liberation, reunification, and the socialist transformation of the Vietnamese revolution. "After winning independence, " he said, "our country can choose one of two roads: either to pass through a transitory stage leading to socialism or else to follow the path of capitalist development. . .. Our road is the one that leads to socialism. . the only system that will create complete unity politically and economically, culturally and socially. Nevertheless, this has not prevented us from examining the question: Should the South follow the national, democratic, and popular revolution for a time before passing to the socialist revolution?. .. We believe that this postponement is not necessary. In fact, after the collapse of the American neocolonialist regime, the population could not stop without betraying itself, but had to pass to the socialist revolution. ... And af the same time, the people had to go through a certain number of phases to carry ouf the tasks of the national, democratic, and popular revolution. . : . In the spirit of the 'uninterrupted revolution' of Leninism, the Workers party of Vietnam told the Vietnamese people to undertake the two revolutions (national-democratic-popular and socialist - INPRECOR) with the peculiarity of passing directly from the first to the second without stopping for a stage of capitalist development. Of course, South Vietnam is far from having achieved the agrarian reform (distribution of land to those who till it) and the total eradication of the power of the feudalists and compradors. But, explaining the meaning of his analysis, Truong Chinh added that the South "must not wait for all the tasks of the national, democratic, and popular revolution to be completed before initiating the socialist revolution and the building of socialism. " (Nouvelles de la RDVN, November 25, 1975) The transformation is imposed as a necessity for the very achievement of the tasks of national liberation. This is the second time - the first being in 1954 - that the liberation struggle in Vietnam has confirmed this law of the colonial revolution. The lesson here is exemplary, 20
VIETNAM FROM LIBERATION TO REUNIFICATION by PIERRE ROUSSET with the heritage of the American war complicating the solution to the problem of economic development. Indeed, Uncle Sam's legacy is not a happy one, Granted, his debacle endowed revolutionary Vietnam with weaponry that makes it the third strongest military power in Asia (after China and India): 1, 200-1, 500 tanks, 400500 combat aircraft, 2,000-3, 000 long-range artillery pieces, an ultramodern radar and transmission system, the naval and air complex of the Cam Ranh Bay. The Americans were forced to abandon $12,000 million worth of industrial investments and economic infrastructure, according to the estimates of Wilfred Burchett (in the Far Eastern Economic Review of October 10, 1975). This included a polyester fiber company, a slaughterhouse, a pharmaceutical company that should permit almost complete satisfaction of domestic needs, a textile industry with a capacity of 250-300 million meters. Nonetheless, the problems are considerable: *The physical ravages of the air war in the countryside have been terrible. According to the PRG, "43% (13,000 square kilometers) of the country's plantations and orchards have been irremediably destroyed, as well as 44% (25, 000 square kilometers) of the forests. " (Far Eastern Economic Review, November 7, 1975, p. 14.) In 1965 there were 34, 000 hectares of sugar plantations; 12,000 hectares remained by 1972. South Vietnam used to export S48 million worth of rubber (as of 1960); by 1973 the figure had dropped to $5.6 million. The South
used to be an exporter of rice; it has become an importer. Water buffaloes, indispensable to agriculture, became targets of American military action; the water buffalo population dropped from 820, 000 in 1963 to 420, 000 in 1973. *A transformation of the social structure of the country came about as a consequence of this destruction in the countryside. At the beginning of the French war some 5-10% of the population lived in urban areas; in 1960 the figure was 15%; in 1975 it was a majority. The population of Saigan approached 4 million. Of this massive population, only about 300, 000 were workers, 60,000 of these in the textile industry. At the time of liberation, there were about 3.5 million unemployed: 1.5 million who were unemployed under the Thieu regime, 1.5 million troops of the demobilized puppet army and police, 500,000 prostitutes, smugglers, and other persons whose resources depended directly on the U.S. presence. (FarEastern Economic Review, October 10, 1975.) *Finally, on the industrial level, the dependence of the neocolonial economy was total. Raw materials and energy were largely if not totally imported. This was the case with the cotton for the textile factories and the gas; electricity was often produced by diesel engines. The structure of the university population inherited from the puppet regime reveals the gravity of the problem posed by the distortion of social development under the impact of the imperialist grip: Of a total of 98, 546 students, 29,905 were in law, 26, 673 in literature, 260(1) in agriculture, and zero in veterinary studies and forestry. (Far Easter Economic Review, November 7, 1975.) The first measures taken by the PRG (such as free distribution of rice to the needy) were only temporary palliafives. The roots of the disease had to be attacked. Those roots were social. Three campaigns Three series of measures were taken in the socioeconomic realm: * The movement of retur to the land. Vietnam cannot maintain a parasitic "Urban" population out of proportion to the industrialization of the country. The plans of the PRG are ambitious. It hopes, reportedly, to return 3 million people to the countryside (the figure given in the PRG Information Bulletin, French edition, June 21, 1975). There is no lack of space and the former peasants have been encouraged to go back to their villages (when these villages still exist) or to "pioneer zones" that have been completely overhauled. But the motion toward return has been slow, partly because of the destruction caused by the war and the many land mines and mortars that still prevent the fields from being worked. This is one factor. But another factor is probably the social weight of the "semi-urbanized" population. About 100, -
000 departures a month are now taking place. The progress in agricultural production seems no less important, aided by the establishment of "mutual aid teams" and cooperatives for material and fertilizer. South Vietnam is said to be on the brink of becoming an exporter of rice once again, at least in small quantities. As for the North, which is less rich than the South, it has attained the goal of an average of five tons of unprocessed paddy rice per hectare per year and has launched a campaign for winter production. The aim here is to use varieties of fast-growing rice in order to squeeze a harvest of grain, vegetables, or plants between the two yearly rice harvests (spring and autumn). *End speculation. A series of measures have been taken to guarantee confrol of the money supply and prices by the revolutionary regime. A single national bank has been formed; the private capital deposited in its accounts and coffers is controlled. But the vast majority of owners had withdrawn their holdings from the banks before the liberation of Saigon. According to Nayan Chanda (Far Eastern Economic Review, October 10, 1975), a total of about 150,000 million piasters were withdrawn from the banks. The PRG decided on a radical measure. On September 22 a monetary reform was announced: a new piaster, worth 500 times the old piaster, was distributed. Everyone had to exchange the total of his liquidity with designated functionaries in one day. The total amount of liquidity was thus measured. Moreover, the entirety of big sums was not immediately handed over in new piasters. A ceiling was set on the value that could be handed out per month and per individual, the surplus being stockpiled by the administration, which redistributed it during succeeding months. The revolutionary regime thus took control of a large money supply and made more difficult the speculative actions that feed inflation on the Saigon markets. * "Abolish the class of compradors." This financial operation was probably only partially effective, certain fortunes being parcelled out among several individuals. But a broader campaign was later launched. The object: break the power of the "comprador" bourgeoisie. This is what Huynh Tan Phat, president of the PRG, explained in an interview granted to Wilfred Burcheft: "We have plenty of difficulties and our enemies have exploited these to sow dissension and to direct discontent against us over prices and food shortages. We have to admit that we have no real organization to run economic affairs. ... Everything was in (Chinese compradors') hands. They disrupted the markets, artificially created shortages, and sent prices spiralling upward, and there was little we could do about it. They controlled everything.... Obviously, it was in the interest of the compradors to see our regime fail and probably they even dreamed of the possibility of it being replaced by a reactionary regime." (Far Eastern Economic Review, October 10, 1975) On September 10 the PRG published a declaration on its economic policy that announced its desire to "severely punish the bourgeois compradors." It was stated that in the cases of those who "participated in speculation during the war, based themselves on the American imperialists, and associated with the chiefs of the puppet administration and army, whether they later fled abroad or remained in the country, all their property
21
VIDANAM will be managed by the state. " (PRG Information Bulletin, French edition, September 21, 1975.) Following the publication of this declaration, mass demonstrations were organized in which many Chinese workers of Cholon participated. Stocks of hidden commodifies were discovered: 4 million meters of silk and cotton ar La Nghia, the "king of textile", considerable stocks of Bastos cigarettes at Siou Phong, the "king of tobacco. " The fortune of Ma Hi, the "rice king, " was inventoried and estimated at about USS400 million. Thanks to the sales of these stocks, the market prices of many commodities fell 30-50%. The urgency of reunification While the September 10 declaration of the PRG opened the campaign against the "compradors, " it also offered state aid to "national bourgeois, small industrialists, artisans, and small-scale merchants. " The explanation advanced for this measure was simple. The new regime was already having big trouble taking over the management of the property that had passed under the control of the state or the workers committees. The productive machine absolutely had to be started up again (about 50% of all enterprises were operating at the end of 1975). The technical qualifications of the industrialists who remained in Vietnam are Irreplaceable under the current state of affairs. At the present time there is no comprehensive figure giving a precise picture of the development of the various sectors of the economy. There are now five sectors in South Vietnam: the state sector, the cooperative sector, the mixed state-private sector, the private sector, and the artisanal sector. In fact, there seems to have been a real class polarization since April 30, 1975: While the great majority of technicians are said to have remained, 70% of industrialists, directors, and adminisfrators fled abroad as the PRG forces approached. For the most part, private capital is concentrated in the small enterprises (generally with 10-50 workers, but sometimes with several hundred). This capital is controlled on two levels: on the one hand by the "free trode unions, " which have expanded widely, and on the other hand by the state, which organizes the supply of raw materials and the sale of commodities and can therefore dictate production choices. In October the insurance companies came under the same measures as the banks had previously. Ar the end of September lists of fixed prices were posted and control over foreign trade was imposed. The fate of foreign investments has not yet been clarified, at least in the case of non-American capital, the French plantations, for example. Nevertheless, these investments are under the de facto control of workers committees and the PRG and their future may be predicted. The state will toke over effective control but will reach specific agreements with the imperialist governments or companies that wish to cooperate. Vietnam wants to diversify its trade, if only to assure a minimum of indepen22 dence. In this area the choices of the Workers party differ radically from those of the "Khmers Rouges": We are not interested in economic autarky, "said Huynh Tan Phat, "and have no intention of pursuing a closed-door policy as far as foreign investments are concerned. " (Far Eastern Economic Review, October 10, 1975.) The oil policy of the PRG is probably reflective of its choices. On August 6 the PRG reaffirmed that "any accord signed with the Nguyen Van Thieu administration on prospecting and exploitation of natural resources in South Vietnam, oil included, is nul and void. Now ... the PRG has decided to undertake exploration and exploitation of oil in South Vietnam. The foreign governments and oil companies that want to take part, including companies that had previously engaged in such activities in South Vietnam, will be well received by the PRG. " (PRG Information Bulletin, September 1, 1975.) Nevertheless, the welcome will be extended only if the new accords are under the control of the PRG and are beneficial to VietIt is nonetheless true that the half-measures proved insufficient. Radio Saigon continued to denounce the action of the "compradors" and of speculators who provoked price instability on the market. Important mistakes were made. In September the revolutionary regime ordered a sharp increase in rice prices in an attempt to satisfy peasant demands. This provoked violent discontent in Saigon, and on October 6 the regime had to make a public self-criticism and return to the old price scales. The existence of two currencies (the northern dong and the southem piaster) created monetary difficulties and nervousness abouf the future value of the piaster, which fostered speculation. A five-year plan was worked out in the North and is supposed to take effect this year. But the plan also concerns the South and requires a unified govemment if it is to be applied. "Today, " declared the DRV radio, "the quicker national reunification is achieved, the sooner it will create conditions for the South Vietnam market to stamp out the Han of the conti vestiges of a decayed and moribund economy. Unification of the country will also create favorable conditions for the northern and southern markets to exchange goods produced in the two zones, supplement each other, and create a prosperous and steady market. " (Nayan Chanda, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 5, 1975.) And the PR Gradio repeatedly refers to the errors and difficulties that have piled up because of the lack of proper planning, which can be worked out only with the North. But the urgency of planning, and therefore of unificafion, flows from long-term objectives as much as from immediate problems. According to Nguyen Khac Vien, the director of Vietnamese Studies, "It may be hoped that in about fifteen years, by the 1990s, the fist stage, that of mechanization, will have been completed and the country will then be able to confront the stage of automation and cybernetics, the first elements of which are already being established. In about thirty years the country should catch up with the world scientific and technical level. " (Malcolm Salman, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 12, 1975.)
What political regime? The social and economic crisis born of the victory is impelling the South to make a forced march along the path toward socialization followed in the North after 1954. In spite of the maintenance of the private industrial secfor and the delays that have been permitted in agriculture before undertaking the socialist reform, the evolution of South Vietnam today is dominated by the dynamic of permanent revolution. But the impending constitutional reunification does not concer the South alone. For its part, the North is trying to make the transition from the end of the war to large-scale socialist production in the realms of both agriculture and industry. Large-scale cooperatives have been set up; factories that were dispersed at the time of the bombing have been partially concentrated again. The province borders have been reIn itself, the governmental reunification poses no great problems. In fact, it has already been realized to a substantial extent. Truong Chinh recognized this in his report to the consultative conference: "At present, the two zones of Vietnam are reunified on several levels ... as concerns the leadership of the revolution: The populations of the North and South have always been led by a single Marxist-Leninist party. " "The task that must be carried out immediately is national reunification on the state level to make official the reunification of our people. " But this "officialization" provides an occasion to pose the problem of the political and constitutional regime of united Vietnam. Here again, Truong Chinh noted the dynamic now under way: "To reunify the country formally on the state level... also means to unify the political and social regimes, that is, the economic structures, the relations of production, the social composition, the state organization, the constitufion and the laws, the culture and the ideology." (Nouvelles de la RDVN, November 15, 1975.) Unfortunately, while the reunification is purely revolutionary in the economic realm in that if accelerates the overturn of the relations of production in the South and considerably broodens the basis for planning, it is more ambivalent in the political realm, It guarantees the crushing of the forces of capitalist restoration and the triumph of the proletarian forces, but it also offers an Institutional framework for the bureaucratic deformations of the revolution in South Vietnam. The political apparatus of the bourgeoisie and imperialism was destroyed in South Vietnam at the time of the liberation. This apparatus could not resist the destruction of the puppet state and the elimination of the neocolonial alternatives to Thieu of the type defended by "Big Minh, " There is no political formation that really represents the bourgeoisie (it being understood that the so-called industrialists association of the NuF does not do so). The only organized forces capable of representing the bourgeoisie indirectly would be the religious circles and above all the Catholic hierarchy. But this hierarchy seems now to have been neutralized - the PRG carefully avoided clashing with religious sentiments - while the
Hoa-Hao and Cao-Dai sects seem divided by the success of the revolution. The political power of the Workers party is attested to by the very decision it took not to repress former collaborators. The hegemony of the Vietnamese Communist party is solidly based; the whole of the Saigon workers movement has been reorganized in the "free trade unions", the various organizations of the former "third force" have been integrated into the corresponding formations of the NLF. Finally, the infrastructure of the popular committees has been set up everywhere. The neocolonial bourgeois state has been destroyed and is being replaced by a workers state in formation. And the former soldiers of the puppet army who took to the hills to fight the new regime - estimated at 10,000 to 12,000 - cannot make any big changes in this. It is not even very likely that they will be able to resist the operations that have been launched against them. But the relative weakness of the Vietnamese revolution could be seen in the liberation of Saigon itself. There was neither a "purely milifary seizure" of the city, nor a generalized uprising. The workers committees and underground trade unions occupied the factories before the final liberation, apparently on April 29, and thus prevented the destruction of the factories. According to Huynh Van Tam, leoder of the trade unions, the AmerIcans had actually worked out a plan to sabotage the industrial areas. (See Far Eastern Economic Review, October 10, 1975.) But while the workers organization of the CP was able to protect the apparatus of production, it was not able to do any more than that. Today it seems that most of the "people's committees" of ihe Saigon region are led by local cadres, people who had been underground, former prisoners, and so on. But the DRV had to send several thousand cadres to the South to aid in the establishment of the management apparatus. In spite of the repression, the Workers party had managed to maintain the continuity of its urban action and base. The decay of the puppet regime and the shaking of American domination also occurred "on the inside, in Saigon. But primarily because of the forces brought to bear, U.S. neocolonial policy made some significant gains, With the liberation, there was no mass revolufionary upsurge resulting in the emergence of genuine soviet-type committees. Many of the people's commitfees arose only after April 30, Consequently, the relations between the Workers party and the masses were not overturned. These relations are characterized by a very deep popular base and a paternalist mode of leadership. The debate on the pace and manner of reunification is significant in this regard. It took place only at the summit of the party and the state. Then the decision was first presented to the consultative conference and only later to the Congress of Representatives of the Population of South Vietnam, which was held December 20-30. This ambivalent relationship between the party and the masses first of all reflects the social weakness of the Vietnamese revolution - a peasant majority and an urbanized population with a low level of proletarianization. But the line of the party has adapted to this instead of fighting against it. More serious, the instifutional
23
VIETNAM model upheld by Vietnamese communism is the model that had been transmitted to the Vietnamese CP by the Stalinized Communist International. The terms of the discussion may be posed more clearly when the draft united constitution for Vietnam is revealed. But there is a good chance that it will resemble the constitution in effect in the North, which stipulates a one-party state and a monolithic party and carefully separates the organization of the local popular committees from the National Assembly, which is elected under a "classic" form that prevents it from being a direct extension of soviet-type structures. Finally, the same ambivalence may be seen in the international policy of the Workers party. The Workers party guards the independence of its orientation and asserts its clear differences with the Kremlin and - in a more obvious way - with Peking. It calls on the peoples of Southeast Asia to seize the "favorable moment" opened by the victory of the Indochinese revolution. It repeatedly stresses the worldwide import of the imperialist defeat of April 1975. More, the Vietnamese revolution plays an active role of revolutionary ferment in the region and especially in Thailand. But the Workers party also sees the "official" world Communist movement -Stalinist and Maoist - as the reality of the workers movement. It acts within that movement. And although it supports, against China, the Portuguese revolution, the "principle of internationalism, " the Angolan MPLA, and the Polisario Front in West Sahara, it can also characterize - discretely - Indira Gandhi as a progressive. Soviet diplomacy holds sway here. The revolutionary dynamic of the struggle of the Vietnamese people is far from exhausted; on the contrary, it remains quite deep. But it is now running up against the twofold problem of the Vietnamese CP's conception of the state - that is, the problem of socialist democracy - and internationalism. It is impossible to avoid these questions. The future evolution of the Vietnamese revolution will partially depend on the answers that are given. In turn, the very difficulties of the phase of transition to socialism underline the fact that they are of importance right now. The party leadership's reiteration of warnings against "bureaucratic attitudes" since the April victory, like the tensions that now exist between Vietnam and China, testify to this. Future articles in INPRECOR will return to this point. Nevertheless, the continuation of the revolutionary forward push in Vietnam is assured by the reunification, the overturn of relations of production now going on in South Vietnam, and the transformations initiated in the North since the end of the American bombing. The grave disequilibrium into which world imperialism was thrown by the victorious resistance of the peoples of Indochina just at the moment when a new wave of international class struggle was taking shape, the shock wave that spread throughout the entire region in the wake of the American debacle, and the consequent process of recomposition of the revolutionary movement in Southeast Asia continue to make the Vietnamese and Indochinese revolutions an example and a stimulant. Ol 24
Fr It is now a month and a half since the government launched an unprecedented repression against the movement of soldiers and the sectors of the workers movement supporting that movement. Last November 26 Prime Minister Jacques Chirac told the National Assembly that an investigation would be opened by the State Security Court. As of now, forty-eight people have been indicted, and ten of them are still behind bars in various prisons in the Paris area. Among those indicted are fourteen soldiers, as well as many local leaders of the CFDT (Confédération Française et Démocratique du Travail -French Democratic Confederation of Labor, the coun try's second-largest trade-union federation), among them Gerard Jussiaux, a leader of the CFDT in Besançon, member of the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU - United Socialist party), and one of the major leaders of the struggle at the Lip watch factory in 1973; among the others indicted are trade-union militants, some of whom had just been released from their military service, and militants of the far-left organizations, including Armand Creus, a member of the Central Committee of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR - Revolutionary Communist League), French section of the Fourth Internafional.
ance EGIME VS. THE OLDIERS by PACO ROBS
Most of the indicted militants are accused of having participated in the activities of soldiers committees or of having supported these committees; some are being detained purely because of their political affiliations. This is the cose with our comrade Armand Creus. In spite of the zeal demonstrated by Judge Gallut, who is leading the investigation, in spite of the scope of the police forces that have been mobilized for several months now, and in spite of the interrogation of dozens of soldiers and civilians and the measures of intimidation that have been taken, the unanimous view of the defense lawyers is that the dossiers of the prosecution are empty. There is no justification whatever for the resort to the Security Court, whose jurisdiction is quite specialized. It was created by de Gaulle in 1963 to wage a struggle against the OAS (Secret Army Organization); the parties of the Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left, the CP-SP electoral bloc) and the trade unions have demanded its dissolution. The accusation the government has made to justify the present repression - "engaging in the demoralization of the army"- is not supported by any serious facts. The poisonous campaign that accompanied the opening of the investigation portrayed militants of the Portuguese SUV (Soldados Unidos Vencerão - Soldiers United Will Win), who had come to France to speak at a series of meetings in solidarity with the Portuguese revolution, as dangerous conspirators who had come to teach techniques of subversion to French soldiers. Along similar lines, the bourgeois press denounced the support extended by some West German organizations, notably our comrades of the GIM (Gruppe Internationale Marxisten - International Marxist Group), to the struggle of the French soldiers doing their military service in West Germany. But the investigation has been unable to turn up any international conspiracy to subvert the army. Development of the soldiers committees The real reasons for the regime's offensive - an offensive it seems prepared to continue by trying to ever more directly take on the organizations committed to active support of the soldiers struggle, primarily the PSU and the LCR - lie elsewhere. First of all, the intent is to break the mass movement that has been developing in the army for the past two years, a movement that neither the various meager reforms of the Ministry of the Army nor the daily repression in the barracks has been able to roll back. Attaining this objective required not only moving to a higher level of repression against the soldiers, but also directly going after the sectors of the workers movement supporting the