Vietnam Victory

Scan page 2

NOW FOR POLITICAL REVOLUTION After 30 years of war, during which the most barbaric and sustained bombardment by the world's most advanced weaponry had failed to extinguish the spirit of revolutionary struggle, the Vietnamese workers and peasants have defeated the puppet forces of South Vietnam and US imperialism.

The greatest blow has been struck against capitalism since the Chinese Revolution of 1949, and a lasting biow also at the treacherous Stalinist conception of "peaceful co-existence" and "detente" put forward by the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies. (see pp 4&5).

Taken with the revolutionary victory of the Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia and the rapidly approaching complete collapse of the government in Laos, the Vietnamese victory must be seen as part of the world movement of the working masses now taking place against the attacks and oppression of capitalism and linked completely with the overthrow of fascism in Portugal, •the mass strikes in Europe and the huge demonstrations against unemployment in the USA itself.

Flowing from this must come an understanding of the continuing international obligations of the new united state of Vietnam. The dangers are that the Hanoi regime, which has held bureaucratic control of the economic and political life, will turn away from these responsibilities. The statement by Mme Minh at Heathrow Airport last week when, amidst general statements on supporting struggle in other countries, she said: "But having suffered so much from foreign intervention it is not our intention to interfere in the affairs of other countries" shows the dangerous tendencies towards nationalism gaining a hold The abandonment of on the bureaucracy now that the immediate threats of imperialism have been dispelled.

The Workers Socialist League has heen the only tendency which, while supporting wholeheartedly the revolutionary struggles of the Vietnamese masses, has stressed the vital need for organs of workers and peasants power to combat the danger of bureaucratic degeneration within the now united country.

This is in opposition to the astounding Pabloite line of the Workers Revolutionary Party, which now declares unconditional and uncritical support for the Hano regime. In Workers Press (12.5.75) Royston Bull wrote: "This continues the consistent revolutionary line pursued by the NLF since they first took up arms in 1941 after the French abandonment to Japanese military invasion." Presumably the WRP consider the consistent revolutionary line incl udes the murder of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, who led the struggles against the French and Japanese in the 1930's and the Second World Ho Chi Minh - murdered Vietnamese Trotskyists. the last 5-6 years are not pleased at US helicopter being dumped into the sea as rout of imperialist forces reaches its climax.

War and who led workers militia in South Vietnam in 1945. Such a statement is scandalous in a paper claiming to be Trotskyist. Even the Pabloite IMG have drawn attention to these killings in their press.

The problems now clearly require a Trotskyist leadership with the lessons of the historical fight against Stalinism. It is clearly impossible to construct socialism (under which the level of material wealth and of production must be raised above that possible under capitalism) within the narrow national confines of Vietnam itself. As Marx wrote two years before the Communist Manifesto: "A development of the productive forces if the absolute necessary practical premise [of communism] because without it want is generalised, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that revive that all the old crap must For the overthrow of capitalism in Vietnam to go forward therefore to the establishment of a socialist wrokers state, there must be both the expansion of industry under the control of organs of workers manWith a considerably weakened agement, directing towards an overall national plan together with the fullest active support for revolutionary struggle throughout Asia and the imperialist world. Just as the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies have restricted the supplies of arms to the struggles in Vietnam and Cambodia as aprt of their separate pushing for deals and detente with the US imperialists - using the Vietnamese masses as a bargaining counter - so now the technological assistance forthcoming to Vietnam will be very much conditioned by the political manoeuvres of the Stalinist bureaucracies. The economy will thus remain inadequate to eliminate the inequalities on which bureaucracy festers and future social contradictions can store up.

The way forward is therefore through the establishment in the towns and villages of soviets through which the power of the liberated workers, peasants and soldiers of Vietnam can be consolidated in challenging the bureaucracy, and bringing about the political revolution.