HO CHI MINH - A POLITICAL ASSESSMENT

HO CHI MINH - A POLITICAL ASSESSMENT 

BY ROBERT BLACK 

The political life and contribution of Ho Chi Minh was rich with contradictions. There can be no doubt that he contained within himself, and came to personify, all the anti-imperialist hatred and fighting spirit of the colonial peoples. This was recognised as much by his enemies as his allies. 

We pay an unstinting tribute to this anti-imperialist tenacity in Ho and recognises that his qualities as a leader have undoubtedly done much to inspire resistance to imperialism, not only in Vietnam and southeast Asia, but throughout the entire colonial and semi-colonial world. 

But a Marxist estimation of his life must go deeper than this. 

An ever-present factor in his mature political career always dragged him back from total victory and enabled the enemies of the south east Asian people to steal back what had been torn from them on the political and military battlefield. 

NEGATIVE

That negative factor was Stalinism’s counter-revolutionary politics. 

Like Mao Tse-tung, Ho instinctively yearned to do battle with imperialism and the internal forces of reaction within his native country. 

But also like Mao, his political development as a communist leader coincided with the ebbing of the European revolutionary tide. Stalinism, not Leninism, became the predominant force in the Communist International after 1923, and it left its indelible mark on all those who were not theoretically prepared to understand and fight it. 

After a short stay in France, where he attended the 1920 Tours Congress of the French Socialist Party (voting with the majority that split to become the French section of the Communist International) Ho moved to Moscow. 

There he studied for three years at the University for the Toilers of East, arming himself politically for his return to Indo-China and the battle against French imperialism. The tragedy of Ho, and with him whole generations of devoted revolutionaries, was that he found himself thrown into political campaigns for which, because of Stalinism, he was politically ill-equipped. 

Ho’s political tutor, with whom he returned to China in 1925, was Borodin, the man responsible for the application of the policy of the ‘‘bloc of four classes’’ in the Chinese Revolution up to the 1927-1928 massacres.

Stalin’s theory of the ‘‘two-stage revolution’’ was foisted on the immature Chinese Communist Farty, forcing it into a suicidal alliance with the Kuo Mintang under the leadership of the anti-communist butcher of the workers and peasants, Chiang Kai-chek. Perhaps Ho, like Mao, learned to distrust the political line of Stalin after the defeat of the first Chinese Revolution. 

If he did not, the events of 1945- 1947 surely must have done. 

The first Gaullist administration of September 5, 1944, contained two Stalinist ministers, Billoux and Tillon. 

The working class was in a revolutionary mood. Many were armed. Only by giving the governmenta more ‘left’? face could the tottering capitalist regime begin to stabilize itself’. 

The return of Maurice Thorez, CP secretary, from Moscow was the signal for de Gaulle to elevate this ‘‘Communist’’ to the position of vice-president until May1947, when the Stalinists were dismissed following a sharpening of the ‘‘Cold War.’’ 

Back in Indo-China, Thorez’s “comrade’’, Ho Chi Minh, having heroically organized the resistance of the Vietnamese people to Japanese imperialism, began to press for the removal of all traces of French colonial influence. After several skirmishes between Ho’s forces and the French colonial troops, large-scale fighting broke out in November 1946. French forces bombarded the towns of Haiphong and Hanoi, with thousands dead and wounded. 

STALINISTS 

The war, which was to end with the crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu, had begun - with no fewer than five Stalinists remaining in the French government. 

More than that, the Stalinist Billoux was Minister for Defence and was personally responsible for the prosecution of the war against the Viet Minh. 

The French Stalinists never resigned from the French government. They were thrown out. 

Right to the end they continued to uphold the ‘‘rights’’ of French colonialism in Indo-China. 

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were on one side of the barricades, Thorez, Stalin and French imperialism on the other. 

But like Mao, Ho remained silent. He never publicly denounced either Thorez or his political tutors in the Kremlin. He was to pay for this silence once again in 1954, when, through the intervention of the Soviet bureaucracy and Molotov, imperialism was able to salvage the southern half of Vietnam from the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu. 

Right to the end, the Stalinist bureaucracy struggled to deflect Ho from his chosen goal of the unification of Vietnam. 

But a stubborn refusal to follow such ‘‘advice’’, even when prompted by an organic loathing of imperialism, is no substitute for a worked out, international revolutionary strategy. 

Ho turned his back on the factional struggles and theoretical lessons of the inter-war years and devoted all his political energies to the Indo-Chinese struggle. 

At a certain level, this concentration paid tremendous dividends, but now its long-term weaknesses are more and more revealed. Like the Chinese Revolution of which it is a part, the struggle in Vietnam has to break out of the confinements forced upon it, not only by imperialism, but by the Stalinist theories of its leadership. 

Ho was a supporter of Stalin’s theory of ‘‘socialism in one country’”’ and though he suffered many times from the practical consequences of that theory when applied by Thorez, Stalin and Molotov, he clung to it to the very end. 

Ho’s persecution of the Vietnamese Trotskyist *movement flowed from that failure to break from the politics of Stalinism. 

The Vietnamese section of the Fourth International was in the vanguard of the struggle against French imperialism, and spearheaded the Saigon insurrection of 1945 against the returning French troops. 

Despite their unconditional, but critical support of the provisional government set up under Ho’s leadership, many members and supporters of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement were killed by the Viet Minh, greatly weakening the common struggle against imperialism. 

We do not forget these crimes committed against our movement by Ho Chi Minh, any more than we seek to play down his very real contribution to the struggle against world imperialism. 

The lesson of Ho Chi Minh’s life is surely that that that all the qualities of militancy and courage (which Ho possessed to the full) are still not enough to bring victory. 

Marxist theory, which today can only be Trotskyism, is the essence of the strategy for victory.