Fire in the Lake (37 page)

While Marxism-Leninism accorded to a surprising degree with traditional Vietnamese notions of government and society, there were elements within Vietnamese Marxism that appeared completely unfamiliar to Westerners. As scholars such as Pike and Zasloff of the RAND Corporation pointed out, the northern as well as the southern Party cadres seemed to know very little about Marxist doctrine. Few of them could explain the class struggle of the international proletariat against world capitalism or describe what their future society would look like. Even middle-level cadres tended to describe the programs of the Party in such vague terms as “land to the tillers” and “the abolition of classes.” Furthermore, there was a strangely moralistic tone to all of their pronouncements. Eager to show that Communism was essentially un-Vietnamese, Pike, for one, concluded that the People’s Revolutionary Party was not Marxist-Leninist in any philosophical sense at all.
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To draw such a conclusion is, however, to misunderstand the place of ideology in a society. Like religion, ideology must rest upon a base of cultural, social, and economic conditions. Many Americans tend to identify Communism as the practice of the Soviet leadership. To do so is to ignore not only important ideological questions but the difference between theory and practice, life and literature. What is “pure Communism”? Which among the Jesuits, the Copts, and the Holy Rollers represents “true Christianity”? In their awe of the French, some of the early Marxists clung to the debates and conventions of the European parties and ended by communicating as much to the Vietnamese as actors speaking in Shakespearian accents would to a twentieth-century audience. As Lenin and Ho Chi Minh understood, Marxism was not a dead language or a precise set of instructions; it was a theory that required translation into life. The work of Ho Chi Minh was to make that translation for the Vietnamese.

The introduction of Marxism into Vietnam and the development of a Marxist movement were attended by a series of far-reaching debates on revolutionary strategy. At various points in the 1920’s and 1930’s there were three Leninist parties and four Trotskyite factions in Vietnam, all of which took slightly different positions on the issues of the class struggle, of nationalism versus internationalism, and on the problems of alliance with the Soviet Comintern, the Chinese Kuomintang, and the French Communist Party. The Trotskyites in general took a “purist” line, opposing the Comintern and its allies in the Kuomintang, opposing an alliance of the Vietnamese proletariat with the peasants and the national bourgeoisie. For them the proletariat constituted the one true revolutionary class. The industrial workers alone were to participate in the Communist organization.
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The curiosity of this line was that the Trotskyite parties were based primarily in Saigon, where there was no urban proletariat to speak of. The Trotskyites disliked French colonialism as much as anyone, but their very exclusiveness drove them to legal activities and finally to dependence on the undependable French left wing. By contrast, Ho Chi Minh’s organization — finally, a coalition of three regional groups called the Indochinese Communist Party — stood for the Leninist program of a two-stage revolution: the first stage a national rebellion uniting the peasants and the bourgeoisie under the leadership of the proletariat, and the second the proletarian, socialist revolution. Allied with the Comintern and in certain periods, the Chinese Kuomintang, the ICP took what advantages the French Stalinist party could offer it during the period of the Popular Front. At the same time it continued to build, where it could, a popular base among all classes of Vietnamese. When the moment of opportunity came in 1945, Ho Chi Minh resolved this last tactical ambiguity. (And without cost to himself, since the French Communist Party did not contest the government over the issue of decolonization.) Abandoning the “Indochinese Communist Party,” the Dong Duong Cong San Dang, the name that spoke of French colonialism and a political unreality, he formed the Viet Minh (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), the Vietnam Independence League. At one stroke he rid himself of French influence and class bias. His movement would be nationalist, but it would be nonetheless orthodox from a Marxist-Leninist point of view. The Viet Minh would carry out the first stage of the revolution — a stage that had no fixed duration, but that depended on the development of the various social classes within it.

Upon bringing the name “Vietnam” into the name of his party, Ho Chi Minh took the concomitant step of changing the phrase indicating “socialism” and his future social policy. For
cong san,
a phrase of Chinese roots suggesting a secular aggregate of individuals, he substituted
xa hoi
, a Vietnamese phrase linking the future distribution of wealth with the sacred communal traditions of the old village.
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(
Xa Hoi Dang
was the name of the socialist party within the Viet Minh.) The second alteration might also seem to be opportunist — was not Marx an atheist? But for Marx revolution meant not a complete break with the past, but rather the fulfillment of what was already taking place within a society. Ho Chi Minh’s new formulation merely reflected the fact that in Vietnam the proletariat remained a small minority. The first stage of the Vietnamese revolution would take place not within a secularly organized industrial society, but within an agrarian community that visualized itself in sacred terms.
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The elimination of class bias from the Viet Minh and the NLF had very different consequences in Vietnam from those such a policy would have had in the West. In Vietnam, and particularly in the south, where there was no industry to speak of, the urban workers did not constitute a true proletariat, nor the urban businessmen a true bourgeoisie. Both belonged to a service economy that depended on foreign capital, if not a foreign presence in the country.
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When Americans, such as Douglas Pike, claimed that the Vietnamese did not understand the class struggle, that they were more interested in nationalism and land reform, they ignored the fact that in the Vietnamese context the class struggle and the war of national liberation were almost identical. To rid the country of the foreigners was, in a sense, to rid it of every class enemy with the possible exception of the landlords, Lenin’s “medieval vestiges.” With the inclusion of a land reform program, the nationalist rebellion was also a struggle for a classless society.

But national liberation was only the first goal of the revolution. The second goal was the transformation of Vietnamese society. To Westerners it was this project that appeared by far the most problematic in Marxist terms, for it involved not merely capturing the means of production, but creating them. Like the Chinese, the Vietnamese believed that this creation could not be accomplished without a change in human nature itself. To many Westerners, including Soviet scholars and non-Communist Americans alike, this formulation implied a revision, if not a rejection, of Marxist causality that puts economic development before the development of political consciousness. According to classical Marxist theory, the elimination of social classes would of itself provide the condition for a solution to the problems of government and the economy. Optimistically, Marx believed that once social oppression had been removed, human nature would gradually improve of itself to the point where even the state would become unnecessary. This optimism was, however, premised on the existence of a proletariat quite as capable (so much went without saying) of managing the factories as the classes it served. In Vietnam and China, however, this essential condition did not obtain. There, classless society — while relatively easy to achieve — meant a society largely composed of peasants and generally ill-adapted to managing any form of modern organization. There the problem of the revolution was not merely to raise the consciousness of the workers, but to change the consciousness of peasants. In Vietnam, as in China, the fact that an official came from a peasant background did not insure that he would behave like one of the people. Whatever background he came from, he would not be immunized against the familiar “diseases” of “authoritarianism,” “cliquishness,” “love of red tape,” and so forth. The society suffered not so much from “the mandarins” as from
mandarinism
— that is, not from a social but a psychological problem rooted in the very structure of the Confucian family. The problem was not necessarily a consequence of the fact that the Chinese and Vietnamese had “skipped” the capitalist “phase of development”; it was quite possibly a consequence of any attempt to industrialize and modernize these particular societies at this stage in world history. The same problem perhaps existed elsewhere in different forms, but the Vietnamese and the Chinese Communists recognized and attempted to deal with it as such.

This attempt had one immediate, and to Westerners somewhat strange, consequence for the Vietnamese definition of the “class struggle.” While the Party cadres often used class categories in the “scientific” or economic sense, they also used them as moral categories. A man could, for instance, become a “feudalist” if he behaved like one. Conversely, a man with bourgeois antecedents could lose his designation of “class enemy” if he changed his ideas and joined the revolution. The historical dialectic was carried out, then, not just between one part of the society and the other, but between the conflicting tendencies in each man. “Re-education” was thus essential to the revolution, and the possibility of it accorded very well with the traditional Vietnamese understanding of revolution as an atmospheric change that comes over the whole society at once.

The project of “re-education,” of changing human nature, went far beyond what Marx and Lenin had envisioned as the role of the socialist state, but it was not so unfamiliar to the Vietnamese. The Confucian state had, after all, attempted to instruct the society in personal, as well as in broadly social, morality. Confucianism was not merely a political system but Tao, a whole way of life. The idea of an official morality must seem threatening to Westerners, but it was natural to the Vietnamese: indeed, it was
the
way in which they understood a political system. Western Marxism with its emphasis on doctrines, theories, and programs would have been not merely antipathetic but actually incomprehensible to those brought up in the Confucian Way.

For the Vietnamese Party cadre Marxism-Leninism was no more a set of doctrines than was Confucianism, but rather a Tao, or, as the Marxists put it, a “style of work,” “a style of leadership.” The Confucian son learned to imitate his father; similarly, the cadre learned to emulate the revolutionary models of conduct. To him policies and programs were of secondary importance. He believed that if all members of the Party behaved “sincerely,” they would automatically come up with the correct policies and programs. The low-level PRP prisoners could not give their American interviewers a theoretical analysis of Marxism nor describe what their future society would look like any better than they could understand the concept of probability. For them, the heart of Marxism-Leninism was the practice of their Party. As Ho Chi Minh once said, “Our Party is as great as the immense sea, the high mountain.… Our Party is virtue, civilization, unity, independence, a peaceful and comfortable life.”
¹¹
No Party chairman in Eastern Europe would have made the same claim, for its scope is Confucian — only now the Party instead of the emperor elides with the ideas of “land” and “civilization.”

As a matter of practical politics during the years of the war, the Vietnamese Communist parties in the north and the south attempted to follow the middle course between “dogmatism” and “revisionism” by means of mass organization, the parallel hierarchies of the state and the Party, and the principle of collective leadership. To a great extent both succeeded. But the problem with that system was that of all authoritarian systems: its final success in moral as well as power-political terms rested on the wisdom of its top leadership. And that wisdom could not be institutionalized. In 1956 the DRVN undertook a land reform program that proved a total disaster for the state, perhaps, as well as for the people involved. On the advice of Chinese experts, the Vietnamese Party incited the poor peasants to arrest, try, and sentence the “landlords” and “traitors to the revolution” in their villages. The result was an anarchic campaign of terror much like that waged by the Diem regime in 1955–1958 in which, by conservative estimate, some fifty thousand people of all economic stations were killed and the lower ranks of the Party badly damaged. Too late to stop a rebellion in his own native Nghe An province, Ho Chi Minh stepped in to halt the campaign, demoting or firing the officials involved and declaring the program an “error” that required rectification.

The true reason and cause behind the land reform remains problematical. Did the Party initially benefit from the terror? Or did the architect of the program, the theoretician, Truong Chinh, blindly follow Chinese advice without realizing what consequence it might have for the Vietnamese villages? Whatever the reason, the terror pointed up in a lurid manner the kinds of conflicts the revolution created in Vietnamese society, and the moral discrepancy, so common to violent revolutions, between means and end. Were those thousands of people sacrificed for the good of the Party, or was the whole program a disaster from beginning to end? In either case, the exercise of great power in the north for a time exacted the same price in suffering that the Diemist anarchy had demanded in the south.

Still, whatever the damage done during the land reform, the “Rectification of Errors” campaign was a remarkable achievement for the North Vietnamese Party and Ho Chi Minh. It may have been the only occasion when a Communist Party leader has publicly declared himself and his own Party chiefs in error over such a major issue. The term “error” must sound Orwellian to Westerners, but for a Party and a people who believe in the confluence of virtue with the laws of the universe, scientifically understood, it has profound, even cosmic, moral implications. The equivalent in the West would be for a president or prime minister to confess that he committed treason against the nation. Ho Chi Minh was able to do it in part because of his tenacity to the principle of collective leadership.