permanent revolu ton in vietnam
In South Vietnam, as in Cambodia, a national liberation struggle has just triumphed. It took the mobilization of a whole population to defeat an enemy that was infinitely stronger materially. But the Vietnamese and Cambodian who rose up in the anti-American resistance was also a peasant, a worker, an intellectual. To confront the imperialist aggression the struggle became a "people's war, " and thus a "class war. " National liberation and social revolution were tightly linked in IndoIt is in the countryside, where nearly 90 percent of the population lived when the war started and where the liberated zones were located, that the social transformations carried out during the struggle have been most profound. It is very difficult today to draw up an overall picture of the agrarian question in South Vietnam, because the situation varies from region to region. Nevertheless, the economic, social, and political scope of the reform carried out can be indicated. To do this we must go back to the conditions of the peasant uprisings of the years 1958-60. The South of Vietnam (Nam Bo) was dominated by large landed property. Before the revolution of August 1945 some 80% of the land in that region was rented to sharecroppers who had to give 50% of their harvest to the landlords. In central Vietnam (Trung Bo), property ownership was more diversified, with smaller plots, but the exploitation of the landless by PIERRE ROUSSET peasants (30% of the total) and the poor peasants (those owning less than half a hectare, 65% of the total) was ferocious. In 1954 the Vietminh carried out an important agrarian reform in the liberated zones: 650, 000 hectares of landed property was distributed (out of a total of 2.3 million hectares), as was the communal land. Rent was reduced to 10to 15% of what it had been. Working peasants dislodged the influence of the notables in the villages and much new land was brought under cultivation. In 1955-56 and 1956-58, Ngo Dinh Diem, placed in power by the French and the Americans, launched ching. The fufure of this revolutionary process was not inevitably socialism. This fact is particularly underlined by the case of Algeria, which also went throuch this dynamic but did not overturn capitalist relations of production. But an analysis of the social overturns that have already taken place or are now taking place in Vietnam, like the political measures taken by the PRG, highlights the fact that the revolution is now growing over into socialism. his "agrarian reform" and tried to take back the gains of the first resistance. "For the South Vietnamese peasants, the U.S. -Diem regime meant the return of the old hated regime, which was threatening the land. " (Vu Can, Etudes vietnamiennes, No. 1819, p. 17, Editions Hanoi, 1968.) This agrarian policy, "counterrevolutionary" in the strictest sense of the term, provoked the first uprisings in the villages. The second resistance began in the villages as a class struggle against the return of the landlords. The land was to remain permanently at stake in the American war and the revolutionary war. By the end of 1965 the National Liberation Front had distributed 1, 650,000 hectares of cultivated land. In the liberated zones the rent for land fell to 5% of its former rate. By the end of 1968 more than 2 million hectares had been distributed, that is, 80% of the cultivated land.* This distribution continued after the Paris accords, 155, 260 hectares in 1973. "Almost all the landlords fled to the cities when the NLF distributed the land, and the liquidation of the feudal proprietors as a class .., was an accomplished fact. The reaction*Before the revolution of August 1945 landed property was divided as follows (in millions of hectares): land owned by local landlords, French colons, and religious communities: 2.3; communal lands: 0.255; lands belonging to peasants: 1 (that is, 28.6% of the total). The total was 3.5 million hectares, of which 3 million were in Nam Bo (formerly French Cochinchine), Trung Bo (central Vietnam) being mountainous. The area under cultivation varied considerably, particularly because of the war and the agrarian reforms. (Source: Nguyen Xuan Lai, Courrier du Vietnam, March 1975, p.24.)
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HANOI... ary rural administration was dislodged. " (Nguyen Xuan Lai, Le Courier du Vietnam, March 1975, pp. 24-25.) American imperialism rapidly understood the danger that these reforms represented for its domination. It decided to promote an agrarian "counterpolicy." At the Midway conference in Guam in June 1969 Thieu stated: "Agrarian reform constitutes the central task of the state; the existence of the nation depends on it." The essential objective of Thie's agrarian reform was the formation of a "new layer of peasants - rich peasants - (which was supposed to serve) as a social base ... for the regime." (Ibid., p. 26.) Of course, the reform officially limited the amount of land that could be owned, but nonetheless it was a windfall for the large proprietors. In fact, "nearly all of them lived in the cities under the protection of the army, their lands having been expropriated during the LF's agrarian reform. " (Ibid., p. 27.) Thus, for land that they no longer possessed they received a sale price and compensation that was supposed to enable them to integrate themselves more tightly than previously into the Saigon comprador bourgeoisie. The regime favored its own flunkeys, given them lands reconquered from the peasants and thus seeking to transform them into capitalist peasants. This South Vietnam style "green revolution" was stymied by the efforts of the PRG and by the economic crisis that shook the zones under puppet con4 the current process of reunification manifests the socialist growing-over trol after January 1973. (See INPRECOR, No.0, May 9, 1974.) Of course, the socialization of agriculture carried out during 1956-59 in the North did not take place throughout South Vietnam. But an agrarian reform must be judged by its social and political consequences: The peasant uprising liquidated a former ruling class, the large landed proprietors. Then it defeated an agrarian policy that was aimed at introducing capitalism in agriculture by basing itself on the formation of a class of capitalist peasants. To do this the working peasant had to set up a revolutionary administration in the villages and ini fiate a process of collectivization of labor: the formation of "mutual aid teams, "of "production groups, "etc.i planting, hydraulic works, and some lands were made collective property or organized into cooperatives. After 1954, the South Vietnamese revolution deepened and broadened the measures that had been preludes to the socialization of agriculture in the North. It is only the radical character of this agrarian reform that explains how the Vietnamese peasants were able to remain on their land in spite of the bombing and burning, how they were able (with the aid of Cambodia and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) to feed the NLF, how in spite of the terrible devastation caused by the U.S. escalation, the liberated zones were producing a surplus of rice one year after the signing of the Paris accords of 1973!
of the revolution in South vietnam The urban revolution Imperialism succeeded in maintaining its domination of the major cities of South Vietnam right up to the end. The urban revolution was consequently saddled with a deep lag in comparison with the revolution that was going on in the liberated countryside. But the liberation of the cities has suddenly turned that situation around. As a corollary, a twofold process has developed: the collapse of the bourgeois regime and the emergence of the urban revolutionary movement. The scope of the collapse of the Vietnamese bourgeoisie corresponded to its organic weakness. French colonialism had blocked the formation of a real, strong national bourgeoisie. American imperialism did not invest in and industrialize the country; French capital remained dominant. The economy of the Saigon regime manifested its imbalance immediately after the signing of the Paris accords: Crisis broke out. The Vietnamese bourgeoisie had remained essentially comprador; very often it was a lumpen-bourgeoisie living on corruption, trafficking, smuggling, and the privileges of the American war. The extent of the "profits" thus realized was enormous. According to Tristan Sarong: "Last year the chief of Tay Ninh province had to pay the tidy sum of 100 million piasters a month (about US$150, -000) to the chief of the Military Region III, which includes nine provinces, in order to keep his post. That offers a glimpse of the 'parallel economy.' •.. " (Le Monde, April 9, 1975.) The weight of
...DA NANG the small and middle-sized companies controlled by Vietnamese capital pales in face of such figures! The loss of landed property had accentuated the dependent character of the Saigonese economy. With the destruction of the puppet military and administrative apparatus and the collapse of the neocolonial domination, the Vietnamese bourgeoisie lost not only its instruments of power, but also the bulk of its means of accumulating capital This sudden uprooting of the bourgeoisie was all the more radical in that the liberation of the cities of South Vietnam was not limited to military conquest. Deep social divisions appeared before, during, and after this liberation, which was an extension of the previous years of urban struggle. Let us take the example of Da Nang, the city with the second-largest population. Two days before its liberation, a New York Times reporter described the situation in these terms: "Those who most fear the approaching Communists are those who are here at the airport. They are the families of army officers, businessmen and the most prosperous merchants, Roman Catholics from North Vietnam who came south in 1954.... The majority of the rest of the population seems content to stay. ... The city food market is functioning normally. ... The poor seem to intend to keep on living as usual, regardless of the imminent arrival of the Communists. " (International Herald Tribune, March 28, 1975.) What emerges from this description is the class
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VIETNAM character of the American war and of the Vietnamese resistance. Giai Phong, the NLF press service, described the stages in the liberation of Da Nang this way: "Just before the liberation nearly 5,000 of Thie's soldiers at the Hoa Cam training center mutinied and went over to the side of the revolution. ... On the eve of March 29 the self-defense forces and the population of several neighborhoods rose up. The next day, the day of the total liberation of the city, thousands of inhabitants sacked the American consulate. The people had hung up the red and blue flags of the NLF. The major arteries of the city were filled with an extraordinarily dense crowd: It was the forced refugees returning to their homes. " (Giai Phong, quated by the French daily Libération, April 3, 1975.) Likewise, in Saigon: "Side by side with what the radio calls the regular units of the liberafion army' there are 'local armed forces, 'that is, the forces of the clandestine networks who have come out of the shadows, without any well-defined uniform. There are women among them." (Jean de la Guérivière, Le Monde, May 13, 1975.) Decomposition of the puppet apparatus; mutinies and defections from the Saigon army; advances of the forces of the PRG; clandestine urban military actions; popular insurrectional movements; mass demonstrations; return of the refugees driven from their homes by the fighting. Those were the things that liberated the second-largest city of South Vietnam. The new administration grows out of revolutionary action, and not primarily military action. Since then, a twofold process has occurred: the systematic destruction of the former neocolonial state apparatus and the takeover of services, factories, and urban life by the PRG, workers committees, and mass organizations. The first of the PRG's "ten commandments, " issued just before the liberation of Saigon, stipulated: "The old system, its laws and regulations, shall be abolished; the reactionary parties and other political organizations in the service of imperialism and the puppets shall be dissolved." (Le Figaro, April 5-6, 1975.) This "commandment" was applied consistently; the end of the Saigon regime confirms, if any confirmation was needed, the determination of the PRG not to leave any doubt on this question. The ultimate rejection of any negotiations, even formal negotiations, and the takeover of the presidential palace by the tanks of the Liberation Army illustrate this decision, as does the manner in which the North Vietnamese press reported the surrender of General Minh: "While awaiting the arrival of an official representative of the revolutionary regime, Minh said to one of our officers, We have been waifing for you since this morning for the ceremony of fransition.' The officer replied, 'The to-6 tality of power, from top to bottom, is in the hands of the revolution, which has won it through its offensives and uprisings. The army and administration have collapsed completely. You cannot transfer power that has slipped out of your hands. You have to surrender. "" (From Quan Doi Nhan Dan, quoted by Le Monde, May 4-5, 1975.) "Military administrative committees" were provisionally set up to manage the big cities while awaiting the formation of "revolutionary people's committees" in the neighborhoods and urban sectors. The PRG has taken control of social services and has seized the goods of "enemies" (the U.S. government) and puppets. "The means of production are the property of the people, " declared radio Giai Phong (Liberation). It does not appear that nationalization measures properly so called have been taken, and foreigners have been invited to remain, provided that they "respect the new revolutionary laws and customs of the country. " But the banks were closed to prevent a flight of capital and many factories abandoned by Fleeing owners have been taken over and have begun working again under the control of the workers. A film made by Roger Pic in Da Nang about a month after its liberation depicted a meeting of men and women workers assembled at the call of the PRG; a workers committee" was set up to control the operation of the factory and the functioning of the technicians, with the aid of cadres of the PRG. It is clearly a general process of workers control that is now going on in the cities of South Vietnam. The student and worker urban militias are protecting services and factories against possible sabotage. The administration of the hospitals has been overturned; the disinherited are now treated free; the poor pay only for food and the rich pay for everything. The new cadres of the revolutionary administration, whether in the villages or the neighborhoods, are inhabitants of the local area who are now emerging from clandestinity or from the guerrilla areas. Le Figaro reported that real mass popular tribunals had been held to publicly try looters. (May 12, 1975.) Saigon is rediscovering its national identity, which American imperialism had tried to destroy and corrupt. The "pleasure houses" have been closed down. The city has been cleaned. The style of clothes is changing. On this subject the new daily Sai Gon Giai Phong (Saigon Liberation) wrote: "Color of clothes, length of hair, and thickness of nail polish are matters of individual choice. Nevertheless, we live in a liberated city. We must get rid of all vestiges of American imperialism, of everything . that has made us an uprooted people. " (Le Monde, May 13, 1975.) In the Roger Pic film an NLF cadre
tells students that it is better to have bell-bottomed trousers than narrow ideas. National concord? In spite of the upheavals, the PRG continues to talk about "national concord." One of the PRG's representatives in Paris explained it to us this way during an impromptu meeting held with militants of the international solidarity movement on the day of the liberation of Saigon: There are several million people who collaborated with the American undertaking in one form or another - in the puppet army, the Saigon administration, in the Catholic communities and the anticommunist religious sects. "Vengeance is a very human sentiment, " but "hunting down the collaborators" would threaten to divide the population dangerously. "Through their sufferings and struggles the Vietnamese people have acquired a political maturity such that we can make them understand that reprisals would inevitably create new divisions among us, and thus would play into the enemy's hands. That is why we are sure that we will be in position to promote a real policy of national reconciliation. But if the ex-collaborators of the puppet regime continue to do evil after receiving the pardon of our people, then they will be punished." Of course, the Vietnamese revolutionaries' constant theme of national concord poses a basic problem, that of the political nature of the regime that is born of the social revolution. In the DRV, for example, it served to maintain bourgeois parties in the Front of the Fatherland - parties that voted in good order for socialization! In a general manner, this theme illustrates a programmatic adaptation by the Vietnamese Communist party to the political heritage of the Stalinized Third International of the 1930s, to the economic backwardness of Indochina (aggravated by the war damages), and to the consequent bureaucratic deformations of the North Vietnamese workers state. If continues to limit the conception that the Vietnamese CP has of the place in the workers state of structures of the Soviet type. But the policy of the PRG testifies to the fact that "national concord" is not aimed at constituting a new bourgeois state in South Vietnam. The denunciation of the urban rightist Catholic opposition in the past (see INPRECOR, No. 10, October 17, 1974, and No. 18, January 31, 1975), the refusal to negotiate the surrender of General Minh and his regime, and the destruction of the neocolonial state today all indicate this. A differentiated policy has been adopted with respect to the old puppet army. Rank-and-file soldiers were immediately set free after their surrender. Officers were sometimes sent to "reeducation camps, as in Da Nang. Rightist "personalities" may perhaps be associated with the revolutionary government at some point. But all the essential new posts (such as the leadership of the urban militias) have been given to tested cadres, and especially to former political prisoners, among whom are the best of the surviving cadres of the urban movement. The leading role of the Communist party had always been stressed in the documents of the North. Now, for the first time, it has been solemnly reaffirmed by the PRG - during the victory meeting in Saigon in which more than a million people participated. General Tran Van Tra (who is said to have been a member of the CP since 1940) recalled the past struggle of the people of Saigon before and "after the founding of our party, during the forty years of the history of our party, of the great revolutionary movements conducted under the leadership of the party- " (Quoted by the French CP daily I'Humanité, May 8, 1975.) And one of the twelve slogans of the victory celebration planned for May 15-17 throughout the country is "Long live Marxism-Leninism!" From the North to the South! But it is the process of reunification of Vietnam now underway that most clearly indicates the noture of the current revolutionary process. "The socialist revolution in the North is providing the historic orientation of the national and democratic revolution in the South, " declared DRV Prime Minister Pham Van Dong in December 1972 on the eve of the signing of the Paris accords. (La Nouvelle Critique, journal of the French CP, No.59.) Yesferday, the unity of Vietnam was asserted in strug gle; today it is being confirmed in victory. General Tran Van Tra, president of the administrative committee of Saigon, affirmed on May 15: "We warmly salute this day, which marks the great reunion of our people. The division of the country no longer exists. " DRV aid to the South took on a new character after the liberation of the cities of central Vietnam. "Everything for the South! That is the new slogan in North Vietnam, wrote the French journalist Jacques Decornoy. "People in Hanoi had come to hear some singers. Amateurs,' commented one Vietnamese. And he added, "And for good reason. All the professional troupes have gone South.' Hanoi is being emptied of functionaries, professors, doctors, and various sorts of administrators. " (Le Monde, April 26, 1975.) In time, the dong, the North Vietnamese currency, will even become the strong currency in the South, while earlier the PRG
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VIETNAM preferred to maintain the piaster. "The DRV has literally been bled white in the space of a month," the Agence France-Presse correspondent further noted. "With these precipitous departures, the North Vietnamese administration is no longer but a shadow of its former self. ... The major effort will be made on the economic level. ... Nearly everywhere, industrial complexes and small production units are affirming their solidarity with the South and their readiness to aid it. " (Le Monde, May 9, 1975.) Of course, the process of reunification will take time to complete. It requires political and social hamonization. But it is now under way. And a cadre of the North told Decornoy that it was necessary "not to think in terms of individual psychotherapy. It is not a question of taking one by one the cases of people in the South who lived for a long time in the American orbit and were influenced by this type of life. What counts is the general revolutionary spirit that these people have." (Le Monde, April 25, 1975.) At the same time, the North is seeing its own political regime influenced by the success of the revolution in the South: "Thus, hints of a desire to liberalize the North are beginning to be discernible in daily life. ... The aim is to put the two Vietnams on the same wavelength. ... The leaders of the revolution are going to have to take account of the aspirations of all those, North and South, who have made a big effort for the war." (AFP correspondent, Le Monde, May 9, 1975.) Of course, the bureaucratic deformations of the Vietnamese revolution are too deeply rooted in the objective situation, and the programmatic adaptation of the Vietnamese CP to this objective situation is too deep to disappear so easily. But the current process of reunification manifests the present actuality of the socialist growing-over of the revolution in South Vietnam as well as the dynamism of the revolutionary process throughout the country! United socialist Vietnam! The agrarian reform in South Vietnam was one of the most radical - if not the most radical - ever carried out in the course of a national liberation struggle. The struggle to win control of the cities and to break imperialist domination was one of the harshest ever. Nevertheless, the socialization of the economy has not yet been achieved. Behind this apparent paradox lies the confirmation of the essential theses of the permanent revolution defended for many decades by Trotskyist militants against Stalinist deformations of Marxism. 8
The revolution in Vietnam, a rural and colonial country, began in the name of tasks that had long since been resolved in West Europe and North America by the bourgeois-democratic revolution: agrarian reform and national independence. But "placed before the alternative lose your rice' or 'lose your fatherland, ' the majority of the landed proprietors opted for the latter." (Nguyen Khac Vien, Expériences vietnamiennes, p.87.) But the Vietnamese bourgeoisie was "economically weak and politically reformist and conciliatory toward imperialism. That is why (it) could not lead a nafional democratic revolution. " (Le Duan, Sur Quelques Problemes Internationaux Actuels, Editions Hanoi, 1964, p.70.) "The revolution of national liberation, although national and democratic in its content, no longer falls within the Framework of the bourgeois revolution, but becomes an integral part of the proletarian revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale." (Le Duan, En avant sous le Glorieux Drapeau de la Révolution d'Octobre, Hanoi, 1970, pp. 25-26.) In the epoch of imperialism, only the proletariat can really take up the slogans of "national independence" and "agrarian reform"; but in so doing, if lays the basis for the foundation of a workers state and commits itself to the socialist growingover of the revolution. That is what is happening in Vietnam today: There will be no bourgeois state and no new revolution between the liberation of Saigon and the reunification of a united and socialist Vietnam! This convergence of the theses of the permanent revolution and the lessons of the Indochinese revolution - beyond the profound differences in origin and orientation that separate us from the Vietnamese Communists - is the most brilliant manifestation of the current march of the world socialist revolution. The Laotian and Cambodian revolutions have followed their own paths. (See INPRECOR, No. 3, July 4, 1974, and No. 13, November 28, 1974.) But today they are engaged in the same process. The consolidation of the new South Vietnamese workers state, its complete reunification with the North, will surely pose new difficulties and problems. The modifications that this victory of the Indochinese revolution will bring in the world situation, especially in Southeast Asia, will be very deep. INPRECOR will return to these questions in coming issues. But first of all, we must salute the victory of the first socialist revolution since Cuba! May 13, 1975
«PEOPLE'S» GOVERNMENT
ARGENTINA Villa Constitución: FRENTE UNCO CLASS DE Since the death of Perón, the Argentine government has not found any means of controlling the situation except to sharpen the repression of the masses to the extreme. This repression, carried out by official bodies like the federal police and the armed forces, has been combined with repressive action by parallel police bodies like the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA - Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) and has escalated into the most sinister campaign of murders the country has ever known. The wave of intimidation and terror that launched this process, combined with the declaration last November of a state of seige throughout the coun try, has gone through two successive phases. The first involved striking at important sectors of the revolutionary organizations, which have been severely hit, isolating workers struggles, which have been repressed by the government and the union bureaucracy, and intimidating sectors of the middle classes-intellectuals, members of the liberal professions, artists, etc. —who have been threatened by the AAA and have left the country by the dozens. The second phase has been the reaction against the repression. Slowly and progressively, new workers struggles have continued to develop; they have recently been spurred on by the serious economic