From Labour Worker, March 1967.
Transcribed by Volkhard Mosler.
Marked-up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
THE ERUPTION of fighting in den towns of south Vietnam has underlined yet again the popular nature of the struggle that the National Liberation Front (NLF) is waging and the impossibility of a US victory.
It has also validated the point that the genuine left in this country has been making for a long time: the only road to peace in Vietnam is complete and unconditional US withdrawal and that talk (whether by Harold Wilson, the “left” MPs or even the Communist Party) of the need for negotiations, for UN intervention or for reconvening the Geneva Conference merely obscures this.
Those Western reporters who have bothered to leave their luxury hotels to enter NLF controlled zones in the cities indicate that the insurgent regime has at least the passive support of the mass of the population. Even the South Vietnamese army seems to have put up little or no resistance.
Only the US presence prevented a complete NLF take over; significantly, the occupying army seems to have tacitly acknowledged this in Hué, where the US flag, and not the South Vietnamese, has been raised over areas recaptured from the NLF. These features of the Vietnam War make it fundamentally different from the typical international conflicts of the cold war, such as the Korean War or the periodic crises over the status of West Berlin. These were turned on and off more or less at will by the great powers, according to their own strategic and economic calculations.
They developed out of the division of the world into spheres of economic and military interest that were decided by the mutual agreement of the powers at the various war-time conferences. Neither the boundary lines decided upon, nor the subsequent quarrelling over the exact positioning of these lines, was dependent upon the desires of the masses of the countries involved.
Nor did either bloc give real assistance to national or social liberation movements within the sphere of influence of the other (the Greek civil war 1946–49 and the Hungarian revolution 1956 were typical instances) although each was willing to make propaganda out of. the embarrassment of the other.
The Vietnam struggle is completely different from this inter-imperialist rivalry, highlighted by the Korean War of 1950. There two satellite regimes originating from the military occupation of the North by Russian troops, and the South by American troops were engaged in a war which expressed only the clash between the strategic calculations of the two controlling powers.
When there was no further possibility of strategic gain the war was abruptly ended, leaving Korea once again divided into two satellite states. In Vietnam the regime that now rules the North was never imposed by foreign troops. It came to power rather as a result of an indigenous struggle against imperialist domination. It could even hold relatively free election in January 1946.
This was only possible because it formulated demands which united behind it all those sections of the population that had suffered from the predations of imperialism. It was for this reason that in the period after 1947, when Ho Chi Minh was forcibly expelled by the French from the Northern towns he had controlled, he was able to fight back without outside troops, and at first without outside equipment.
This has been just as true of the present struggle in the South. This began independently of the promptings of outside powers. Indeed, any such promptings seem to have been in an opposed direction. Both Moscow and Peking brought pressure to bear to persuade the Vietminh to accept the division of the country in 1954 – and Moscow at least saw this as a permanent division; in 1957 it could demand at the United Nations the recognition of both states.
Even the North Vietnamese government refused aid or encouragement to those in the South who took up arms against the notorious Diem dictatorship until the end of 1959. when the renewed struggle in the South was already two years old.
It is because the Vietnamese struggle is a genuine national liberation movement against imperialism that we must wholeheartedly support it. But this should not make us confuse its demands with socialist demands.
Imperialist domination means that the ruling class of one country in addition to exploiting its own workers, exploits the whole population of another country – including often exploiting classes within that country. In the struggle against imperialism all sorts of classes can be involved. Thus, even the capitalist class of an oppressed nation can, by fighting for its independence from existing capitalist powers, weaken capitalism and aid the development of working-class forces – although this capitalist class itself comes into conflict with these forces in the long term.
In most of the underdeveloped world today conditions do not make the development of an independent private capitalism possible. Those sections of the population who would directly benefit from such a development (in particular certain middle-class groups and underemployed intellectuals) look towards a state capitalist development as the way out.
They want to develop national industry so as to provide themselves employment, cohesion and power. This involves using state power to control industry and to exploit other sectors of the population as through the collectivization of agriculture.
But to gain control they have to get rid of imperialism and of those elements directly or indirectly dependent upon it. They attempt to lead other classes in a struggle for national independence. This necessitates them fighting against the super-exploitation of these classes. In this sense they stand for the common interests of all classes.
That is why socialists have to support such struggles. The major task is to weaken the rival systems of imperialism that exploit the working class; keep the so-called third world in the grip of underdevelopment and threaten mankind with a nuclear holocaust. National liberation movements contribute directly to undermining this system, even though in the long run the bureaucratic classes that emerge from them come into conflict with their own exploited classes, as when the North Vietnamese army had to forcibly put down peasant uprisings in 1956.
Indeed, we should not only support these struggles but gain heart from them. They demonstrate the fundamental weakness that underlies the apparent omnipotence of capitalist society.
Despite the vast technological superiority of the US, it cannot begin to defeat the NLF. It can destroy but cannot conquer. The sheer cost of maintaining the war machine begins to expose all the contradictions within American society. The government finds it increasingly difficult to provide resources to appease strikers or slum dwellers.
But even more important, these contradictions begin to find conscious expression. For the first time in years unofficial rank-and-file movements have begun to develop in the US unions, while the ghetto uprisings of the negro movement, often directly inspired by the success of national liberation movements, and the negroes’ own experience of the Vietnam war, reaches new peaks of militancy. In this way the structure of capitalism links what goes on in Vietnam to what occurs in the streets and factories of the US ‐ and here.
This also indicates how we can aid the struggles of the Vietnamese. For if their struggle is our struggle the limit to the resources the US and its allies can pour into Vietnam is determined by the need to try and keep the working classes of the advanced countries quiet.
The more militancy develops among workers in the advanced western countries, the more difficult this balancing of resources becomes for it. In this sense a peaceful strike by non-political workers can actually help the NLF more than the most militant student demonstration. (Britain’s withdrawal from East of Suez probably owes more to the recent dock strike than of years of protest).
This is not an argument against continual agitation and demonstration around the Vietnam issue. This, of course, is necessary, but for it to be really fruitful it must be linked with agitation on issues of mass concern in the struggle against capitalism in this country: the tenants’ struggle, the fight against redundancy and the defence of basic trade-union rights.
As an old but still apposite slogan has it, the main contribution we can make to the struggles of the oppressed throughout the world is to make the revolution in our own country.
Last updated on 18 September 2022