasnost blowing across from

Moscow, we dont yet know.

Building the Fourth International is as practical a matter in post-1975 Vietnam as

anywhere else in the world. It does have a little history of its own, which, although strictly

outside the scope of this article, could be touched on. See especially Chroniques

Vietnamiennes, its predecessor Nghien Cuu, the letter from the Bolshevik-Leninist Group

of Vietnam to the USFI of 5 February 1947 (published in the above-mentioned pamphlet,

Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam by the Spartacist League), and also a series of

articles in Workers Press, 3, 17 and 24 February 1990. A polemic in the Summer 1980

special edition of the USFIs Inprecor, entitled Dbat Sur La Situation En Indochine,

touched on some political and theoretical issues of vital importance arising from the

Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pots Cambodia.

11

La Lutte and the Vietnamese Trotskyists

Daniel Hemery

The following extracts have been translated by Ted Crawford from Daniel Hemerys book,

Revolutionnaires Vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine, which is published by F.

Maspero (1 Place Paul Painlev, Paris 5) in 1975. We are greatly indebted to both author

and publisher for permission to reproduce them in English garb here.

Daniel Hemery is a member of the Ligue Communiste Internationalists, the French section

of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The research on which his book is

based formed part of the doctorate he submitted to the University of Paris in 1973. He

lectures at the Universite Jussieur, and has also written an account of the thought of Ta

Thu Thau before he became a Trotskyist, Ta Thu Thau: Litineraire politique dun

revolutionnaire vietnamien, in Pierre Brocheux (ed.), Histoire de lAsie du sud-est, Lille,

pp.193-222. The snippets that we produce here reflect only a fragment of the massive

research of Comrade Hemerys 526 page book, and hopefully will tempt confident French

readers to study the rest.

As is our custom, the notes have been renumbered, though it should be possible to find

them very easily in the original from the page references which we give. Unless otherwise

stated, the notes are the authors own, but we have cut out or reduced some notes that do

not deal with the Trotskyist theme that is our concern here.

*******************

1. An ambiguous approach to national reality? [1]

It is surprising that the writings of the group attach little importance to this issue [the

national question - Eds.]. The evocations of national history, which one can read in 1925-

27 from the pen of Tran Van Thach or of Ta Thu Thau, cease. The key words of the

national question, fatherland or independence, are hardly used. La Lutte always writes

in the language of class struggle, it hardly borrows from that vocabulary, however rich it is

in French, and only once mentions the word Vietnam. Furthermore, when this lack of

interest ceased, it was tempted to give way to iconoclasm. Did they not write in April 1935

that for a long time in this country patriotic sentiments have not had any sort of echo?

However, the readers were not deceived, and some of them questioned this. A retired

teacher, interviewed by a reporter of the journal on the question of the language of

education, confessed his astonishment:

12

I know that you are not nationalists at La Lutte, but all the same I swear to you that above

all I love my country, our country. You seem, all of you, to ignore the fact that we are a

conquered people.

In 1934-35 Vietnamese Marxism seemed to put itself at the opposite extreme to

patriotism. Can we see here the existence of a Vietnamese version of Luxemburgism, or

even a national nihilism? The reader of the journal must look carefully at these

impressions. One could talk of the national issue being half-hidden, rather than there

being an absolute silence on this question. The nationalist demand is actually put forward

in La Lutte, but in counterpoint, at once as an implicit element of the general theme of the

journal and the group, and as a minor motif in its explicit discourse. It can come up swiftly

in different random contexts when national oppression is shown. Thus, of a Vietnamese

journalist, victim of a beating up, La Lutte justified its protests in these terms: The group

around La Lutte is one of the many efforts which our people make to gain respect. The

national theme pushes out things not found in the international rubric in the form of a

constant reminds: of the right of colonised peoples to independence. It also takes a

cultural or educational detour. One of the slogans of the journal is for the adoption of

Vietnamese (but it is still called Annamite) as the official language in the colonial

legislatures, and as the language of education.

The national language is expressed in La Lutte [2], but its occurrence is weak. In the 21

months up to June 1936, it only produced about 20 articles on this. [3] Statements on the

national theme can be classified in general into two categories. The first is set around the

criticism of the patriotism of the bourgeoisie, and seeks to show the role which it plays in

the alienation of the working classes. Even in an oppressed country, the La Lutte people

thought that the patriotism of the ruling class was an instrument of oppression. This did

not mean, however, an absolute condemnation of patriotism, because its positive value

was affirmed in the statements of the second category. La Lutte thus made a distinction

between two historical varieties of patriotism, one being the alienating patriotism of the

bourgeoisie, the other being in the interests of the majority of the nation, the patriotism

of the working class and its allies. These statements forcefully claimed an identity

between the national cause and the interests of the working class. But several of them ...

gave them less importance and showed the necessity of an intransigent class struggle. For

the group this was certainly the principal weapon of national liberation. To emphasise all

the more the importance of this dialectic of class and nation, La Lutte even bent the

Stalinist definition of the second of these two themes. We know, it said in April 1935,

that a nation is not necessarily a community of race, language or religion. To have a joint

future it must be an economic unity.

13

2. International links [4]

Through Gerard Rosenthal [5] La Lutte corresponded with the International Secretariat of

the Trotskyist movement, and at the beginning of 1936 received the publications of the

different national Trotskyist groups Belgian, Chinese and Australian as well as the

French paper of the Spanish POUM. But the references in the journal to Trotskyism

remained very discreet for a long time, the first only appearing in March 1936 with some

extracts from Rvolution, the paper of the French Revolutionary Young Socialists (JSR).

Eventually, the political contacts of the group spread to the whole political spectrum of

the French left, the pacifist movements, and above all, the Comit d'amnistie aux

Indochinois, and the Ligue Anti-Imperialiste [6], movements which were promoted by

Francis Jourdain, the most active Paris correspondent of La Lutte, as well as, through the

intervention of Daniel Guerin, the Colonial Committee of the SFIO. Guerin became one of

Ta Thu Thaus correspondents at the end of 1936, and the spokesman of the group in the

SFIO.

The intensity of these contacts was uneven. Contacts with the Comit damnistie were

particularly active, and were founded on mutual confidence. Contacts with the Fourth

International, which had not yet been formally established, were very loose. This was for

reasons which were not only due to the needs of the United Front. The international

contacts of Vietnamese Trotskyism were for a long time of a purely ideological nature, and

it always kept total liberty of action. There were a number of reasons for that the

weakness of the Fourth International and the Eurocentric nature of its preoccupations,

together with its lack of knowledge, hardly allowed it to intervene in the tactical choices to

be made in Indochina. Its leaders seem to have been somewhat reserved with regard to

political practice in Indochina, but they had confidence in the Vietnamese Trotskyists and

supported them. [7] We must doubtless return to the analysis developed by Trotsky in

order to explain the independence of his Vietnamese supporters. Like the majority of the

inspirers of contemporary Communism, he never truly suspected the future importance of

the revolutionary movements then developing in the great French colonies of North Africa

and Indochina, to which his writings only made rare allusions. He had, however, with

remarkable perspicacity, criticised in 1930 the reluctance of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in

France to take sides on the national question. The later short texts where he dealt with

Indochina, all dated in 1939, were in return almost entirely devoted to very specific rather

than general questions. [8] The necessity of maintaining the struggle against French

imperialism and, above all, of breaking from the policy of weakening the anti-imperialist

movement that was then being promoted by the Comintern as far as the Communist

parties in the French and British colonies were concerned, was certainly affirmed, but

without going deeply into the analysis of the actual developments taking place in

14

Indochina. Above all, he had for a long time thought that the historically decisive battles

would take place in the industrialised countries, the Soviet Union, China and India. [9]

3. Keeping an eye on peasant life [10]

Apart from the personal links of its editors with the countryside, La Lutte possessed its

own circle of correspondents, who were often village school teachers, sometimes freed

political prisoners sent back to their villages who could not start secret activity again

because they were watched, or young people, the educated unemployed, of whom an

official report in 1936 deplored that they were not assimilable by the established order of

the village:

True pariahs, they could not be classified amongst the dan, and they were rejected by

native society which despised them, and which they in turn despised.

In addition, La Lutte could count upon the hidden support of the underground militants of

the Communist Party.

This peasant implantation of a workers organisation was not peculiar to the La Lutte

group, but was an historic characteristic of Vietnamese Communism. From this period it

had a different sociological profile compared to the great Communist parties of the

interwar period, the French or German for example. This spread of workers ideas in

peasant or semi-peasant circles certainly echoes the Chinese experience, and even calls to

mind the influence of Socialism or Anarchism amongst the workers in semi-rural industry,

which played a key role in the nineteenth century in the workers revolutions and in the

birth of trade unionism in Europe. [11] And as far as La Lutte is concerned, we must

appreciate with more precision the true influence of the legal movement in the rural

milieu. It would not perhaps be too much of an exaggeration to say that because of its

more obvious urban character, it was able to build an underground Communist

organisation.

Its influence was weak amongst the peasantry of Transbassac, but pretty solidly

established in the provinces of central Cochin China, that semi-circle which went around

the Jonc plain and its moonscape countryside. It was there that La Lutte people found

both an audience and information about the countryside.

4. Two electoral campaigns [12]

From February to May 1935, Cochin China saw a continuous electoral campaign. The La

Lutte people came near to success in the first round, and carried it off easily in the second.

15

La Luttes campaign for the colonial elections on 3 and 17 March had only propagandist

aims. The group had hardly any serious hope of success, and only put up six candidates,

three Communists and three Trotskyists, in the Eastern and Central Provinces. [13] It was,

however, not completely absent elsewhere. At Vinhlong, in the third constituency, the

advocate Duong Van Giao, a friend of Ta Thu Thau and the groups lawyer, was elected

deputy in the central provinces, thanks to the support of the Cao-daists, and another

independent candidate Phan Khac Giang, in the fifth constituency (Cantho), affirmed his

sympathies for La Lutte. Even if the constitutionalists were re-elected nearly everywhere,

the elections still represented quite a success for legal Communism. [14] In contrast to the

dull campaign of the rural gentry, the La Lutte people had shown unequalled cohesion and

vigour, and imposed a quite different kind of electoral competition.

As can be read in the confidential report on the election, the Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau

once again showed himself to be the real head of the revolutionary organisations. After

getting to know thoroughly the electoral legislation, they mobilised all the resources of

the legal party and its sympathisers, and made contact with clandestine organisations.

After carefully explaining their manner of working on the edge of legality without ever

openly breaking the law, they gave everybody different tasks. Some had to make

collections among workers who were not electors, collecting the sinews of war, whilst

others had the jobs of editing papers and leaflets, propaganda and information. [15]

The group was refused the right to organise meetings, but knew how to get its

programme known amongst the middle bourgeoisie and the small peasants of the centre

and the East. In each county town La Lutte had its propagandists, who went by bicycle

through the countryside carrying posters, personally visiting each elector, distributing

thousands of leaflets, and organising meetings and local support groups. [16] The three

principal slogans of the candidates, the Three Whales of the revolutionary movement,

were first the Amnesty [17], secondly, raising wages, dividing up the great estates, and

freedom for the trade union movement, and thirdly, the installation of peoples power.

They had a real impact. For the first time in Indochina an election took place with a radical

challenge to the established political order, and on the claim to a parliament elected by

universal suffrage. La Lutte had put the problems of ordinary people at the centre of its

campaign, and supported a detailed programme of immediate demands. [18] It opposed

to the friendly relations of the constitutionalist politics with the French administration a

quite different conception of parliamentary activity, and tore to pieces the image of the

Colonial Council, saying:

Can it be said that the Colonial Council represents the people, as it has no power? Even if

it did have any of the powers of any European parliament, it would be powerless without

16

a movement organised by the people. We must send to the Colonial Council

representatives who can talk loudly to the whole people from the parliamentary tribune

and who will help to organise the conquest of People's Power. [19]

They vigorously fought the constitutionalists, all of whom sparred with the La Lutte

people, which earned them a stern call to order from the authorities. The elections of

March 1935 marked the end of part of the electoral base of the constitutionalists, in

particular the young people of the towns:

The constitutionalists, taking note of their political work, only pull behind them their

personal friends or very respectable electors. They have become leaders, destroyed by

their own success, whose supporters, over time, have left them, without yet being

replaced by new elements. [20]

The divorce between the conservatism of the supporters of Bui Quang Chieu and the

quickening rhythm of change in the country had become irreversible.

The municipal elections in Saigon of 6 and 12 May accelerated the process. The tactics and

general campaign themes of the group were unchanged. La Lutte raised the question of

the chaos of the colonial city, the growing imbalance between the general underprovision

of the urban area and the growth of its working class population, the absence of any

cheap housing policy, and the misery of the inhabitants of the shanty towns. The

government noticed the reception by the urban masses of this new political language.

For the first time, they wrote in a report, they were spoken to in a language made for

them. [21]

5. La Luttes first balance sheet [22]

After 21 months of existence, La Lutte appeared as a vigorous political movement which

had gone beyond the stage of a simple propaganda group. The confidential reports then

used expressions about it which reflected this growth: legal Communist party or, legal

movement. Their tone was alarmist. All emphasised the dominant influence on the

audience that the group was in the process of acquiring in the political life of the South.

What, then, was La Luttes character? Numerically it was growing. However, one must not

see it as a political organism of the European type, highly organised and openly displaying

its forces. La Lutte can hardly be understood with the help of todays categories of French

political sociology. The party, which was actually part of the legal movement, was limited

to a strict minimum elected representatives and journalists but many militants worked

secretly under its direction; plenty of more or less anonymous friends and sympathisers,

workers, clerks, school students, village school masters, and smallholders, brought it

17

decentralised and benevolent assistance. On the other hand, it offered a welcoming

organisation to ex-political prisoners who were too carefully watched when they returned

from France or the Soviet Union to be able to take part in underground organisations.

They carried on three activities: the correspondence and collection of information, the

circulation of the journal and giving an oral translation of it, and propaganda activity

during elections or strikes.

This loose and open structure represented the beginning of the semilegal movements

which developed in Indochina during the period of the Popular Front, and the future of

which the group foresaw. [23] It permitted great flexibility and popular initiative, which

compensated for the weakness of the official group. La Lutte functioned as a

semimovement deprived of an internal organisation. After it came out of its initial

isolation, the circulation of the journal grew a little. Its sale was more than 1,500 copies at

the start of the autumn of 1935, a number only appreciated by noting the tiny public

Indochinese press. In reality, such a small circulation represented several thousand

readers and listeners, and an indeterminate number of ordinary sympathisers. The

cohesion of the group was its strength. Differences were sorted out by discussion. [24]

Thus, as a reader wrote, after the electoral success of 1935, the political tendencies of

the workers movement came together. [25]

La Lutte had a strong attraction in urban society. It re-established the bases for

continuous Communist activity in Saigon. What were they? Above all, they were the

working class and youth. The group had succeeded in attracting the attention of the

workers and the coolies who were crushed by the crisis and by the cumulative effects of

capitalist and pre-capitalist methods of exploitation. It was a real part of the workers

movement at the moment that it was retaking the offensive. The administration saw in its

militants the recognised advisors of the needy class. [26] Its working class activity was

spread further in May 1936 with the creation of study circles of workers [27], of which the

first, for the workers in the Arsenal, met on 16 June at Nguyen Van Nguyens house. It is

true that they had to stop the meetings in July, as its members feared they would be

sacked. On the other hand, La Lutte had published a series of pamphlets called The Social

Library in Quoc Ngu, of which the first, edited by Nguyen Van Tao, was sold out in a few

days. [28]

The fusion between the intellectuals and the advanced elements of the proletariat was

well on its way. La Lutte was equally at work among the youth in the schools. The group,

which knew how to run its political work through the network of precapitalist socio-

economic structures (the market, the shed at the crossroads, the artisans workshop) was

now present inside the national cultural system, notably within the private schools. [29]

18

The Trotskyists of La Lutte taught in these places, and had great authority there, above all,

Ta Thu Thau, a well-known lecturer by whom young people and their parents wanted to

be taught. [30] On several occasions the paper had defended the pupils. [31] It was

circulated in the vocational schools, at the industrial and the mechanic schools, and at the

Lycee Petrus Ky where Nguyen Van Nguyen led a Marxist study circle in April 1936. In the

course of the following years a great number of these students would come to strengthen

the legal organisations.

Legal and illegal operations constituted two dialectical aspects related to the same

political phenomenon that is to say, the rooting of Communism inside the body of

Vietnam society. The clandestine activists helped the legal ones [32], and these prolonged

and amplified the partial battles which the former organised, such as those of the tobacco

growers. La Lutte was also a political substitute. Whatever its vitality, the Indochinese

Communist Party was convalescent, having to use most of its resources to regroup, and

was not without the inherent sectarian tendencies of a period of defeat or isolation. La

Lutte gave to the party the continuity of Communist action, and despite certain extremist

statements, had shown sufficient flexibility to pull moderate and patriotic opinion towards

the Communists.

At the same time, the Communist movement had undergone another mutation. Until

then, its mass basis had been above all in the countryside, the towns being the

strongholds of the colonial system. After 1932 the legal movement enabled it to transfer

Communisms centre of gravity to urban surroundings, and to rebalance the relationship

between urban and peasant struggles. Urban action allowed the revolutionaries to spread

modern forms of political combat through the countryside, apd to give them inspiration

and continuity. In the pre-war period, and with the birth of the crisis of colonialism, the

urban centre had for a time acquired the key role; a new dialectic of town and country

which would have its full effect in the revolution of August 1945, which was simultaneous

in both the city and the villages. It was only 1946, with a new historical structure that of

the long war which reversed the balance between the town and the countryside.

These transformations favoured the reorganisation of clandestine Communist

organisations after the repressions of April-May 1935 in the South and Annam, and of

August-September 1935 in the North. It was precisely in Cochin China that their

reconstruction had been most rapid. From July clandestine propaganda was renewed in

Saigon, Giandinh, Rachgia, Baclieu and Travinh, and in at least eight provinces by July

1936. [33] Underground Communism was weak, but its ability to resist outweighed the

efforts of the police to root it out, and gave alarm to the highest levels in Hanoi. On their

side, the Trotskyists had been able to rebuild an embryonic clandestine organisation, the

19

League of International Communists (LCI) founded in July 1935. [34] They criticised the

strategy of Popular Fronts, and demanded the formation of a mass workers party and an

anti-imperialist front uniting the different tendencies of the workers movement. At the

time of the arrest of their most active leaders [35], most notably Luu Sanh Hanh, Ho Huu

Tuong and Ngo Van Xuyet, they had recruited militants in about 40 workplaces.

6. The anti-imperialist United Front [36]

There was hardly any lasting consensus between the Vietnamese Trotskyists and

Communists on the question of political strategy. In Saigon the Trotskyists were inspired

by the conclusions of the manifesto Whither France?, which Trotsky had published in

October. The last lap of the race between Fascism and the workers revolution had

started: no third way was possible but only short detours, which led to one or the other. In

the end a recourse to violence was inevitable.

In June the Vietnamese Trotskyists made a similar analysis of the Indochinese situation in

their illegal papers and then, only a little later, in their legal journal Le Militant, the first

four numbers of which were issued between 1 and 21 September 1936.

The economic recovery and the French crisis could only lead to another mass movement

in Vietnam, which, supported by the offensive of the French working class, would shake

the colonial system. They envisaged the appearance of a revolutionary situation in

Indochina and prepared for it. The illegal review Thuong Truc Cach Mang (Permanent

Revolution) of the Lien Doan Cong San Quoc Te had put forward the idea of creating

action committees in the spring of 1936, which had already been advocated by Trotsky in

November 1935. [37] The Trotskyist underground militants thought that in Indochina

these peoples committees would allow an offensive mass movement to be formed, and

so they started to set them up. There was perfect synchronisation of analysis between

them and their western comrades. Whilst the Parisian proletariat was occupying the

factories, Trotsky ended his article of 9 June with the words the French revolution has

begun; in Saigon, even as the arrest of their people was taking place on the 11th, the

illegal Trotskyists circulated an appeal to go forward:

Comrades, several hundreds of thousands of French workers of the metropolis have struck

and occupied the factories. Let us follow them, let us rise up in the factories and

plantations in each province and village. Let the workers and peasants elect delegates to

form action committees. Follow the workers of France! Down with the imperialist

Indochinese government! Long live the independence of Indochina! Seize the lands of the

landlords! Long live French and Indochinese Communism! [38]

20

The Trotskyist analysis thus included a revolutionary outcome for all the developments of

June 1936. The logic of the crisis in the metropolis would set a date for the liberation of

the Indochinese peoples. The French revolution would open the way to the Indochinese

revolution [39], and they must aim for the conquest of power, and never lose sight of

internationalism. Now was not the time to have confidence in the government of Leon

Blum, indeed one had constantly to distrust it. In the same way the Trotskyists reaffirmed

the double necessity of making practical agreements with the Vietnamese big bourgeoisie,

and of maintaining the class struggle, so they thought of the United Front as a tactic of

simultaneous alliance and struggle. [40] Anything was possible in France and Spain, and all

this would happen in Indochina ... [41]

7. The Action Committees [42]

The dialectic of the illegal and the legal the coordination of open activity and the

activity of our party according to a document of the PCI had meant a rapid growth in

the movement of the provisional Action Committees. The La Lutte group did almost all the

work at the centre. They printed innumerable leaflets on behalf of the Action Committees,

and in their own name, notably the manifesto Dong Duong Dai Hoi (Indochinese Congress)

[43], and their militants knew how to use the most varied forms of oral propaganda (for

example, they got theatre groups to put in passages in their plays which mentioned the

aims of the Congress), they organised many meetings in the provinces, and started up

some of the Committees in the Saigon-Cholon area. [44]

La Lutte also published the pamphlet Cach Lam Viec Cua Banh Hanh Dong (Method of

Work of an Action Committee), an interesting guide to the recently formed Action

Committees [45], by the Trotskyist militant Dao Hung Long, just released from prison, and

a member of the committee for the convening of an Indochinese Congress. In order not to

have to ask for legal authorisation, these Committees could never have more than 19

members. This obligation made discussions and decentralised political initiative easier,

and in this Ta Thu Thau saw some of the conditions for success. He foresaw getting

thousands of such Committees established. They did not have formal constitutions, and

legally had to be temporary, but were, nonetheless, destined to become permanent

organisations of the masses. The pamphlet recommended limiting the numbers of

organisers to five, and reserving the other places to representatives of the masses.

The spread of the Committees had to obey the rule of fission. When a Committee reached

20 members it had to split.

Each Committee had great liberty of action. According to the pamphlet which perhaps

put forward a Trotskyist vision of the movement there would be no leaders or central

committee [46], whilst conferences of the Committees would enable coordination and

21

political debate to take place; it recommended having a Committee in each village. Each of

these organisations elected a Secretariat which met at least once a week, organised the

expression of popular demands, edited a discussion bulletin, drew up lists of resolutions,

and arranged to elect the conference delegates. La Lutte would manage external affairs

both with the French left of the metropolis and Saigon [47], and with the Vietnamese

press in the rest of Indochina. It brought valuable help to the foundation in Hanoi of the

legal Communist group Travail in September 1936, which resulted in a northerly extension

of La Luttes formula (but with different politics) and of the Congress movement. [48]

The secret organisations played an equal if not more important role. From outside they

exercised a critical check on the actions of the group, a double entry check since there

were two political lines in the Congress. Le Militant, the legal paper of the Trotskyists,

warned against holding any illusions in the southern bourgeoisie. [49] The Trotskyists, still

just starting their clandestine organisation, actively pushed for the preparation of an

Indochinese Congress, and the formation of Action Committees [50], in which they saw

the embryonic structures for a situation of dual power.

In the weeks following La Luttes call, the clandestine Communist organisations set

themselves the task of multiplying the Action Committees in the immediate future. [51]

The Bureau Abroad [Communist Headquarters Eds.] followed the development of the

campaign and the action of La Lutte with attention. Its resolution of 3 October [52]

commented favourably on this, but criticised what the Bureau considered as clumsiness:

the article of Nguyen An Ninh which denqunced the manoeuvres of the President of the

Chamber of the Representatives of Tonkin, and the caustic remarks of La Lutte about the

bourgeoisie. [53] But beyond this critical comment on the movement, the ICP, by far the

biggest revolutionary party, favoured the spread of Action Committees with all its forces,

the great majority of such owing their existence to it.

In short, the ex-political prisoners who started to return to their villages really made up

the backbone of numerous Committees. Because of the surveillance to which they were

subject, they were all struck off to run the Committees which, let us repeat, were legal.

The police made a partial list of the very numerous ex-political prisoners among the

activists at the end of September 1936. In the village of An Truong (Travinh), the old

centre of the peasant movement of the South and an area of harsh repression after the

great demonstration of 1 August 1931, the Action Committee was founded after the

return of a group of freed prisoners who by then had a relationship with La Lutte. Ta Thu

Thau was seen there on several occasions at the beginning of 1937. [54] Another police

source reckoned that 25 per cent of all the members of the Committees were ex-

prisoners. [55]

22

8. Repression [56]

The colonial government, already certain of the home governments support, immediately

struck at the vital centres of the Congress movement. On 21 September the headquarters

of La Lutte and the homes of Ta Thu Thau and Nguyen An Ninh were seized and searched.

Both were imprisoned. On 3 October it was the turn of Nguyen Van Tao. Three days later

their demand to be freed on bail was rejected.

The relationship between the Communists and the Trotskyists came under pressure

following the appearance in Le Militant of harsh criticisms of Soviet foreign policy and the

French Popular Front, and became more bitter in October. On 8 October the Trotskyist

weekly made public its decision to suspend publication in order not to handicap that of La

Lutte. [57] The Central Committee of the ICP added to its circular of 3 November this

conciliatory preface:

If the Trotskyists sincerely enter the Popular Front, we will welcome them with pleasure,

but we will always be careful, because we only believe in peoples' deeds, and not their

words. [58]

At the time of this step backward, La Lutte appeared more than ever irreplaceable, even

in a milieu strongly aligned with the Communist movement. It is remarkable enough that

it also had good relationships with the Cao-daists. The government accused the sect of

Pham Cong Tac of providing campaign funds to the group [59], a fact which evidently is

unproven, but it is symptomatic that Ta Thu Than, Nguyen An Ninh and Nguyen Van Tao

had, at the invitation of Ho Phap, joined in the mourning ceremonies for Le Van Trung at

Tay Ninh on 26 November. [60]

The arrest of the militants of La Lutte, and the hunger strike that they undertook for 11

days from 24 October, caused huge indignation in Vietnamese opinion, both in Saigon and

the countryside. In the villages close to Saigon, the merchants and the hackney cab drivers

[61] struck on 5 November. In Saigon demonstrations were under way, and the popularity

of La Lutte had never been so great. [62] The isolation of the French authorities was at its

height.

The movement for the calling of the Indochinese Congress was effectively opposed by the

neo-colonial policy of the Popular Front. However, Marius Moutet was far from having

approved the repressive operations of the colonial government, whom he accused in a

long letter of 24 November of having taken unnecessary risks in keeping in prison three

politically important individuals [63], and of having exaggerated the danger. Pushed by

the minister, the colonial government went into reverse and relaxed its grip. It then

allowed the publication at Hue of the Nhanh Lua (The Rice Seed) of Nguyen Khoa Van on

23

24 October, whilst on 5 November Nguyen An Ninh, Nguyen Van Tao and Ta Thu Thau

were freed. [64] The case against La Lutte was also dropped on the orders of the minister.

[65] As all three left the main prison, the first great wave of strikes in Vietnamese history

had already started.

9. The strikes [66]

The setting at liberty of the three leaders of La Lutte on 5 November opened the second

phase of the Popular Front period in Indochina. It marked a pause in the political struggle

continuing since August between the national movement and the neo-colonial policy of

the Popular Front. This respite itself reflected the extension of the struggle to the terrain

of class conflict. From the end of October 1936 to the end of August 1937, Vietnam was

shaken by an unprecedented wave of strikes without an equivalent in any other French

colony. The Minister of Colonies had been forced to drop the case against La Lutte

precisely because he feared that the political crisis would develop into a social explosion.

In the same way the strikes imposed pressure on the legal revolutionary movement. The

tasks of the hour became to aid the strikers and to organise solidarity around them. From

this came the two key tasks which appeared imminent at the end of the summer the

legalisation of the Congress campaign and the proclamation of political democracy.

In the course of the strikes it was clear that the influence of Trotskyism and Communism

among the working class was progressing with giant steps. The strike offensive itself

consisted of a great spontaneous impulse. Often the initiative came from the depths of

the proletariat, and resulted from collective consciousness, but this spontaneity had

joined up with the activity of organisations, and it would have been vain to oppose them.

The double structure of the Communist movement, including Trotskyism, had played a

profound role, and had given coherence to the push of the working class. Even if

documentation is almost totally lacking, one cannot doubt that long before October 1936

the secret trade union nuclei reconstituted by the ICP since 1934 had taken over a large

number of strikes, such as that of the sawmen. The November 1936 issue of Giai Phong,

the underground paper of the Interior Committee of the ICP, gave credit to Communist

militants for the leadership of strikes in the distilleries, the clothing industry, the sawmills,

potteries and soapworks, but recognised that: Although the mass movement is boiling

up, many strikes and working class struggles have escaped the control of the Communist

Party. [67]

In other cases it was Trotskyist militants who had organised the strikes. [68] From the

evidence, all the underground organisations, whatever their tendency, had abandoned

slow recruitment in favour of joining the workers spirited offensive.

24

The activity of La Lutte was only a little more understood. Official documents blamed it,

with malicious exaggeration, for being responsible for most of the strikes in Saigon. The

political report of December 1936 thus conjured up:

... the double game of La Lutte, the double texture of its work: on the one hand carrying

on outside activities on behalf of certain trades and substituting itself for the CGT, which

does not exist here, justified by the need to modernise workplace legislation, and the

necessity for applying this to the working population in Cochin China, which is backward

on a world scale, and on the other hand carrying on secret underground work and

profound anti-French opposition. [69]

In the end, one of the results of the strike movement was the formation of important

underground unions, of which the police took notice at the end of December 1936. The

Communists had created the Tong Cong Hoi (General Workers Union), and were

represented in at least 11 important enterprises, notably the Arsenal, the FACI and Shell

[70], and had published at the end of January the first number of Hop Nhut (The Union).

By 1 March 1937 they numbered 800 members in Saigon and 700 others in several

sympathising groups. [71] In addition the underground Trotskyist militants were in the

process of getting an important audience in the Saigon working class. They were active in

the factories, notably the Arsenal where they were more influential than the

Communists [72] on the railways, in the water and electric companies, and had formed

another embryonic general union, the Lien Hiep Uy Tho Thuyen (The General Workers

Federation) which, after November 1936, regularly published the monthly Lien Hiep (The

Union), a union propaganda organ. [73]

10. The break [74]

The split in La Lutte in June 1937 had led within two months to the ruin of the political

project that was conceived the year before by the Vietnamese Communists and

Trotskyists. The event is not a superficial one in Vietnamese political history. In a sense it

opened the way to the ideological reorientation of Communism, which culminated in the

foundation of the Vietminh, and through this established new roots in the national

revolutionary tradition. Crucially, however, this split brought into play the principle factors

which affected the general evolution of the revolutionary parties: the changes in the

dynamism of the mass movements on the basis of doctrinal choice, the personality of

human beings, and the impact of the policy of the colonial government and of the

Comintern on the course of the national movement, etc. It is still necessary to add that,

like all splits during the Stalinist epoch, it harboured no fewer emotional repercussions

than reasoned elements. Their combination would result in the widening of the split into

an irreconcilable conflict, culminating in its tragic end in 1945.

25

Underground Trotskyism did not have the same strength. In Vietnam, as in many other

countries, it seems, moreover, to have always kept a group structure without ever truly

acquiring that of a solidly organised and geographically spread party. [75] Ta Thu Thau was

above all an orator, perhaps by personal temperament and certainly as a result of his ro1e

in legal political life. Nevertheless, since the scuttling of Militant in October 1936, the

illegal Trotskyist group of Ho Huu Tuong, because of the difference in its experience in

1931-32, had succeeded in providing a complete system of both legal and underground

publications, and it was in the process of becoming a force to be reckoned with. [76] It

published its constitution in the May 1937 issue of its paper, Tien Quan (The Vanguard).

The Trotskyists had won young followers in the Saigon factories in which they had done

their best to build trade union committees. These, the embryos of a working class trades

unionism, absorbed most of their efforts, apart from propagandist action in Saigon-

Cholon, as well as in some central provinces like Mytho and Travinh [77], and some help

they gave to the Action Committees.

In the spring of 1937 their members had set up a trade union federation of Nam Ky (Lien

Uy Tho Thuyen), whose rules were published and adopted on 1 May. [78] It had active

organisers in at least 39 workplaces in Saigon and Cholon: the Arsenal, where they were

particularly influential, the French Est-Asiatique, the FACI, the railways, rubber

manufacture, the tramways company, Indochina distilleries at Binh Tay, the water and

electricity company, Franco Asiatique oil, the rice mills at Hiep Xuong, Duc Hiep, Extreme

Orient and Hang Thai at Cholon, among the dockers, the labourers in the ricemills, and

among the workers in the potteries and the sugar mills of the provinces Cholon, Giadinh

and Thudaumot. [79]

Fairly numerous documents show that the Trotskyist worker militants and their

sympathisers played a leading part in the organisation of strikes in 1936-37 in the South.

In the absence of sufficiently conclusive pieces of evidence it is difficult to be more

positive, but it is probable that their role was considerable in the great strikes from May to

July 1937. [80] The Vietnamese Trotskyist movement the expression already

corresponds to reality had from the beginning a successful implantation in the Saigon

region, whose importance moreover can be measured by the frequent warnings against

Trotskyism in the underground Communist press.

This double development had significant consequences. The underground groups now had

the necessary resources to keep the autonomous legal organisations alive, but the latter

had to show themselves to be more willing to conform to the orientation of the

underground groups. The relative independence from which La Lutte had benefited could

only be put into question in the long term.

26

The aborting of the Indochinese Congress and the disappointments caused by the

Indochinese policy of the Leon Blum government had brought into question the

unconditional acceptance of the Trotskyist and Communist lines. Since the reappearance

of Militant, the legal Trotskyist weekly, on 23 March 1937, the publications of the

Indochinese Communist Party denounced the campaign conducted by the Trotskyists

against the Popular Front, and in parallel, against the Moscow Trials. At the centre of this

polemic there was the attitude to be adopted vis-a-vis the Popular Front. Thus the 15 May

1937 issue of the Trotskyist paper Tien Quan:

The supporters of the Third International persist in supporting the Popular Front, alleging

that it is not responsible for the actions of the Popular Front government and the

government of Indochina. The reality is that without the support of the Popular Front,

there would not be a Popular Front government, and that, without the confidence

accorded by it to Brevie, and without the confidence given in his turn to the local

administrative heads and so on, there would not be the repression from which the

Indochinese are suffering. [81]

This analysis of the real relations between the different levels of the pyramid of colonial

power undoubtedly rings true. For the Trotskyists, imperialism under a Popular Front

government was still imperialism. There were thus no new variables to be introduced into

the tactics of the revolutionary movement. After 1936, just as before it, these consisted in

preparing the working class and the peasantry through the daily experience of class

struggle and anti-imperialist conflicts for the distant future perspective of a revolution

with a proletarian direction and content. All the same, it remained for Vietnam to resolve

the near-Sisyphean tasks which were posed at the same historical moment, and presented

to all the sections of the international Trotskyist movement, that is the construction of

workers' parties, at once both revolutionary and connected to the masses.

Daniel Hmery

Notes

1. From pp.105-7.

2. Let us above all recall that the group included men who were radical patriots such as

Nguyen An Ninh, Tran Van Thach and Le Van Thu. There is nothing to suggest that they felt

uneasy with the Trotskyist or Communist critique of nationalism, and everything to

suggest that their sympathy for the two varieties of Communism took root in their

patriotism.

27

3. Significant of this reserve is the restrictive title of the most important of these articles,

Let us Talk about National Aspirations.

4. From pp.140-1.

5. He participated in the first activities of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in Paris (he was

arrested in the course of the demonstration outside the Elysee), and he was active in the

Comit damnistie aux Indochinois.

6. The League Against Imperialism came out of the Liga Gegen Koloniale Unterdrckung

(which emerged in Berlin in 1925), and was founded at the Brussels Congress (10-15

February 1927). Ta Thu Than spoke at the Second Congress (Frankfurt 20-30 July 1929),

and Tran Van Thach wrote in the first number of its bulletin in 1928. In 1934 it had a

Vietnamese section in Paris with a paper Phan De (The Anti-Imperialist). Its French

section disappeared in 1936.

7. According to Pierre Naville, La Lutte appeared too populist and they had reservations

about the alliance with the Communists.

8. Or at least those that have been published.

9. Naville recalls that the correspondence which he had with Trotsky defended the

opposite idea, according to which the major crises of French capitalism would be found on

its colonial periphery. Trotsky did not allow himself to be convinced.

10. From pp.199-200.

11. We should recall the Jura Federation in the First International.

12. From pp.253-56.

13. The administration did not allow Nguyen Van Tao, Tran Van Thach, Nguyen Van

Nguyen and Ho Hun Tuong to stand, as they were not old enough, but they stood for the

principles of La Lutte.

14. The following were elected: Tran Van Kha, Vo Ha Tri, Tran Van Sang (first

constituency); Nguyen Phan Long, Huynh Van Chin and Nguyen Dang Lien (second); Bui

Quang Chien, Thuong Cong Thuan at Gocong, Bentre, Travinh and Vinhlong; Le Quang

Liem, Nguyen Tan Duoc (fourth, Rachgia, Longxuyen, Chaudoc Hatien and Sadoc); Huynh

Ngoc Nhuan, Tran Trinh Huy, Truong Dai Luong (fifth, Cantho, Soctrang, Baclieu); Duong

Van Giao (in the third) and Pham Van Tiec (in the fourth) seem to have been the only

independents elected.

28

15. Report of Governor Pages, 11 March 1935.

16. In Cai B the electoral address of La Lutte was written by hand and taken to the

electors homes by schoolboys. On 1 March the police seized 8,000 leaflets in Vietnamese

at the printshop, but La Lutte was able to produce several dozens of thousands of leaflets.

17. A demand personified by the candidature at Giandinh of Nguyen Van Nguyen, who

had just been released from the Poulo-Condore.

18. Let us just cite the matter that interested the peasantry the remission of rents and

debts until the end of the crisis, the division of the cong dien and the cong tho among the

agricultural workers, the distribution to the poor of 300,000 hectares of abandoned rice

land and the stocks of rice belonging to the dien chu, the abolition of the poll tax, and the

exemption from the land tax for those with less than five hectares.

19. La Lutte, 19 February 1935.

20. Police report of 15 May 1935.

21. Report on the Saigon electoral college sent by Pages, 9 July 1935.

22. From pp.263, 270-1.

23. According to the police archives of June 1936, Ta Thu Thau had the perspective of

gathering together a large legally recognised Communist Party, and would have proposed

to the constitutionalists the calling of a conference of their party, which would have

created a useful precedent. At the very most this is only a hypothesis.

24. The only conflict appeared after 21 months. Tran Van Thach was opposed to the idea

of negotiating with the other Vietnamese and French councillors for the election of Ta Thu

Thau to the post of first assistant, and the appointment of Nguyen Van Tao and Tran Van

Thach as delegates to the Administrative Council. The La Lutte people had spoiled their

ballots at the time of the Mayors election, and Tran Van Thach had been publicly

reprimanded.

25. La Lutte, 25 June 1935.

26. Police archives, November 1935. Mixing closely in the life of the workers, denouncing

all the abuses of which the humble are victims, leading strike movements, the young men

of La Lutte have become the idols of the Annamite population. (LOeuvre Indochinoise,

Hanoi, 9 December 1935)

29

27. Ta Thu Thau had great hopes for this sort of propaganda. He thought it would be a

step in reaching out to all classes of the Annamite people. (Police archives, March 1937)

28. Le front populaire et les aspirations des masses Indochinoises, published 8 July 1936.

Other titles were Le Fascisme et la guerre civil en Espagne (Fascism and the Spanish Civil

War) and Etude sommaire de la lutte des classes (A Short Study of Class Struggle) which

appeared in 1937.

29. Founded in great number after the First World War, often at the initiative of the

constitutionalists, who had at that time perhaps seen in them a way of establishing a

centre of cultural resistance.

30. Phan Van Hum taught Vietnamese language and literature at the Lyceum P. Downer,

from which he was sacked in 1935 after a strike by lecturers. Ta Thu Thau taught French,

ethics and history in the Institute of Huynh Khuong Ninh, Chau Thanh and at Nguyen

Trong Hy school in Giadinh. Anh Van, who was his pupil, has a moving portrait of his old

teacher. The police accused Ta Thu Thau of having led the pupils of Chan Thanh on a

hunger strike at the end of 1934 (Police report, fourth quarter 1934) but this hardly agrees

with the recollections of Anh Van (Hoang Don Tri).

31. In particular against the tyrannical principal of the Mechanics School. See the letter

from the pupils in La Lutte, 10 January 1935.

32. Then the police arrested at Song Phuoc (Mytho), two militants who had escaped from

Paulo-Condore who were persuading a farmer to vote for La Luttes candidate. (Political

report of December 1935) According to the police reports of December 1935, the

leadership of the ICP in the South still hesitated in February 1935 whether to support the

La Lutte lists, but the Bureau in exile gave Tran Van Giau the task of organising the illegal

organisations participation in La Luttes campaign.

33. At this date (June-July 1936) the police reckoned the effective members of the

Indochinese Communist Party in the South to number 70, and the unions of peasants and

workers to be 7,000. (Note on the ICP and unions much abbreviated Eds.)

34. By Luu Sanh Hanh, released from prison at Cap St Jacques and a journalist on Duoc

Nha Nam. The chief members of the group were the white collar worker Ngo Van Xuyet,

the students Trinh Van Lau and Ngo Chinh Phen, the returnee from France, Nguyen Van

Nam, the printer Ky and the coolie Don. With the help of Ho Hun Tuong from October the

Ligue published the review Cach Mang Truong Truc (Permanent Revolution) and the

paper Tien Dao (Vanguard).

30

35. The Arsenal, the tramways, the petrol stores at Nha Be, the aerodrome at Cat Lay, etc.

Their trial took place on 31 August 1936. (Seven were found guilty and sent to prison from

six to 18 months).

36. From pp.285-7.

37. We have not been able to find this document, and we have relied on the recollections

of Ho Hun Tuong and Ngo Van Xuyet.

38. He saw in this a way of breaking what he called the anti-revolutionary resistance of

the party and trade union apparatus and of preparing to arm the workers, anti-Fascist

self-defence and the general strike. The idea of elected Action Committees had also been

put forward by Dimitrov in his report to the Seventh Congress, but was then abandoned

by the Communist International. At any rate, Action Committees were created by the

Vietnamese Communists for some years. Thus, at the beginning of 1936, the Provisional

Committee of Nam Ky recommended the formation of Action Committees in each village

against the tax system.

39. From Depeche d Indochine, 15 June 1936.

40. And vice-versa, we are tempted to say. But no text or document justifies this

supposition.

41. Cf. the article A Tous in Le Militant, 8 September 1936.

42. From pp.314-318.

43. At least that of the La Lutte action committee which had, according to the police, put

out at least 20,000 leaflets, and which was the active antenna of the Organising

Committee of the Congress.

44. Nguyen Van So was a member with Dao Hung Long of the provisional Action

Committee of the neighbourhoods of Cho Dui, Cau Ong Lien, Cau Mui, Cau Kho and

Choquan. Ganofsky and several other supporters of La Lutte belonged to that of the outer

suburb of Dakao. Tran Van Thach, Ho Huu Tuong, Ninh and Hum led the Action Committee

of La Lutte, Nguyen Thi Luu that of the women of Saigon, Le Van Thu Ca, that at Choquan,

Truong Thi Sau, wife of Nguyen An Ninh, that of the village of My Hoa, and Duong Thi Lai,

wife of Phan Van Hum, the Action Committee of An Thanh (Thudaumot) etc. The La Lutte

group controls to our knowledge about 200 Action Committees in the Saigon-Cholon

region and its outskirts. (All from police archives)

45. Abbreviated translation in the police archives.

31

46. Only this would avoid the dissolution into the party of the Committees which were

more rigidly structured.

47. Cf. the friendly exchange in Agir, 3 August 1936, between Ta Thu Thau and C. Metter,

who attacks the La Lutte people for allying with the Vietnamese bourgeoisie (the

marriage of the carp and the rabbit). Ta Thu Thau replied to him that the progressive

elements of the bourgeoisie, like the working class, wanted democratic liberty, and that

the Organising Committee had made provision for the French left equal to the other

ethnic minorities, and invited him to take part in the La Lutte Action Committee. Cf. La

Lutte, 2 and 9 September 1936.

48. According to Ho Huu Tuong, during the summer of 1936, the legal Communist activists

of Tran Huy Lieu sent Dang Thai Mai and Vo Nguyen Giap (released from prison 18

November 1931) to Saigon to consider with the La Lutte people the creation of a legal

paper in the North. Dang Thai Mai was stopped at the frontier, but Vo Nguyen Giap was

able to get to Saigon. He met Ta Thu Thau, Nguyen Van Tao, Ho Huu Tuong, etc. Hanoi

being under direct French rule, it was possible to publish a French paper there. The La

Lutte people would have passed on the name of the experienced Trotskyist militant,

Huynh Van Phuong, who finished his law studies in Hanoi in 1935, and two other

Trotskyist sympathisers, Tran Kim Bang and Le Cu. If the participation of the two latter in

editing Le Travail is uncertain, that of Huynh Van Phuong did take place. So the Travail

group had a few Trotskyists and a majority of Communists and their sympathisers,

including Giap, and without counting the clandestine editors: it was in regular

correspondence with La Lutte. Le Travail came out from 1 November 1936 to 16 April

1937. Tran Van Thach wrote several articles for it. From the summer of 1937 until 1945

there was a tiny Trotskyist group in the North.

49. Cf. for example Bilans et perspectives, 15 September 1936. The paper, edited by Ho

Huu Tuong, contains Trotskys main articles written at the time.

50. Among the Action Committees led by Trotskyists which the police mention are those

of the Saigon pupils led by the young Nguyen Van Cu, that of Giarai (