NUMBER NINETEEN TEN CENTS MAY 1975 Saigon puppets flee All Indochina must go communist! The fall of Saigon on 30 April to the National The triumphant advance of the NLF-DRV proved and the complete collapse of the capitalist class Liberation Front and Democratic Republic of Viet­ conclusively the complete untenability of the and its state apparatus, there is now only one nam (NLF-DRV) is a decisive defeat of US imperi­ 1973 Paris peace treaty, an agreement promoting possible path of 'development -- the expropriation alism and its South Vietnamese puppets. Together the illusion of peace between the classes, pro­ of the basic productive forces. Whatever the with the success of. the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, claiming acceptance of continued capitalism in outward forms of rule in Cambodia and South Viet­ it is a great victory for the oppressed through­ South Vietnam and a coalition government with the nam, they are now deformed workers states, which out the world, and especially for the workers and capitalist Saigon government. The peace treaty can only base themselves on the property forms of peasants of Indochina who have fought so long and came not out of a decisive military victory but proletarian rule, but with socialist development suffered so much through three decades of war out of a heroic struggle of the masses resulting and the international extension of revolution against oppression. But with this victory the in a military standoff with their enormously held back by a bureaucratic caste ruling in the struggle does not end, either for the peoples of powerful enemy. But it was a political setback, absence of a conscious, active working class and Indochina or the world proletariat. As Marxists a treacherous compromising of the basic tasks of organs of workers' democracy. we must evaluate its true significance in order the revolution, opening the door to defeat de­ It was above all the decay, corruption and to go forward prepared for conflict with the spite the military strength of the NLF-DRV fol­ rapacious villainy of the puppet regime, propped corrupt and ruthless class of exploiters who lowing the withdrawal of US troops. As the up by promises of continued US aid alone, which despite their setback in Vietnam still rule the Spartacist tendency said at the time the Paris led to the rapid, almost effortless advance of world. Long live the Indochinese Revolution! treaty was signed: the NLF-DRV forces in what had begun as a limited Forward to the World October! "The main difference between this and the 1954 offensive intended not to take Saigon but only to sellout is the ceasefire in-place, ie, the force the replacement of Thieu and the creation continued presence of large numbers of NLF/DRV of a coalition government. But like rotten wood troops in the South. Because of this, and the the Saigon puppet army crumbled at the first difficulties (real, but not insurmountable) strong blows. The refusal of the Saigon ruling for the US in reinvading, we can judge that classes to agree to a coalition after the Paris ._Ik"',,--t.l!e. ce~s~Ji:J;~ 4P.~ lj,Qt. ~a:n,a.a iilmediate treaty wllS,·of decisive importance. The formation liquidation of the struggle and could well of the coalition demanded by the NLF would have lead to a Viet Cong victory in the South. postponed indefinitely the offensive and left the However, this gamble is based on the funda­ South Vietnam military apparatus temporarily in­ mental strategy of betrayal which has been the tact. A popular-front coalition might have saved essence of Vietnamese and international them, probably not permanently, but perhaps long Stalinist policy since the inception of the enough for US intervention to become feasible struggle. There has been no Dien Bien Phu and once again. Instead, evidently with encourage­ the NLF continues to call for a coalition ment from the US administration the Saigon regime government, which, if realized, with the obstinately refused all the class-collaboration­ Saigon military apparatus intact, could still ist propositions of the Stalinist-led NLF, gam­ lead to defeat." (Workers Vanguard no 16, bling on being saved in extremity by a new US in­ February 1973) tervention. Luckily imperialism and its lackeys proved too weak_and too brittle to provide sufficient scope But when the crunch came, the US bourgeoisIe for class-collaborationist treachery. To have left Thieu in the lurch, having decided by 1973 that keeping Vietnam was no longer worth the ignored the danger of defeat would have made that enormous war effort and growing popular discon­ defeat more likely; we warned of the danger and tent that it engendered. Still, up until today celebrate that it was unrealised. President Ford's decision on the eve of Saigon's With the NLF and Khmer RouQe in full control fall to abandon any intervention plans, it was possible that the US would act. Contingency plans existed for an assault, under the guise of "evacuating" Americans, on the NLF-DRV forces concentrating around Saigon and vulnerable to air attack. But the reluctance of Congress to grant more aid to Thieu after the rout of the ARVN in the northern provinces reflected the general ruling-class consensus that, as Nelson Rockefeller put it, "It's really too late to do anything about it" (quoted in the New York Times, 4 April 1975). And any intervention would have meet strong popular resistance within the US, already suffering from an economic depression and with leading government institutions substan­ tially discredited by constant political scandals. This military paralysis did not stop the American bourgeoisie from concocting anti­ communist hysteria about the Red Menace to inno­ cent Vietnamese babies, and to the butchers, torturers and thieves who were the Vietnamese "allies" of the US, supposedly threatened by an impending Communist "bloodbath" -- this from the blood-stained perpet~ators of napalm and terror­ weapon attacks on Vietnamese civilian population, operation Phoenix, saturation bombing of both North and South Vietnam, "free fire zones" and defoliation! Recently the Communist Party of Australia Top: Ho Chi Minh and General Leclerc toast March 1946 accords allowing French troops into North (CPA) 's Tribune has "attacked" our analysis of , Vietnam. Left: Viet Minh troops enter Hanoi, 1954. Right: NLF-ORV troops enter Oa Nang, 1975. Continued on page two """" Fiscal fiddling can't Marx versus KeJnes • • • • page 4 stop depression by Joseph Seymour \.. ~ CONTINUED F.ROM PAGE ONE served -- that all political prisoners be re­ jectively revolutionary under the influence of an leased [a point left out of the Peace inexorable "revolutionary momentum" -- leading to accords], a government of national accord the same conclusion: there is no longer any need Saigon puppets and reconciliation formed, and that all US for a revolutionary party based on the Trotskyist • • • mil i tary personnel withdraw." program. For the CL the "proof" that the Viet­ namese Stalinists have "assimilated" the Trotsky­ the role of the Stalinists in Indochina: Thus despite the overwhelmingly favourable ob­ jective circumstances it was still possible that ist theory of permanent revolution is their "Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger needn't Stalinist class collaborationism would snatch adopting not the Trotskyist program but armed worry, the Australasian Spartacist (April defeat from the jaws of victory. struggle, "the alternative of revolutionary com­ 1975) assures its readers that the 'Cambodian bat" (Inprecor, 27 March 1975). But of course, The victory in Vietnam has meant not a vindi­ armed struggle is always subordinate to a pol­ stalinists' have a 'strategy' to 'maintain cation but the violation by the Vietnamese capitalist rule'. The Spartacists, the most itical program and has variously been adopted by Stalinists of their own perspective of a "two Stalinists, bourgeois nationalists, and centrists way-out of all the sects, advocate a struggle stage" revolution. It proves that at stake in must be waged to construct Trotskyist parties as well as Leninists. The Stalinists smashed Indochina all along has been not just a question capitalism only against their own perspectives, in Indochina'. Words fai 1. " (Tribune, of self-determination (as the CPA and also the 15 April 1975) only to preserve their own position, only because "Trotskyist" Socialist Workers League (SWL) have the working class was and is not an active, They do indeed. With blatant dishonesty Tribune maintained); not just the democratic tasks of direct contender for power, and only under the drags our words from their context. What we said national independence and minor land reform; but exceptional conditions of a collapse of the local was: "while the strategy of the Stalinists is to a fundamental class conflict. In this epoch bourgeoisie and the inability of imperialism to form a popular front government and maintain these tasks historically belonging to the bour­ intervene in time. The CL has yet to explain why capitalist rule ... any coalition government of geois revolution can only be carried out by the the 1954 betrayal occurred, in spite of success­ this sort would be highly unstable, and ... at dictatorship of the proletariat, by ftmbarking on ful armed struggle. Was it all the fault of most be a transitory episode in the process of the road to socialist development. The class Moscow and Peking? In that case, why have the forming a deformed workers state." The recent conflict of Vietnamese workers and peasants on Hanoi bureaucrats, these "unconscious Trotsky­ "Declaration of the Second National Congress of one side against Vietnamese capitalists, land­ ists", never called for political revolution in Kampuchea" of the National United Front of Kam­ lords and their imperialist patrons on the other those countries, and why have they not denounced puchea (FUNK) and the Royal Government in Exile could be resolved only by smashing capitalist before the international proletariat the numerous (GRUNK) reassert their "policy of a broad union property relations and the capitalist state -- or crimes of Brezhnev and Mao? In fact the likes of of the entire nation, the entire people regard­ by the triumph of counterrevolution.