By Manuel Velasco

On April 30, 1975, U.S. troops finally withdrew from capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, after 10 years of occupation and aggression towards its native population. For the first time, a US invasion was defeated by the resistance of a people and the internationalist solidarity of the world.

The imperialist rapacity that led the world to two world wars was far from stopping in the postwar period. Without the threat of fascism and with a Soviet workers’ state, prestigious for its defeat of the Nazis despite its bureaucratization, the peoples of the world rose up against colonial oppression, in many regions with a socialist perspective. The case of Vietnam is one of the most emblematic. First resisting French, Japanese and then U.S. imperialism.

Since the First Vietnam War (1945-1954), guerrilla warfare based on the peasantry was the method adopted by the Vietnamese masses, taking inspiration from the Chinese revolution. But the debates on the direction of the revolutionary process differentiated the Vietminh, composed of the Communist Party of Vietnam with influence in the North, from the Unified Liberation Front, influenced by Trotskyism and with greater presence in the South. While the Vietminh demanded “all power to the Vietminh”, from Trotskyism the answer was “all power to the people’s committees”. Finally, the disputes ended with the dissolution of the people’s committees and the execution of the Troskyist leaders ordered by Ho Chi Minh and Stalinism in order to negotiate the partition of Vietnam after the defeat of the French army.

The 1954 Geneva agreements were a maneuver to dissuade the mass movement in its struggle for the total decolonization of the territory. The division of Vietnam into two districts from the 17th parallel was determined, with which the Vietminh lost part of the territories under its control in the south, and elections for reunification were promised.

The advance of the construction of a workers’ state in the north of Vietnam meant a partial triumph which sooner rather than later demonstrated its limits, since it sowed the false illusion of a peaceful road to reunification. With Eisenhower as president, the US took advantage of the departure of French imperialism to set up a puppet government in South Vietnam headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. The failure to call for elections together with Diem’s attempts to restore the old class relations in the countryside motivated the Vietnamese peasantry to take up arms again and restart the guerrilla war.

The progressive dispatch of troops from the United States, with the backing of a series of allied countries, resulted in 20 years of atrocious crimes by U.S. imperialism against a population with an unbreakable will to resist the invasion.

Beating Goliath, why did the United States fail?

The reason for the outcome of the Vietnam War is not exclusively military in nature, but essentially political. Explanations attributing the defeat of the United States to military deficiencies can easily be dismissed by considering some numbers: it is estimated that the US expenditure for the invasion of Vietnam was around 400 billion dollars, between 1965 and 1973 15 million tons of bombs were detonated in North and South Vietnam, about 50,000 tons of chemical defoliants and 200,000 tons of napalm were dropped on the Vietnamese before the establishment of the cease-fire in 1973.

The reality is that the causes of the Vietnamese triumph were the nature of the war (it was essentially a civil war, in which the pro-Yankee side did not have the support of the native population) and the strong anti-war opposition that had its epicenter in the United States.

Throughout the years of the war, there were various demonstrations of the strength of the mass movement in solidarity with the people of Vietnam. On April 17, 1965, the first mass mobilization against the war took place, 200,000 people mobilized in the United States. Protests were also numerous in London, Paris, Melbourne and Tokyo, where 100,000 or more mobilized. In this way, a global internationalist movement began to take shape, with the U.S. student movement at the forefront, but also with the participation of sectors of the workers’ movement and veterans of the same war.

The crisis reached its peak after President Nixon’s announcement of “vitnamization” in 1969, which consisted of the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops and their replacement by mercenaries. Although sectors of reformism and Stalinism sought to generate expectations about the negotiations by downplaying the importance of the demand for the immediate withdrawal of the army, discontent multiplied in the face of the government’s lies. In May 1970 in the U.S.A. university occupations reached 89% of independent universities and 76% of public ones, with an estimated 5 million students taking part in the actions. The rise of the student movement dragged along the labor movement and in New York City 250,000 people participated in the first anti-war mobilization organized by trade unions.

The force of internationalism also overflowed the bureaucracies

While the youth and workers of the world rose up against the war in support of the people of Vietnam, the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies played a double card: while pressuring the masses of Indochina for a negotiated settlement with imperialism, they gave aid in a measured way to sustain the resistance but without forcing a direct U.S. defeat. The 1971 figures show the lukewarm opposition of the bureaucratized workers states to the invasion; the $9 billion in US military spending was “confronted” by the $100 million of the USSR and the $75 million of China.

Although the rhetoric of Stalinism sought to ridicule imperialist aggressions, they never put direct intervention in perspective. The motive for peaceful coexistence was the preservation of trade relations with the U.S. in pursuit of sustaining the privileges of the bureaucracies.

Finally, the U.S. gambled on preserving a sepoy government in South Vietnam by negotiating coexistence with North Vietnam and the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies. However, it was the very pressure of the Vietnamese masses that swept away the “Thieu regime”, which eventually collapsed under its own weight, mired in contradictions, backed only by arms and deeply questioned by the people.

…two, three, many Vietnam!

The most recent years of capitalism prove that the imperialist countries retain the same ambition and cruelty as at the time of the Vietnam War. Just as the U.S. televised its “exploits”, today the Zionist colonization of Palestinian lands propagandizes its crimes through social networks. But the lessons of history show us that in the face of internationalist unity the various imperialisms turn out to be mere giants with feet of clay. The triumph of Vietnam was a domino effect that strengthened anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Latin America and around the world. Once again we must surround the peoples who raise their voices against the oppression of foreign powers with solidarity. Although imperialism pretends to be invincible it can be defeated, just as it has been in the past it can be in the present.

We cannot fall for the siren songs of the treacherous bureaucracies that insist on the failed tactics of negotiation with the enemies. The self-determination of the peoples is the only solution to put an end to the colonial and imperialist subjugation of the oppressed. In the same way, we must discard all reformist expectations, only with a socialist horizon is it possible to guarantee and safeguard all the conquests that are the fruit of our struggle.