*HO CHI MINH AND THE VIETNAMESE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Ho Chi Minh.

HO CHI MINH AND THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN VIETNAM

BOOK REVIEW

HO CHI MINH: A LIFE, WILLIAM J. DUIKER, HYPERION PRESS, NEW YORK, 2000

By way of an introduction I note that while I was writing a draft of this book review President George W. Bush had just completed participation in an international conference held in Vietnam. In one of the small ironies of history a photograph of the meeting between American and Vietnamese leaders displayed a huge bust of the late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh hovering over the room. There was a time in the 1950’s and 1960’s when Ho was more than a mere historical reminder in the room. To many youth, particularly in the West, ‘Uncle’ Ho represented the most intransigent opposition to Western imperialism. Today, at a time when heroes for leftists are few and far between and Vietnam’s leadership has taken a distinctly different direction toward the shoals of “market socialism” and away from Ho Chi Minh’s ideas a look at his politically flawed but fascinating life seems in order.

The Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky on more than one occasion noted that the Western labor movement had not produced the kind of hardened, resilient and committed revolutionaries produced in Russian and Eastern Europe. While there were definite historical reasons for that divergence centered on different political conditions it nevertheless remained an abiding different (and does until this day). The life of Ho Chi Minh as presented in the biography under review is yet another example that highlights that difference, this time in early 20th Asia, in revolutionary commitment and intensity. While the fates and the political directions of both Trotsky and the Stalinist Ho diverted shapely the commitment to communism, as they understood it, remained a lifelong commitment, even under inhumanly trying circumstances. Ho’s biographer has done an excellent job of gathering the materials, some only recently accessible from Soviet and other archives, which enable a knowledgeable reader to follow the ups and downs of his political career. That, said, the author does not and cannot really understand the nature of communist commitment and in the end can not draw any serious political conclusions about the life of his subject. His book nevertheless will be used as a definitive study of Ho’s life and influence.

Forty or so years ago the name Ho Chi Minh brought forth either anger or admiration. Anger, from the former colonialist power France for having been forced to abandon Vietnam after its military defeat and from a neo-colonialist American imperialist military force about to get its comeuppance from guerilla and regularly armed forces led by the wily Ho. Admiration, from the youth of the world, particularly the West, that a ‘new’ strategy might be 'aborning' to defeat the various imperialisms of the world and create another road to socialism not based on the Soviet or Chinese-style models.

Ho essentially built up his organization from scratch under very loose Communist International supervision from Moscow. From an American Communist’s point of view the Communist International always seemed to be intervening, for good or evil, in the internal life of its party to insure implementation of the party line. Sometimes the commands were as quickly communicated as the telegram wires would carry them. Such was apparently not the case in remote Vietnam. While Ho was a committed Stalinist he was clearly no self-serving bureaucrat of the Soviet-type revolutionaries have come to loathe. Rather it is his virtually unchanging lifelong political perspective of a variation of the ‘bloc of four classes’ strategy handed down from the Comintern in the lead up to the Chinese Revolution of the mid-1920’s that places him in the Stalinist camp. Previously, I have called such a strategy as applied to places like China and Vietnam as 'Stalinism under the gun'. Apparently the vicissitudes of Vietnamese mountain life and geographical proximity led to more contact with the Chinese revolutionaries. Seemingly Ho was more influenced by them than the Soviets on some aspects of revolutionary rural warfare. However, a look at Ho’s political actions, especially in the post World War II period, shows a pronounced bias toward Soviet leadership in the showdown of between the Soviet Union and China for leadership of the international communist movement. That tilt was not reciprocated by the Soviets as they generally saw the Vietnamese struggle as marginal to their global interests.


One of the most contradictory phenomena that confronted the revolutionary movement in the 20th century was the fact that unlike Karl Marx’s projections the socialist revolution did not start in the Western industrialized society. It started in economically backward Russia and moved East. Moreover, it started with a small although very politicized industrial working class dependent on the good will of a vast peasantry and preceded to areas where the industrial working class was either virtually non-existent or had been militarily or politically decimated. Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam under French colonialism represented just such a development. Hence, from the beginning of the revolutionary struggle in Vietnam it was an alliance between the revolutionary intellectuals and the peasantry that formed the basis for the national liberation front not the traditionally Bolshevik intellectual/worker combination prescribed by Lenin. This is important, because the program which will animated the peasantry, land to the tiller, is very different from the program of workers democracy. And that in a nutshell is the difference between Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam. The difference between ‘socialism in one country’ and permanent revolution’ Ho won that political fight but can anyone today argue that Vietnam is on the road to socialism as either Stalinists or Trotskyists would understand the development.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Let me make one thing clear-as a partisan of Leon Trotsky this writer has many political differences with world Stalinism. Not the least of which the blood line draw over the question of the murder of Vietnamese Trotskyists by Ho‘s forces in the post-World War II uprising against the French during the first phase of the independence struggle. Yes, we then, later during the American phase of the struggle and now defend the Vietnamese revolution against world imperialism and against internal counterrevolution but a political crime of such magnitude cannot be swept under the rug. Some day the memory of the struggles and sacrifice of the Vietnamese Trotskyist liberation fighters will receive their just recognition-in Vietnam and elsewhere.