Smash Imperialism with International Socialist Revolution!

Defend and Extend the Vietnamese Revolution!

North Vietnamese tank 390 smashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. More Soviet and Chinese-built tanks and armored vehicles from Brigade 203 followed. Commandos of the Second Corps stormed the palace. Their commander, Pham Duy Do, described the events to the Vietnam News Agency. “I ran into the main hall and pulled back a curtain and found the entire Saigon regime seated. I shouted ‘You’re surrounded. Drop your weapons and surrender. Do not move. If you do, we will open fire.’” Pham ran to the second floor and waved the insurgents’ flag from the balcony to signal that the palace had been captured. North Vietnamese troops arrested the vice president – U.S. puppet president Nguyen Van Thieu had fled the country two days earlier – and escorted him to a radio station where he announced his government’s unconditional surrender. It was noon on 30 April 1975. That afternoon helicopters evacuated the last U.S. personnel from a rooftop near the embassy.

This past 30 April 2025, hundreds of thousands of citizens from across the country and well-wishers from abroad lined the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to witness the official celebration of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of South Vietnam and national reunification. Videos of the crowd show a sea of the national flag, red with a yellow star, also adorning teenage faces and T-shirts. The flag of the wartime National Liberation Front (NLF), referred to derisively by the U.S. military as “Viet Cong” (for Vietnamese communists), was also prominent. Thousands of troops from all branches of Vietnam’s military marched in the lavish official parade, along with Communist Party cadres. Laotian, Cambodian and, for the first time, Chinese, troops marched behind Vietnamese formations. CP general secretary To Lam hailed the celebration of Vietnam’s 30-year struggle which put “an end to the more-than-a-century domination of old and new colonialism and bringing the country into a new era – the era of national independence and socialism.”

The decades-long struggle of the Vietnamese workers and peasants did indeed put an end to colonial and capitalist rule in Vietnam, and 1975 marked the ignominious end of the U.S. imperialist war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese. That defeat was exactly the problem for Donald Trump. The Big Stick imperialist president instructed senior U.S. diplomats to boycott the events celebrating the Vietnamese victory. Veterans’ groups traveling to Vietnam to promote reconciliation were told they were on their own. The diplomatic snub was on top of the 46% tariffs on Vietnamese exports to the U.S. levied earlier in April. Trump imposed them on nearly every country on earth but those on Vietnam were the second highest on any nation except China, whose products were subject to a 145% levy (later reduced, temporarily, to “only” 30%).

Since taking office in January, the U.S. president has been on a tear, not only ruling by decree as a would-be strongman, but seeking to regiment the whole of society in Trumpland USA.¹ Internationally, he wants to lord it over Trumpworld, vowing to “take back” the Panama Canal, grab Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, tell European leaders where to get off and force the entire world to come begging for lower tariffs. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky got an Oval Office dressing down when he dared to talk back and failed to act like a proper puppet. As Trump channels President William McKinley’s drive for imperial conquest and hails the 1890 McKinley Tariff, Vietnam would seem to be slated to be another U.S. neocolony. But the imperialists have a problem: thanks to the victory of the revolution, Vietnam is a workers state, albeit bureaucratically deformed.

 Trump’s moves against China go beyond trade war – it’s full-on economic war. His biggest stick has been tariffs, but on May 1, he threatened that anyone who buys Iranian oil “will not be allowed to do business” with the U.S. “in any way, shape or form.” Beijing buys 90% of Iranian petrochemical exports, so this was a threat to cut off trade with China altogether. On April 9, as the punitive tariffs on the rest of the world were to go into effect and with the spectre of a global stock market crash looming and the bond market in turmoil, Trump blinked and declared a “pause.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping, unlike Zelensky (who gave in to Trump’s demand to control Ukrainian strategic minerals), refused to be bullied. So on April 12, after weeks of wheedling to get Xi to call, Trump blinked again and agreed to scale back tariffs on China for three months. He just didn’t have the cards.

On Vietnam, Trump has a different posture than his predecessor Joe Biden. The Democrats’ alliance-based strategy encouraged investment in Vietnam, seeking to use it as a proxy against China and stoking tensions in the South China Sea. But Trump’s “America First” policies have the effect of pushing Vietnam into China’s embrace, as the two deformed workers states face a common threat. Hence the Chinese troops in Ho Chi Minh City on the 50th anniversary of the Vietnamese victory. Revolutionary Marxists – Trotskyists – defend China and Vietnam, along with North Korea and Cuba, against imperialist aggression and the threat of counterrevolution. While their Stalinist rulers, imbued with a nationalist outlook, still yearn for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, the League for the Fourth International says that it is necessary to deepen and extend the revolution internationally throughout the region, and the world.

Different Strategies, Same Goal

Less than a year ago, in July 2024, Democratic president Biden dispatched Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Hanoi following the death of Vietnam’s Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Truong. Blinken attended a reception at the presidential palace in Hanoi and conveyed condolences to Truong’s successor To Lam, posing in front of a bust of Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). The vibe was certainly different than Trump’s hostility, but not the basic aim of U.S. policy. A U.S. statement (22 July 2024) declared the purpose of Blinken’s trip (accompanied by Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin), which also included Laos, Japan, Mongolia, Philippines and Singapore: “Secretary Blinken will reaffirm the importance of the work the United States does with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific to advancing security and prosperity and facilitating a shared vision for a free and open region.” In other words, its aim was to contain China.

Blinken was even more explicit in a visit to Vietnam in April 2023.

“As part of our growing bilateral security partnership, we’re finalizing the transfer of a third U.S. Coast Guard cutter to Vietnam, complementing a fleet of 24 patrol boats and other equipment, training, and operational facilities we’ve provided since 2016. All of these efforts bolster Vietnam’s capacity to contribute to maritime peace and stability in the South China Sea.”

So the U.S., both under Biden and Trump, has been supplying the military wherewithal to spark clashes that threaten China’s crucial trade corridor.

For the Democrats, the economic interests of U.S. imperialism are best secured with “free trade,” reflecting the interest of corporations like Nike (half its sneakers are produced in 162 Vietnamese factories employing half a million workers) and Apple (200,000 workers at 35 locations in Vietnam). Intel and SpaceX have announced future investments. In March, more than 60 American tech, defense and energy companies joined a business mission to Vietnam to explore investment opportunities. In addition, the South Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung is the largest foreign investor in Vietnam.

The Democrats looked to “soft power,” (diplomacy, USAID subversion, Radio Free Asia propaganda, etc.) backed up by the U.S. Pacific Fleet, while Trump wants to erect tariff walls, dispensing with diplomatic niceties, and give $1 trillion to the Pentagon. And as the new defense secretary Pete Hegseth put it in mangled Pentagon-speak in a leaked policy document, “China is the department’s sole pacing threat” (Washington Post, 29 March). The Trump administration is systematically gearing up for war on China. In this, the MAGA Republican militarists are in lock step with the Democratic Party Cold Warriors.

Bipartisan U.S. Imperialist War on Vietnam

Like the bipartisan war drive against China, the Vietnam War was waged by both main U.S. political parties. After the French colonialists’ defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Republican president Dwight Eisenhower established the South East Asia Treaty Organization, a Pacific version of NATO, and sent 700 military personnel and military/economic aid to bolster the corrupt South Vietnamese dictatorship of Ngo Dinh Diem. In May 1961, Cold War Democrat John F. Kennedy sent additional military “advisors” to South Vietnam, including 500 Special Forces. Kennedy authorized the start of clandestine warfare against North Vietnam with U.S.-trained South Vietnamese agents.By the end of 1962, there were approximately 11,000 military advisors in South Vietnam. Their policy was “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem” – until Diem became too much of a liability and was assassinated in a CIA-backed coup in November 1963.

Following JFK’s assassination that same month, Lyndon Johnson massively escalated the war. The trigger was the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin incident” in August 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed a U.S. destroyer had been struck by North Vietnamese forces in an “unprovoked attack.” (The attack never happened, and the U.S. warships were engaged in covert operations near Vietnam’s territorial waters.) Using the imaginary incident as a pretext, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution which was then used to authorize the massive deployment of some 500,000 U.S. troops, non-stop carpet bombing of North Vietnam and indiscriminate bombing with chemical agents in the South, including Agent Orange to destroy vegetation and force peasants from their land.² The horror of the U.S. war was captured in the famous photos of soldiers torching peasants’ huts and a naked young girl running from a napalm bombing attack.

In the stunning Têt Offensive of January-March 1968, North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces overran U.S. bases and pounded the army of the South Vietnamese puppet regime. Amid escalating antiwar protests and rampant demoralization of U.S. troops, defeatist sentiment spread in Washington over the losing imperialist war. LBJ decided not to run for reelection. Following the 1968 election, victorious Republican president Richard Nixon launched a policy of “Vietnamization” of the war. The aim was to reduce U.S. casualties coupled with intense bombing of North Vietnamese cities, mining its harbors, secretly bombing and invading Cambodia and Laos, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. But the heroic Vietnamese tenaciously kept on fighting while U.S. troops were close to rebellion, with over 900 incidents of soldiers “fragging” (throwing fragmentation grenades at) officers.

Meanwhile, on the home front, U.S. cities were exploding with protests against racist police repression of Northern ghetto upheavals. There was a direct connection with the Vietnam War, as black troops complained of being given the most dangerous missions and world boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused the draft, saying “No Viet Cong ever called me n----r.” In April 1970, when Nixon invaded Cambodia, over 1 million students at over 880 college campuses around the U.S. staged walkouts and/or occupied campus buildings. On May 4, four protesting students were murdered by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University in Ohio, and a week and a half later two students were gunned down by city and state police at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

With no end in sight, Nixon ordered a U.S. withdrawal following the February 1973 ceasefire. U.S. forces dragged away in defeat, but the war continued. The then-revolutionary Spartacist League (SL) issued a statement, “There Is No Peace! The Civil War Goes On” (Workers Vanguard No. 16, February 1973). It noted: “Especially since the massacre of hundreds of thousands of workers and communists in Indonesia in 1965 accomplished a major imperialist aim in Southeast Asia, key sectors of the American bourgeoisie have favored an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.”

The SL statement declared that it did “not support in any way this robbers’ peace,” and called for military victory to the NLF. But it noted that the NLF program called for a coalition government and a neutral (capitalist) South Vietnam. In the end, the talk of coalition evaporated as the puppet government collapsed, and after two more years of bloody fighting, the Saigon regime fell on 30 April 1975. The SL proclaimed:

“On April 30 the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) rode triumphantly into Saigon as leaders of the defeated puppet regime and South Vietnamese bourgeoisie fled the country by every means available. The military victory of the DRV/NLF marks the end of 30 years of civil war against colonialism and imperialism and their local allies. It means the overthrow of capitalist rule in South Vietnam, a historic conquest for the working people of the entire world and one which must be unconditionally defended by class conscious workers against imperialist attack.

“We hail this stunning defeat of U.S. imperialism, the first in a major war during this century and greet the victory of our class brothers and sisters in Indochina with internationalist proletarian solidarity.”

–Workers Vanguard No. 68, 9 May 1975

At the same time, WV added: “we warn the Indochinese masses that they must place no confidence in their Stalinist leaders” who still seek “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. It called for “workers’ political revolution led by a Trotskyist party in order to establish the organs of proletarian democracy and open the road to socialism. All Indochina Must Go Communist!”

The article recounted how in August 1945, when British and French forces arrived to end Japanese occupation in World War II, the Vietnamese Trotskyists organized thousands of workers to rise up in Saigon against the reestablishment of colonial rule while the Stalinists sought to negotiate with the imperialist allies. The Trotskyists proclaimed “Long live the arming of the people! Land to the peasants! Nationalization of the factories under workers control! Toward the workers and peasants government!” The Stalinists, in contrast, proclaimed a “bourgeois democratic government,” adding that “Those who incite the peasants to seize landed property will be severely and mercilessly punished.” The Trotskyists went down fighting against the imperialists while the Stalinists stood by, and then murdered the surviving Trotskyists.³

Nevertheless, the Vietnamese Trotskyists of the International Communist League called for military support to the Stalinists’ Viet Minh nationalist front against the French colonialists.

Popular Front Antiwar Movement

The widespread opposition to the imperialist U.S. war in Vietnam is well documented and even mythologized in popular culture. Coming on the heels of the 1960s civil rights movement, hundreds of thousands took to the streets to oppose the war. There were considerable divisions within the movement, as many demonstrators became radicalized by the nightly horror show on TV and the audacious actions of the National Liberation Front fighters, while the leadership was oriented to winning support from Democratic Party “doves.” You couldn’t miss that the big antiwar marches were in odd-numbered years, while in the even-numbered years the energy was drained into Congressional campaigns of liberal Democrats appealing for the “peace” vote. By late 1969 there were confrontations between marchers with “Viet Cong” flags⁴ chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!” and demonstration marshals, some chanting “peaceful, legal” over and over, trying to keep the radicals away from the rest of the protesters.

The two main antiwar coalitions for much of the war were the Peoples’ Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ), led by the reformist Stalinist Communist Party (CP), and the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC), led by the equally reformist, long-since ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). There were some differences: PCPJ was multi-issue and called for a ceasefire, NPAC was single-issue and called for withdrawal. But both were “popular front” coalitions bent on shackling antiwar activists to liberal capitalist politicians. Each camp had their favorite Democrats: PCPJ would bring out Oregon senator Wayne Morse while NPAC featured Indiana senator Vance Hartke as a speaker (and member of its steering committee). When the Spartacist League and other leftists including the Progressive Labor Party protested the presence of bourgeois politicos at NPAC conferences, they were ejected, sometimes violently.

Radicals who came out of the New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which split between different Maoist and Guevarist factions in 1969, organized coffee houses for antiwar GIs (drafted soldiers) and organized in the army while identifying with the NLF fighters. This gives the lie to the right-wing myth of “peaceniks” spitting on returning soldiers. However, both official antiwar coalitions called to “bring our boys home,” thus fostering the consciousness of a social-patriotic “peace” movement rather than waging a revolutionary struggle against imperialism. The coalitions with liberal Democrats, meanwhile, served as guarantors that opposition to the war would stay within the bounds of capitalism. That is not what Vietnamese workers and peasants were fighting and dying for.

The upshot was that when Nixon abolished the draft and, following the Paris Accords in early 1973, withdrew U.S. forces, the “antiwar” movement soon petered out while the war in Vietnam dragged. In retrospectives, many participants in the antiwar movement credited it with ending the war. An article on “The Four Stages of the Antiwar Movement” in the New York Times (24 October 2017) concluded, “The fourth stage of the antiwar movement had mobilized enough people to force Congress to finally end the war.” This is not true. While millions marched in the streets, as Workers Vanguard (No. 379, 17 May 1985) wrote on the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, “It was not Fifth Avenue peace crawls but the Vietnamese peasants and workers who ‘stopped the war’ – by winning it on the battlefields in Indochina.”

Struggle for Socialist Revolution Against Capitalist Imperialism

In his book Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War (1978), SWP antiwar organizer Fred Halstead wrote that, “It is even possible that the antiwar movement will prove to have been in a number of aspects a rehearsal for the coming American socialist revolution.” On the contrary, it was because the popular-front antiwar movement did not fight for revolutionary opposition to the imperialist war, but rather made a class-collaborationist bloc with liberal sections of the bourgeoisie, that it acted as a brake on radicalization toward revolution. Among Democratic Party politicians the “Vietnam doves” soon became “Middle East hawks” during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. On the left, some Maoist groups closed up shop after Nixon went to Beijing, along with war criminal Henry Kissinger, to clink glasses with Mao Zedong and enlist the Chinese Stalinists in a front against the Soviet Union.

In popular culture, liberal despair was reflected in a spate of movies about “older (and sadder) but wiser” former antiwar protesters. This was exemplified by the 1983 film, The Big Chill, which portrays University of Michigan (where the first Vietnam War teach-in was held) alums who marched on Washington in the ’70s as they gathered a decade later lamenting the loss of their former ideals. And as Democratic president Jimmy Carter in 1980 set out to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome” by engineering a CIA-sponsored war of Islamist “holy warriors” in Afghanistan, the liberals were joined by reformist leftists in howling against Soviet intervention to prop up the reform regime in Kabul. A year later, these pseudo-socialists were enthusiastically embracing CIA-supported Solidarność in Poland, union-buster Ronald Reagan’s favorite “union.” By the end of the ’80s, Solidarność had spearheaded a counterrevolution, the Gdansk shipyard workers who started it lost their jobs and Polish women lost the right to abortion.

The then-revolutionary Spartacist tendency stood its ground, hailing Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and calling to “stop Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland.” When much of the left supported the annexation of the East German deformed workers state (DDR) by imperialist West Germany in 1989, and two years later cheered the Yeltsin-Bush countercoup in the Soviet Union, the Spartacists fought tooth and nail, on the ground, against counterrevolution, from the DDR to the USSR. But the imperialist-led destruction of the Soviet-bloc deformed workers states led to a wave of defeatism in the Western left, eventually including the Spartacist League. In 1996, it expelled the authentic Trotskyists who went on to form the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International. Today, under new management, the born-again SL has renounced virtually everything the revolutionary Spartacist League stood for, turning from proletarian internationalism to chasing after and embracing bourgeois nationalism.

Today, as Trump escalates his tariff war with the world, Washington is demanding that Hanoi cut trade ties to China, which would kill the Vietnamese export industry since almost all the products assembled there use Chinese components (“China in Way of U.S.-Vietnam Trade Deal,” New York Times, 24 May). Both under Democrats and Republicans, the U.S. is gearing up for a war to bring about a counterrevolution in China that would inevitably engulf Vietnam. Yet that would be a nuclear World War III, threatening all of humanity. Meanwhile, as Vietnam faces ever-present threats, both military and economic, from the U.S. and its allies, the gains of the revolution are also endangered by its leaders who continue to seek accommodation with imperialism. On May 4, CPV general secretary To Lam signed Political Bureau Resolution 68 saying “Vietnam’s private sector will be the most important driver of the national economy.”

The private, i.e. capitalist, sector of the Vietnamese economy is already large, powered by giant imperialist corporations. Lam is known as “an ardent supporter of private businesses” (Fulcrum, 23 September 2024), and Resolution 68 is an invitation to increase and accelerate capitalist restorationist forces. Now under the hammer of sky-high tariffs, the Vietnamese leadership is racing to push through construction of a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi and plans for a Trump skyscraper in the capital. To do so, it is ignoring a half dozen legally required steps and seizing land from a number of families with long-term use rights in order to curry favor with the “first family” of U.S. imperialism (New York Times, 25 May). In Vietnam, land seizures have frequently sparked protests, sometimes quite militant, in the past.

There has also been resistance to government support for foreign-owned corporations, notably in 2018 protests against a law to establish special economic zones. There have also been thousands of strikes, sometimes quite large, over miserable wages and working conditions, particularly in garment factories owned by Hong Kong, Taiwanese and South Korean companies, but also in a plant of the Japanese manufacturer Canon.⁵ Resistance to Western domination is a point of tremendous pride for the Vietnamese people. Yet the “multinational” conglomerates that are at the heart of Vietnam’s private sector are a threat of neocolonial domination, after the Vietnamese workers and peasants bravely fought and vanquished the French and Americans. To reinforce the state sector as the motor force of the economy will require the initiative of the workers through organs of revolutionary workers democracy.

This must go together with the struggle – both in Vietnam and China – to expropriate the dangerous capitalist sector of the economy and oust the Stalinist bureaucracy that fosters it, threatening the revolutionary gains millions fought for. Rather than building illusions of cooperation with the former imperialist masters, establishing genuine xô viết rule of workers councils with a revolutionary internationalist communist leadership is key to defending and extending the Vietnamese Revolution. A half century after the victory that ended the Vietnam War, the task for revolutionaries is to build Trotskyist parties internationally capable of leading proletarian struggles to open the way to the genuine socialism of a classless society throughout the world. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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