15.05.2025

Fifty years on

Left organisations, writers and academics alike have been drawing the wrong lessons. They think Vietnam can be repeated in Palestine … anywhere. Direct action by isolated small groups and broad fronts have become their common coin, argues Mike Macnair

American combat troops finally withdrew from Vietnam in late March 1973, and Saigon, the capital city of the southern regime, fell two years later, on April 29-30 1975, ‘ending’ the long-running war (US sanctions, a form of siege warfare, were imposed, and the Chinese punishment intervention in 1979 in support of the Khmer Rouge, which gained US support, can, though, be seen as forms of continuation of the war).

The 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon has been marked by several left groups, concerned not only with the history but also with modern-day lessons. The left’s lessons, however, are largely wrong. It is necessary to begin with an outline narrative of the war to see why.

The Vietnam war began effectively in 1946, and US involvement in 1950. During World War II, the existing French colonies and protectorates in Indochina had been occupied by the Japanese, and the Allies had supported national resistance groups led by the Communist Party of Vietnam.

When the war came to an end, the British occupied southern Vietnam, disarmed the resistance groups and handed the country back to the French. The north was occupied by Chinese Kuomintang troops, which did not disarm the resistance movement; the CPV-led resistance movement was able to declare independence, the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and a Viet Minh (Vietnamese Revolutionary League - a nationalist front led by the CPV) provisional government.

French defeat

The French invaded the north in 1946 and were able to obtain effective control of the cities and towns, but not the countryside. After the Chinese revolution in 1949, the DRV/Vietminh began to receive significant military matériel from the newly formed People’s Republic of China, and from 1950-51 they were able to develop a conventional army under the leadership of Vo Nguyen Giap. The Chinese revolution led the USA, which had been lukewarm or hostile towards French recolonisation of Indochina, to support the French. US matériel and military advisors began to arrive from October 1950, and by 1954 the US was paying 80% of the costs of the French war effort.

The next four years saw a complex mixture of guerrilla and conventional warfare, culminating in 1954 with a major conventional defeat inflicted on the French at Dien Bien Phu. Afterwards, diplomacy briefly took over. Under the 1954 Geneva Accords, the French conceded Viet Minh control of northern Vietnam, while the Viet Minh conceded to the French temporary administration of southern Vietnam. A declaration called for all-Vietnam elections in 1956 to decide on unification.

In fact, the USA now forced the French out of the south and gave its support to a government led by Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic nationalist who had collaborated with the Japanese. Substantial US resources were put into building up the Diem regime and the 1956 elections were never held.

From 1957 the CPV began guerrilla activity in the south with military support from the DRV. The scale of this activity gradually built up, and the Diem regime’s armed forces proved unable to contain it. In 1960 the CPV formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) in the south. The US in 1961 moved beyond CIA resources to the direct use of US troops as ‘advisors’ to the southern army - by 1962 there were 14,000 of them.

The NLF controlled about a third of the territory of the south by 1963. Recognising that the situation was deteriorating, the US now sanctioned a military coup that killed Diem and overthrew his regime. The South Vietnamese generals had, however, great difficulty in forming a stable political leadership, and political crisis continued through 1964 and 1965 until the emergence of Nguyen van Thieu as the USA’s preferred protégé.

In February 1965 US troops officially went directly into action, and by the end of the year the US had over 100,000 troops in Vietnam. By 1966-67 the number had risen to 300,000 and by January 1968 to 498,000. The DRV and NLF, which had begun to shift from guerrilla to conventional warfare, were forced back to guerrilla methods.

Also in 1965 the USA began an enormous air onslaught on the DRV, with the aim of destroying the north’s willingness to support the NLF. This failed in part because of the DRV government’s mobilisation of the population to repair damage, conceal operations, etc, but also because the USSR supplied the DRV with MiGs and sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles, while China maintained a steady supply of lower-level arms. It was later estimated that around 1,400 US aircraft were lost over the DRV between 1965 and 1968.

The US seemed to have restabilised the situation. It was therefore an enormous shock to Washington when in February 1968 the NLF launched a major offensive against the regime in the cities and towns of the south. The attacks were beaten off, but US general William Westmorland’s request for another 200,000 troops was rejected; in November 1968 the bombing campaign against the DRV was halted, and in January 1969 peace talks began in Paris. The US began to adopt a policy of ‘Vietnamisation’ - a retreat in theory to US troops playing only an advisory and back-up, rather than a front-line, role.

Nonetheless, the war was to drag on for another seven years before the final collapse of the southern regime in 1975. The US now put major resources into training and equipping the regime’s army and building up paramilitary forces, though its confidential documents continually complained about the problem of these forces avoiding direct combat with the NLF and developing into local protection rackets.

The number of US troops in Vietnam began falling in 1969: from 542,000 in 1968 to 336,000 in 1971 and down to 45,000 in July 1972. In spite of the avowed policy of ‘pacification’ and ‘Vietnamisation’, US troops continued until 1970 to be employed in aggressive ‘search and destroy’ sweeps against the NLF, with massive use of firepower that devastated peasant villages without eliminating guerrillas. An American invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and a southern regime invasion of Laos in 1971 - both aimed at eliminating guerrilla ‘sanctuaries’ - were both failures.

By 1971-72 the US army in Vietnam was experiencing a crisis of morale and discipline, with large-scale drug use, fragging (assassination) of officers and NCOs, the trebling of absent-without-leave and desertion rates, and an approximate doubling of mutinies and refusal of orders between 1965 and 1971.

In 1972 the DRV launched a large-scale conventional offensive, across the north-south border, which after early successes was beaten back by the southern army with massive US air support, the DRV gaining only limited territory. This apparent success for ‘Vietnamisation’ enabled the US administration to save its face enough to sign a ceasefire agreement in Paris in January 1973 and the last US combat troops left Vietnam in March.

President Richard Nixon, meanwhile, was fighting for his political life in the face of the Watergate scandal, and was unable to resist when on June 30 1973 Congress voted to cut off funds for all US military activity in Indochina. The Congress went further, cutting the funds for resources for the southern regime’s army by 50% from 1973 to 1974 and again by a third from 1974 to 1975. The results for the southern army were disastrous. Trained in the US style of massive use of firepower, they were now subject to enormous cuts in ammunition supplies and their ability to use air support - in November 1974 they were down to 85 rifle bullets per man, per month - a tiny figure. In January 1975 the DRV opened a new conventional offensive, and the southern regime now collapsed rapidly.

An account sympathetic to American objectives and conduct of the war, Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam (Oxford 1978), concludes that the USA in the end was never able to construct in South Vietnam either broad political consent to the regime or a state not radically weakened by corruption. But he also argues that this was not in itself decisive: rather what caused the Thieu regime to fall was the US abandonment of its ally in 1973-74. He attributes this latter, as well as the collapse of US morale around 1970 and after, to the (as he sees it) malign role of anti-war activists.

Opposition

The successive administrations never had overwhelming support for their Vietnam policy and until 1964-65 US involvement was largely covert. A 1964 poll showed 53% of university graduates willing to support the sending of troops to Vietnam, but only 33% of those with school education (a rough parallel for class, indicating less support for the war among the working class). Polling in August 1965 showed 61% in favour of US involvement in Vietnam - a clear majority, but not large enough to marginalise opposition. That opposition was strongest among blacks, women and the over-50 generation that had lived through the depression and World War II. By 1971 the polls showed a clear, but equally not overwhelming, majority of 61% against the war.¹

The active anti-war movement in the US began on a small scale in 1965 and grew at least in part out of the experience of the black civil rights movement that had been going on since the mid-1950s. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the lead organisations in the civil rights movement, called for withdrawal from Vietnam in early 1966, and SNCC members began engaging in non-violent direct action against the war that year.

From 1967 the movement began to snowball, with perhaps two million involved in one or another form of demonstration on the October 15 1969 day of action, and continued into the early 1970s: in 1971 20,000 people took part in a sit-down protest in Washington and 14,000 of them were arrested, while demonstrations nationwide continued to attract hundreds of thousands. Non-violent direct action was clearly learned from the civil rights movement, which had used such tactics in its campaigns against segregation and for black voter registration.

The US was fighting in Vietnam with a conscript army. Although it had previously only used conscription in full-scale wars, selective conscription - ‘the draft’ - continued through the Korean war and into Vietnam. The officer corps was traditionally supplied in small part by the military academies, but more extensively by the Reserve Officer Training Corps on the university campuses.

Draft refusal as a mode of protest against the war had been first suggested in 1964. Burning draft cards or handing them back became a clear symbol of organised refusal. By mid-1965 there were 380 prosecutions of draft refusers, but by the end of 1969 there were reported to be 33,960 offenders. In May 1969, 2,400 of the 4,400 who had been summoned to the Oakland, California draft induction centre failed to turn up. Meanwhile, the draft board offices and induction centres became the targets of protests. Those against ROTCs led to their removal from over 40 campuses, and between 1966 and 1971 ROTC enrolment fell by two-thirds.

Individual acts of overtly political resistance by US servicemen and women began as early as 1965 and became more common as the war went on. A servicemen’s anti-war movement developed, with more than 50 underground anti-war newspapers circulating in US military bases by 1970. Refusal to fight spread to the troops in Vietnam, especially among blacks.

The race question also had a more direct impact on the willingness of the US administrations to continue the escalation and attrition strategy of 1965-68. 1967 saw enormous riots in the black ghettos. The group advising president Lyndon Johnson on general Westmorland’s request in early 1968 for another 200,000 US troops commented:

This growing disaffection [the anti-war movement] - 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.

His advisors clearly judged that the US faced not merely non-violent resistance, but the risk of riots turning into full-scale insurrection. This was reflected elsewhere in the US regime in exemptions from the Civil Rights Act 1968 for police and armed services members engaged in “suppressing a riot or civil disturbance”, and in a substantial stepping up of the FBI’s agent provocateur activities against black organisations and the left.

The idea that the US risked full-scale revolutionary crisis if it continued with escalation in Vietnam may well have been false; but it was this fear as much as the simple fact of the anti-war movement protests that determined the decision to de-escalate from 1968.

Another factor was the beginning of the reflection of the movement in the high-political terrain. Johnson’s decision to de-escalate (and not to seek re-election) was partly informed by the strong result of anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire presidential primary election on March 12 1968.

Local direct actions were organised by a wide variety of bodies, but the big demonstrations and nationwide days of action needed broad coalitions, since there was no party capable of fully taking the lead in the movement: the Communist Party of the USA, for example, though much larger than its Trotskyist and Maoist/New Left competitors, was not able to act on its own.

Inspired partly by the American movement and partly by the common lines of the ‘official’ CPs, the Maoists and Guevarists, and the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International wing of the Trotskyists, Vietnam solidarity movements sprang up in 1966-70 in a wide range of countries and in particular in Europe and Japan. These were not important to the American defeat in the way the US anti-war movement was, though they may have lent aid and comfort to it.

Vietnam provided the first opportunity for the groups of the far left to appear as leaders of an actual movement; thus, for example, members of the International Marxist Group (whose remote descendant is today’s Anti-Capitalist Resistance) and International Socialists (today’s Socialist Workers Party) were prominent in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain, which mobilised 100,000 in London in October 1968.

American defeat

It is traditional on the left to say that the US was defeated in Vietnam by the heroic and prolonged resistance of the Vietnamese people and the growth of the mass anti-war movement in the US - which also involved considerable courage in acts of direct action and resistance in the face of police repression, though protestors never met the scale of violence that was inflicted on the Vietnamese people. This is a partial truth, but it would be more accurate to say that the US could not have been defeated without these elements.

Much more, however, was also needed. Guerrilla struggle has been carried out by the Palestinians now for nearly 60 years, with support from a substantial international solidarity movement, without defeating the Israeli state and its US backer. But the defeat of the US in Vietnam involved a series of very specific elements.

In the first place, the Vietnam war has to be understood in the context of the cold war and the Sino-Soviet split. The US was not prepared to contemplate immediate full-scale war with the USSR or China. But the lesson of the French defeat in 1954 was that this also excluded the reconquest of the DRV: resupply across the Chinese border had allowed the Viet Minh to maintain guerrilla and conventional forces that tied down French forces and ultimately defeated them at Dien Bien Phu. The reconquest of the DRV would require open war with China - and, as general Douglas MacArthur had suggested in Korea and Westmorland was to suggest in Vietnam, the use of nuclear weapons, risking a general nuclear war.

On the other hand, the Sino-Soviet split led Beijing and Moscow through the late 1950s and 1960s to posture to each other’s left as supporters of the colonial revolution. As a result, the DRV obtained substantial support from both powers. In particular, the Soviet supply of air defences, though it did not neutralise American air superiority, made its exercise seriously costly, while general resupply limited the military effect of US strategic bombardment of the DRV. The result was that the US could only have won the war politically, by stabilising the southern regime, not by militarily destroying the ability of the DRV or the NLF to fight.

Secondly, the US had committed itself, by virtue of the doctrine of ‘containment’, to defending a proto-state created in the southern half of Vietnam out of a combination of émigrés from the north, former collaborators from the French regime, and local pre-feudal elites. The resources poured into this entity understandably did not produce a transition to capitalism (as it did in formerly feudal South Korea), but vanished into the pockets of state actors. The southern Vietnamese regime never became anything more than a corrupt, predatory entity, and this character was reflected in the relative ineffectiveness of its armed forces and its inability to make itself appear more attractive to the masses than the Stalinism to its north.

For the US to win the war, South Vietnam had to become something like South Korea, where America had imposed land reform and supported state-led industrialisation. The US kept applying pressure for land reform in order to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the peasantry; the regime delayed, adopted half measures, and so on, while the regime’s troops operated large-scale looting and protection rackets in their own interests - and those of landlords and officials who paid them off.

Thirdly, the US suffered from a sharp internal contradiction in the postwar period between, on the one hand, its reliance on democratic ideology to legitimate itself both internally and internationally and, on the other hand, its reliance for its state core (officer corps, security apparat, etc) on a ‘party of order’ characterised by anti-democratic ideologies and nostalgia for the pre-Civil War slaveocracy. This contradiction adversely affected its ability to coerce the local elites in southern Vietnam and give effect to stabilising policies.

It also exploded in internal US political life in the form of the black civil rights movement, which in turn shaped the US anti-war movement. In this context, the fact that the US was relying on a conscript army became politically fatal, by giving opponents of the war a clear political focus and allowing mass opposition to the war to become directly reflected in the armed forces.

Radicalisation

Elements within the US state drew a number of lessons from their defeat in Vietnam. Most fundamentally, the fall of Saigon and the contemporary (1974-75) defeat of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and revolutionary crisis in Portugal led core elements to conclude that the policy of ‘containment of communism’ adopted in around 1950 had failed and that it was necessary to adopt a new policy of ‘rollback’.

The new policy began with the ‘human rights offensive’ launched by president Jimmy Carter (1976‑80), and was continued by Ronald Reagan’s massive military build-up in the 1980s, which aimed - successfully - to break the capacity of the USSR to sustain military competition with the US and thereby, by removing the Soviet military umbrella, to give the US a free hand throughout the world.

Another lesson that was rapidly carried into effect was the end of the draft. The French used its foreign legion and colonial troops rather than conscripts from an early stage in Vietnam, and the British abandoned conscription rapidly after Malaya and Cyprus - evidently conscript armies are untrustworthy for ‘counter-insurgency’ purposes. The US followed suit after Vietnam. All the more reason for communists and republicans to demand universal military training and a popular militia!

An associated change has been a shift from long-term military and covert operations in order to support regimes, as in Vietnam, to short-term interventions to destroy resisting regimes, leaving chaos behind (Lebanon, Somalia, ex-Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya …).

The linkage between the crisis of military morale, the growth of mass opposition to the war and the race issue led leading political and some military actors in the US to make a serious attempt to develop a black middle class and a black element in the officer corps through ‘affirmative action’ and other measures. The American right never fully accepted this project and has been engaged since the late 1970s in efforts to roll it back. With Trumpism there is now a sharp shift in this direction.

Meanwhile, the lessons the left drew from Vietnam were simple and disastrous. The first was that a combination of colonial guerrilla insurgency with a solidarity movement in the metropolises based on direct action could defeat the projects of imperialism. It is from the high point of the Vietnam war, as much as from the dissemination at the same period of Che Guevara’s falsified account of the Cuban Revolution, that the infatuation with guerrillas, individual terrorism and ‘minority direct actions’ took its starting point.

What was omitted in this story was, first, the fact that the US anti-war movement emerged from a mass radicalisation on the issue of race - the civil rights movement, which had already made the US state paranoid about internal threats; second, the role of conventional military action in the Vietnam war; and, third, the role of Soviet and Chinese military support to the DRV - especially the anti-aircraft assistance that made the US bombing of the north so costly, but also the more general supply of arms and resources.

The problem was that the New Left’s (understandable) hostility to the USSR led it to downplay the actual role both of the USSR and China and of the overall international situation in the US defeat in Vietnam. The ‘official’ CPs had their own reasons for wanting to assert the ‘purely national’ character of the Vietnamese movement. The left thus failed to think internationally, even when it was engaged in ‘international solidarity’.

An associated idea was the centrality of forms of ‘direct action’. Proponents of this - chiefly coming from the Maoist, anarchist and pacifist traditions - have never quite realised that the reason for the centrality of direct action in the US movements of the 1950s-early 1960s (Civil Rights Movement) and later 1960s (Vietnam) was the presence of targets that were easy to hit by direct action: segregation in the Civil Rights movement, and the apparatus of the draft and the ROTCs in the anti-war movement.

Outside this context, ‘direct actions’ like those of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, etc - unless they really become mass actions, involving the activity of millions - achieve only publicity stunts, not immediate blows to the regime and its projects. But, on the other hand, if they did become the action of millions, they would be an immediate insurrectionary threat to the state, in the way in which the direct actions of the 1960s were not. They would thus pose the question of political alternatives.

Another problem was the idea of small, committed groups swimming in the sea of broader fronts as being the road to political hegemony for revolutionary politics. This too came from the Maoist and Guevarist arsenal; but it seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the anti-war movement in the US was built by a combination of coalitions and local initiatives of very diverse groups.

What it neglected to mention was, first, that the Vietnamese and Chinese CPs were already mass parties before they began via their guerrilla operations to “swim like fish in the sea of the people” (Mao).² And, second, the anti-war movement in the US, though its effects helped the US state to reach the decision to ‘Vietnamise’ and withdraw, did not in itself achieve political victory. Subsequent broad mass movements and fronts have mobilised very substantial forces, which have, however, dissipated as soon as the immediate crisis has come to an end.

Commentary

I have not systematically searched out all the left commentary on the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. But some of the coverage is in a limited way illuminating (cast in descending order of political prominence in Britain).

The Morning Star carried on April 30 two very different articles. The editorial for May Day - ‘As imperialism and militarism threaten human progress, workers of the world, unite’ - is excellent: it emphasises the character of the working class as an international class, and opposes efforts to confine trade unions to national boxes or to ‘pay and conditions’. It opposes people who claim that CPV leader Ho Chi Minh urged national roads, quoting his insistence that “the strength and perseverance of the Vietnamese originate primarily from the solidarity and support of world peoples”. The same issue, however, has an article by Vietnam specialist Kyril Whittaker - ‘The legacy of Ho Chi Minh’ - which is a classic Soviet fellow-travelling piece, elevating the cult of the personality of “Uncle Ho” and celebrating Vietnamese progress.

Socialist Worker’s Instagram and Facebook pages on April 30 pointed not to a current article, but to one from November 26 2023: by former Socialist Worker staff writer Sophie Squire, ‘Lessons for today from fight against Vietnam war’. The ‘lesson’ offered is an unmodified version of the left ideas I have criticised above: “It was the resistance of the Vietnamese people, combined with a mass anti-war movement in the US, that had made it impossible for the warmongers to continue. That amalgamation of forces is what’s needed today to end Israel’s assault on the Palestinians.” This is delusional.

The Fourth International’s International Viewpoint had on April 29 a retrospective by its long-time Indochina specialist Pierre Rousset: ‘Vietnam, 30 April 1975 - 50 years ago, a historic victory, but at what price?’ Rousset has considerably more on the aftermath of 1975. He recognises the role of Soviet and Chinese military aid; notes the extent to which Vietnam paid a heavy price for its victory. He considers the Khmer Rouge regime “at best embryonic” and argues that “in such a borderline case, it is best not to brandish concepts”. On strategic lessons, he stresses - as his tendency always has - flexibility:

There are strategic ‘models’. However, a strategy must take into account the evolution of the situation, the reactions of the enemy force, the results of previous phases of the struggle ... In reality, a concrete strategy evolves and often combines elements that belong to different ‘models’. The Vietnamese never stopped adapting their strategy.

RS21 on May 9 has a ‘long read’ (over 5,000 words): ‘Vietnam, 1968 and what lies ahead of us’ by Jonathan Neale, who was a participant in the later stages of the US anti-war movement and published a history of the war from 1960-75 in 2001. Largely narrative, Neale’s account relatively downplays the conventional warfare and the geopolitics of US defeat, stresses the character of the war as a class war (“Air wars between great industrial powers and poor peasants are always class wars”), and has nothing to say about what happened after 1975. He emphasises the anti-war movement, making the point that:

It was also a proxy war in the global civil war. The capitalist United States backed France, and communist Russia and China backed the Viet Minh guerrillas. People often get confused about proxy wars these days. The thing to remember is that every proxy war is simultaneously a bloodbath between the actual combatants. And the people on the ground are not necessarily fighting and dying for the same things their sponsors value.

I would guess that this is addressed to arguments that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war between Nato and Russia. But the point is not made explicit. What would its implication be if it were?

Neale’s actual conclusion is from personal experience. In 1968 he still supported US policy, and as an overseas student refused to go to the London anti-war demo. By 1969 he had severe doubts and in 1970 was active in the US anti-war movement. So “remember always: great movements change the world, because people change. The way you change the world is not to unfriend the people who disagree with you. It is to change the minds and hearts of the people who do not agree with you, so that together we can change the world.” This is an entirely valid and important point.

The problem remains the continued illusion of a repetition of Vietnam. Clearest in the SWP, it is still present in the other left commentators.

1. This and the subsequent points are from H Zinn A people’s history of the United States London 1996.↩︎

2. Various forms of the tag are in circulation, but the following is rather less dramatic: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/ch06.htm.↩︎