AnarWiki/markdown/Saigon_Commune.md

The **Saigon Commune** was a brief uprising and effort to create a
libertarian socialist society in Saigon, Vietnam in 1945.

One of the main concerns of the Vietminh Committee was to ensure its
‘recognition' by the British authorities as a de facto government. To
this end the committee did everything it could to show its strength and
demonstrate its ability to ‘maintain order'.

Through its press it ordered the dissolution of all the partisan groups
that had played an active role in the struggle against Japanese
imperialism. All weapons were to be handed over to the Vietminh's own
police force. The Vietminh's militia, known as the 'Republican Guard'
(Cong hoa-ve-binh) and their police thus had a legal monopoly in the
carrying of weapons. The groups aimed at by this decision were not only
certain religious sects (the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao) but also the
workers' committees, several of which were armed. Also aimed at were the
Vanguard Youth Organisation and a number of 'self-defence groups', many
based on factories or plantations. These stood on a very radical social
programme but were not prepared to accept complete control by the
Vietminh.

The Trotskyists of the Spark group (Tia Sang), anticipating an imminent
and inevitable confrontation with the military forces of Britain and
France, started to distribute leaflets calling for the formation of
Popular Action Committees (tochuc-uy-ban hanh-dong) and for arming of
the people. They advocated the creation of a popular assembly, to be the
organ of struggle for national independence.

Workers of the big Tramway Depot of Go Vap (about eight kilometres from
Saigon), helped by Tia Sang militants, organised a workers' militia. The
militia issued an appeal to the workers of the Saigon-Cholon area to arm
themselves and to prepare for the inevitable struggle against the forces
of British and French imperialism. By now General Gracey had prolaimed
martial law.

Before it abandoned the centre of Saigon, the Vietminh Committee
plastered the walls with posters, inviting the population to 'disperse
into the countryside', to 'avoid confrontation', and to 'remain calm,
because the Committee hopes to open negotiations'. A sense of insecurity
hovered over the town, which slowly drained itself of parts of its
Vietnamese population.

During the night of 22-23 September 1945 French troops, supported by
Gurkhas commanded by British officers, reoccupied various police
stations, the Post Office, the Central Bank and the Town Hall. They met
no immediate resistance. The news spread like a trail of gunpowder and
triggered off a veritable insurrection in the working class districts of
the town. Explosions were heard in widely separate areas. The movement
had broken without anyone giving any kind of directive.

The Vietminh had certainly not called for insurrection. Their one
preoccupation was 'law and order' and their own accession to power -
following negotiations.

In all the outlying suburbs trees were cut down, cars and lorries turned
over, and primitive furniture piled up in the streets. Elementary
barricades were set up to prevent the passage of French and Gurkha
patrols, and the taking up of strategic positions by the imperialist
forces. The centre of the town rapidly fell under the control of the
French and Japanese troops, supported by Gurkhas. But the poorer suburbs
of Khanh Hoi, Cau Kho, Ban Co, Phu Nhuan, Tan Dinh and Thi Nghe were
firmly in the hands of the rebels.

The rebels themselves were not a homogenous lot. Among them were members
of the Popular Committees, of the Vanguard Youth, Cao-daists, and even
'off the line' groups of Stalinist Republican Guards.

In areas where the popular forces were in control Frenchmen were shot:
the cruellest functionaries of the old regime, the hated policemen,
known by the population to have participated in torture, were sought
out, killed and thrown in the canals. Racialism, fed by 80 years of
imperialist domination, and by the contempt of the white man for the
yellow man, left its imprint on the violence of the masses, which
erupted at moments like these. The massacre of a hundred French
civilians in the Heraud Estate, at Tan Dinh, was a painful reminder of
this fact. The threats of certain French colonists to skin the Annamites
alive to make leather sandals' rebounded back against all whites.

The occupation forces feverishly searched the whole centre of town. This
did not prevent the insurgents from setting fire to various important
buildings, such as the Manufactured Rubber Company, and to warehouses.
During the night of 23-24 September, guerrillas attacked the port
without respite. The following day revolutionary groups openly paraded
in the Rue de Verdun and marched up the Boulevard de la Somme,
converging on the Market Place, which they later burnt down. In Saigon
there was neither water nor electricity. Supplies were breaking down.
Each day the French sought to extend the area under their control, while
various armed groups organised themselves as guerrillas in the periphery
of the city.

The Vietminh Committee produced a leaflet: \`The French ...seem to take
pleasure in murdering our people. There is only one answer: a food
blockade.' While seeking to \`starve out' the French (a futile hope, as
the British ships controlled the access to the harbour) the Vietminh
clung to its hope of starting negotiations with the British. Talks with
Gracey did at last start ...and a truce was announced on 1 October. On 5
October General Leclerc, head of the French Expeditionary Force,
arrived. His mission was to \`restore order, and to 'build a strong
Indochina within the French Union'. He landed his troops. The commandos
of the battleship Triomphant paraded down the Rue Catinat. The hated
Tricolour again fluttered from various windows.

The \`negotiations' between the Vietminh and the British continued. The
only result was that British and Japanese troops were allowed \`free and
unmolested passage' through zones occupied by the insurgents. The
Vietminh Committee, continuing its policy of appeasement towards the
imperialist Allies, had consciously taken this decision. The Gurkhas and
the Japanese moved out further detachments occupying strategic points on
the periphery of Saigon. On 12 October French troops, supported by
Gurkhas, launched a general attack towards the north-east. The miserable
peasant huts burnt from Thi Nghe to Tan Binh. The encirclement of the
town by the rebels was gradually broken, in desperate fighting.

The leader of the Bay Vien group of guerrillas refused to undertake
underhand police work against other tendencies not affiliated to the
Vietminh. He proclaimed his independence in relation to the latter. His
was not the only armed band to refuse the authority of the Stalinists.
The biggest of such \`dissident' groups was known as the Third Division,
de-tam-su-doan. It was led by an erstwhile nationalist, who had for a
while placed his faith in Japan. A few hundred armed men organised
sustained resistance to the French, in the Plaine des Joncs, but they
surrendered a few months later, and the group disbanded.

The Vietminh would not tolerate any tendency that dared formulate the
least criticism of it. It dealt with such tendencies by physically
liquidating them. The militants of the Trotskyist group La Lutte were
the first victims of the Stalinist terror, despite their proclamations
of \`critical support to the Vietminh government'. Gathered in a temple
in the Thu Due area, and while preparing the armed struggle against the
French on the Gia Dinh front, they were surrounded one morning by the
Vietminh, arrested and interned shortly afterwards at Ben Sue in the
province of Thu Dau Mot. There they were all shot - together with some
30 other prisoners - at the approach of the French troops. Among those
murdered was Tran Van Thach, one-time municipal councillor for Saigon,
elected in 1933 on a Stalinist-Trotskyist list, and a few months earlier
released from the penal settlement at Poulo Condore. Ta Thu Thau, also
released from Poulo Condore, had gone to Tonkin Province to help
organise assistance to the famine-stricken areas. He was murdered by
supporters of Ho Chi Minh, on his way back, in central Annam.

In this atmosphere of Vietminh terror, the workers' militia of the Go
Vap tramway depot, some 60 strong, participated in the insurrection, on
its own initiative. The 400 workers and employees of the Tramway Company
were well-known for their militancy and independent frame of mind. Under
French imperialist rule there had been no trade union rights. After 9
March 1945, when the Japanese had replaced the French at the head of
this particular enterprise, the workers had immediately constituted
their own workers' committee and put forward a series of demands.

Japanese soldiery, led by Colonel Kirino, had come to threaten them, but
confronted by their militant and united stand, had eventually been
obliged to grant them a wage increase and even to recognise 11 delegates
elected by the 11 categories of workers: electricians, carpenters, metal
workers, etc.

In August 1945, when foreign technicians had momentarily abandoned the
enterprise, the depot had been taken over and managed by the workers
themselves, until the time of the insurrection.

All those insurgents who did not rally immediately to the Vietminh flags
were denounced by the Vietminh as traitors. Workers who didn't identify
with the \`patriotic cause' were called \`saboteurs' and
\`reactionaries'. The southern CGT was presided over by the
arch-Stalinist Hoang Don Van. Its function was to control the workers of
the Saigon-Cholon area, by nominating their \`representatives' for them,
from above.

In this atmosphere of violent ideological totalitarianism, the workers
of the Go Vap tramway depot, although affiliated to the southern CGT,
refused the label of Cong-nhan cuu-quoc (Worker Saviours of the
Fatherland). They insisted on remaining a proletarian militia, and
rejected the Vietminh flag (yellow star on red background), saying they
would continue their fight under the red flag, the flag of their own
class emancipation.

The tramway men then organised themselves into combat groups of 11 men
under elected leaders - and under the overall command of Tran Dinh Minh,
a young Trotskyist from the north who had published a social novel in
Hanoi, under the pseudonym of Nguyen Hai Au, and who had come south to
participate in the struggle.

At this stage the local Stalinists, under the command of Nguyen Dinh
Thau, seemed far more concerned at arresting and shooting their left
critics - and in fact all whom they saw as potential rivals for the
leadership of the movement - than at prosecuting the struggle against
the French. Terrorist acts became the rule. They left a deep imprint on
the \`state-in-embryo' which the maquis was soon to become. The
emergence of the Vietminh as the dominant force, in the years to come,
was only possible after a lot of working class and peasant blood had
been shed.

Refusing to accept the authority of Nguyen Dinh Thau, the tramwaymen's
militia sought to regroup in the Plaine des Joncs, towards which it had
opened a way, fighting meanwhile against the Gurkhas and the French at
Loc Giang, Thot Not and My Hanh.

In the Plaine des Joncs the tramwaymen established contact with the poor
peasants. And it was here that, in a fight against the imperialist
forces, Tran Dinh Minh was killed, on 13 January 1946. Some 20 other
tramway workers had already lost their lives in the course of battles
waged on the way.

The intolerance of the Vietminh in relation to all independent
tendencies, the accusations of treachery combined with threats of murder
and the numerical weakness of the tramwaymen's militia eventually forced
its members to disperse. Three of them, Le Ngoc, Ky and Huong, a young
worker of 14, were stabbed to death by Vietminh bands.

The Saigon explosion reverberated into the countryside and into the more
distant provinces. The peasants seized the local officials who had most
distinguished themselves by their cruelty or their extortions, and many
were put to death. But in the countryside, as in the towns, the pretext
of popular anger against the exploiters was everywhere used by the
Vietminh to settle accounts with political dissenters.

<https://libcom.org/history/articles/saigon-commune-1945?fbclid=IwAR0LaUUClEoC5v-FADmGA6xupEy-hbxi7JlIDO1Q3TFrC-FzVwL-D5L3Gx4>

When France returned as a colonial power to Vietnam in 1945, the
Vietminh were determined to hold back social revolution, writes Mark
Goudkamp

The events surrounding the 1945 Saigon insurrection against imperialist
French troops re-occupying Vietnam at the end of the Second World War
have been overshadowed by the US war in Vietnam two decades later.

But Vietnam in the 1930s and 1940s was one of the few places at the time
where Trotskyism played a central role in the labour movement.

Two groups, La Lutte (Struggle) and the League of International
Communists, had significant influence, particularly in Saigon and its
twin city Cholon. During the uprising, they played a leading role in
setting up scores of Popular Action Committees.

A small group of Vietnamese students in Paris were convinced by the
writings of the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. Stalin’s rise to
power in Russia had crushed the revolution and seen the adoption of
socialism in one country, as Stalin sought alliances with imperialist
powers like Britain and France. This also led Stalin to a “stages
theory” of revolution, which held that underdeveloped countries like
China and Vietnam could only achieve nationalist revolutions that
brought local capitalists to power. The lessons of the Russian
revolution of 1917, where a democratic revolution grew over into a
socialist revolution bringing workers and peasants to power, were
ignored.

In China in the 1920s, Stalin’s approach proved disastrous, as the
Communist Party held back workers’ struggles and allowed a nationalist
party to take power and unleash vicious repression against workers.

The Vietnamese Trotskyists sought to develop a Marxist strategy in
opposition to the Indochinese Communist Party that was led by Ho Chi
Minh and loyal to Stalin’s Russia.

<strong>French colonial rule </strong>

French colonial rule in Indochina was brutal, but it also generated
massive resistance.

In 1930, rebellious soldiers in the north and peasants across Vietnam
staged an armed uprising. The French responded by destroying the
villages—bombarding some, while security police reduced others to ashes.

The Vietnamese Trotskyist Ngo Van Xuyet recalled in his autobiography In
the Crossfire: “Between May 1930 and June 1931, I counted newspaper
reports of no less than 120 peasant marches and more than 20 strikes in
Cochinchina \[the southern part of the French Vietnam\].”

From 1934, a coalition of revolutionaries (Stalinists, Trotskyists, and
anarchists) began to produce a legal French-language newspaper, La
Lutte, and to stand in Saigon City Council elections. This alliance,
which struggled against both the colonial regime and the pro-French
bourgeois Constitutionalist Party, lasted nearly three years. Ngo
recalls how meetings were, “filled to overflowing with the common people
of Saigon and infiltrated by Sûreté cops \[the secret police\]”, with
speeches using taboo words like “union”, “capitalist”, “proletarian”,
“strike” and “class struggle”.

But in 1935 the “Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Pact” was signed, and
the Indochinese Communist Party, following Stalin, put Russian foreign
policy before revolution, and dutifully supported the French empire.

Faced with this turn by the Communist Party, Ngo Van and other comrades
split from La Lutte to form the League of Internationalist Communists
(LIC). As Ngo writes: “We feared that the victory of Vietnamese
nationalism over French imperialism would simply mean the rise of an
indigenous bourgeoisie, and that the desperate condition of the
exploited workers and peasants would remain the same as ever.”

But the Trotskyists’ influence was growing. They organised a large
secret meeting with delegates from 40 factories and workshops in
Saigon-Cholon to set up the Syndicalist Workers Federation.

The police issued a statement of alarm, “The workers are supporting the
Trotskyist party more than the Indochinese Communist Party.”

In Saigon council elections in 1939, with the Second World War looming,
the Trotskyists humiliated both the Stalinised Communist Party and the
Vietnamese bourgeois parties.

The Communist Party had campaigned for democratic reforms but supported
the French government’s conscription of 20,000 extra soldiers to defend
their empire in the coming war and a new armaments tax.

The Trotskyists denounced all compromise with the French colonial regime
and argued for a “united front of workers and peasants” against war.

They wrote to Trotsky, now living in Mexico after being expelled from
Russia by Stalin, that, “despite the shameful coalition of the
bourgeoisie of all types and the Stalinists we have won a stunning
victory.” Trotsky was overjoyed.

<strong>World War II</strong>

When the war broke out, the French authorities ruthlessly repressed both
the Trotskyists and Communists. While the Japanese army swept through
Asia in the early 1940s, it was only in March 1945, as they faced defeat
by the Allies, that the Japanese imprisoned the French authorities and
took direct control of Vietnam, trying to present themselves as
liberators from colonial rule.

Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party created the Vietminh (Vietnam
Independence League). Its program excluded any reference to class
struggle and agrarian revolution. Instead, its aim was: “To expel the
French and Japanese fascists and to establish the complete independence
of Vietnam, in alliance with the democracies.”

The new Japanese Governor launched the JAG (Vanguard Youth) to try to
tap Vietnamese nationalist sentiment and maintain control. “In the
cities, the \[JAG\] movement soon became the de facto power in every
factory, every office, every workshop and every school… It was the same
in the countryside, from the main county towns to the smallest hamlet,”
Ngo wrote.

When the Japanese army surrendered to the Allies on 15 August, it left a
power vacuum. Vietminh troops entered Hanoi and took control of northern
Vietnam.

But workers did not simply want national independence. Near Hanoi 30,000
coal miners elected workers’ councils to manage production, taking
control of public services, the railways and the telegraph system. “In
this working-class ‘Commune’, life was organized with no bosses and no
cops”, wrote Ngo.

However, the Vietminh, in line with the Stalinist “stages theory” was
determined to limit the struggle and crushed any efforts towards
workers’ revolution. They looked to deal with Britain and the US,
boasting: “\[We have\] collaborated closely with the Allies in the fight
against the French and the Japanese. We will thus be in a good position
to negotiate \[independence\].”

Most of the nationalist groups now aligned themselves with them. The
Vietminh announced that they were forming an interim government.

The Vietminh urged people to co-operate with the Allies, declaring,
“Every building, public or private, should display the national flag
of Vietnam, surrounded by the flags of the British, the Americans, the
Russians and the Chinese.”

The Vietminh denounced the Trotskyists who were organising the workers,
“A certain number of people who are traitors to the Fatherland. We
must punish the gangs who are stirring up trouble.”

In the north, Ho Chi Minh had already eliminated his political
opponents. Now the Trotskyists in the LIC organised to resist in the
south. “We put out a leaflet and distributed it in the Central
Marketplace, calling on the population to arm themselves, to organize
themselves in people’s committees and to set up people’s militias…

“In Saigon, large numbers of people’s committees arose spontaneously as
organizations of local administration… Embryonic people’s councils were
springing up everywhere”.

In some provinces peasants spontaneously took possession of the land.
“‘The land to those who work it’ had once been a Communist party
slogan, but now, shamefully, in the name of independence, party
militants tried to restrain the peasant. The peasants responded by
threatening to lynch them.”

Although the Communist-led Vietminh cravenly welcomed British General
Gracey’s arrival in Saigon, he quickly ejected their interim government.
The Vietminh urged the population (along with its armed forces) to
disperse into the countryside and to, “remain calm, as the de facto
government hopes to obtain negotiations”.

But Gracey freed and re-armed French soldiers, who unleashed a reign of
terror against the local population.

The city centre fell to the French, supported by British forces. But the
outskirts of the city and the suburbs, where most of the poor lived, was
controlled by a coalition of insurgents (including some Vietminh).
Saigon was surrounded. What happened in the city was now crucial.

In Saigon, workers at the Go Vap tram workshops, influenced by the
Trotskyists, broke with the Vietminh labour union and formed their own
workers militia.

<strong>Under fire from two sides </strong>

However, the Trotskyists were under fire from two sides—Anglo-French
troops and the Stalinist Vietminh. It was the latter who murdered most
of their leaders.

Ta Thu Thau (a very popular Trotskyist who had been elected three times
to the local council) was captured and murdered by the Vietminh on his
way back from the North.

A week later, the Vietminh sent police against the Tan Dinh people’s
committee in Saigon where the Trotskyists were very active. Weapons were
seized and 30 delegates imprisoned.

French forces were failing to break out of Saigon. But on 3 October, the
Vietminh called for insurgents to only fight the French. This “appalling
and deadly folly”, as Ngo describes it, allowed British Gurkhas and
Japanese troops to pass freely through insurgent controlled areas and
re-take strategic positions, enabling the French to break the resistance
elsewhere.

Within months, masses of French troops had re-established colonial rule.

Ngo fled for France, one of the few Trotskyists to survive the
Vietnminh’s massacres. He later wrote that: “Of all those who had
taken part in the revolutionary opposition movement and who had remained
in the country, barely a one survived.”

The Saigon uprising exposed the counter-revolutionary policy of
Stalinism on a scale no less significant than the crushing of the
Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39.

The Vietminh fought a guerrilla war against the French, defeating them
in 1954. But Vietnam was then divided with Ho Chi Minh controlling the
North while a US-supported dictatorship controlled the south.

A heroic war to unite Vietnam finally defeated US imperialism in 1975.
But the Communist Party, after crushing the hopes of workers’ revolution
in 1945, simply set about building an independent Vietnamese state
capitalism. It was the Trotskyists, and the insurgent workers’ struggles
they took part in, that showed the possibility of the struggle against
imperialism to build genuine socialism from below.

<https://www.solidarity.net.au/marxist-theory/1945-saigon-uprising-workers-anti-imperialism-vietnam/>

On demonstrations in the 1960s, it was common to hear marchers chanting
“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, we will fight and we will win”, in honour of the
Vietnamese Stalinist who led the fight against US occupation. The best
sections of the left replied with their own rhyme — Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh
— how many Trots did you do in?” They were referring to the mass
murder of the Vietnamese Trotskyists by Stalinist forces in 1945. Sixty
years on, the massacre has largely been forgotten.

The Vietnamese Trotskyists stood for independent working class politics
against French and Japanese imperialists, the Stalinists and other
nationalist forces. The butchering of these working class socialists,
which paved the way for Ho Chi Minh’s rule, underlined the nature of
Stalinist revolution in Vietnam which put a new ruling elite in power.
The example of Vietnam shows why we must remain critical of even the
most successful nationalist movements.

**Background**

From the 1880s Vietnam was part of the French empire in Asia, known as
Indochina. Vietnam consisted of three separate states. In the north was
Tonkin, with Hanoi its major city. Tonkin and Annam in the centre
constituted a single French protectorate. In the south was Cochin China,
a French colony centred on the city of Saigon. The Indochinese Communist
Party (PCI) was formed in 1930 under the leadership of Nguyen Ai Quoc,
who would later take the name Ho Chi Minh.

The first Vietnamese Trotskyists were students living in France. In 1932
a permanent split took place among them. One group, led by Ta Thu Thau,
was called the Struggle group. The other was known as the October group
after its magazine.

Between 1933 and 1937 the Struggle group participated in a united front
with the PCI and other Marxists, known as La Lutte (after the magazine
they produced). They succeeded in getting La Lutte members, including Ta
Thu Thau, elected to the Saigon municipal council.

The October group supported La Lutte but criticised the Struggle group
for collaborating too closely with the PCI. The united front broke up
after the PCI supported the Popular Front and backed the Moscow trials
against the Trotskyists.

Both Trotskyist groups made considerable headway in the labour movement.
In 1937 the Fédération Syndicale du Name Ky was organised under
Trotskyist leadership.

The Federation had active organisers in at least thirty-nine enterprises
in Saigon and Cholon including the government arsenal plant, on the
railways, the tramways, in the water and electric company, the petroleum
company, several rice processing firms, pottery works, sugar refineries,
distilleries and on the docks.

Trotskyists were the predominant force in the wave of strikes that took
place in Cochin China in late 1936 and early 1937.

The Struggle Group continued to publish La Lutte in French and in 1939
published a Vietnamese language version Tranh Dau as well. In elections
for the Cochin China Colonial Council in 1939 three Trotskyists of the
Struggle Group, Ta Thu Thau, Tran Van Thach, and Phan Van Hum, got 80%
of the total vote, beating Constitutionalists, Stalinists and others. In
1939 the group had around 3,000 members.

The October Group was also active. Its legal newspaper Le Militant was
suppressed at the end of 1937 because of its support for strikes.

However, it began to publish October once again as “a semi-legal
magazine” and also put out Tia Sang (Spark), first as a weekly and then
at the beginning of 1939 as a daily newspaper.

At the outbreak of World War II the French colonial police arrested two
hundred Stalinists and Trotskyists and drove their organisations
underground.

**1945**

In March 1945, the Japanese, who had occupied French Indochina in 1940,
dispensed with the puppet French administration they had maintained in
place until then.

After the US dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese
surrendered on 15 August. A vacuum opened up, triggering a revolutionary
situation with several forces contesting for power.

In 1941 Ho Chi Minh convened a conference in China to form the Viet Minh
(an abbreviation of Viet-nam dot-lap dong minh, The League for the
Independence of Vietnam).

On 18 August the Vietminh took control of Hanoi and began organising its
forces in the south. The Stalinist policy, determined by the wartime
alliance between the USSR, France, Britain and the US, was to support
the Allies as a road to “national liberation”.

The October Group was reconstituted as the International Communist
League (LCI) in August 1944. It had several dozen members, though many
were experienced cadres. The Struggle group was re-established in
May-June 1945.

In Saigon the United National Front (UNF) took over after the Japanese
surrender. The UNF consisted of nationalists such as the Party for the
Independence of Vietnam, the Vanguard Youth and religious sects such as
the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai.

One myth, put about by the Stalinists and repeated since by academic
historians, is that the Struggle group participated in the UNF.

However there is no evidence of this, either from documents issued by
the UNF or from the LCI.

At the same time, workers went into struggle and peasants began
uprisings. The high point was the creation of a working class commune in
Tonkin province. According to LCI member and eyewitness Ngo Van: “The
miners of Hoa-gay in Camphu district (a conurbation with a population of
300,000) rose in revolt, set up workers’ committees, and on that basis
established a truly proletarian government. The workers took over the
mines, tramways, railways and telegraph system, arrested the bosses and
the police, and destroyed the local apparatus of the old imperialist
state… All the means of production were placed under the direct control
of a management committee elected by the workers themselves and
completely controlled by them. The principle of equal pay for all levels
of manual and intellectual work was put into effect. Public order was
maintained by armed workers. During the three months of its existence
(from the end of August until December 1945) this first proletarian
government made mining production work normally, secured the economic
life of the region, conducted an intensive struggle against illiteracy
and brought in sickness benefit.”

The first peoples’ committees were organised in Saigon on 19 August.

The LCI was very active in establishing the committees to take power in
local areas, organising over 150 in three weeks. A provisional central
committee was set up to coordinate these peoples committees under
Trotskyist leadership.

The LCI had its own printing shops and press, and every three hours its
political directives were sent among the people in the form of
communiqués.

According to LCI member and eyewitness Lu Sanh Hanh: “On 19 August, the
workers of the Ban Co district of Saigon were the first to move into
action and set up the first popular committee in the south. Some went
out into the streets with army rifles they had stolen from the Japanese
and hidden away for months. Others carried pistols of various and
dubious origins.”

Meanwhile, the Struggle group extended their activities to the Hanoi
region in the north. There they published a daily newspaper, Tranh Dau
(Struggle) with a reported circulation of over 15,000.

On 21 August a demonstration of 300,000 people marched through Saigon.
The Trotskyists called for arming of workers, a national assembly and
for a “workers and peasants government”.

On 22 August the Stalinists in Saigon, led by Tran Van Giau told the UNF
to dissolve. Members of the Vanguard Youth defected from the UNF to the
Vietminh. On 25 August the Vietminh occupied the offices of the UNF and
organised a huge demonstration in Saigon to consolidate their rule,
extending its control over all three states of Vietnam.

On 2 September the Stalinists organised a demonstration to declare
independence and, ironically, to welcome the arrival of Allied troops.
Around 400,000 people marched in Saigon, only to be fired on by French
colonists.

On 4 September the popular revolutionary committee in Saigon issued a
call for the expropriation of the factories. On 6 September the Vietminh
government unleashed a propaganda assault on the Trotskyists at the same
time as British troops landed in Vietnam. The following day Tran Van
Giau ordered all non-government organisations to be disarmed.

The Vietminh government had members of the popular committee in Saigon
arrested. According to Lu Sanh Hanh: “On 14 September the Stalinist
chief of police, Duong Bach Mai, sent an armed detachment to surround
the headquarters of the committees when the assembly was in full
session.

“We conducted ourselves as true revolutionary militants. We allowed
ourselves to be arrested without violent resistance to the police, even
though we outnumbered them and were all well armed. They took away our
machine guns and pistols, and ransacked our headquarters, smashing
furniture, tearing up our flags, stealing the typewriters and burning
all our papers.”

**The Saigon insurrection**

During the night of 22-23 September 1945 French troops, supported by
Gurkhas commanded by British officers, reoccupied various police
stations, the post office, the central bank and the town hall in Saigon.
Some French troops wanted to skin the Vietnamese alive “to make leather
sandals”.

The news triggered off an insurrection in the working class districts of
the town. Explosions were heard in widely separate areas. The movement
broke out without any kind of direction.

According to Ngo Van, the rebels were not an homogenous group. They
included members of the popular committees, the Vanguard Youth,
religious sects and even “off line” groups of Stalinists.

Workers at the big tramway depot of Go Vap near Saigon, helped by the
LCI, organised a 60-strong workers’ militia. The militia issued an
appeal to the workers to arm themselves and to prepare for the struggle
against British and French imperialism.

A truce was announced on 1 October. On 5 October General Leclerc, head
of the French expeditionary force, arrived to “restore order” and to
“build a strong Indochina within the French Union”. In the following
months, the French took back control of Vietnam with the consent of the
Vietminh.

In March 1946 Ho Chi Minh signed an agreement to welcome the French into
the north and to reunify the country under French control. Only when the
French reimposed direct colonial rule did the Vietminh start the fight
for independence that would eject the French in 1954 and the US in 1975.

**Repression**

The Stalinists fought to erode the power of popular committees that
sprang up spontaneously in urban areas. They were able to impose
themselves by nationalist demagogy, by force of arms and through the
murders carried out by their secret police, the Ty Cong-Au.

The Vietminh did not tolerate any tendency that dared formulate the
least criticism of it. It dealt with such tendencies by physically
liquidating them. Militants from the Struggle group were the first
victims of the Stalinist terror, despite their proclamations of
“critical support to the Vietminh government”.

Ta Thu Thau was killed in circumstances that have still not been
clarified. Tran Van Thach, Nguyen Van So, Nguyen Van Tien and other
workers were murdered at Kien-an on 23 October 1945. Phan Van Hum and
Phan Van Chanh “disappeared” somewhere in the areas controlled by the
guerrillas in Cochin China and Nguyen Thi Loi was murdered at Binh Dang
(Cholon) in October 1945. Le Ngoc and Nguyen Van Ky, members of the LCI,
were tortured to death by the Ty Cong-Au at the beginning of 1946. Other
LCI members such as Hinh thai Thong were disembowelled and buried in a
mass grave with hundreds of others.

The miners’ commune in the Tonkin region was disbanded by the troops of
Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government and the workers’ councils smashed.
In the countryside, the Vietminh restored land occupied by peasants to
its original owners.

**Ho Chi Minh's bloody role**

Ho Chi Minh was the leading Stalinist in Vietnam for nearly four
decades, heading the movement in Hanoi from 1945 until his death in
1969. He was the intellectual author of the murder of the Vietnamese
Trotskyists, if not the actual executioner.

In 1939 he wrote three letters that prepared the ground for the murders.
He described the Trotskyists as “a band of criminals”, “running dogs of
fascism” and “the most infamous traitors and spies” (10 May 1939). He
went on to tell PCI members that Trotskyists were “collaborating with
the invaders” and “sabotaging the movement” (7 July 1939). He claimed
that they were receiving $100,000 a month from the Japanese. In a report
written at the same time he said that the Trotskyists “must be
politically exterminated”.

In October 1945, the PCI paper published in Hanoi said: “The Trotskyist
bands must be put down immediately” and in February 1946 the interior
minister said: “Those who have pushed the peasants into taking over the
estates will be punished without pity.”

When Ho Chi Minh was in Paris at the end of 1945 the French Trotskyist
Rodolphe Prager asked him about how and why the Vietnamese Trotskyists
had been killed. He said that it had been done by local Vietminh
officials under conditions in which it was impossible for those in Hanoi
to control what all of the local leaders were doing.

And during this same trip Ho Chi Minh told French socialist Daniel
Guerin, who also made enquiries about Ta Thu Thau: “All who do not
follow the line laid down by me will be broken.”

In the official history of the period, The August Revolution (1960), Ho
Chi Minh’s regime admitted that they had to “expose the saboteurs” and
had to “arrest the leaders of the Trotskyist band”.

**Further information**

Thanks to Simon Pirani, who has made important materials on Vietnam and
Trotskyism available in English, for comments and corrections on this
article. An excellent account by a participant is Ngo Van’s
Revolutionaries They Could Not Break, (Index 1995). Some materials on
Vietnamese Trotskyism are available on the web – particularly on the
Revolutionary History website www.revolutionary-history.co.uk and the
Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line, part of the Marxists website
www.marxists.org

**Postscript: Vietnam and Iraq**

Many activists and commentators compare the situation in Iraq today with
Vietnam in the late 1960s. Whatever similarities there might be, key
differences stand out. Firstly Ho Chi Minh did lead a genuine national
liberation movement, whereas the so-called resistance in Iraq is
sectarian (i.e. based on religious and/or local affiliations). More
importantly, the worker’s movement in Vietnam was virtually non-existent
(mainly because off repression) – whereas there is a burgeoning labour
movement in Iraq today. There is also marked differences on the left.

Flashback. Conway Hall, 13 September 1969 at a memorial meeting held
after the death of Ho Chi Minh. Prominent member of the International
Socialists (now SWP) Chris Harman to his credit denounced the murder of
the Vietnamese Trotskyists. The representative of the North Vietnam
regime stormed out.

Fast forward. Imagine. John Rees chairs a meeting for Moqtada Al-Sadr at
the Friends Meeting House, with Saddam-admiring Galloway hailing the
“heroic” Iraqi resistance. A prominent AWLer gets up and denounces the
Mahdi Army and the Islamists for the murder of Iraqi socialists, trade
unionists and students. She chastises the SWP for abandoning independent
working class politics. Galloway and Al Sadr storm off the stage.

<https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2005/09/12/forgotten-massacre-vietnamese-trotskyists>

French imperialism had first reached Vietnam in 1867, subjugating the
fiercely nationalist population twenty years later with the creation of
the Indochinese Union, which remained pan of the French empire until
1941. The taking of Paris by Hitler’s armies was the signal to Japanese
imperialism to invade into Indochina, and its forces remained there
throughout the war. In March 1945, as the Allied victory neared, the
Japanese installed a puppet emperor, Bao Dai.

Japan’s imminent demise, and the impotence of the Vietnamese bourgeois
and landowning classes, caused administrative chaos and a devastating
famine through the summer. The working class political parties that had
gone underground or disappeared during the war re-organised.

In 1945 the Trotskyists pursued a defeatist policy against all foreign
imperialisms, calling for national liberation struggle to be combined
with social revolution, and basing themselves on the working class
centres, particularly Saigon. The Struggle group, which had pursued the
united front policy in the 1930s, re-constituted itself in May 1945, its
leader Ta Thu Thau who had recently been released from the Poulo Condor
island concentration camp travelling north to organise the movement
there. The Internationalist Communist League led by Lu Sanh Hanh (author
of Some Stages … see p61 in this pamphlet) issued a manifesto on March
24th calling for struggle against Japan to be combined with the struggle
for workers’ power; members of the group led the workers of the Go Yap
tram depot near Saigon, who later organised a workers’ militia which
played a vital role in the August revolution.

The Stalinist strategy, on the other hand, was to wage guerrilla war
against the Japanese, receiving aid first from the Chinese Kuomintang
and then from the American imperialists. The Vietminh front was founded
in 1941 in Kwangsi, southern China, which was then under Kuomintang
control. ‘From the beginning, the Vietminh asked for aid from the
Chinese Kuomintang government … The Vietminh offered its services in
gathering information in Indochina and creating a local military force
for joint action against the Japanese.’ (Marxism in South East Asia, ed
F Trager, Stanford University, 1946).

Ho collaborated with the American imperialists from 1942 to 1945, giving
tactical assistance and intelligence to General Wedemeyer, Head of
Southern Command (Chungking), General Gallagher of the Special Command
Section, and General William Donovan of the ass (forerunners of the
CIA). (Details in Ho Chi Minh, by W Warbey, pp 78-80, and Vietnam by
Stanley Karnow, pp 138-9). (Of course revolutionaries have often
accepted aid from imperialist powers during war, but it must be
remembered that here the policy of the Vietminh was not defeatist, but
supported the ‘democratic’ imperialists of China, France and the US
against the axis powers.)

The Vietminh sought to avoid confrontation with the French forces,
replacing their slogan ‘drive out the Japanese and French’ with ‘drive
out the Japanese fascists’. (Quotations from VCP documents, reprinted in
Breaking Our Chains, Hanoi 1960, p 11).

The Vietminh, which was effectively a ‘popular front’, including the
property-owning classes, had a programme of national liberation and
agrarian reform, but in line with the Stalinist theory of ‘stages’,
specifically excluded the establishment of workers’ power. In May 1945,
as Japan collapsed, the Stalinists established a ‘liberated zone’ in the
six northern provinces. The property of foreigners was taken over, but
that of Vietnamese bourgeois and landowners preserved. The Stalinists’
aim was, in their own words:

‘1. To disarm the Japs before the entry of Allied forces into Indochina;
’2. To wrest the power from the hands of the enemy; ’3. To be in a
position of power when receiving the Allied forces.’ (Factual Records of
the Vietnam August Revolution, an official publication, quoted in
Trager, p 151).

While condemning De Gaulle’s intention of re-establishing imperialist
control in their propaganda, they simultaneously contacted him for
negotiations. One bourgeois historian points out that the ‘Vietminh had
even communicated to the French a memorandum which accepted the
principle of the temporary re-establishment of French sovereignty in
Vietnam.’ (Trager, p 151)

The August Revolution

A revolutionary situation erupted in Vietnam on 16 August 1945 when the
Japanese surrender was announced. In the provinces of Trung Bo, Bac Bo,
Sadec and Long Xuyen, resurgent peasants killed their landlords and
expropriated the land.

But the centre of the revolution was Saigon. Huge demonstrations
demanding national independence, and freedom from all types of
oppression, took place: of 300,000 on 21 August, and one million on 25
August. The slogans of the Trotskyists for workers’ power swelled their
contingents by thousands.

More than 150 popular committees were set up (this policy was actively
fought for by the Trotskyists of the ICL), the first one at Ban Co on 19
August. They took administrative power in many Saigon suburbs, starting
with Phu Nuan on 19 August. A conference of the committees issued a
programme which insisted ‘that the national bourgeoisie will be
completely incapable of playing the role of the revolutionary vanguard,
and that only the popular alliance of the industrial workers and rural
toilers will be able to free the nation from the domination of foreign
capitalists’. (Some Stages of the Revolution in the South of Vietnam, by
a Vietnamese Trotskyist from Quatriéme Internationale, Sept 1947, see pp
61-72 in this volume).

As in all revolutionary situations, no amount of organisations or
publications could satisfy the masses’ thirst for political leadership.
Tranh Dau, the paper of the Struggle group, became daily; the ICL at one
point issued bulletins every three hours from a newly-established
headquarters. Hundreds of Vanguard Youth committees were set up, some
under Stalinist leadership, all of whom declared their readiness to die
for national liberation. The bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties also
proliferated; according to an ICL report no less than 50 new ones
sprouted up.

How the Vietminh stepped in

Who was in control of Saigon? The differences between various accounts
show how volatile the situation was.

Certainly the United National Front (UNF), which had a programme for
national independence and included bourgeois nationalists, the Cao Dai
and Hoa Hao religious sects and the Vanguard Youth, was handed power by
the collapsing Bao Dai administration on 14 August, and passed it on to
the Vietminh a week later.

John Spencer, a supporter of the anti-Trotskyist Banda group, has
recently made the stupid allegation that ‘at least some of the
Vietnamese Trotskyists took part in the formation of the UNF under
Japanese auspices on August 14th, 1945’, a ‘grouping which was dearly
intended as a counter-weight to the Vietminh’. (Vietnamese Trotskyism
and the August Reuolution of 1945).

Spencer is obviously trying to give some ‘scholarly’ weight to the
Stalinist lie, originated by Ho Chi Minh, that the Trotskyists were
working for the Japanese. But at least one authoritative account says
that the UNF ‘included a small Communist minority’, as well as the
Trotskyists of the Struggle group. (Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins
and Development, by R Turner, p 39). The same account explains how the
Vietminh leader Tran Van Giau arranged for the UNF to hand over power to
him by negotiation.’\*

Secondly, a report from the Struggle group to the International
Secretariat of the Fourth International (The August Revolution and the
Struggle Group,. in files of the ISFI, Library of International
Contemporary Documentation, Nanterre University, Paris) states that they
proposed to the Stalinists a united front on the policy of national
independence and agrarian reform, the latter turning it down ‘because
they believed that they could count on the aid and compliance of the
Allies, to achieve a “democratic republic of Vietnam” through diplomatic
means.’ It was after this, and after the Vietminh assumed administrative
control, that they took part in meetings with the bourgeois
nationalists—at which the Stalinists were also present, accusing the
Trotskyists of ‘sabotage’.

A few weeks later, when British troops were welcomed into Saigon by the
Vietminh, the Trotskyists certainly found themselves in a de facto
alliance with the bourgeois nationalists: both advocated armed
resistance to the re-imposition of imperialist control. (Spencer does
not express his own opinion on the small matter of the British invasion,
relying on quotations from various sources supporting the Stalinist view
that opposed those who resisted the British as ‘crazy’, ‘provocateurs’
and ‘ultra-lefts’).

On 22 August, after two weeks of revolutionary turmoil, the Vietminh
held a meeting with UNF representatives who agreed to hand over control
of the city.

At 5am on 25 August, the day of the million-strong demonstration, the
Vietminh occupied all the government buildings and formally set up a
‘Provisional Executive Committee of the Southern Vietnam Republic’.

The policies of this administration were two-fold: to maintain, if
possible, the tottering Vietnamese bourgeoisie and land-owning class,
and to welcome the allied troops under conditions where a deal would be
negotiated with them.

Stalinist leader Tran Van Giau proclaimed that ‘democratic liberties
will be secured and guaranteed by the democratic allies.’ (Quoted in
Some Stages … in Quatriéme Internationale).

Another Vietminh official, Nguyen Van Tao, was more explicit: ‘All those
who have instigated the peasants to seize the landowners’ property will
be severely and pitilessly punished … We have not yet made the Communist
Revolution, which will solve the agrarian problem. This government is
only a democratic government, that is why such a task does not devolve
upon it. Our government, I repeat, is a bourgeois-democratic government,
even though the Communists are now in power.’ (Vietnamese Communism: Its
Origins and Development, p 43).

Historian Phillipe Devilliers recounts that Vietminh leader Duong Bach
Mai spoke of ‘calming the tempestuous ardour of rank-and-file militants,
in showing them that the task of the moment was not to make a
proletarian revolution but to smash “colonialism” by calling on all the
people to struggle against it.’ (History of Vietnam 1940-52, by P
Devilliers, p 181).

Buttinger says that the Vietminh government in Saigon ‘went so far as to
decree the death penalty for attacks on private property.’ (Vietnam: A
Dragon Embattled, J Buttinger, vol 1, p 347).

Spencer, attempting to ‘place into context’ the slaughter of the
Vietnamese Trotskyists, claims they were ‘unambiguously hostile’ to the
Vietminh’s ‘revolutionary administration’. In fact this administration
was counter-revolutionary, i.e. determined to prevent property
take-overs at all costs, even when popular committees and peasant
uprisings had already implemented them on a large scale.

In the North

Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla force was able to take power in Hanoi by walking
into a political vacuum which followed the Japanese surrender.

A bourgeois writer says: ‘A genuine popular revolution took place that
surpassed that of the wildest calculations of the Vietminh, though they
alone were prepared for the events as an organised force with a definite
programme. Claiming the support of the Allied powers and pointing to
their previous activity, the Vietminh won acceptance by the people,
particularly in North Vietnam. The Japanese authorities looked on
benignly while Vietminh partisans occupied the public buildings in
Hanoi. They also turned over local stocks of arms to the Vietminh.’
(Trager, p 152).

Spencer, and other pro-Stalinists anxious to prove that the Trotskyists
worked with Japan, please note.

On 22 August, Emperor Bao Dai was ready to ask the Vietminh to form a
government, but instead abdicated on receipt of a telegram from the
Hanoi General Association of Students, which passed a motion put by
former Trotskyist Ho Huu Thuong calling on the Vietminh to form a
government of national independence and oust Bao Dai. Thuong was
condemned by other Trotskyists who claimed this was a capitulation to
the Vietminh. The Vietminh formed a provisional government and
proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September.

There is little historical evidence concerning the Vietminh’s
relationship with the workers’ movement in the north. But one report in
the files of the ISFI says that after the Japanese surrender, a workers’
government was set up in the large mining town of Hon Gay. (A “Moscow
Trial” in No Chi Minh’s Maquis, ISFI files in Paris). The imperialist
administration was dismantled, and its officials arrested along with
factory bosses, and socialist measures including equal wages and
workers’ control of all industries passed.

The report states that the workers’ administration was broken up by
Vietminh militia who arrived in December, after the defeat of the Saigon
revolution and the internment of non-Stalinist militants in Hanoi.

From their own accounts, it is clear that the Stalinists stressed the
‘democratic’ nature of their administration (the declaration of
independence was based on the American one of 1778), and concentrated on
preventing clashes between workers and Kuomintang units who came into
Vietnam in early September to disarm Japanese soldiers.

The Allies move into Saigon

By the beginning of September, the Saigon working class was agitated.
Fearing the return of the hated French imperialists, they demanded guns.
The Stalinists called on them to welcome the ‘democratic’ allies and
attacked the Trotskyists in increasingly frenzied tones.

On 1 September, the Vietminh’s Nam Bo (southern Vietnam) propaganda
commission sent loudspeaker cars into the streets calling on people to
welcome the Allies. The response was a demonstration of 400,000 people:
many were armed with bamboo spikes; the Struggle group called for an
armed demonstration and weapons were carried among its 18,000-strong
contingent.

As the march passed Saigon Cathedral, right-wing French colonialists
opened fire on it, killing 40 and wounding 150. Armed Struggle
supporters, led by veteran tram workers’ leader Le Van Long, arrested
the provocateurs, planting the flag of the Fourth International on the
roof from which they had fired. The assassins were handed over to the
Vietminh police, who released them almost immediately. (This account
taken from The August Revolution and the Struggle Group, ISFI files,
Paris).

As the British invasion grew nearer, conflict sharpened between the
Stalinists and all those who were ready to take up arms against the
Allies. On 7 September Tran Van Giau ordered the disarming of all
non-governmental organisations.

Three days later, the British troops came in, with French aircraft
overhead. The Trotskyists of the ICL issued a statement denouncing
Stalinist collaboration with the Allies and’ calling for armed
resistance to the imperialist armies.

The Stalinists responded by arresting popular committee delegates as
they met in conference on September 14th; the ICL-dominated conference,
although armed, gave themselves up peacefully, perhaps underestimating
the readiness of the Vietminh to carry through their bloody threats.

On 16 September the Stalinists announced their readiness to negotiate
with the Allies about Vietnam, or part of it, becoming part of the
French Union. But General Gracey, the British commander, was not
interested. Instructions had come from the Foreign Office to tolerate no
Vietnamese power: Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had concluded a
secret deal with France, whereby the French would get south Vietnam back
but would stay out of Syria and the Lebanon. (See Ho Chi Minh, by W
Warbey, pp 47-54). It was this agreement, and not simply Gracey’s
imperial arrogance, that gave impetus to the Allied occupation of Saigon
and sunk the Vietminh’s hopes of doing a deal.

The British, aided by French troops and remnants of the Japanese army
which came under Allied command according to the terms of Japan’s
surrender, took over Saigon city centre and all administrative
buildings. Encouraged by the passivity of the Vietminh, the French
re-occupied the barracks of the Second Colonial Infantry, the airport,
the arsenal, the port and other strategic positions.

The General Secretary of the Saigon-Cholon regional council, Trotskyist
Le Van Vung, was assassinated: Phan Van Hum, another leader of the
Struggle group, called for the evacuation of non-combatants from the
city centre. A bitter struggle ensued between the Allies and
revolutionary workers, who were joined by deserters from the Japanese
army.

‘In the struggles, the workers and peasants did their duty, alongside
the Trotskyist militants who proudly flew the flag of the Fourth
International’, the Struggle report to the ISFI stated. ‘But those who
fought these early battles fought alone. Tran Van Giau refused to
replenish their provisions, or to supply arms or ammunition.

‘In the Thi Nghe sector, of 214 combatants, all Trotskyists, 210 were
cut down. On the third day of the struggle, Tran Van Giau issued
leaflets calling for the arrest and disarming of the Struggle fighters,
who had fought without orders from his government, which had been
preparing itself to welcome the “liberating Allies"\!

‘In spite of their superior weaponry, there were insufficient numbers of
French soldiers, and they often had to turn back before resistance
detachments, whose weapons were hopelessly inferior but who had decided
to die in the fight against French imperialism.’

Of course this was neither the first nor the last time that the
imperialists would encounter such stubborn heroism in Vietnam. But in
this case, when imperialism world-wide was threatened with revolutionary
movements and was at its weakest, the Stalinists acted to ensure that a
movement outside their control was physically destroyed.

John Spencer claims that the Vietminh did not contest the British order
to disarm, ‘though they clearly had no intention of obeying it
themselves’. The above quotation from the Struggle group answers this
nonsense, which is proffered in an attempt to give the Stalinists
‘revolutionary’ credentials.

The Struggle report contains another piece of evidence to answer those
who claim that the Trotskyists collaborated with the Japanese against
the ‘revolutionary’ Vietminh. It states that following a meeting in
which the Stalinists specifically accused the Trotskyists of ‘sabotage’,
the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao peasant-based religious sects (the former armed
with 900 rifles and four 45mm cannons which they had received from the
Japanese) offered to join the Struggle group to fight the Vietminh—but
the Trotskyists rejected an alliance with such unreliable forces, not
being prepared to ‘lead them to a slaughter.’

\*Neither the Trotskyists nor the Stalinists signed the founding
programme of the UNF, in fact.—S.P., see page 54-55.

A Stalinist Massacre

Part 4 OF Vietnam & Trotskyism

By Simon Pirani

Reprinted from Workers Press, 3 January 1987

1 OCTOBER 1945: Vietnam had been through six weeks of revolutionary
convulsions, coming to a climax in the last week of September when
British, French and Japanese troops occupied Saigon city centre,
displacing the Vietminh administration and threatening terror against
the revolutionary workers and peasants.

After repeated attempts, the Vietminh negotiated a truce with the
British on 1 October, the chief result of which was that imperialist
troops—British, French and Japanese—were given ‘free passage’ by the
Vietminh through the defiant Saigon suburbs.

A one-week ceasefire between 3 October and 10 October was used by the
imperialists to strengthen their forces. On 5 October, General Leclerc
arrived at the head of a French Expeditionary Force.

As the French and Gurkhas renewed their offensive against the
Trotskyists and other resistance forces, Tran Van Giau had the nerve to
issue a leaflet condemning the Trotskyists as ‘French imperialist
agents’.

‘The Trotskyist fighters who retreated to the west were disarmed at Cho
Dem’, states the Struggle report. (The August Revolution and the
Struggle Group, ISFI files, Paris).

‘The Struggle forces who went east tried to mobilise two armies, the
Hoang Pho I and the Hoang Pho II, when they were surrounded at Xuan
Truong by large numbers of armed Vietminh forces: Tran Van Thach, Nguyen
Van So and Nguyen Van Tien were taken to Thu Dau Mot where they were
given a military trial and shot on the orders of Kieu Dac Thang, a
common criminal and jail bird made a General courtesy of Duong Bach Mai
(the Stalinist police chief); Phan Van Chanh and Phan Van Hum took the
direction of Bien Hoa, from where they hoped to reach Hue.

‘Now we have no news of these comrades … (Later reports indicate that
both Van Hum and Van Chanh were killed by the Vietminh). Nguyen Thi Loi,
another comrade on active service, fell at Can Giuoc (Cholon).

‘All the Trotskyists at Thu Dau Mot were exterminated. At My Tho, Tan
An, Bien Hoa, Can Tho, Tay Ninh, there were mass arrests of Trotskyists.

‘Hinh Thai Thong, of Struggle, was arrested at My Tho while presiding at
an interprovincial meeting of delegates from the villages and districts.
Thong was disembowelled.

‘How many other comrades of the Fourth International paid with their
lives for their allegiance to the cause of revolution?

‘There were those who were able to join the resistance (of the
Vietnamese army) whose commanders were either with us or sympathetic.

‘For example the Third Division, commanded by Nguyen Hoa Hiep, had a
large number of Trotskyists.’

The Trotskyists in other groups fought just as heroically as those of
Struggle. The Go Yap tramwaymens’ militia, led by members of the ICL,
made a stand against the Vietminh, Gurkhas and French troops on the
Plaine des Joncs. They held out until January 1946, when their leader
Tran Dinh Minh, was killed by the Vietminh.

A report in the ISFI files indicates that the LCI fighters were wiped
out by the Vietminh at Kien An on 23 October 1945. (A ‘Moscow Trial’ in
Ho Chi Minh’s Maquis, in the ISFI files).

The leader of the Struggle group, Ta Thu Thau, met his fate on his way
back from his journey to north Vietnam. Arrested at Quang Ngai in
central Vietnam by the Vietminh, he was placed in front of a People’s
Tribunal.

Due no doubt to the esteem in which Thau was held as a workers’ leader,
the Tribunal three times declared him not guilty of crimes against the
people. Despite this the veteran revolutionary, a former teacher who had
been half-paralysed during his imprisonment at Poulo Condor, was taken
out and shot by the Vietminh. (Reported in Quatriéme lnternationale,
August 1946).

The documented proof of the huge scale of the repression cannot be
reconciled with those apologists for Stalinism who claim that Ho Chi
Minh did not know about the massacre, that perhaps it was the work of
some over-zealous rank-and-filers, that Tran Van Giau was afterwards
disciplined by the Vietminh as a result of it, etc etc.

The reports submitted to the ISFI, particularly, confirm indisputably
that the Vietminh worked consciously and deliberately, and often
effectively aiding the French and British, to wipe out the Trotskyists
and other resistance forces.

The Vietminh and the French

The Vietminh’s attempts at compromise with the Allies were not as strong
as French imperialism’s determination to re-establish colonial power.

The more the Vietminh decimated the revolutionary forces in the
resistance, the more they found themselves under attack from a ruthless
enemy which gave no quarter.

Having destroyed the revolutionary leadership of the Vietnamese working
class, the Vietminh turned to the bourgeois nationalists of the Vietnam
Revolutionary League and the Vietnam Nationalist Party.

On October 23, 1945, the day that LCI militants were massacred at Kien
An, the Ho Chi Minh government in Hanoi signed a pact with the
nationalists to work jointly against the French.

The Indochinese Communist Party, at its conference on 9—11 November
1945, decided on an even more astonishing gesture to appease the
anti-communist leaders of the nationalist forces: they dissolved the
Communist Party, which was not to be reconstituted until 1951\!

The French finally agreed to talk to Ho when they had strengthened their
military grip on Vietnam.

Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu was installed as governor in Saigon, while
General Leclerc sent a flotilla carrying 13,000 troops into the Gulf of
Tonkin in the north.

On 6 March 1946, an agreement was signed permitting French troops on
Vietnamese soil, recognising Vietnam as a free state within the French
Union—and leaving the question of dividing the country (the French were
in favour of this) to a future referendum.

This agreement was justified by Vietminh General Vo Nguyen Giap to a
mass rally in Hanoi on the grounds that the Bolsheviks had also signed
the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, which enabled it to strengthen
itself for future struggles.

There is a difference: the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed by
revolutionaries who were working actively for the success of the German
revolution, and simultaneously mobilising the Red Army and the Russian
working class to fight the invading imperialist forces; the treaty with
the French was signed by Stalinists who had set out with the stated
intention of doing a deal with imperialism, and who, far from organising
revolutionary workers to defend state property, had threatened those who
took property from the bourgeoisie and landowners with death—and
ruthlessly carried out that sentence against the Trotskyists.

Conclusion

Neither the Hanoi deal nor the Fontainbleau negotiations which went on
from May to September 1946 could satisfy the French imperialists’ thirst
for conquest.

On 24 September 1946 they bombarded Haiphong harbour, killing thousands,
and plunged Vietnam into a war which ended seven years later at Dien
Bien Phu, and re-started immediately with the entry of American troops
who replaced the French.

The Vietminh strategy of ‘People’s War’ was not, as was claimed even by
Trotskyists, an extension of the strategy of working class revolution:
the long drawn out struggle was forced on the Vietnamese people because
the working class revolution of August 1945 was betrayed in the most
despicable and violent traditions of Stalinism.\*

Apologists for Stalinism like Spencer do not even seriously consider the
strategy of workers’ revolution advanced by Trotskyists: he only quotes
the historian Buttinger who said the Vietminh were right to regard
resisting the French in Saigon as insane.

So-called ‘Trotskyists’ like Martin McLaughlin likewise argue that the
Vietnamese Trotskyists ‘committed a severe tactical error in pressing
ahead with strikes and demonstrations in Saigon’ because they faced the
British-French occupation force, with Chinese Kuomintang forces in the
north. (Vietnam and the World Revolution, by M McLaughlin of the Workers
League (US), p 17).

But if it was a ‘severe tactical error’ to oppose the re-imposition of
French imperial rule in Saigon in 1945 was it not a still greater one to
attempt to form a workers’ administration in Paris in 1871?

Was it not ‘insane’ for the Kronstadt sailors and workers to declare a
workers’ government in May 19171 And surely a still greater ‘tactical
error’ to ‘press ahead’ with the July 1917 demonstrations in Petrograd?

At all these points, when the working class entered on the scene of
history in its thousands and millions—which is precisely what makes a
revolutionary situation—revolutionary leaders took the working class
into struggle, often convinced that it held the possibility of defeat.

Indeed the Russian Revolution itself was made on that understanding.

What should the Vietnamese revolutionaries have done when the workers
formed popular committees, the peasants expropriated the land and
hundreds of thousands took to the streets demanding national
independence?

The Stalinists of the Vietminh tried to quell the revolutionary movement
in order to do a deal with the Allied imperialists; the Trotskyists,
basing themselves on the perspective of international revolution which
was being confirmed by revolutionary movements worldwide at the end of
the war, took the leadership of that movement and fought to the end.

Those who reject their stand reject the class struggle strategy on which
the communist movement is based, worked out by Marx, Engels and Lenin
and carried out in practice both in the victorious revolution of October
1917, and in the defeated revolutions class="sub” of Paris 1871, Germany
1918 … and by the Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945.

\* Trotsky himself wrote, with great insight, about the possibility of
confrontation between Stalinist-led peasant armies and working class
revolutionaries, in a letter to his Chinese supporters in 1932.—S.P.,
see p 113.

The Fourth International & the Stalinist Ho Chi Minh

Concluding part of Simon Pirani’s series Reprinted from Workers Press,
24 January 1987.

‘In so far as capitalism has created a world market, a world division of
labour and world productive forces, it has also prepared world economy
as a whole for socialist transformation,’ wrote Leon Trotsky, attacking
Stalin’s reactionary fraud of ‘socialism in one country’, in 1929.

‘Different countries will go through this process at different tempos.
Backward countries may, under certain conditions, arrive at the
dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced countries, but they
will come later than the latter to socialism.’ (The Permanent
Revolution, New Park edn,p 155, see excerpt pp 105 -109 in this volume).

Fifty-seven years later, the contradiction between the struggle and
sacrifice of backward countries on the one hand, and the unresolved
crisis of international working class leadership and the delay of the
socialist revolution world-wide on the other, remains a central feature
of the class struggle.

In Vietnam, a peasant army, organised under a Communist Party imbued
with reactionary Stalinist ideology, achieved a crushing victory over
the mightiest imperialist power of all.

Today the state founded on that victory faces hostility from imperialism
on the one side, from the reactionary Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy on
another, from the crushing backwardness of its own war-weary rural
economy on a third—and finally from the narrow nationalist and
bureaucratic outlook of its own Stalinist rulers.

The problems faced by the Vietnamese workers—like those of workers in
other countries—can only be considered as part of the problems of the
world working class.

Their struggle is part of the permanent, international revolutionary
process.

The only tendency which approached Vietnamese problems in this way was
Trotskyism.

The Aftermath of 1945 and the War with France

It was the refusal of the Saigon workers and their Trotskyist leaders to
compromise with the French-British-Vietminh carve-up of Vietnam in
September 1945 that led those forces to turn on them.

The Vietminh executed Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau and hundreds of
Trotskyist cadres.

Trotskyist and nationalist forces, who had resisted the French when they
had re-entered Saigon, were driven into the countryside where they
fought a guerrilla war against the French, British-officered Gurkhas and
the Vietminh.

Ho Chi Minh, the Stalinist leader, went to Paris and negotiated with the
French, signed an initial agreement which recognised the French presence
in the south on 6 March 1946.

Despite being decimated by the massacre, the Saigon Trotskyists
re-organised in the International Communist Group (Union des Communistes
Internationalistes), and in October 1946 issued a leaflet condemning the
agreement signed by Ho, which ‘offered nothing but advantages for French
imperialism: the restoration of French control, economic, financial and
customs, and reparations for the French’.

The leaflet called on workers to maintain their political independence
from the bourgeoisie, organise trades unions and fight for workers’
liberties.’ (For a Revolutionary Trade Union Organisation, leaflet in
the files of the ISFI, Paris).

In the north, where the Stalinists had set up the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam (DRV), initial progress by Trotskyists of the Struggle group was
cut short by ruthless persecution.

A report in the Fourth International’s journal states that at first the
DRV had tolerated the thriving Trotskyist movement, which won wide
support, and met particular success in organising women.

At one point DRV speakers had even attended Trotskyist meetings.

But after a particularly successful Trotskyist rally at Bach Mai,
‘having realised the popularity of working class policies, and
dreading their growing influence, Ho Chi Minh gave a secret order to
arrest T., the leader of the group, and other members of the Fourth
International.

‘But, despite this they could not prevent the clandestine publication of
The Struggle, and participation of Fourth Internationalists in the
resistance. (Quatriéme Internationale, Jan-Feb 1948).

While ensuring the destruction of his Trotskyist opponents at home, Ho
returned to Paris for more talks with the French, which dragged on from
May to September 1946 … while French troops swarmed across Vietnam,
ready to renew open hostilities against the DRV.

Ho’s policy of trying to negotiate crashed to the ground on 23 November
1946, when French ships bombarded Haiphong harbour in the north, killing
thousands and signalling the start of Vietnam’s bloody seven-year war
with France.

There is no record of what privations and repressions the Saigon
Trotskyists faced as war engulfed the country.

But a manifesto issued by their provisional central committee stated:

‘To those who believe that the national liberation of Vietnam can be
achieved by negotiations with French imperialism, with or without
mediation by other imperialists, we say: we will not achieve liberation
without a concerted struggle of the working people and peasants of
Vietnam, together with the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan
countries, hand in hand with the other oppressed peoples’.

The statement, dated 8 July 1947, recognised that the crisis of the
colonial peoples could only be resolved with the progress of the world
revolution as a whole.

It called on Vietnamese workers not to place their fate in the hands of
the national bourgeoisie but to prolong their resistance struggle ‘to
accentuate the over-all crisis of France.’ (Our Position, manifesto in
ISFI flies).

Contact with the Chinese Section

The relentless advance of Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, and the
disintegration of the Kuomintang forces in 1948-49 must have filled
every worker and revolutionary in Asia with hope.

The international significance of the Chinese revolution was clear to
the Vietnamese Trotskyists, who sent one of their leading members to
contact the Chinese Trotskyists in February 1949, eight months before
Mao’s victory.

This delegate attended a conference of the Revolutionary Communist Party
of China, which not only discussed at length the Chinese political
situation, but also resolved to establish, jointly with the Vietnamese
comrades, a Far Eastern secretariat of the Fourth International, and to
set up a joint cadre school.

But Mao Tse Tung’s victory in October 1949 heralded another chapter of
Stalinist repression.

Many Chinese Trotskyists suffered, at his hands, the same deadly fate
that Ho had meted out in Vietnam four years earlier.

The Chinese RCP moved its head office to Hong Kong, but the British
colonial authorities were no more ‘democratic’ than the Maoists.

RCP leaders P’eng Shu-tse and Liu Chia-liang then moved to Vietnam, at
the end of January 1950.

‘Hardly a few months passed however, before misfortune struck again’,
wrote P’eng’s wife, Ch’en Pi-Ian. (Looking Back over my Years with P’eng
Shu-tse, introduction to The Chinese Communist Party in Power, P’eng).

‘Two leading Vietnamese Trotskyists were invited to participate in a
conference in the zone controlled by the Vietminh.

‘We had been assured that the conference was being organised by
Trotskyist elements inside the Vietminh, among them being the Chief of
Staff of the army in control of this zone.

‘The conference was scheduled to discuss the military situation and
organisation problems of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement.
Unfortunately, the Stalinists had prepared a trap.

‘When the conference came to an end, all the Vietnamese Trotskyists, and
our comrade Liu Chia-Liang … were arrested’.

Liu, a veteran of the 1926-7 Chinese revolution, who joined the
Trotskyists in 1931 and served several sentences under the Kuomintang,
died shortly afterwards in the Vietminh jail.

When Ch’en and P’eng left Vietnam fearing for their own lives, their
Vietnamese comrades were still imprisoned but alive. Nothing further is
known of them.

Vietnam and the Split in the Fourth International

How did the Trotskyist movement internationally—itself subject to
massive repression by Stalinism and fascism alike—react to the Stalinist
crimes against the sections in the East?

News of the 1945 Saigon massacre reached Paris nearly a year afterwards,
whereupon Trotskyists there publicised it, and publicly demanded of Ho
Chi Minh—who was in Paris talking to the French government—an answer for
this crime.

On the other hand, Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova (who in later years
opposed the Fourth International and the defence of the USSR, condemning
it as an exploitative class society), was in 1947 accusing the FI
leaders of relaxing the fight against Stalinism.

In a criticism of the international leadership, written together with
Benjamin Peret and Grandizo Munis, she stated that the Indochinese
section had been ‘forgotten for so long’, that ‘even to demand who
assassinated Ta Thu Thau has been forgotten, in order to support,
without serious criticism, the Stalinist government of Ho Chi Minh,
greetings from whom were so warmly hailed by The Militant and La
Verite.’ (FI Internal Bulletin, 1947).

A full discussion on the Fl’s politics in 1947-8 is beyond the scope of
this article.\* But, in the period immediately following, there is a
clearer picture.

Without doubt, the Fl leadership under Pablo, which revised Trotsky’s
fundamental theses on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism
following the Communist Party’s coming to power in Yugoslavia and China
in 1949, capitulated to Stalinism to the extent that it deliberately
covered up and minimised the repression of Trotskyists.

When the Fl split in 1953, with the International Cornmittee (ICFI)
forming around JP Cannon’s Open Letter in opposition to Pablo’s
liquidationism, a letter from the Chinese Trotskyist P’eng to Cannon
accused Pablo of trying to stifle discussion on Stalinism in the Far
East Commission of the FI’s Third Congress in 1951; refusing to
distribute information on the wholesale arrest and murder of Chinese
Trotskyists by Mao; and concealing for four months, May to September
1953, an appeal from the Chinese Trotskyists on behalf of imprisoned
comrades.

P’eng states that, with regard to Vietnam, Pablo’s entryism of a special
type’, actually meant sending Trotskyists from France back to their own
country, with instructions to join the Vietminh, and without a clear
understanding of the extent of Stalinist repression.

‘When the Vietnamese comrades were ready to return to their country to
apply the “entryist policy", and called a meeting in which I was invited
to make a speech, the chairman of this meeting made a request of me not
to mention before the comrades the recent persecutions experienced by
the Chinese comrades.

‘I knew quite well that it was an instruction or suggestion from Pablo,’
wrote P’eng.

‘Although I observed the request of the chairman, I still warned him
personally that the “ostrich policy” was the most dangerous.’ (Towards a
History of the Fl, Part 3, Vol 3, p 170-1, published by the Socialist
Workers Party (US), Education for Socialists series.).

The Trotskyist group referred to was built among Vietnamese workers in
France during and after the war.

When it returned to Vietnam in the early 1950s, this group was split—a
majority faction supporting the Pablo leadership, and a minority
supporting the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) who had
opposed Pablo.

This minority voted against the resolutions of the FI Third Congress
along with the PCI.

We have pointed out (see article reprinted from Workers Press of 20
December above) that while the ICFI was formed on the basis of opposing
Pablo’s adaptation to Stalinism and his attempts to liquidate
independent Trotskyist organisation, that in later years the Healy-Banda
leadership in the IC had itself manifested liqudationism with regard to
Vietnam.

But the French PCI, which founded the IC together with the SLL-WRP and
the American SWP, did continue to pay attention to Vietnamese
Trotskyism, running classes on its history throughout the 1960s and
early 1970s.

A well-known incident in the late 1960s, while proving nothing in
itself, is illustrative: members of the United Secretariat of the FI on
a Vietnam solidarity march in Paris chanted ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’—and
were robustly answered ‘Ta, Ta, Ta Thu Thau’ by a PCI contingent.

<http://www.matierevolution.org/spip.php?article1522>