Vietnam and Communism

[AmericanSocialist]

Hello so I have been watching a little bit on the Vietnam war. I want to find out more about Communism in Vietnam. Were the rebels in Vietnam really communist or were they revisionist? Are there still a big movement for communism in Vietnam?

[Comrade_Winter]

The Vietnam war was war declared by the U.S.A. against North-Vietnam, a country already ruled by communists, in order to prevent a spread to South-Vietnam. After the American forces pulled out and North-Vietnam officially had won, entire Vietnam became ruled under communism. Unfortunately, the American horrible weapons during the war, such as napalm and plant poison, left the country in a bad condition, and many people starved. Like many other countries, Vietnam is still considered a "People's Socialist Republic", but has taken capitalist tendencies. For instance, the state only covers 20% of your medical fees. Ho Chi Minh, the first leader of the communist party, has several places named after him. Such as the capital, Ho Chi Minh City, and the largest road, Ho Chi Minh Trail.

[Red Future]

The Vietnamese Communist Party embraced the Chinese Deng Model or "Doi Moi " in the early 1980s so yes they are revisionist (despite still claiming Marxist-Leninism as the party doctrine)

[pranabjyoti]

What can anyone say about a party, that are now assisting a dirty, dangerous semi-feudal country (India) to suppress the ongoing revolutionary struggle by teaching the army jungle warfare? JUST F**K THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF VIETNAM.
They are just another bunch of scums hiding behind the Red Flag.

[thefinalmarch]

A thorough search of revleft reveals the following:

"...the Party cannot put forth too high a demand (national independence, parliament, etc.)... It should only claim for democratic rights...." - Ho Chi Minh, The Party's Line in the Period of the Democratic Front. 1939.

"In order to complete the Party's task....a national union conceived without distinction of class and parties is an indispensable factor.... [The communists] are always disposed to put the interests of the country above that of classes, and to give up the interests of the the Party to serve those of the Vietnamese people." - Central Committee of the Indochina Communist Party. 1945.

http://a31.idata.over-blog.com/2/84/53/29/lecler10.jpg

Ho Chi Minh with French General Leclerc de Hauteclocque toasting the accord reintroducing French troops to north Viet Nam. 1945.

"We are convinced that the Allies, which at the Teheran and San Francisco Conferences upheld the principle of equality among the nations, cannot fail to recognize the right of the Vietnamese people to independence." - Ho Chi Minh. 1945.

"The rights of property and possession of Vietnamese citizens are guaranteed." - Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. 1946.

"....this [south Viet Nam] regime must be overthrown and a government of a national and democratic union put in its place composed of representative of all social classes....Support the national bourgeoisie...." - Program of the National Liberation Front of South Viet Nam. 1960.

[AmericanSocialist]

Thank you for the information. There is so much about history within the past 20 t0 40 years that I do not know too much about. Its shameful that a socialist nation could not arise out of these places.

[Zealot]

Maybe now I'm not so sure about back then. The rebels even had people traveling with them whose prime purpose was to give speeches and inspiration taken directly from Marxism. They probably had good intentions but Ho Chi Minh died before the war even ended so he did not get to see his dream played out

[Cleansing Conspiratorial Revolutionary Flame]

'Were the rebels in Vietnam really communist or were they revisionist?

Ho Chi Minh's Rebels were hardly Revisionist when they were directly under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh; As Ho Chi Minh had previously been involved with the Comintern (Beginning with Lenin)
Not to mention that in Ho Chi Min's very policy, he had instituted Land Reform that was to benefit the Peasant and had done his best in order to unite the Urban Proletariat and the Rural Proletariat (Peasants).

Ho Chi Minh had as well acted against Imperialism and Neo-Colonialism within Indochina and had liberated Vietnam from both French Neo-Colonialism and Imperialism, Japanese Imperialism and from Imperialism directed at Vietnam from the United States.

Speaking of which Ho Chi Minh's role in leadership during the Vietnamese War of Liberation against Imperialism from the United States had grown massively symbolic as opposed to being an actual form of leadership.

From a perspective of Marxism-Leninism-- Ho Chi Minh had directly allied himself with the policies of Leninism and Socialist Constructivism that had disregarded Revisionism.

'Are there still a big movement for communism in Vietnam?'
The Current Vietnamese Communist Party is Dengist in nature and has adopted Capitalism at the stake of exploiting the Working Class within Vietnam and allowing Imperialism the capability of rooting itself yet again within Vietnamese Society.

[Rusty Shackleford]

The Vietnamese communist forces were really the only ones fighting japanese forces in SE asia, and after the war, the communist forces declared vietnamese independence. the day the peace treaty was signed.

Now, the vietnamese communists started killing the french soon after too.

Diem bien phu.

bRtyUi_TWrg
sSNCAtFHGbI

Besides being a stylish reporter, he bashes on the ARVN, US, and South Vietnamese governments. :lol:
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http://images.travelpod.com/users/cordlepops/1.1289071674.american-pilot-captured-by-vietnamese-woman.jpg

[Hebrew Hammer]

I have a group that may interest you.

[RED DAVE]

I would love to hear, as usual, from Maoists, as to how a revolutionary socialist organization ended up instituting one more capitalist country. I mean, is state capitalism/private capitalism, which you call revisionism, some kind of a virus that Maoists are prone to?

China - Maoist-led revolution, now CAPITALIST
Vietnam - Maoist-led revolution, now CAPITALIST
Nepal - Maoist-led revolution, now CAPITALIST

Not a good record.

RED DAVE

[Rusty Shackleford]

Ho Chi Minh was a Maoist? News to me.

[RED DAVE]

Ho Chi Minh was a Maoist? News to me.My bad. I should have said Stalinist. To me, it's sort of like chocolate chip cookies and chocolate mint chip. :D Not a whole lot of difference.

RED DAVE

[Rusty Shackleford]

My bad. I should have said Stalinist. To me, it's sort of like chocolate chip cookies and chocolate mint chip. :D Not a whole lot of difference.

RED DAVE


that not a whole lotta difference led to 3-4 confrontations between the two camps.


though basically by the time the bulk of these happpened, both sides dropped "Stalinism" and Mao Tse-Tung thought.

China - USSR
Vietnam - Cambodia
Vietnam - China
ALO - USSR (Afghanistan)

Although, Doi Moi is pretty much Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. And even now, China and Vietnam are at odds.


Just one of the many sad results of the sino-soviet split.

From what i know, the Viet Minh were more aligned with the USSR than they were with the PRC(As the Khmer Rouge was closer to the PRC).


Funny thing though. It would almost seem that the CPC and the Viet Minh would have been fraternal organizations since they were in the same (huge) region fighting the same enemies for roughly a century.

[Kamil]

When asked about his lack of theoretical output, Ho Chi Minh replied something along the lines of "why should i write anything when Mao has written all there needs to be?"


Much in the same way old Chinese culture influenced Vietnam, so did Maoism filter in to Vietnam. Idiosyncratic Vietnamese communist ideology would later influence the other movements in what was once Indochina: Laos and Kampuchea (Cambodia).


Im not familiar with what happened in Laos, but in Cambodia the Maoist inspired Vietnamese model was in turn remolded via the paradigm of traditional Cambodian culture. Later on, ties between the Cambodian Communists, once merely a puppet movement of Vietnamese interests, and their "big brother party" in Vietnam soured as the Cambodians asserted their independence.


The Vietnamese had originally imagined a united Indochinese Federation, stating in their propaganda "Vietnam cannot be Free until Laos and Cambodia are Free". They believed that since the Marxist-Lenninist idea of a nation constitutes a common shared language, land, and culture, not blood, they various "Indochinese" countries, who spoke related languages and lived in the same area and shared a common overarching culture, should be conjoined into a union, like the USSR.


The Cambodian Party, whose central commitee had been students in Paris and former associates of the hardline Stalinist French Communist Party, disagreed and wanted a sovereign nation. They referenced Stalins essay on Marxism and the national question and the concept of socialism in one country, stating instead that Cambodia was a distinct cultural group and must be an independent nation-state to go down the path of acheiving comminism.


This disagrement pushed the two away from eachother, moving Vietnam closer to the Soviet Union and moving Cambodia closer to China. Since China was anti-soviet they would assist Cambodia against the pro-soviet Vietnamese.

[milk]

To add a little more to Kamil's post, and with looking back to revolutionary Russia and its implications for international socialism, according to Leninist doctrine, Central Asian nomads and apparently African tribal societies too, were at the bottom of a hierarchy of revolution. The Mongolian revolutionaries, for example, like the nearby and Red Army-assisted Tuvans who after the Russian Civil War had their ‘autonomous’ territory incorporated into a region of the Soviet Union, didn’t have a Communist Party, but in evolutionary matters, a different sort of party – the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party – more suitable for a country without the necessary conditions for socialist, proletarian revolution, and which in theory brought the most progressive non-proletarian forces of a socially and economically 'backward’ country together. With the assistance of a proletarian dictatorship in the former Russian Empire, these pastoral peoples could bypass capitalism and head towards socialism, provided they maintained links and followed the lead of socialism in the making, then occurring in their big neighbour.

The Vietnamese would later use in adapted form this doctrine (revived by Stalin in the 1940s when the Soviet army fought its way through eastern and central Europe, installing anti-fascist coalition governments, or People's Democracies) for the Cambodian Communists with their own Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, although they were behind the European satellites. The Chinese would also adapt such doctrine with the concept of New Democracy, however, what was once seen as a distinct pattern of transition from capitalism to socialism, a Soviet re-jigging of the concept of People's Democracy later came to view the changes that had occurred in the European states after the Second World War as being, in their fundamentals, the same as proletarian dictatorship in the USSR.

This re-adjustment would filter down to the Vietnamese in Indochina, but earlier, at the top of a revolutionary pecking order was the Soviet Union, followed by the European People's Democracies. Following them was the People's Republic of China. Then, it was the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and finally Laos and Cambodia who were yet to progress, and only under Vietnamese leadership in a struggle to liberate the whole region. The Cambodians would later seriously disagree with this inferior status in matters of progress, and had other independent ideas, than being subordinate to a Vietnamese ‘big brother’ (not in the Orwellian sense) in ex-Indochina, which had a vision of an Indochinese federation of socialist states (the federation idea borrowed from the French colonialists, minus the socialism), with Laos and Cambodia following the lead of the Vietnamese, and all in turn assisted by supposedly ‘real existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union. Also at play, were problems regarding the Vietnamese viewing Cambodia not as a place for independent socialist revolution, but of geopolitical significance in confronting United States imperialism. Feeding into the above, were sometimes cooperating but also competing interests. These became apparent with Vietnamese opposition to the late-1960s Khmer Rouge insurgency, with fears for Cambodia's supposed neutrality and the protection of vital border camp complexes which allowed the North Vietnamese and NLF to escape direct military pressures from US forces in the South, and enable their resupply. And of course, when conflict spread further, for the Cambodians there was the issue of Vietnamese involvement and matters of leadership and control in the country during the 1970-75 civil war.

Two good books to read on all of this are:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9748/005bjt.jpg

Falling Out of Touch: A Study on Vietnamese Communist Policy Towards an Emerging Cambodian Communist Movement, 1930-1975, by Thomas Engelbert and Christopher E. Goscha.

http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/9248/003jr.jpg

Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model. Volume 1. Imitation and Independence, 1930-1975, by Steve Heder.