Trotskyism in Vietnam () was represented by those who, in left opposition to the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) of Hồ Chí Minh, identified with the call of Leon Trotsky to re-found "vanguard parties of proletariat" on principles of "proletarian internationalism" and of "permanent revolution". Active in the 1930s in organising the Saigon waterfront, industry and transport, Trotskyists presented a significant challenge to the Moscow-aligned party in Cochinchina. Following the September 1945 Saigon uprising against the restoration of French colonial rule, Vietnamese Trotskyists were systematically hunted down and eliminated by both the Stalinist-front Viet Minh and French Sûreté.
The emergence of left opposition An identifiable Trotskyist tendency among Vietnamese revolutionary circles emerges first in Paris among the student youth of the Annamite Independence Party.Alexander, Robert J. (2001), Vietnamese Trotskyism (https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/alex/works/in_trot/viet.htm). Retrieved 10 October 2019 Following the bloody suppression of the Yên Bái mutiny, their leader Tạ Thu Thâu expressed their view of the revolution in Indochina in the pages of the Left Opposition La Verité (May and June issues, 1930). The revolution would not follow the path the Third International had endorsed in making common cause with the Kuomintang in China. A commitment to a broad nationalist front ("Sun Yat-sen ism") would betray the revolutionary interests of the anti-colonial struggle. For the colonised the choice was no longer between independence and slavery, but between socialism and nationalism. As "the social enemy of imperialism." the worker and peasant masses would free themselves from oppression under the French overseer only through their own organised action. "Independence is inseparable from proletarian revolution."Văn, Ngô (2010) In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary. AK Press, Oakland CA,’, pp. 159-160
For organising protests against the execution of Yên Bái insurgent leaders, in May 1930 Tạ Thu Thâu and eighteen of his compatriots were arrested and deported back to Cochinchina.
In Saigon the deportees found several groups of militants open to the theses of the Left Opposition, including some within the ICP. In November 1931 dissidents emerging from within the Party formed the October Left Opposition (Tả Đối Lập Tháng Mười) around the clandestine journal Tháng Mười (October). These included Hồ Hữu Tường, Dao Hung Long (alias Anh Gia), and Phan Văn Hùm. Declaring that, "being at all times a reactionary ideology, nationalism cannot succeed but to forge a new chain for the working class", in Paris in July 1930 they had formed an Indochinese Group within the Communist League [Lien Minh Cong San Doan/Groupe indochinois de la Ligue Communiste (Opposition)],Văn (2010), pp. 52, 156,169-170 the French section of the International Left Opposition.
Once considered "the theoretician of the Vietnamese contingent in Moscow,"Tai, Hue-Tam Ho (1996), Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA., p. 242 Tường was calling for a new "mass-based" party arising directly "out of the real struggle of the proletariat of the cities and countryside."Văn (2010), p. 168 But the repression triggered by strikes by in Saigon-Cholon and by a peasant jacquerie in the surrounding districts was such that for all factions organisational activity proved near impossible. Between 1930 and the end of 1932, more than 12,000 political prisoners were taken in Cochinchina, of whom 7,000 were sent to the penal colonies. The structures of the Party and of the Left Opposition alike were shattered.Văn (2010), pp. 54-55
The Struggle and the Internationalist League
In 1933, several factional representatives, including Tạ Thu Thâu, Nguyễn Văn Tạo of the ICP [later to be labour minister in Hanoi]Patti, Archimedes L. A., (1982) .Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America's Albatross, University of California Press, p. 494 and the anarchist Trinh Hung Ngau, regrouped around charismatic figure of Nguyễn An Ninh, and took the initiative of legally opposing the colonial regime in the Saigon municipal elections of April–May 1933. They put forward a common "Workers' List" and briefly published a newspaper (in French to get around the print restrictions on Vietnamese), La Lutte (The Struggle) to rally support for it. In spite of the restricted franchise, two of this Struggle group were elected (although denied their seats), the independent (later Trotskyist) Tran Van Thach and Nguyễn Văn Tạo.
In 1934 the La Lutte the collaboration was revived on the basis of a formal Party-Oppositionist entente: "struggle oriented against the colonial power and its constitutionalist allies, support of the demands of workers and peasants without regard to which of the two groups they were affiliated with, diffusion of classic Marxist thought, [and] rejection of all attacks against the USSR and against either current."Hemery, Daniel (1975), Revolutionnaires Vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine. Paris: François Maspero, p. 63. ISBN 978-2707107688 In the March 1935 Cochinchina Colonial Council election candidates supported by La Lutte obtained 17% of the votes, although none were elected. Two months later in the Saigon municipal elections four of six candidates on a joint "Workers' Slate," including Tạ Thu Thâu and Nguyễn Văn Tạo, were elected, although only Tran Van Thach as the ostensible non-communist was allowed his seat.Taylor, K. W., (2013) A History of the Vietnamese, Cambridge University Press, p. 515
At the end of 1935, unwilling to enter into a further accommodation with the "Stalinists, " the October Group of Hồ Hữu Tường, Lu Sanh Hanh and of Ngô Văn (the chronicler of the Trotskyist struggle in later exile) formed the core of the League of Internationalist Communists for the Construction of the Fourth International (Chanh Doan Cong San Quoc Te Chu Nghia--Phai Tan Thanh De Tu Quoc). The League maintained a "complete system of clandestine and legal publications"Hémery (1975), p.398 including its own weekly "organ of proletarian defence and Marxist combat", Le Militant (this carried Lenin's Testament with its warnings against Stalin, and Trotsky's polemics against the Popular Front),Van (2010), p. 86 topical pamphlets in both French and Vietnamese (including Ngô Văn's denunciation of the Moscow Trials) and an agitational bulletin, Thay Tho (Wage and Salary Workers).Van (2010), pp. 168-169. After Le Militant was suppressed, from January 1939 the League/the Octobrists began clandestinely publishing Tia Sang (The Spark).
The title, The Spark, may have been a reference to Tia Sang (the Spark) group in Hanoi, and suggests an organisational connection. In 1937–38, this northern group had put out a weekly, Thoi Dam (Chronicles), with a call to workers and peasants to set up "unified people's committees in the struggle for rice, freedom and democracy."Van (2010), p. 173 Octobrists are reported to have been active in labour organising in Hanoi, Haiphong and Vinh.Patti (1982), p. 522
While the Stalinists urged respect for the law to the peasants who had begun to agitate in a violent manner against direct and indirect taxes and for a reduction in rents, the League's call for "action committees" was met with widespread arrests. The "first trial of the Fourth International" opened in Saigon on 31 August 1936. Following publicised testimony of their torture and maltreatment, Lu Sanh Hanh and seven of his comrades received moderated sentences of 6 to 18 months.
In Saigon, with a renewed upsurge culminating in the summer of 1937 in general dock and transport strikes, the tide on the left seemed to be running in favour of the Trotskyists. Judging by the frequency of the warnings in the clandestine Communist press against Trotskyism the influence of the oppositionists in the organised unrest was "considerable" if not "preponderant."Hemery (1975), Appendix 24.
Tạ Thu Thâu and Nguyễn Văn Tạo came together for the last time in the April 1937 city council elections, both being elected. Together with the lengthening shadow of the Moscow Trials (obliging the Party loyalists to denounce their erstwhile Trotskyite colleagues as "the twin brothers of fascism"), growing disagreement over the new PCF-supported Popular Front government in France ensured a split.Frank N. Trager (ed.). Marxism in Southeast Asia; A Study of Four Countries. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1959. p. 142
The La Lutte group had entered its own Popular Front known under the name of the Indo Chinese Congress Movement (Phong-tiao-Dong-duong-Dai-hoi) with the bourgeois Constitutionalist Party, in order to draw up demands relating to the political, economic and social reforms that were to be presented to the new government in Paris. But the leftward shift in the French national Assembly in Thâu's view had not brought meaningful change. He and his comrades continued to be arrested during labour strikes, and preparations for a popular congress in response to the government's promise of colonial consultation had been suppressed. Colonial Minister Marius Moutet, a Socialist commented that he had sought "a wide consultation with all elements of the popular [will]," but with "Trotskyist-Communists intervening in the villages to menace and intimidate the peasant part of the population, taking all authority from the public officials," the necessary "formula" had not been found.Hemery (1975), p. 388
Thâu's motion attacking the Popular Front for betraying the promises of reforms in the colonies was rejected by the PCI faction and in June 1937 the Stalinists withdrew from La Lutte.Văn (2010), p. 161
Labour unrest culminated in the general strike of 1937 that included workers in the arsenal at Saigon, of the Trans-Indo Chinese Railway (Saigon-Hanoi), the Tonkin miners and the coolies of the rubber plantations. Their demands were for an eight-hour day, trade union rights, rights of assembly, a free press, etc. The government resorted to repression and in October the Indochinese Congress Movement was itself dissolved. Trotskyist and Stalinist papers that had sometimes been able to appear in the Vietnamese language were banned once more, and the labour legislation remained a dead letter.
The Workers and Peasants slate vs. the Democratic Front In April 1939, together with the Octobrists, the now wholly Trotskyist La Lutte group celebrated what a reviewer of Ngô Văn's later accountVan, Ngo (2000), Viet-nam 1920-1945: Révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale, Paris: Nautilus Editions describes as "the only instance prior to 1945 in which the politics of 'permanent revolution' oriented to worker and peasant opposition to colonialism won out, however ephemerally, against Stalinist 'stage theory' in a public arena."Goldner, Loren (1997) "The Anti-Colonial Movement in Vietnam". New Politics, Vol VI, No. 3, pp. 135–141. In elections to the colonial Cochinchina Council a "United Workers and Peasants" slate, led by Tạ Thu Thâu, triumphed over both the Communist Party's Democratic Front and the "bourgeois" Constitutionalists with fully 80 per cent of the vote.