In the first six months of 1978, the contradictory aspects of the Vietnamese revolution have intensified. On the one hand, a number of steps decided on by the government-such as the measures taken against the big capitalist merchants in the south-have made it clear that the anticapitalist dynamic under way in Vietnam is being continued.
But at the same time, the sudden outbreak of the Vietnam-Cambodia and Vietnam-China conflicts have heightened the regime's dependency on the USSR and given added weight to its bureaucratic deformations.
It is this seemingly contradictory aspect of the Vietnamese revolution that must serve as the starting-point for a new discussion of the political lessons to be drawn from its successes and failures.
In the past, the war in Indochina was the focal point of the confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution on a world scale, between national liberation struggles and imperialism. The victory over U.S. imperialism and the neocolonial regime in South Vietnam underscored the timeliness of the struggle for socialism worldwide.
Today, the advances and setbacks of the Vietnamese revolution shed light on both the dynamic of the revolution in the colonial and semicolonial world, and the problems of the transition to socialism.
A Long Process of Permanent Revolution
The real meaning of the sharp confrontation in March between the Vietnamese government and the comprador bourgeoisie of South Vietnam can be understood only by reviewing the totality of the measures taken before, during, and immediately after the seizure of power in 1975. For those measures were only the temporary outcome of a long process of permanent revolution that began at the outset of the revolutionary struggle and that remains to be completed. This process continued (although not without faltering) throughout the second Indochinese war, often more rapidly than during the first phase of resistance to French colonialism.
The peasant upsurge that marked the beginnings-spontaneous at first-of the second wave of the Vietnamese resistance often began as a way of defending the agrarian reform carried out by the Vietminh and placed in jeopardy by the Diem dictatorship. Land ownership became the concrete issue at stake in many military offensives and counteroffensives. When victory came, the power of the big landed proprietors had been broken in the former liberated zones, and weakened to a large extent in the other rural districts. At the same time, moves toward setting up agricultural cooperatives had begun in these areas.
The crumbling of the puppet army and administration in April 1975, followed by the steps taken by the new revolutionary government to dissolve the military, administrative, and political apparatus of the puppet regime, cemented the collapse and destruction of the bourgeois state in South Vietnam.
The anti-imperialist struggle had been carried out north and south of the 17th
..under a single, undivided parallel leadership-the Vietnamese Communist Party. It was this same single leadership that now found itself at the head of the North Vietnamese state and of the new administration in the south made up of the forces of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) and the National Liberation Front (NLF). The army, too, was placed under a single command.
A common economic plan immediately began to be implemented despite the different situations existing in the two zones. The government took control of the bulk of the former imperialist holdings in South Vietnam, the foreign-owned plantations as well as most of the major Vietnameseowned private industrial enterprises, whose owners had generally fled before the final collapse.
What arose in South Vietnam was a new workers state. This fact alone makes it possible to understand how the reunification of the country-mandated by the April 1976 elections—could take place so rapidly, barely one year after the liberation forces" seizure of power.
The last major economic bastion held by the bourgeoisie in South Vietnam belonged to the big comprador merchants of the Cholon district in Saigon. The test of strength soon began. The commercial bourgeoisie took advantage of the fact that it still controlled the marketing and distribution network, trade in commodities, and substantial amounts of currency to sabotage the fragile economic equilibrium in the south.
In September 1975, the government tried to break its power, but without success. It was not until March 1978 that this objec tive was finally reached, at the cost of a genuine test of strength.
A resolution adopted by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in April 1975, just before the fall of Saigon, noted that the power of the Vietnamese revolution derived from this interaction between the social revolution and the national liberation struggle: *
... the revolutionary process under way ... is challenging the bases of capitalist and neocolonialist domination in Vietnam...
"The military victory of the forces of the PRG over the Saigon puppets would, of course, not in itself guarantee the socialist growing-over of the revolution in South Vietnam; the revolution's consolidation in the cities will depend on a series of social, political, and economic measures. But the process of permanent revolution will enjoy conditions very favorable for its development; the overthrow of the organs of puppet power and the dissolution of the reactionary parties in the newly liberated cities are an indication of this."
This is what actually happened. The transitional economy has not, of course, been completely consolidated. For one thing, the country's level of industrialization, as well as the mechanization of agriculture in the north, is still much too low, and collectivization in the south is still running up against the opposition of the landowning small peasantry. Unemployment in the south is still a long way from being overcome.
But the course that the Vietnamese revolution has followed has once again confirmed the Marxist theory of permanent revolution:
The national liberation struggle has continually been fueled by social mobilizations.
The first socialist measures had to start being implemented even before the seizure of power.
The smashing of imperialist domination could not take place without destroying the power of the indigenous bourgeoisie and without the birth of a workers state.
And no sooner did the revolutionary government begin to carry out bourgeoisdemocratic tasks—which were still a long way from being completed-than it had to make deeper and deeper inroads into capitalist legality and unify the country.
Of all liberation struggles, the one in Vietnam was probably the most closely and lastingly tied to a process of social revolution and to the leadership of a Communist Party. However, as in the north two decades earlier, the workers state that arose in the south was marked by strong bureaucratic deformations from the outset. The revolutionary struggle did not directly lead to the emergence of genuine soviet organs of proletarian power, in contrast to what had happened in the USSR and in Western Europe between the two world wars.
It is impossible in this space to review all the factors that underlie this break in the "classical" revolutionary process, such as the consequences of the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers state and of the Stalinization of the Communist International; the conditions under which the post-World War II anti-imperialist upsurge had to take place; and the burden of the precapitalist past, colonization, and then the U.S. grip on Vietnamese society. But it is important to note that the Vietnamese Communist Party reflects this breaking up of the process to a high degree, and that its orientation and the contradictory political role it has played cannot otherwise be explained.
The Vietnamese revolution had to confront two formidable opponents which did not hesitate to commit substantial forces to defeating it: French and U.S. imperialism. The military escalation during the second war in Indochina remains unparalleled to this day in the history of wars and revolutions. The effects of the Sino-Soviet dispute were felt from the very beginning of the second wave of resistance. It is hard to see how victory could have been possible if the Vietnamese CP had not played an active role in the fight against imperialism, while leading the liberation struggle in the field virtually without challenge, and if the Vietnamese CP had not been conscious of the irreducible class conflict underlying the nationalist uprising of the toiling population.
On several occasions, the Vietnamese CP had to make crucial decisions that went contrary to the pressures exerted on it by the Soviet and Chinese leaderships combined, as in 1959-60, when it decidedquite belatedly-to relaunch the armed struggle in South Vietnam. Very soon, moreover, the pressing need to "skip over the stage of capitalist development" was emphasized in the programmatic documents of the party (but not in those of the front), while at the same time the goal of reunification was continually restated. This was true, for example, in the major writings of Le Duan in 1963 and 1970, of Truong Chinh in 1968, and of Giap 1973.
In 1974, moreover, Giap stated as the "political objective" and the "fundamental and immediate task" of the "Vietnamese revolution" (in its totality), and of "national wars and insurrections," not only independence and "popular democracy," but also socialism. Written after the signing of the Paris peace accords in 1973, but before the final offensive in 1975, this
CHINA
VIETNAM Hano' *
LAOS
Gull of Tonki
Vientiane
Nongkhai
THAILAND
* Bangkok
CAMBODIA
Prom Penh
Pnom Penh
Gulf of Saur
South (hina
Washington Post document, to all intents and purposes, held good for the struggles then under way in South Vietnam. Above all, the Vietnamese CP refused in practice to give a share of power to any bourgeois force whatsoever in the leaderhip of the liberation struggle. The so-called bourgeois parties of the "Patriotic Front" or the NLF were closely controlled by cadres of the Vietnamese CP
This is what enabled the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International to state at its December 1972 meeting that, despite the Vietnamese CP's speeches about "national reconciliation" and the "Stalinist political training" of its leaders, "the balance of the last fifteen years clearly demonstrates this party's tenacious commitment to the overthrow of the bourgeois state in South Vietnam." This had to be taken into account, the statement said, to understand how the pressure of the revolutionary
• masses would be exerted on a party "which in its practical orientation has broken with Stalinism's classical Menshevik line in the colonial and semicolonial countries and which is independent of the Moscow and
Peking bureaucracies.
Like the Cuban leadership, the Vietnamese team has displayed qualities that are greatly superior to those of the other leaderships, nationalist or Stalinist, of the liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s. However, the Vietnamese CP's positions regarding relations between the party, the state, and the masses remain much closer to those embraced by Stalinism than by revolutionary Marxists, including a one-party regime, the outlawing of the right to form tendencies and factions within the party, the formalized domination of the party over the organs of state, and the theoretical justification given to the lack of soviet organs of power. By defending these positions and putting them into practice, the Vietnamese CP has not only accepted as natural the original bureaucratic deformations of the Vietnamese workers state, which were largely the result of objective factors; it has also endorsed them politically and thus strengthened them.
Here lies the contradictory role that the Vietnamese CP has played in the development of the Vietnamese revolution. It was able to lead the revolution to victory, even if with great difficulty. At the same time, however, it formalized and extended the authoritarian, paternalist, and substitutionist-more repressive, than today-relations it had established before the liberation struggle with the masses mobilized under its leadership.
The Lack of Soviets
The role of the Vietnamese CP is not, of course, solely to blame for the rise of a workers state bureaucratically deformed from birth. A process of bureaucratization has deep-seated and multiple roots, including a number of national and international factors of a historical nature that cannot be detailed here.
Furthermore, we should not forget that the Vietnamese revolution is now running up against many more difficulties than simply the lack of structures of socialist democracy, such as the consequences of underdevelopment, the devastation of war, isolation, the Sino-Soviet dispute, and a growing dependency on the USSR.
view the political regime in Vietnam, and what the CP's program has to say about it, as one of the central problems, one of the most crucial questions that has been posed since the victory, cannot be considered an "idealist" or "normative" attidude.
As a matter of fact, the gravity of the "bureaucratic danger" does not need to be proved. The CP leaders themselves recognize it in their own way. They have launched a series of campaigns against "bureaucratism- that sometimes reach into high places. The generals belonging to the Tay and Nung minorities who were stripped of their posts on the Central Committee (but not of all their posts in the state apparatus) were charged with having had private villas built for themselves.
In the fifth district of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) alone, about 200 cadres were reportedly arrested and were unable to explain how they had come by the wealth they had amassed since April 1975. Within the party ranks, people are admitting more and more openly that they are dealing with a problem of institutions, and that it is necessary to rediscuss ways to get the population to actually play the role of "collective master" that is officially vested in it.
This corresponds to recognizing the importance of what in our view is a crucial problem-the relationship between the nature of the political regime existing in a workers state, and the institutional framework in which the bureaucracy, as a social layer, can develop and express its own interests. But at the same time the Vietnamese CP still maintains the dogma of a single party, governed by bureaucratic centralism, and holds to a nonsoviet conception of the state.
For the Vietnamese leadership, the struggle against "bureaucratism" is still supposed to be carried out primarily within the ruling party. But this party, while still the party that led the revolutionary strug gle to victory, is also, and increasingly, the party-state under whose wing a bureaucracy is taking root.
The bureaucracy cannot reform itself The key to the struggle against it does not lie in "raising the moral standards" of the single ruling party from within, but in overturning
•the relations between the masses and the state apparatus in its entirety-that is, in a change of regime and the rise of workers and peasants coun cils.
The conditions for such a change of regime are not solely dependent on the will of the leadership of the "vanguard party," and they do not necessarily exist today. Of course, the history of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s is there as a reminder. But the more we emphasize the many objective obstacles in the way of establishing a regime of genuine socialist democracy, the more we are forced to recognize the importance of the subjective factor-the conscious action of the partyin overcoming them.
The fact is that no "transitional society" can shirk this question for very long. The failure of Maoism and of its attempt to find an original road" to socialism gave a negative confirmation of this. And the amazingly advanced documents, in terms of their conception of socialist democracy, that have been published in dazibao form in China-such as the one signed Li I- Che'-give a positive confirmation of the relevance of the revolutionary-Marxist program on this question.
An Overall Political Problem
The decision-making monopoly enjoyed by the party-or, more specifically, by its leadership-obviously bars the population from exercising what the CP calls its "right to be the collective master." How could it be otherwise when all that is demanded of the masses is to discuss a line that has already been decided on, and while the essential facts of the situation are not made known to them, or are doled out with an eyedropper, thanks to the party leaders' monopoly over the media?
The general functioning of the transitional society is influenced by this situation. How can an economic plan that takes the political factor into consideration be drawn up if the population has no way of knowing about the various options under discussion, and thus no way to make its opinion known directly? And how can the growing tensions on Vietnam's borders be kept from giving rise to nationalist ideologies within the country, if the real issues and real reasons for these mounting conflicts are not explained publicly and politically?
On this last point especially, the positions endorsed by the CP leadership explicitly bar it from telling "the whole truth" to the Vietnamese people, or, for that matter, to foreign political activists, regarding the situation of the worldwide communist and workers movement.
For example Nguyen Kac Vien, a writer and semiofficial spokesman for the regime, noted in an interview published in the second half of 1977 in the Journal of Contemporary Asia that in cases where disagreements arise with another state or another "sister" party, "our general attitude is to make our position known in meetings between our two parties or our two states, but not to discuss these questions publicly ... so as to promote relations of solidarity between the different Communist parties in the world."
It was in the name of this principle that the growing political differences among the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese parties were hidden up to the outbreak of bloody combat on the ground. It is in the name of this principle that the Vietnamese leadership is still silent about the heavy and historic responsiblities of the Soviet leadership, although it has begun making public attacks on Maoism and says that China is no longer socialist.
More generally, the programmatic conceptions of the CP leadership bar it from making any comprehensive, thoroughgoing, and truly internationalist critique of Stalinism. This is especially true inasmuch as defending "its" revolution's "own land struggle for socialist democracy in China and an end to bureaucratic privilege.—IP/I
immediate) interests" continues to outweigh everything else, although the position of the Vietnamese revolution in the international arena has changed since victory; the primary viewpoint from which the situation of the worldwide workers movement is judged is still the national one.
This is what now enables the Vietnamese CP to say that the Soviet leadership has merely committed "errors" (opportunist and chauvinist ones), whereas the Chinese leadership has "betrayed." This closely reflects the way in which relations between the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Soviet Communist parties are evolving, but it also reflects a lack of regard for the history of the worldwide workers movement and the many revolutions sacrificed by Stalin and his successors on the altar of "building socialism in one country."
Finally, these conceptions are not unrelated either to the justifications that may be given for the shifts in Vietnamese diplomacy, or to the past use of the ideology of "national reconciliation" in the program of the NLF and PRG. In both cases, tactical "necessities" won out over the educational role that should fall on a leadership whose goal is to further the emergence of soviet-type organs of proletarian power, and which sets itself the task of reviving militant internationalism.
It was precisely for this reason that the resolution adopted in December 1972 by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International condemned the references made by the leadership of the Vietnamese CP to the ideology of "na-
" without, however, tional reconciliation, questioning its will and capacity to bring down imperialist and bourgeois domination in its country.
As a matter of fact, it was the duty of revolutionary Marxists to "clearly explain that there is no possibility, in Vietnam or elsewhere, of 'national concord' between the exploiting and exploited classes," for "even when the bourgeois ministers [of a possible coalition government] are hostages of an already proletarian state power, their presence ... can only disorient the proletariat's class consciousness."
In the end, there was no coalition government in Vietnam. However, the warnings issued by our movement in 1972-and earlier-were just as relevant to the subse. quent problems faced by the Vietnamese revolution.
At a campus seminar held in Paris, Nguyen Kae Vien in effect admitted why the bourgeoisie was not immediately neutralized in April 1975, before it had time to prepare itself to defy the measures of the revolutionary government. It was not because of objective difficulties alone (such as the lack of a state-owned alternative distribution network), but also because of a political error, which he described as "rightist," and which had been committed precisely in the name of national concord.
The price of this error seems to have been heavy, since it took almost three years of successive conflicts to break the resistance of the big merchant bourgeoisie of South Vietnam.
Obviously, it is not a matter of denying a revolutionary leadership the right to make compromises, both in the national and in the international realm. It may have been necessary, in the wake of the victory, to try to develop a kind of Vietnamese "New Economic Policy" by availing themselves of the services of the private industrialists who had remained in the country, and by seeking to attract foreign capital. But in that case, it was not necessary to give indications-moreover, without believing it-that "concord" could reign between exploiting and exploited classes.
It is likely that today, after the failure of this "new economic policy" and the break with China, it may be necessary to rely more on the Soviet bloc and to seek to sign diplomatic and trade agreements with the countries in the region. But this does not give anyone the right to imply that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has ceased to be the very reactionary and proimperialist organization that it is, or that the Thai, Philippine, and Indonesian governments might have a few progressive virtues because Hanoi needs their help.
For in that case, the compromises that may be essential to the Vietnamese revolution bear too heavy a price tag. They are made at the expense of the level of consciousness of the Vietnamese masses themselves and of the political activists fighting their own reactionary regimes in the rest of Southeast Asia.
Nor is it a question of placing a simple equal sign between Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow, without worrying unduly about what the Vietnamese CP has been able to accomplish, and the difficulties that the Vietnamese revolution is coping with. The Vietnamese regime-like the Cuban regime, for that matter-is not playing the same role internationally as the Soviet and Chinese regimes, just as these regimes do not have the exact same relations with their respective populations. But what we should do is make a threefold observation.
With the victory over the imperialist intervention and the reunification of the country, the Vietnamese revolution has entered a different stage, one that places "new problems ... both in the area of economic reconstruction and in the area of social and political organization" (to quote the April 1975 United Secretariat resolution) high on the agenda.
Or, to put it another way, at the heart of the current difficulties, we find questions similar to those that shook up the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam during the crisis of the 1956 agrarian reform and the repression of the Vietnamese "hundred movement, questions that had flowers"
been partly blurred by the north's involvement in the second wave of resistance.
The break between the population and a profiteering bureaucracy came suddenly to the fore, so suddenly, moreover, that the CP leadership was deeply worried. A series of natural disasters, followed by the onset of the crisis in Indochina, only sharpened these social and political tensions. The basic contradictions that the CP is facing are no longer the same as during the revolutionary anti-imperialist upsurges; appeals to unity in the face of new "outside threats" will not be able to change anything in the long run.
The situation is made especially difficult by the fact that the regime is dealing with a population in the south whose political cohesiveness and confidence in the historic leadership mission of the Vietnamese CP is much less than that of the people of North Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, when the government succeeded, after harsh rebuffs and severe self-criticism, in recruiting the peasantry for the setting up of cooperatives, even though it was unable to carry out the mechanization of agricul-
However, one of the major lessons of the last three years is that although the leadership of the Vietnamese CP shows an acute awareness of the sharpness of these social and political tensions, it had also proved incapable of executing programmatic turns that are essential for getting at the roots of the bureaucratic danger. This is because such turns are by far too alien to its political history, and also because this leadership is itself the chief beneficiary and dependent of this bureaucratic milieu.
Thus, we find in Vietnam the same problems that have shaped, or are shaping, the evolution of other regimes that have emerged from successful revolutions, regimes led by parties—whether they originated in the Stalinized Comintern or elsewhere-that have played a revolutionary role independent of Moscow in practice, such as the Yugoslav, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.
This means that the conditions that enabled these leaderships to play this independent role were not sufficient to prepare them for the tasks inherent in societies in transition to socialism and confronted with the problem of the growth of a bureaucracy.
We might even say that what enabled them to assert their independent political choices-the fact that their anti-imperialist struggles were rooted in a nationalist framework-made it more difficult for them to understand the roots of the bureaucratic phenomena, which can be fully grasped only in light of the international experience of the workers movement. There can be no lasting solution without a twofold militant outlook combining socialist democracy and genuine internationalism.
Vietnam could probably have avoided the evolution it is now undergoing only with the help of a rapid revolutionary breakthrough in Southeast Asia, which would have saved it from regional isolation, and of a rise of the class struggle in the imperialist centers, which would have given rise to the exemplary rebirth of soviet organs of proletarian power. This did not happen; on the contrary, the repercussions of the Sino-Soviet conflict in the region had profoundly damaging consequences on the course of the Vietnamese revolution.
From now on, the struggle against bureaucracy is objectively on the agenda of the Vietnamese revolution. However, no political force exists that is in a position to put forward a program of socialist democracy in Vietnam today. It would be futile to hope that such an antibureaucratic program might be put forward tomorrow by the Vietnamese CP and its leadership.
Such a program can arise only from a new experience on the part of the Vietnamese laboring masses, the experience of the contradictions of the transitional society that they are familiar with, aided, we hope, in the not-too-distant future, by other mass revolutionary experiences in Western Europe and China.
These antibureaucratic tasks--the establishment of a genuine regime of socialist democracy-can be carried out only by a mass uprising of the Vietnamese workers-an independent upsurge, even if it may be supported by many activists and cadres of the present-day CP.
This, of course, will take time, but it is nonetheless one of the basic lessons of the progress and failures of the Vietnamese revolution since the victory in 1975.
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Notes
1. For the text of this resolution, see Intercontinental Press, May 5, 1975, pp. 598-601.
2. For the text of this statement, see Intercontinental Press, January 15, 1973, pp. 27-29.
3. "Li I-che' was the pen name of a group of three former Red Guards from Canton. In December 1974 the three pasted up a pamphletlength wall poster in Canton, calling for a
4. This refers to the New Economic Policy carried out by the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1924-25. This policy softened some of the measures introduced under "war communism," permitting a partial return to a free market, in order to encourage the investments that were essential for a minimal economic recovery.