A Story of Vietnam by Lam Truong Buu

Author:Lam, Truong Buu [Lam, Truong Buu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-24T23:00:00+00:00

31. First Issue of the Tap Chi Cong San.

Politics were more amenable in Cochinchina where the Constitutionalists more than ever vociferously demanded basic human rights while moving closer and closer to the policy of Franco-Vietnamese Collaboration, devised years earlier by the former Governor General Albert Sarraut. As before, the colonial government took the Constitutionalists’ words seriously, but hardly heeded any of their suggestions nor did it give satisfaction to any of their more important requests. The southern branch of the ICP could not operate efficiently as the French Security Services had decimated its Central Committee several times. After 1932, Tran Van Giau, a returnee from France, painstakingly reconstituted its organizational structure and strengthened the training of its cadres with the publication of the magazine Tap Chi Cong San (The Communist Review)

Notwithstanding these efforts, the southern ICP soon found itself on the defensive, when an important contingent of Vietnamese radical student-activists were either forcefully repatriated back from France for sedition --nineteen of them-- or returned voluntarily in order to continue their fight against the Indochinese colonial administration. Most of them were Marxists, but of another allegiance. They followed the teaching of Leon Trotsky which asserts that if Marxist theories and practices were fully applied, it would inevitably lead to a world revolution waged by the proletariat through an enduring class struggle. That platform was spelled out in the Fourth International. The members of the ICP, on the contrary, supported Stalin and, therefore, adhered to the principles of the Third International. With the benefit of hindsight, the Trotskyists reproached the ICP for overemphasizing the role of the peasantry at the expense of the industrial workers in the formation of the Nghe-Tinh Soviets, for example. They faulted the Communists for being misguided by their nationalism in promoting a bourgeois-democratic stage in the revolution in order to obtain the liberation of the Indochinese peoples from French imperialism. Instead, they should have maintained a state of permanent revolution under the leadership of the proletariat so as to reach socialism which consisted in the establishment of a government of peasants and workers. Finally, the Trotskyists blamed the Communists for too readily following the thesis put forth by Stalin who promoted the creation of “Socialism in One Country” instead of keeping alive the flames of revolution so as to build up socialism in many countries with the hope of ultimately conquering the whole world. The highest goal set by the Communists, the Trotskyists railed, was to create a “Socialist Republic of Vietnam” or, maybe slightly better, a “ Union of Socialist States of Indochina”, rather than reaching higher to the Trotskyist aim of founding the “Union of Socialist States of Asia”, or even better still the "Union of Socialist States of the World.”

In spite of these differences, the two Marxist groups agreed to carry on separately their clandestine activities, but to cooperate in their overt ones. They settled on an agenda which consisted of publishing newspapers and magazines or redirecting the editorial tendencies of already existing media.

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