From Socialist Worker, No. 113, 15 March 1969, pp. 2 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
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The solidarity movement in Britain has mobilised large numbers of people. IAN BIRCHALL says we must not restrict them to a single-issue campaign ... |
‘Tan Hiep ... had a school and a church, neat houses and gardens, pigs and water buffalo, a useful irrigation system, and a population of more than 2,000 people.
‘Last night Tan Hiep was utterly destroyed ... by United States F-100 bombers and Vietnamese Skyraiders. Just before dark the jets dropped napalm into the hamlet followed by high explosive. Everything was either burned or blasted.’ (Guardian, February 28, 1960)
IN SPITE OF the bombing halt, in spite of the talks in Paris, the real war in Vietnam, the war on the ordinary people, goes on.
Since the beginning of last year it has been clear that the US in Vietnam are beaten, militarily and politically.
Morale among American troops gets lower and lower. Pot smoking and alcoholism are rife. There is a whole colony of deserters in Cholon, and recently an American negro was killed fighting for the National Liberation Front.
Corruption and inefficiency are so widespread in the South Vietnamese administration and armed forces that talk of ‘handing over’ to them is no more than a piece of tired rhetoric.
The new Nixon government is anxious to come to terms with Russia and China. Nixon himself, once a hard-line anti-communist, wrote in Foreign Affairs (October 1967), ‘We cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations.’
The question is not really whether the US gets out of Vietnam, but when and how.
Here economic factors become important. ‘Defence’ in the United States employs, directly or indirectly, over seven and a half million people. Annual military expenditure amounts to nearly $2,000 for every American family.
US capitalism would benefit from a withdrawal from Vietnam – providing it is not too quick and not too complete.
Business Week of July 27, 1968, calculates that if 50 to 100,000 troops remain in South East Asia, then the military budget would be reduced by $15 to $20,000 million (about a fifth of the total).
Here Nixon can expect sympathy and understanding from his comrades in the Kremlin. The New York Times of January 27 reported on a meeting of top Russian and American diplomats:
‘Perhaps most surprising were the hints given at the Westchester Country Club that the Soviet Union would welcome some continued American military presence in South Vietnam after conclusion of a political settlement in Paris.’
So Nixon will play a waiting game, continuing the peace talks, while trying to gain concessions through Moscow (and possibly Peking).
A sign of his double-faced strategy is the appointment as negotiators to the Paris talks of Henry Cabot Lodge, personal friend of Air Marshall Ky, and Marshall Green, former ambassador to Indonesia, and man behind the scenes in the murder of half a million Indonesian communists in 1965.
In this situation, the National Liberation Front have no choice but to continue, the military struggle. The Americans complain that new attacks by the NLF are a breach of the ‘understanding’ reached when the bombing was stopped last autumn.
But for the last 25 years, from Korea to Guatemala, from the Dominican Republic to Chicago, the US has shown that it ‘understands’ nothing but brute force.
Our solidarity with the Vietnamese people must continue to be whole hearted and unconditional. Big demonstrations, like the one planned for this Sunday in London must go on.
At the same time, however, it is important to go beyond the slogans and try to see the Vietnamese revolution in a world political context.
We support the Vietnamese revolution because it has the support of the mass of the people in South Vietnam. No guerrilla movement can survive without this popular support – as Che Guevara discovered in Bolivia.
It is, moreover, a revolution independent of the power blocs of East and West. Russia has tanks to spare for Czechoslovakia, but little more than words and outdated equipment for Vietnam.
China’s ‘cultural Revolution’ has led to trainloads of arms for Vietnam being captured for use in internal fighting(see the Financial Times, November 13,1968).
But the Vietnamese revolution is not a socialist revolution. The programme of the NLF appeals to ‘Rich people, soldiers, workers, peasants, intellectuals, employees, trades, youth, women.’ When, in 1945 and 1946, after the defeat of the Japanese, propertyless peasants seized the land, it was Ho Chi Minh’s leadership that punished them.
The Vietnamese people are fighting for the right to control their own country. But the withdrawal of US troops will be the beginning, not the end of the Vietnamese revolution.
A victory for the Vietnamese, however, will be concrete proof that popular forces can defeat any military machine. The French defeat in Vietnam was a major factor in sparking off the Algerian revolution.
A US withdrawal from Vietnam will inspire popular movements from Bolivia to the Philippines, from Mozambique to Thailand.
This does not mean that the US will necessarily make the same mistakes again that they made in Vietnam.
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In France, Vietnam committees in many places developed into the Action Committees that played a central role in last summer’s general strike, in Britain, Vietnam has been a major issue for educating and mobilising the student movement.
And the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign has succeeded where Herbert Morrison failed. It has killed the British Communist Party.
Anyone who doubts this should read the article Unity and the Ultra-left by Ken Geering in the February 1st issue of Comment, a CP discussion journal.
Less than a year ago Comment published Betty Reid’s hysterical attack on Trotskyism in the VSC. Now Geering writes ‘The ultra-left, can rally 20,000 to 100,000 at the drop of a hat. We can’t.’
From now on the CP is merely a faction, tagging along behind.
There is now only one way forward for the Vietnam movement in Britain. It must turn increasingly to the working class.
Placards and banners calling for ‘workers’ control’ are excellent – but they are no substitute for the banners of union branches and shop stewards’ committees, which are still few in numbers on the big demonstrations – fewer, probably, than they used to be on the CND marches.
To win the working class, the Vietnam movement must go beyond a single-minded commitment to Vietnam. A New Society poll showed that 68 per cent of the 100,000 demonstrators on October 27 last year were against the capitalist system as a whole.
A campaign that restricts itself to Vietnam alone may well find that the leadership are a long way behind the rank and file.
The war in Vietnam may end. The war. in Britain, in the factories and estates, continues.
It is a quieter, less dramatic war, but for the future of humanity it is just as vital.
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Last updated: 25 October 2020