Strange victories

"Vietnam: Whose Victory?" is a pamphlet published by the now defunct libertarian socialist group Solidarity in Britain. I haven't seen this particular edition. I have the original edition, which hit the streets back in 1973. Solidarity opposed both sides in the Vietnam War, and hence refused to call for a North Vietnamese or NLF victory. This may have been *the* most unpopular position on the far left at the time!

The bulk of the pamphlet contains an analysis of the war by Bob Potter, whom I presume was a member of Solidarity. Despite opposing both the DRV and the Republic of Vietnam, Potter's analysis still sounds "Trotskyist". Thus, he places a strong emphasis on Ho Chi Minh's deadly attacks on Ta Thu Thau's Trotskyist movement in Saigon during the 1940's. He claims that both Stalinists and Trotskyists are class collaborationist and popular frontist, and that Stalinism seeks to betray the revolution in favour of capitalism and imperialism. In many ways, Potter's spin is "more Trotskyist than Trotsky".

As a counter-weight, the editors have appended the official analysis of Solidarity, according to which the Stalinists (and presumably the Trotskyists) aren't betraying anyone. Rather, Stalinism represents the interests of a new, state capitalist class which *actively* attempts to take power by smashing traditional capitalism or colonialism. The editors also argue that Stalinists and nationalists *can* "carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution", something Trotskyism (and by implication Potter) considers impossible or unlikely.

I'm not a big fan of North Vietnam myself (nor of South Vietnam, for that matter), but I must say that Solidarity's pamphlet is marred by a kind of (perhaps unconscious) First World chauvinism, probably derived from Cornelius Castoriadis' idea that a genuine socialist revolution is impossible in the Third World. (Castoriadis was a leftist intellectual whose ideas had influenced Solidarity.) Surely, only Solidarity could write something as silly as the following: "It was as if at least some students were learning what workers had instinctively known for years, namely that the jockeying of power between the various Vietnamese bureaucrats, North and South, and their search for `recognition' by and even `partnership' with imperialism (all in the name of `national' revolution) had absolutely nothing to do with the problems of ordinary people".

No? What "ordinary people" are we talking about? Sure, maybe Sunday shoppers in London or jaded intellectuals at a café in Paris didn't care about the Christmas bombings of Hanoi, but please... What about "ordinary people" in, say, Hanoi? Or in Saigon, for that matter? Weren't they at least tangentially interested in "the jockeying for power between the various Vietnamese bureaucrats"? What about ordinary people in the United States, who could be drafted? And why should the "instincts" of "workers" count, especially since Solidarity usually seems to reject them? (See "The Irrational in Politics". No pandering to the working-class instincts there!)

Sometimes, the parochialism of the British libertarian left is simply amazing...