the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 12, 2025
A half century ago, on April 30, 1975, the final U.S. forces left Vietnam in panic and chaos. U.S. attack helicopters and planes which for years had patrolled and terrorized the Vietnamese population were stuffed with fleeing U.S. embassy and CIA officials, along with the last of the U.S. troops, and 40,000 Vietnamese who had closely collaborated with the U.S. Some of the desperate U.S. allies dangled from the overloaded helicopters and fell to their deaths on the streets below. Once the helicopters delivered their charge, there was no place to leave them, and many were simply dumped into the sea.
The people of this poor, underdeveloped country had accomplished the unthinkable. They had defeated the mighty military forces of the United States, the biggest imperialist superpower in the world.
For 50 years, dating back to the 1920s, the Vietnamese people had fought against imperialist domination. First, they fought against French imperialism, which had colonized Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia, in order to plunder the region’s wealth, while enslaving and starving the population. Important French banks enriched their fortunes. The Michelin Tire Company got its start exploiting the region’s rubber plantations.
During World War II, the Japanese military displaced the French and occupied the region. After World War II, the French military reclaimed Vietnam and launched a new war with an army of 400,000 troops. Yet, in 1954, Vietnamese forces laid siege to the French fort in Dien Bien Phu and defeated the French army, thus ending the war.
But the fight of the Vietnamese was not over even then. Behind the scenes, the American government had already been footing much of the bill for the French war. This money could have been used to considerably modernize Vietnam. Instead, the U.S. used the money to pay for more death and destruction. The reason was simple: U.S. imperialism was not going to let any "raggedy ass little fourth rate country," as Lyndon Johnson put it, interfere with the way the world’s superpower made its decisions about how to rule over an important part of the world.
In 1954, the U.S. government engineered an agreement with the Vietnamese to “temporarily” split the country in two. The nationalist forces under the leadership of the Communist Party took control of the North. The U.S., which didn’t want to see the whole country under the authority of the “Communists”, and therefore wanted to prevent the reunification, tried to build up a pro-American regime in the South. Under Diem, its handpicked president, a huge police state was set up. By the late 1950s, almost half a million people in South Vietnam were arrested, another 68,000 executed. Diem left the nationalists no choice but to fight. In 1959, the C.P. began to mobilize to fight against the South Vietnamese government. They called on the population to support this fight. The Second Indochina War was gearing up.
The U.S. began to beef up its own forces. Under Kennedy, the number of U.S. “advisers” went from 875 to 16,000 by the end of 1963. By the end of 1965, U.S. troop strength had jumped to 180,000; three years later, it peaked at 543,000. In total, three million U.S. soldiers served in Vietnam.
The U.S. supplemented these troops with the heaviest use of fire power in the history of warfare up until that time. The U.S. dropped 14 million tons of bombs and munitions, equal to more than three times the number of bombs dropped during World War II and Korea. The U.S. also used 400,000 tons of napalm. And it sprayed 5.2 million acres of farmlands and forests with 1.7 million tons of defoliants, destroying 40% of the farmlands and forests.
By conservative estimates, the country lost more than a million people in the war with the United States; another million were wounded, and 300,000 Vietnamese were listed as missing in action. Perhaps half a million children were orphaned and millions of peasants were forcibly moved to new homes and fields.
Yet, the U.S. was not able to defeat a Vietnamese population that fought with extraordinary courage and determination. The turning point of the war came in 1968. The Vietnamese carried out an offensive during the Tet New Year in 1968. It was a coordinated, full-force attack on 36 of 44 provincial capitals, and 65 district capitals, and many military bases. In the fighting, the National Liberation Front (NLF) lost almost half its guerrilla forces. But the Tet offensive forced the U.S. government to realize that it was waging a war in which it had an entire population arrayed against it. So, the U.S. policy-makers decided it was too costly to pursue the military escalation.
The period that followed the Tet offensive proved to be the beginning of the extremely slow de-escalation of the war. Five years after Tet, in 1973, the U.S. finally completely withdrew all U.S. combat troops. Two years after that, the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government fell. Imperialism had finally been pushed out. Vietnam was soon united into one country.
The United States and its allies were defeated, finally driven from the South in 1975. But the United States did not stop attacking Vietnam. It just continued its war by other means. In 1975, U.S. imperialism imposed an economic embargo against Vietnam. Even countries willing to trade for Vietnamese rice, once production returned, had to avoid U.S. reprisals. In addition, Vietnam faced a constant threat of invasion from China, egged on by the United States, which forced the Vietnamese to invest a large part of their meager resources in their military. When Vietnamese troops entered neighboring Cambodia to stop the attacks of the ruthless Khmer Rouge, the United States prevented its allies from delivering even emergency food and medical supplies. So, it was the U.S. government which continued the hostilities for more than two decades, in order to punish Vietnam for the military defeat the United States had suffered.
Of course, the U.S. used the vast poverty and destruction that the U.S. had inflicted on Vietnam to reinforce its propaganda that socialism can only lead to poverty and underdevelopment, whether or not the nationalist government of Vietnam had anything to do with socialism. It is supposed to be proof to the rest of the world that it is useless to defy imperialism. Even with a military victory, a country will decline, not rise, if it goes against the wishes of the imperialists.
But nothing can be further from the truth. Vietnam is the illustration of the dead end of nationalism. The only solution for the Vietnamese people would have been the overthrow of imperialism and the establishment of a new world order. For the Vietnamese, this kind of fight would not have been any harder, it would not have meant any further sacrifices. It would only have had a different aim.
But this was not the program of the Vietnamese Stalinist Communist Party leadership. They claimed to be communist. They were characterized as communist by the imperialist governments, mainly because of their links with the USSR. But in fact, their program was simply that of nationalism, to simply build a national state, independent of imperialism. The Vietnamese revolution was on the same basis as the bourgeois revolutions in the imperialist countries two centuries before.
Even when it would have been possible to spread the fight beyond the border of Vietnam and unite the fights of the Vietnamese with the fights of those in the rest of the world, the nationalist leaders never considered it. Nor did they even attempt to bring their fight against imperialism into the imperialist countries themselves. They consciously turned their back on any fight of the oppressed beyond the borders of Vietnam.
During the 30 years of the Vietnam war, there were a whole series of struggles that took place in the underdeveloped and imperialist countries. Revolts shook China, India, Korea, Bolivia, Algeria, Kenya, Cuba, Lebanon, Angola, Mozambique, Djibouti. Vietnam, whose struggle was among the longest and hardest, having fought against three imperialist powers, certainly had earned a tremendous moral authority in all these countries. It is why Che Guevara called for “One, two, three, many Vietnams.” Yet, the Vietnamese nationalists did not try to use their authority to coordinate those struggles to direct them to destroy their imperialist oppressors.
In the 1960s, the Vietnamese war became the rallying point in most of the imperialist countries. It was over the war that student movements in not only the U.S., but in France, Germany, Japan and Italy started up. It was looked on as the beacon for people fighting everywhere.
In the U.S. the war against Vietnam occurred while black people were fighting in the streets of U.S. cities. And the two fights impacted on each other. In 1968, when the Johnson administration was faced with the choice of what policy to pursue, after the Tet offensive it chose not to continue the pace of the military escalation. The Pentagon Papers gave as the reason: “This growing dissatisfaction accompanied as it certainly will be, by increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities because of the belief that we are neglecting domestic problems, runs great risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.” Imperialism, with big problems at home, was not completely free to carry out its policy overseas.
Both the Black Revolt, and the revulsion against the war, infected the U.S. army. By the late 1960s, the U.S. army was becoming more and more unusable. Incidents of killing of officers by their own troops, as well as incidents of insubordination and desertion, skyrocketed to their highest levels in U.S. history. There were incidents of mutiny. Troops refused to go into battle. More frequent, even typical, were negotiated agreements to undertake “search and evade” operations.
The Black Movement started before the U.S. went to war in Vietnam. But the war heightened and sharpened the contradictions of the society. The Communist Party leadership of Vietnam could have tried to rely on these contradictions to find allies in the U.S. itself and maybe to help start a revolutionary fight in the heart of imperialism. But they chose not to.
So, despite having gained independence, they are still exploited by their capitalist class, as well as by imperialism—especially U.S. imperialism.
Imperialism must be overthrown on an international scale. This was never the objective of nationalist leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party. But world revolution must be a goal for the peoples of the world.