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	Workers Vanguard No. 1075	2 October 2015

On China, Vietnam and Nationalism

(Letter)

Brooklyn, NY
20 June 2015

Dear WV:

While I agree with most of the “facts” you present in your June 12 article (“Defend China Against U.S. Military Provocations!” [WV No. 1070]), I find it a bit short-sighted historically. Quite aside from whether or not China and Vietnam are “workers’ states”, history has shown (and you will agree) since 1945 that “workers’ states” are generally quite incapable of transcending their interests as nation-states. This was clear in the lack of cooperation among the Comecon states before 1989, and it is clear today in what you call the “treacherous alliances” China and Vietnam have made over the years with the U.S. imperialists. Vietnam’s hostility to China did not begin in the 20th century, but is based on 1000 years of dealing with different phases of Chinese aggression and occupation under various modes of production. You recall Ho Chi Minh’s remark in 1945 (I quote from memory), when he agreed to British and French troops (but not the armies of the Kuomingtang) occupying Vietnam and returning Indochina to French colonialism: (and this while he was overseeing the massacre of the Trotskyists who opposed this policy): “The British and French will return, and then they will leave. Otherwise we will have our faces in Chinese shit for much longer.” What the Vietnamese call the “American war” (1954-1975) is largely forgotten there, but the much older historical enmity towards China is not. As a forgotten “statesman” once said, “countries have no friends, only interests.”

Loren Goldner

WV replies:

The social overturns that took place in East and Central Europe, China, North Korea and later Vietnam, Cuba and Laos swept away capitalist rule, creating workers states that Trotskyists have always defended unconditionally against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. But to Loren Goldner, the class character of such countries is irrelevant, based on his claim that since 1945 “history has shown” that they are “incapable of transcending their interests as nation-states.” His arguments partake of standard bourgeois ideology in this era of the so-called “death of communism,” projecting that any fight for social revolution is futile.

Goldner presents national antagonisms as eternal and immutable. History shows the contrary. In the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolshevik Party under V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky led the proletariat to power in Russia, building a workers state comprising myriad nations and ethnic minorities that had been brutally oppressed in the tsarist “prison house of peoples.” The Bolsheviks went on to found the Communist International in 1919 in order to forge revolutionary parties to lead the fight for a world socialist order. Unlike early Soviet Russia, the workers states established after 1945 were deformed from the outset, ruled by nationalist bureaucracies patterned after the Stalinist regime that usurped political power in the USSR beginning in 1923-24. Yet despite bureaucratic rule and unable to overcome material scarcity, these revolutions were historic gains for workers and the oppressed. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, for example, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians and others lived peacefully until a wave of counterrevolution in East Europe touched off nationalist conflicts in Yugoslavia and destroyed that workers state. Our defense of the deformed workers states includes a perspective of proletarian political revolutions to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies and install regimes of workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. The construction of a global communist society, which crucially requires socialist revolution in the most advanced industrial countries, will lead to the disappearance of borders and national distinctions.

Renouncing this perspective, the Chinese, Vietnamese and other Stalinist regimes preach the nationalist lie that socialism—a classless society based on material abundance—can be built in a single country. Introduced by Stalin in late 1924, this profoundly anti-Marxist dogma expressed the narrow interests of the privileged caste he represented. The natural corollary of this revisionism is seeking “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism—a program that has led to the betrayal of numerous opportunities for proletarian revolution around the world, undermining the workers states themselves.

However, there is a contradiction between the nationalism inherent in Stalinist ideology and the proletarian nature of the states ruled by such bureaucracies. Deriving their privileges from collectivized property, the Stalinist ruling castes are at times forced to defend those property forms against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution, including by giving economic and military aid to other workers states. The example of COMECON (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), a trade bloc of the USSR and several deformed workers states primarily in East and Central Europe, refutes Loren’s argument. COMECON’s most important component was the exchange of Soviet oil and natural resources—at less than world market prices—for manufactured goods. Moscow was willing to pay economically to support other COMECON states as buffers against imperialism, in the process helping to spur industrialization and higher living standards in those countries, some of which were better off than the Soviet Union.

The economic relations between the COMECON countries were a far cry from an international planned economy. In “Economic Nationalism Fractures COMECON” (WV No. 495, 9 February 1990), we noted that the bloc’s policies were severely distorted by Stalinist nationalism. Nevertheless, COMECON’s experience stands in stark contrast with that of capitalist trade blocs like the European Union and NAFTA, which serve to enrich the stronger, imperialist powers (e.g., Germany and the U.S.) at the expense of weaker, dependent countries (e.g., Greece and Mexico).

To try to bolster his case, Goldner recalls a quote, which may well be apocryphal, ascribed to Ho Chi Minh. His intent is to show the Vietnamese Stalinists’ supposedly everlasting antagonism toward China. In fact, his citing this anecdote underscores that he sees no difference between a bourgeois state and a workers state. The quote refers to the bourgeois Guomindang regime, whose murderous rule over China would soon collapse as Chiang Kai-shek and his cohorts fled to Taiwan before the advancing People’s Liberation Army. Far from there being a timeless national antagonism, after taking power in 1949 Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initially provided a great deal of military assistance to the Vietnamese Stalinists.

This did not mean that Mao’s regime had broken from Stalinist treachery. In 1954, Ho’s Viet Minh expelled the French colonialists and overthrew bourgeois rule, creating a deformed workers state in North Vietnam. That same year, the Chinese (and Soviet) Stalinists pressured Ho to agree to the division of Vietnam, thus maintaining capitalism in the South. Later, the Maoist regime turned its back on North Vietnam, mainly due to the bitter split between the Moscow and Beijing bureaucracies. This came to a head at the height of the Vietnam War, as China forged an anti-Soviet alliance with U.S. imperialism. Warning of just such a development, in 1969 we raised the call for Communist unity against imperialism, declaring that this urgent need demanded a fight for political revolution from Moscow and Beijing to Hanoi. The U.S.-China pact was sealed by Mao’s welcoming Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972 as American bombs rained down on Vietnam.

The ludicrous assertion that the war is “largely forgotten” in Vietnam amounts to a breathtakingly false whitewash of the crimes of U.S. imperialism. By some estimates, over 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the “American War.” This April 30, the Vietnamese celebrated the 40th anniversary of the workers’ and peasants’ heroic victory over the U.S., through which South and North Vietnam were reunited as a workers state. The war is commemorated in monuments and museums throughout the country, such as the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The fact that some 15 percent of Vietnam is still littered by unexploded ordnance (largely from U.S. cluster bombs) makes the war impossible to forget. We condemn the Vietnamese rulers’ attempts in recent years to align with U.S. imperialism against China over disputes in the South China Sea. As we warned in the article Loren cites, this rapprochement is a deadly danger to both the Chinese and Vietnamese workers states.

The unrelenting military and economic pressure exerted by the imperialists, compounded by decades of Stalinist misrule, ultimately spelled the end of the Soviet Union as well as the DDR (East Germany) and the other deformed workers states in Europe. Defense of the remaining workers states is a central task for revolutionary Marxists fighting to eradicate capitalist exploitation and oppression from the planet. This is the perspective of the International Communist League as we fight to reforge the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky and his followers in 1938 to carry on the program of the October Revolution. In this effort, we find some inspiration in the young Ho Chi Minh, who took up the banner of the October Revolution while in Paris and then helped plant it in China in the early 1920s as a Comintern militant.