The first and second Indochina wars were epic causes for the left
in a movement unparalleled since the Spanish Civil War. The third Indochina war, the estimated 60,000 Vietnamese troops, now fighting 60km inside Kampuchea, which has now generated further clashes between Vietnam and China, has in contrast been greeted on the left with an almost total conspiracy of silence, broken only by occasional appeals for all sides to negotiate. The academic analyses of the origins of the war, the clarion calls for peace, the eloquent appeals to the peoples of the entire world for solidarity - all such manifestations are now conspicuous by their absence. In their place, there proceed from the radio and press of Hanoi and Phnom Penh ritual atrocity stories detailing the barbarity of the "other side" or disputes as to who bears responsibility for the mass exodus of the Chinese minority from Vietnam. Instead of the proud claim of the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world have no country we witness the slaughter of thousands of<workers and peasants, Vietnamese and Kampuchean alike, for the sake of preserving old colonial frontiers whose existence is allegedly vital to the new "socialist nations". Is this what the long fight, from 1946 to 1973, against American and French imperialism was designed to win for Indochina?
The self-destruction of "socialist" nations in nationalist disputes over frontiers
and the rights of national minorities are not without precedent. The coming to power of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe after 1945 led equally to an immediate recrudescence of Balkan frontier claims and counter-claims left over from the epoch of imperialism, which at times led to bitter fighting. At this time, however, the Soviet Union could intervene to "arbitrate" these disputes, though not by the Leninist method of ascertaining the will of the people involved by referendum. Equally, the mass expulsions of the Chinese from Vietnam has its parallel in the Stalinist liquid�ation of the world's first Jewish national state, one of the federal republics of the U.S.S.R., and the virulent anti-Semitism of the Moscow trials and the "doctors' plots". All the tired romantic sentimentality over how different the "East" is allegedly from the rest of the world serves the purpose only of threadbare conceal�ment of the fact that the history of Stalinism is being repeated in South-East Asia. In Russia, Stalinism achieved power only after great, tragic conflicts with the forces of authentic Bolshevism. In Asia, the liturgical repetition of the old, devalued, bureaucratic anathemas against whoever is the victim of the next purge echo the history of the Soviet Union as farce.
Stalinism is not merely a set of unpleasant bureaucratic habits periodically
denounced by Trotskyists. It is the path to betrayal of the revolution. The incitements to national and racial hatred now fostered by the ruling bureaucracies of China and Indochina are no abstract violation of Marxist principles, something one can find repulsive and then forget about. Violations of Marxist principle are not abstract but have real consequences. We warn, that the statement in the Communist Left programme that, of all the countries in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Kampuchea is closest to the restoration of capitalism owing to the sharply pro-peasant anti-prole�tarian character of its revolutionary regime, will in the immediate future be verified by the collapse of the present Kampuchean regime either through Vietnamese aggression or direct or indirect imperialist assault. It is unlikely that this collapse will be isolated. Imperialism has been working for more than thirty years to exacerbate divisions, first between Russia and China, and now between the Indochinese states. Its favoured weapon for creating such division has been the ideology of bourgeois nationalism. The existing situation in Asia is a situation where the so-called "liberal" wings of the American State Department, the "doves" on Vietnam, the men who hoped to split China from the Soviet Union as early as 1949, are now demonstrating to the "hawks" that what the United States failed to achieve by war, can now be achieved by diplomacy and nationalist propaganda. The principal exponent of this policy is Brzezinski. The aim of this policy is to make China move even further from its present subordination in foreign policy to the United States - and to some extent Japan - in a bloc against the Soviet Union to an economic subordination to the United States. The trade agreements China is now entering into with such reactionary states as Argentina and its linking of the fight against the so-called "Gang of Four" with increased business at the Shanghai fair show that this diplomacy has not been without effect. Equally, Vietnam's links to the imperialist World Bank arid its new laws offering imperialist investment direct shares in Vietnamese trading enterprises show Vietnam is on the same path. Neither of these states has, of course, yet restored capitalism. Nationalised property relations remain, on the present path, however, the restoration of capitalism, as a result of the division of the so-called "socialist" bloc in the face of imperialism, is only a matter of time, and a very short time at that. Should the present border skirmishes escalate further, to all-out war, imperialist military intervention cannot be ruled out.
The Stalinists, whose only reaction to the most serious warnings is to portray them as "provocations", will claim that the Communist Left predicts the disintegration of the Sino-Soviet bloc because it "wants" this disintegration. Though it is very late to counter the national separatism directly arising from the Stalinist theory of "socialism in one country" which Trotskyists have always and everywhere opposed, a revolutionary program can still defeat the schemes of imperialism in East Asia. That revolution against the bureaucracies betraying socialism into the nanCIS OT /American imperialism, through the poison of reactionary nationalism. The aims of this political revolution must be the establishment of workers' and peasants' soviets and communes which will substitute direct proletarian democracy for bureaucratic militarism (first of all in the army) and the transformation of the separate national workers' and peasants' states into a proletarian dictatorship crossing national boundaries. For such a program to be carried out, however, a revolutionary party is necessary. The Vietnamese Stalinists physically destroyed the cadres of Vietnamese Trotskyism in the 'forties, thereby breaking the strength of the revolutionary left in the South and strengthening the power, first of Bao Dai, then of Dilem and his many successors. The punishment for this crime is now falling due. The slogan TURN THE NATIONAL WAR INTO POLITICAL REVOLUTION, will not be forgotten in Indochina, no matter how history takes its course. If however the present border skirmishes should develop into a full Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, Kampuchea's right to self determination must be defended in a limited war.
The "mass movement" in the West against American aggression in Indochina now, under the test of history, stands condemned for its failure to understand that American imperialism could manipulate the national Stalinist bureaucracies of Indochina for its own aims, so that not only imperialism but also Stalinism had to be attacked in China. Fake "Trotskyist" attempts to evade the consequences of the failure to raise the issue of Stalinism at this time find their most cynical expression in the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International's" pitiful begging of the Stalinist bureau�cracies that they "negotiate" their differences. The crisis of Stalinism finds its expression precisely in the national disintegration of what was once an international Sino-Soviet bloc transitional to socialism. The revisionist Trotskyists along with the "Communist" Party of Australia try to hide their betrayals by papering over the crisis of Stalinism with the discredited World Peace Council line of "talks". The Vietnamese-Kampuchean and the Vietnamese-Chinese conflicts will no more be ended by peace talks than the Sino-Soviet conflict was. What is needed is the elimination of the bureaucracy as the conducting medium of the politics of American imperialism.
The guerilla warfare of the heroic period of resistance to imperialism was based politically on the organisation of the peasants on the basis of nationalism by a Stalinist bureaucracy while the urban working class was given neither organisation nor leadership. How paper-thin the bureaucratic "socialism" that resulted, and how strong the nationalism, the new series of suicidal conflicts amply illustrates. However "militarily difficult" working class action was claimed to have been in the first and second Indochinese wars, the preservation of the gains of those wars now demands the organisation of the working class to smash the nationalist bureaucracy and to provide the poor peasants with an alternative revolutionary communist leader�ship based on soviet power. Never before has the correct analysis of the different roles of working class and peasantry vis-�-vis the bureaucracy been so crucial for revolution. Those who, like the Spartacist Tendency, fail to understand that China and Indochina are workers� and peasants� states which have to be transformed by a political revolution led by the organised workers into proletarian dictatorships must inevitably, by misunderstanding the class forces and overestimation of the peasantry, betray to Stalinism. A "military" criticism of "guerillaism" - which leads ironically, to the slogan of "military" victory, not for the Indochinese workers and peasants, but the South Vietnamese NLF whose nationalism was too much even for the Stalinists - is not enough. As even Spartacist "leader" Logan noticed, before he had betrayed the few vestiges of Marxism he ever learnt, it is impossible to abstract military from political considerations in a revolutionary war. What is needed is a Political theory of the dual role of the peasantry in the first stages of anti-capitalist revolution. Only the Communist Left has such a theoretical position, derived from the experience of the first - 1917-1919 - period of the Russian revolution. The Spartacist theory leads to the absurd position that the NLF would refuse to capture Saigon militarily - a position history refuted very sharply.
The events in Asia are evidence that the crisis of Stalinism is now approaching collapse before imperialism. Stalinism is now near a point of political weakness where imperialism can score decisive victories over it. These victories of imperialism, which only the Communist Left has warned against, can be turned into defeats for imperialism if they lead to a major international turn away from Stalinism in the Workers' movement. It is to this end that the Communist Left is working. In Indochina now, as in the "anti-war mass movement" of the early seventies, what is needed is the organisation of the working class, independent of petty bourgeois forces, precisely in order to lead these petty-bourgeois forces to the most militant form of action, the turning of imperialist war into civil war and bureau�cratic nationalist war into political revolution. Along this line alone can the revolutionary party be built.
Issued by the Communist Left, Box M21 7, Sydney Mail Exchange