On this May Day the world working class is celebrating the history-making victory of the Vietnamese rebels, who have succeeded in expelling the last contingent of imperialist armed forces from their country.

The Socialist Workers Party hails this victory, which has come after decades of heroic struggle against a succession of imperialist powers. The triumph is a powerful reaffirmation of what May Day itself represents to the workers movement: worldwide solidarity of all the oppressed. This solidarity found powerful expression in the international antiwar movement, the strongest component being right here in the United States, where the American revolutionists played a major role.

The victory in Vietnam will inspire the peoples of the colonial and semicolonial world who are fighting for national liberation from economic and political domination by imperialism. It is a victory for all those throughout the world who are fighting oppression and exploitation.

For nearly ten years the war in Southeast Asia was the central focus of the struggle between imperialism and the advancing world revolution. The U.S. rulers decided to contain the revolution in Vietnam by American military means and entrenchment of a counterrevolutionary government in South Vietnam. They wanted to show the peoples in the colonial and semicolonial areas that any who tried to stand up against U.S. imperialism would be crushed. But although Washington’s mighty military machine pounded this tiny country year after year, it could not defeat the popular resistance.

The victory of the Vietnamese people over imperialism was long delayed by the policies of Moscow and Peking. In 1945, after the defeat of Japanese imperialism, the Vietminh swept into power. Under Stalin’s agreements at Yalta and Potsdam, however, Indochina was to remain in the imperialist “sphere of influence.” The Vietminh, whose leaders were trained in the Stalinist school, accepted the reentry of imperialist forces, which ushered in the next phase of the war.

After the French were defeated by the Vietminh in 1954, both Moscow and Peking pressured the Vietnamese to accept the division of their country and the creation of the artificial “country” of South Vietnam, this time under Washington’s aegis.

Moscow and Peking refused from the beginning of Washington’s escalation to provide adequate material aid for the Vietnamese rebels or to take the initiative in organizing international mass actions in their behalf. This betrayal was condemned in 1967 by Che Guevara, who warned that the Vietnamese were “tragically alone” in their struggle and that in addition to the guilt of U.S. imperialism, “they are likewise guilty who at the decisive moment vacillated in making Vietnam an inviolable part of socialist territory….”

This treachery took its most blatant form in the spring of 1972, when Nixon was toasted in Moscow while he was carrying out the brutal bombing, mining, and blockade of North Vietnam. It was under this pressure that the Vietnamese were forced to accept the continued presence of the Thieu puppet regime in the 1973 accords.

But despite these obstacles, which greatly increased the cost in blood and suffering for the Vietnamese people, their revolutionary aspirations pressed the struggle forward.  
 
International movement
The heroic resistance of the Vietnamese helped promote the radicalization of a new generation of youth throughout the world. An international antiwar movement developed, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets throughout the United States and in cities such as Tokyo, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Mexico City, and Paris.

The brutality of the Pentagon’s military onslaught revealed for the whole world the terrible lengths to which Wall Street will go in order to maintain and advance the capitalist system. Millions of Vietnamese were killed. One million Cambodians, one-seventh of the population, were killed or wounded. The countryside of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos was devastated.

The military cost alone for bringing about this death and destruction amounts to an estimated $400 billion. More than 56,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

As the U.S. military commitment deepened, and the economic and social costs of the war at home rose, the rulers found it harder and harder to use the old anticommunist arguments to justify their brutality. At each turn, they were exposed as brazen liars.

Washington put all its political and military authority on the line in Vietnam, but the White House strategists miscalculated badly. They underestimated the determination of the Indochinese people to be rid of foreign domination and their capacity for struggle to achieve that goal. And they underestimated the deep antiwar sentiments of the American people and their ability to see through the government’s lies about its aims.

The defeat of the imperialists in Vietnam thus represents something new. It is the first war of such size that the United States, the world’s strongest imperialist power, has lost. It is also the first war that has led to the development of a mass antiwar movement inside the United States. It is this overt antiwar sentiment that left the White House with no choice but to accept defeat and to withdraw to a new line of encirclement of the colonial revolution in Southeast Asia.

President Ford and others in ruling-class circles are bemoaning the rise of what they call “isolationism.” They are trying to persuade the American people to support the “internationalism” of a world police force, of B 52s, of secret wars, and of organizations like NATO and the CIA.  
 
A common enemy
But the American people’s opposition to imperialist military adventures is not “isolationism.” Just the opposite. It is part of the internationalism of the oppressed and exploited all over the globe who have a common interest in struggling against a common enemy.

As a result of the political education the American people have gained from the war and the antiwar movement, the options open to the top cops of international capitalism have become more restricted. They now must bring into their calculations the likely opposition of masses of Americans—including GIs—to new U.S. military operations to prop up dictatorships threatened by popular rebellions.

They can no longer rely on the American people bowing passively to the defense of imperialism under the banner of anticommunism. As all the opinion polls now show, the American people are opposed not only to intervention in Vietnam but also to U.S. military intervention in other areas of the world.

The antiwar movement played a crucial role in helping to bring about this change in American political consciousness. This movement began ten years ago as a small minority of the population. But it won over the majority of the American people.  
 
Role of the SWP
The Socialist Workers Party is proud of the role it played in leading and organizing the antiwar movement in the United States. From the very beginning, the SWP recognized the importance of this movement and threw its energies into it.

In the November 22, 1965, issue of the Militant, Fred Halstead, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and a prominent antiwar organizer, predicted the course the antiwar movement would follow:

“It is well within possibility that not just a few hundred thousand, but millions of Americans can be actively involved in the struggle against the Vietnam war. A movement of that scope, even though centered around the single issue of the war, would have the most profound effects on every social structure in the country, including the trade unions and soldiers in the army.

“It would very probably also result in a general rise in radical consciousness on many other questions, just as it has already had an impact against red-baiting. But above all, it could be the key factor in forcing an end to the Pentagon’s genocidal war in Vietnam. The lives of untold thousands of Vietnamese men, women, and children, and U.S. G.I.’s may depend on it. That alone is reason enough to put aside sectarian differences to unite and help build a national organization which can encompass anyone willing to oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam, regardless of their commitment, or lack of it, on other questions.”

This understanding of the significance and impact of the antiwar movement guided the activities of the Socialist Workers Party throughout the course of the war. Building this movement was seen as our foremost task.  
 
Perspective for Vietnam
What is the perspective now opening before the Vietnamese masses with the defeat of U.S. intervention?

The Vietnamese people have been fighting for more than thirty years for national and social liberation. This irrepressible struggle—generated by the intolerable conditions of life of the masses of peasants and workers—took its first leap forward with the Vietnamese defeat of Japanese imperialism at the end of World War II. It continued after the war, first against the French, and then against the United States.

This fight for national liberation against imperialist domination was closely intertwined with popular struggles for an end to repression, an end to onerous taxation, for land reform, and for other social gains.

The leaders of the Vietnamese liberation forces have often compared their struggle to that of the revolutionary fight of the American colonies against Britain two centuries ago.

The parallel is valid, but unlike the American Revolution, which occurred when capitalism was on the rise as a world system, the Vietnamese revolution is occurring when world capitalism is in its death agony. The fight for national liberation in Vietnam has been a fight against the most powerful capitalist countries and their puppet regimes, and it has an anticapitalist logic and potential.

The indigenous capitalist and landlord class within Vietnam was so stunted by the imperialist domination of the country that it has always been completely dependent on the imperialists for support. This has meant that the struggle against foreign capitalism has also been a struggle against its domestic agents and counterparts.

With the defeat of the Saigon army, and with Washington’s options severely limited by antiwar sentiment at home, the objective possibility now exits for achieving the long strived for goal of national unification and self-determination of Vietnam. The objective conditions also exist for a social revolution to abolish the entire system of exploitation for private profit.

The needs of the masses of workers and peasants of Vietnam run directly counter to the interests of the landlords and capitalists and their military machine, which supported the U.S.-created puppet government. A workers and peasants government independent of these elements in needed to carry out such tasks as land reform, lowering of taxes, and reunification of the North and South.

The upsurge in South Vietnam and the crumbling of the puppet Saigon government have already carried the Provisional Revolutionary Government well beyond its stated program of “reconciliation” with the now collapsed Saigon regime. “Reconciliation” with the remaining capitalist-landlord forces is impossible without going against the desires and interests of the masses of peasants and workers.

After years of suffering and war, the Vietnamese masses deserve the full fruits of their victory. The task ahead is unification with the workers state of North Vietnam and the establishment of proletarian democracy. A government based on soviets as exemplified in the October 1917 revolution in Russia would inspire the masses throughout Asia and throughout the world and would bring appreciably closer the victory of socialism on a global scale.

This is the perspective we as revolutionary socialists support as we celebrate the victories now being won in Vietnam.  
 
 
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