This Nation and Socialism Are One is a collection of Le Duan's speeches and essays, gathered and edited by Professor Tran Van Dinh and issued by Vanguard Books of Chicago in 1976, with a preface dated that same year by the political scientist A. W. Singham. The date is not incidental to the book; it is the book's whole reason for being. Saigon had fallen on 30 April 1975, the country was formally reunified in the elections of April 1976, and Le Duan — First Secretary of the Vietnam Workers Party, the man who had directed the war in the South and now stood as Ho Chi Minh's successor at the head of a single Vietnamese state — delivered the Political Report to the reunified National Assembly on 25 June 1976, "thus officially opening the stage of Socialist Reconstruction for the whole of Vietnam." Tran Van Dinh assembled the volume in the immediate afterglow of that victory, to make available in English, for a Western readership sympathetic to the anti-war movement, the thought of the party that had beaten first France and then the United States. It is a solidarity book, not a Soviet export product; but the doctrine it carries belongs to the same family as the Progress Publishers titles this series examines, and it states that doctrine more nakedly, in its own leader's words, than any Moscow textbook would dare.
The liberation struggle this book stands on was real, and any reading of it that forgets that has disqualified itself at the outset. The French did conquer Vietnam in the nineteenth century and rule it for the benefit of Paris; the Japanese did occupy it; the United States did visit upon a poor agrarian country a weight of ordnance greater than all sides dropped in the Second World War, and lost. Le Duan's own writing does not exaggerate the achievement, because the achievement did not need exaggeration. His tribute to the women of the southern resistance — the "brass-legged and iron-shouldered transport fighters" who kept the supply lines open under bombardment, the detainees who "despite cruel tortures, remained unwavering in their rock-like belief" inside the U.S.-Saigon prisons — is one of the more moving passages of political prose to come out of the war, and it is earned. A reader who came to this book knowing nothing would learn a true and terrible and heroic thing. Nothing in what follows is a denial of any of it. The criticism this introduction makes lands on the doctrine the book uses to interpret that struggle, and on a history the doctrine is built to erase — never on the Vietnamese people's fight, which needs no apology from anyone.
The title is a thesis, and Le Duan means it literally. "Nation and socialism are one," he tells the National Assembly. "For us Vietnamese, love of country now means love of socialism; it means devoting all our zeal, strength, intelligence and talent to the building of their socialist homeland." A page earlier he states the condition that has, in his account, made the two identical: "Today, when our fatherland has gained complete independence and when the country has been cleared of all aggressors and has been reunified, nation and socialism merge into one." Patriotism and the socialist project are no longer two loyalties that might pull apart; after 1975 they are the same loyalty, and to be a good Vietnamese is to be a builder of socialism.
The strategic spine beneath that fusion is the doctrine of stages. Le Duan states it with complete clarity: the party's 1930 Political Theses laid down that "the Vietnamese revolution must go through two stages: first, the national democratic revolution; then, bypassing the stage of capitalist development, a direct passage to the socialist revolution." This is orthodox Comintern strategy for the colonial world — first unite the whole nation against the imperialist and the feudal landlord, defer the socialist question, then advance to it once independence is won — and Le Duan attaches it, without embarrassment, to the name that guarantees its authority. The communists, he writes, "must now seize hold of the national democratic banner and march forward as Stalin had insisted they do." One will search a long way in the Progress catalogue before finding so frank a citation of the source.
The engine of the two stages is the worker-peasant alliance under the leadership of the party. The peasants, "conscious of having land once the country had been independent," "followed the proletariat and firmly built the worker-peasant alliance under the leadership of the working class, through its Party." That leadership is not one institution among others. "The Party is the nucleus lying at the heart of social life which sets in motion the whole apparatus of the regime, and drives the entire society forward." The state itself is the party's instrument: "Only through the State... can the line, policies and tasks worked out by the Party penetrate into social life and become a reality."
And here the fusion in the title reaches its logical end, in the single most revealing sentence of the book. "In any given historical period," Le Duan writes, "a nation is best represented by a certain class. In Vietnam today, when the nation and socialism are one, the best representative of the nation is the Vietnamese working class and its vanguard party, the Vietnam Workers Party." Follow the chain: the nation is one with socialism; socialism is embodied in a class; that class is represented by its vanguard party. The party therefore is the nation's authentic self. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a theory of legitimacy, and it has a sharp practical edge. If the party is the true representative of the nation, then those who oppose the party from the left — who claim to speak for the workers and peasants against it — are not rivals within the revolution. They are enemies of the nation. The doctrine that unites the nation is also the doctrine that licenses the elimination of everyone who might divide it.
Search the whole of this book — all eighty-five thousand words of it — and certain names never appear. The word "Trotsky" does not occur once. Neither does Ta Thu Thau. Neither does La Lutte. There is no acknowledgement, anywhere, that the Vietnamese revolutionary movement of the 1930s contained a large, indigenous, working-class current that took the socialist revolution seriously, that outpolled the Stalinists in its own stronghold, and that was physically destroyed in 1945 — not by the French, and not by the Americans, but by the movement whose victory this book celebrates. The silence is total, and it is not the silence of a foreign author's ignorance. Le Duan lived through these events; he was a Central Committee member of the party that carried them out. The silence is the doctrine at work.
The facts are not obscure. They are recorded by the movement's own survivors — the Saigon historian Ngo Van above all — and were reported in the Fourth International's press across four decades. In the 1930s Saigon possessed one of the strongest Trotskyist movements anywhere in the colonial world. Around Ta Thu Thau and the newspaper La Lutte ("The Struggle," Tranh Dau in Vietnamese), Trotskyists and Communists collaborated for several years in a united front that at moments topped the poll in the city's municipal elections and had a serious base among its workers. Intercontinental Press, the weekly of the American Socialist Workers Party, set out the arc in its issue of 23 September 1985: "The Struggle" group led by Ta Thu Thau, "which was later recognized (in 1939) as the Vietnamese section of the Fourth International — worked closely with the Indochinese Communist Party in southern Vietnam from early 1933 through mid-1937." The alliance broke when Moscow's Popular Front line made cooperation with any anti-colonial Trotskyist impossible; in one of the ironies the official history cannot afford, Ta Thu Thau was jailed in 1937, the same account records, "by the 'democratic' Popular Front government of French imperialism" — a French Popular Front in which the Communists sat.
Then came the reckoning. In the late summer and autumn of 1945, as the August Revolution swept into Saigon and the Trotskyists pressed to arm the workers' committees and carry the revolution past its bourgeois-democratic limits — precisely the "second stage" that Le Duan's doctrine insists must wait — the Viet Minh security services turned on them and killed them. Intercontinental Press stated the essential fact plainly in its issue of 9 April 1979: "Dozens of Trotskyists who opposed this were massacred by the VCP, including the popular Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau." The 1985 account is more particular still: the leaders of "The Struggle" and of the sister League of International Communists "were murdered" over a few weeks; Ta Thu Thau himself, arrested by Viet Minh forces in south-central Vietnam as he travelled from Hanoi back to Saigon, "was tried and acquitted three times by local People's Committees in Quang Ngai province, but subsequently was murdered nonetheless." He had spent much of the previous decade in French prisons. He was killed by the revolution he had given his life to.
This is not a charge invented by later critics with a grudge. The Fourth International named the murders as the news of them arrived and mourned Ta Thu Thau as one of its own. Its International Executive Committee, in an appeal "Against the War in Indo-China!" printed in Fourth International in June 1947, sent its "fraternal greetings to the courageous fighters of Viet-Nam" and, in the same breath, recorded that the Indo-Chinese section "on the morrow of the country's 'Liberation' and at the very beginning of the Indochinese revolution, was deprived by the criminal hands of Stalin's GPU of many of its leading elements, among them the heroic figure of comrade Ta-Thu-Thau." The appeal called on the survivors to continue the fight "both against French imperialism and against all betrayal of the revolution from within by the Stalinist agents, leading the Viet Minh." The movement gave its greetings to the Vietnamese struggle and grieved its Vietnamese dead in a single sentence, and saw no contradiction, because there was none.
The erasure did not end in 1945. It was still being maintained forty years later, and Intercontinental Press caught it in the act. Reviewing a February 1983 article in the Vietnamese Communist Party's own theoretical journal Tap Chi Cong San, the paper noted in November 1985 that the party was still slandering "murdered Fourth International leader Ta Thu Thau and other Vietnamese Fourth Internationalists as 'agents of imperialism' and 'spies for Japanese fascism'" — the identical charge Moscow had leveled at them before the killings — and observed that "not a single Vietnamese government or Communist Party leader has ever publicly repudiated these murders. Not once in 40 years." This Nation and Socialism Are One, published in 1976, sits squarely inside that forty-year silence. Its refusal to name Ta Thu Thau is not an oversight of editing. It is the same act of state, performed in a book of solidarity for a Western audience that had never heard the name and would not learn it here.
What was the quarrel actually about? Not personalities, and not a squabble over tactics. It was the deepest strategic question the socialist movement of the twentieth century ever faced, and Le Duan's book states one answer to it with unusual candor while suppressing the other entirely. The question is whether the revolution in a backward, colonial country must pass through a discrete "bourgeois-democratic" stage — a national-democratic stage in which the working class subordinates itself to a broad patriotic bloc and postpones its own social demands — before socialism can be posed at all. Le Duan's whole framework answers yes: two stages, the first completed, the second now "opening." The Vietnamese Trotskyists answered no, and they answered it in the name of the theory the Soviet tradition spent forty years suppressing without ever quoting: the theory of permanent revolution.
Trotsky had put the colonial case in the second thesis of The Permanent Revolution (1930) in words that read as though addressed across the decades to this exact book: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The claim was never that the democratic and socialist tasks could be legislated apart and scheduled in advance. It was the opposite: that they interpenetrate, that they cannot be cleanly separated into a "first" and a "second" stage, and that a movement which holds the working class back behind a national bloc for a whole epoch forfeits the one force capable of carrying the anti-imperialist revolution to its end. The Saigon Trotskyists took this seriously enough to press, in 1945, for arming the workers rather than hailing the returning Allied troops. That is what they were killed for.
One does not have to settle that argument in the Trotskyists' favour to see what the book has done with it. Le Duan condemns no rival theory by name; he simply proceeds as though no rival existed, as though the "two stages" were self-evident Leninism and the men who disputed them in Vietnam itself had never lived. The reader is given a doctrine and denied its critics, presented with a road and shielded from the graves beneath it. The Fourth International's press — Fourth International in 1947, Intercontinental Press in 1979 and 1985, and later International Viewpoint, which reviewed Ngo Van's own history of the period in 1995 — kept the record the party destroyed. Whatever one concludes about permanent revolution as strategy, the fact that the argument had a Vietnamese side, and that its Vietnamese partisans were murdered rather than refuted, is exactly the kind of fact a book like this exists to make disappear.
None of this makes the book worthless; it makes it a primary document of the first importance, and it contains real thought that should be credited plainly. Le Duan was not a Moscow functionary reciting formulae. He was the strategist of an actual, victorious people's war, and where he writes about how revolution is made he is often original and sometimes wise. "Revolution is creation," he writes; "it cannot succeed without imagination and ingenuity. There has never been nor will there ever be a unique formula for making a revolution that is suited to all situations." That is not a boilerplate sentence. It is the considered view of a man who had watched imported formulae fail — including the 1956 land-reform errors his own party publicly admitted — and who had learned that the seizure of power in August 1945 worked precisely because "our Party creatively applied the law of violent revolution and insurrection," combining political and military struggle and seizing "the opportune moment" when Japan surrendered. His insistence that a small nation could defeat a great power by opposing "smaller to bigger forces, lesser to larger quantities," through the total mobilization of a whole society, was not propaganda; it was a description of something that had actually happened, and that the strategists of three empires had said was impossible.
There is intellectual substance, too, in Le Duan's theory of "collective mastery" — his attempt to describe socialism not merely as state ownership but as the working people's active, organized command over their own society, exercised through the state "and under the leadership of the vanguard party." A critical reader will note at once that the last clause reintroduces the very substitution the theory claims to overcome — the "collective master" turns out to need the party to master on its behalf — and The Revolution Betrayed (1936) had already anatomised, in the Soviet case, how easily the mastery of a class becomes the mastery of a bureaucracy that speaks in the class's name. But the tension is Le Duan's own, and he presses at it more honestly than most of his Soviet contemporaries. His pages on cadres and organization, on the danger of "autocratism and arbitrariness on the one hand and anarchy on the other," on the need to bind even the party's own officials by law, come from a leader who had seen what an unaccountable apparatus does to a revolution and was trying, within a framework that could not name the problem, to guard against it.
That is why the book belongs in this series and why it should be read rather than dismissed. It is a lucid, confident, first-person statement of the Soviet-tradition doctrine of the national-liberation revolution, offered at the peak of that doctrine's prestige, by the one man best entitled to state it, at the very moment of its greatest triumph. And it is more revealing than any Moscow textbook precisely because it is so unguarded — because it tells you, in the leader's own voice, that the nation and the party are to be treated as one thing, and leaves you to discover elsewhere what was done, thirty years before, to everyone who disagreed. Read Le Duan for the strategy of the war, which is genuine and hard-won, and for the theory of the peace, which is a clear specimen of the doctrine this series exists to examine. Then set the title beside the record it suppresses. The nation and socialism were made one in Vietnam; but the making required that certain Vietnamese socialists be unmade first, and this book is a monument to how completely they were forgotten.