Vietnam Was a Victory! Two, Three, Many Defeats for Imperialism!

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April 30 marks 40 years since the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants defeated U.S. imperialism and its South Vietnamese puppet forces. This victory for the exploited and oppressed internationally served for years to stay the hand of American imperialism around the world. After losing the war, the U.S. rulers subjected devastated Vietnam to an imperialist embargo as part of their drive to strangle the Vietnamese Revolution. Washington helped arm Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia after his ouster from power by Vietnamese forces in 1979, which ended a reign—marked by mass murder and wholesale destruction of urban areas—that proved to be not even the most deformed type of workers state (see “Oust Genocidal Pol Pot Gang from UN!” Workers Vanguard No. 338, 23 September 1983).

During the U.S. war against Vietnam, Canadian “observers” and “peacekeepers” served as spies for their American masters. Today, the Tories in Ottawa are poised to enact an anti-Communist bill commemorating April 30 as “Black April Day” at the behest of counterrevolutionary Vietnamese emigrés. Marxists unconditionally defend Vietnam and the other remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states—China, Cuba, North Korea and Laos—against imperialist and domestic counterrevolutionary forces. We print below excerpts from a 1975 statement by our U.S. comrades hailing the taking of Saigon.

MAY 4—On April 30 the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) rode triumphantly into Saigon as leaders of the defeated puppet regime and the South Vietnamese bourgeoisie fled the country by every available means. The military victory of the DRV/NLF marks the end of 30 years of civil war against colonialism and imperialism and their local allies. It means the overthrow of capitalist rule in South Vietnam, a historic conquest for the working people of the entire world and one which must be unconditionally defended by class-conscious workers against imperialist attack.

We hail this stunning defeat of U.S. imperialism, the first in a major war during this century, and greet the victory of our class brothers and sisters in Indochina with internationalist proletarian solidarity. The struggle against the imperialists’ Vietnam war has also been a major task of socialists in the imperialist centers, dominating the political experience of a whole generation of young aspiring revolutionaries. And it is as fellow combatants in the international class struggle that we warn the Indochinese masses that they must place no confidence in their Stalinist leaders.

The victory in Vietnam, like that in Cambodia two weeks earlier when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, belongs to the heroic worker and peasant fighters in Indochina who have struggled resourcefully and tenaciously for decades in order to break the grip of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation on the peninsula. But while a victorious social revolution has occurred, the struggle to establish revolutionary and internationalist workers states in the region is far from over….

What has been created in South Vietnam and Cambodia are deformed workers states, qualitatively equivalent to the degenerated workers state which emerged in Russia with the consolidation of the Stalin-led bureaucracy. The ruling bureaucracies of the deformed workers states are narrowly nationalist in outlook, attempting to balance precariously between imperialism and the working class. Based on the property forms of a workers state, they occasionally put up a limited and distorted defense of the social conquests achieved by the overthrow of capitalism in order to preserve their own privileged position.

But because their rule is based on the political expropriation of the working class, these petty-bourgeois bureaucratic castes are incapable of mobilizing the proletarian masses for an international revolutionary assault on the bastions of world capitalism, since it would simultaneously mean their own demise. The Stalinist rulers in Hanoi, Saigon and Phnom Penh must be overthrown by a workers’ political revolution led by a Trotskyist party in order to establish the organs of proletarian democracy and open the road to socialism. All Indochina Must Go Communist!

—“Capitalist Class Rule Smashed in Vietnam, Cambodia!” Workers Vanguard No. 68, 9 May 1975