New light on Vietnamese Marxism

Abstract

The historical roots of Vietnamese Marx-sm and its popular appeal are well-known, but the history of the Marxist movement, especially before World War II, has been, up to now, obscure and difficult to pinpoint. Most students of Asia recall that the Indochina Communist Party (ICP) was the first communist party to come to power in Asia (in 1945, with the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), although the Korean Communist Party has the distinction of being the first Asian communist party. The reasons for the early success of the ICP (founded formally in 1930) and information about its early history are largely obscure in Western scholarship on Vietnam. The sources are in Vietnamese (published in Vietnam) and in French in the colonial archives in France. This is not likely to be rectified in the near future in the United States, at least, because Vietnam scholarship no longer enjoys the academic and research support it once had and there is no sign of any rush of support to help fill the gap.

Notes

This dearth of support for scholarly research on Vietnam is regrettable since it is difficult to see how the U.S. can deal adequately with the historical experience of the war without investigating why the Communist movement (rather than the U.S.) won in Vietnam. In addition, the current tendency of academic and intellectual circles to treat Vietnam as passé and the media to resuscitate Vietnam like an old World War II movie does not augur well for imminent change. This “neglect” can also be traced to a conscious/unconscious effort on the part of U.S. policy-makers and research foundations to discourage investigation of subjects that would question their legitimacy.