Left-Communist Group of Vietnam

  The 1930s-1940s proved to be a period of intense social upheaval and proletarian action in colonial Vietnam. Faced with the Stalinist class-collaborationists of the Viet Minh, and the colonial empire of France, the proletariat in Vietnam tried to forge its own communist path. Proletarian elements grouped around the League of Internationalist Communists tried to push this path along, and help the proletariat realize it’s force as a distinct class. Although the struggle ended in victory for the bourgeoisie, and the League had most of its members liquidated by the Viet Minh, drawing lessons from the period is still crucial. That is what we have set out to do in this piece. The Proletariat as the Revolutionary Class The most immediate lesson one can draw from the period is that the proletariat is the only revolutionary class in the capitalist epoch. It was the industrial and rural parts of the proletariat which formed the embryos of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Notable among th...

  [note: The mythology in question here is unrelated to the Sorelian conception of myth.] The most revered figure in Vietnamese politics is the guerilla fighter. The guerilla fighter, with their conical hat and second-hand firearm, is an idol of the nation, but one who is horribly disfigured. Rather than the nationalist republican they were, the guerilla is presented as a mystical proletarian partisan who, with their comrades, fought the forces of world capital itself.  In fact the fighter, given their role in Vietnamese conflicts, is propped up as the basis for Vietnam itself. They are given festivals, ceremonies, processions, and museums innumerable.[1][2] And their politics, thoroughly maimed and separated from them, are propped up as the basis for Vietnam’s politics. Like the creation myths of old, the fighter is made the personal creator of the nation, and so the characteristics of the creator are passed down to creation. In this way a link is forged between the fighter a...