Bình luận về Hồ Chí Minh và Đảng Cộng Sản Việt Nam

Bình luận về Hồ Chí Minh và Đảng Cộng Sản Việt Nam

Monday 21 January 2013

CRITIQUE OF COMMUNISM

CRITIQUE OF COMMUNISM II * HISTORIES OF THE COMMUNIST PARTIES

CHAPTER II
HISTORIES OF THE COMMUNIST PARTIES

I.HISTORY OF THE SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY


I.1. The Russian Feudal Regime

The history of Russia began with that of the East Slavs. By the 18th century, the Grand Duchy of Moscow had become the great Russian Empire. By the time of Catherine the Great, the Russian Tsars enjoyed virtually autocratic rule over their nobles. In 1861, Nicholas II abolished serfdom, though the emancipation didn't in fact bring on any significant change in the condition of the peasants. As the country became more industrialized, its political system experienced even greater strain. Attempts by the lower classes to gain more freedom provoked fears of anarchy, and the government remained extremely conservative. In 1894 Nicholas II acceded to the throne. To make matters worse, the increasing Russian presence in the far east provoked the hostility of Japan. Nicholas was forced to grant concessions to the reformers, including most notably a constitution and a parliament, or Duma. The power of the reform movement was founded on a new and powerful force entered Russian politics.

I.2. The Russian Revolution

At the end of XIXth century, by the influence of French revolution, and Marxism, a lot of intellects, and politicians attempted to overthrow the feudal regime of Russia. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, or RSDLP also known as the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and the Russian Social-Democratic Party, was a revolutionary socialist Russian political party formed in 1898 in Minsk to unite the various revolutionary organizations into one party.
The RSDLP program was based on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - that, despite Russia's agrarian nature, the true revolutionary potential lay with the industrial working class. The RSDLP was illegal for most of its existence; at the end of the first party congress in March 1898, all nine delegates were arrested by the Imperial Russian Police.

In 1903, the Second Congress of the party met in exile in Belgium to attempt to create a united force. However, after unprecedented attention from the Belgian authorities the venue for the congress was moved to London. At the congress, the party split into two factions on November 17 because of the dispute between Lenin and Martov. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters, whereas Martov wanted to keep party membership open to any Russian who supported Marxism. The Lenin's faction played a relatively minor role in the 1905 Revolution, and were a minority in the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies led by Trotsky. Neither Lenin nor Martov had a firm majority throughout the Congress as delegates left or switched sides but Lenin labeled the group the Mensheviks (members of the minority) and his own group the Bolsheviks (members of the majority). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevik

Plekhanov believed that Russia could not pass directly from its backward state to a rule by the proletariat and that first an intermediary bourgeois regime must be developed. Plekhanov' s vision was more of state similar to the Western Democracies, therefore we can call his faction the Democrats instead of Mensheviks, and Lenin Communists instead of Bolsheviks because Mensheviks and Bolsheviks are a misnomer and a deception caused by Lenin.

When World War I began in 1914, the large Social Democratic parties of Europe of the Second International supported their various countries' war efforts. This led Lenin to a final split with the Second International. Lenin opposed the war, believing that the peasants and workers were fighting the battle of the bourgeoisie for them. He adopted the stance that what he described as an "imperialist war" ought to be turned into a civil war between the classes.

In 1917 Russia went through two revolutions: February 24 - 29 and October 24 - 25. The first revolution overthrew the tsarist government and replaced it with a Provisional Government of Duma members (mostly members of the Cadet party). The Democrats participated in the Kerensky provisional government.At that time, Lenin was in Switzerland. The German government clearly hoped Lenin's return would create political unrest in Russia, which would help to end the war on the Eastern front, allowing Germany to concentrate on defeating the Western allies. Therefore, the German government permitted Lenin and his company traveling through Germany by rail. On 16 April 1917, Lenin arrived by train to a tumultuous reception at Finland Station, in Petrograd.

Leon Trotsky, the "famous leader of the bandits and the hooligans," caused a sensation at the pre-parliament. He openly accused the government and the bourgeoisie of encouraging the "bony hand of hunger," to strangle the revolution. Then he and all the Communists walked out of the meeting. Sukhanov thought that they were "now taking up arms against the entire old world."

Soldiers on the Eastern Front were dismayed at the news and regiments began to refuse to move to the front line. There was a rapid increase in the number of men deserting and by the autumn of 1917 an estimated 2 million men had unofficially left the army. Some of these soldiers returned to their homes and used their weapons to seize land from the nobility. Manor houses were burnt down and in some cases wealthy landowners were murdered. Essential to a successful Communists takeover was deception.

Lenin declared that Russia was ripe for an immediate socialist revolution. The Communists overthrew the government in the October Revolution. The Democrats opposed this coup and participated in the short-lived Constituent Assembly (Jan., 1918), but they generally refused to side with the anti-Bolshevik forces during the civil war. The The Democrats were suppressed by 1921. Meanwhile, in 1918, the Lenin's faction became the Russian Communist party.

I.3. The vanguards

I.3.1. Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1857-1918)
Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov was a Russian revolutionary and a Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the Social-Democratic movement in Russia and was the first Russian Marxist.
Plekhanov contributed many ideas to Marxism in the area of philosophy and the roles of art and religion in society. He wrote extensively on historical materialism, on the history of materialist philosophy, on the role of the masses and of the individual in history, on the relationship between the base and superstructure, on the role of ideologies, on the revolutionary democrats such as Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Herzen and Dobrolyubov. In his master work, The Development of the Monist View of History, Plekhanov wrote an outstanding book that remains a classic of Marxism to the present day. His efforts to popularize Marxist ideas in Russia during gloomy periods of reaction and repression earned him an honored place in the international working-class movement.
Plekhanov was one of the organizers of the first political demonstrations in Russia. After a fiery speech during the Kazan demonstration in 1876, indicting the tsarist autocracy and defending the ideas of Chernyshevsky, Plekhanov led an underground life. He was arrested twice, in 1877 and again in 1878, and faced with increasing persecution he emigrated in 1880. It would be 37 years before he returned to Russia.
Plekhanov used the pseudonym of N. Beltov in his most famous work, The Development of the Monist View of History, N. Kamensky or Utis in some articles. Plekhanov was originally a Narodnik, a leader of the organization "Land and Liberty". After emigrating from Russia in 1880, he established connections with the Social-Democratic movement of western Europe and began to study the works of Marx and Engels. This led him to renounce Narodism and become a Marxist. In 1883 in Switzerland, he co-founded with Lev Deutsch and Vera Zasulich, the "Emancipation of Labor" group, which popularized Marxism among Russian revolutionaries. At its dissolution, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and worked
with Lenin. In 1903, at the second congress of the RSDLP, Plekhanov broke with Lenin and sided with the The Democrats. During World War I, he took a "nationalist" position (as opposed to the Communists ), calling for the defeat of Germany. Lenin accused Plekhanov, along with his other critics, of "social chauvinism" in the April Theses. Despite his differences, Plekhanov was recognized, even in his own lifetime, as having made an outstanding contribution to Marxist philosophy and literature by Lenin. Plekhanov returned to Russia after the February Revolution and formed Yedinstvo. However, he left Russia again after the October Revolution because he was hostile toward the Communists. He died of tuberculosis in Terijoki, Finland (now Zelenogorsk, Saint Petersburg, Russia). He was buried in the Volkovo Cemetery near the graves of Belinsky and Dobrolyubov. Despite his disagreements with Lenin, the Soviet Communists cherished his memory and gave his name to the Soviet Academy of Economics and the G.V. Plekhanov Saint Petersburg State Mining Institute.

Major works
Works Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883) The Development of the Monist View of History (1895) Essays on the History of Materialism (1896) A. L. Volynsky: Russian Critics. Literary Essays (1897) N. G. Chernyshevsky's Aesthetic Theory (1897) The Materialist Conception of History (1891) On the Question of the Individual's Role in History (1898) Scientific Socialism and Religion (1904) The Proletarian Movement and Bourgeois Art (1905) Henrik Ibsen (1906) On the Psychology of the Workers' Movement (1907) Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908) The Ideology of Our Present-Day Philistine (1908)
Karl Marx and Lev Tolstoy (1911) Art and Social Life (1912-1913)

I.3.2. Julius Martov (1873-1920)
Julius Martov was born in Constanipole in 1873 to a Jewish middle class parents. Martov became a close friend of Vladimir Lenin and in October, 1895, formed the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Classes. Forced to leave Russia and with others living in exile, Martov joined the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). Over the next few years he worked closely with George Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in publishing the party journal Iskra. At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party in London in 1903, there was a dispute between Martov and his long time friend, Vladimir Lenin. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed believing it was better to have a large party of activists. At the end of the debate Martov won the vote 28-23 . Lenin was unwilling to accept the result and formed a faction and he called his faction the Bolshevik ( Russian for "majority"), and his component the Mensheviks - (Russian for "minority"). In fact, the Mensheviks were actually the larger faction. Lenin's faction later ended up in the minority and remained smaller than the Mensheviks until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Seen as the leader of the The Democrats (Mensheviks), Martov edited the journal Iskra from November, 1903 to its closure in October, 1905. Along with George Plekhanov and Leon Trotsky, he used the journal to attack Vladimir Lenin and his supporters. An opponent of the First World War, Martov worked with Vladimir Antonov and Leon Trotsky, to produce the internationalist newspaper, Our World. After the February Revolution Martov returned to Russia but was too late to stop some The Democrats joining the Provisional Government. Martov was not invited by the Communists to join the government after the October Revolution. Martov supported the Red Army against the White Army during the Russian Civil War, however, he continued to denounce the persecution of liberal newspapers, the nobility, the Cadets and the Socialist Revolutionaries. In 1920 Martov was forced into exile. He continued to criticize Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet government but refused to join other anti-communists exiles in calling for allied intervention in Russia. Julius Martov died in Schomberg, Germany, in 1920.

I.3.3.Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970)
Alexander Kerensky was born in Simbirsk, Russia. He was the son of a headmaster, Kerensky studied law at the University of St. Petersburg. In 1905 Kerensky joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) then joined the Russian Labour Party and in 1912 was elected to the State Duma. In February, 1917, Kerensky announced he had rejoined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and called for the removal of Nicholas II. When the Tsar abdicated on 13th March, a Provisional Government, headed by Prince George Lvov, was formed. Kerensky was appointed as Minister of Justice in the new government and immediately introduced a series of reforms including the abolition of capital punishment. He also announced basic civil liberties such as freedom of the press, the abolition of ethnic and religious discrimination and made plans for the introduction of universal suffrage. Lvov's resigned and was replaced by Kerensky.In November, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace and members of the Kerensky's cabinet were arrested. and his loyal troops was defeated by Communists forces at Pulkova. He remained underground in Finland until escaping to London in May 1918. He later moved to France. On the outbreak of the Second World War Kerensky moved to the United States. He worked at the Hoover Institution in California and wrote his autobiography, The Kerensky Memoirs: Russia and History's Turning Point (1967). Alexander Kerensky died of cancer in New York on 11th June, 1970.

I.3. 4.The Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was the ruling and only legal political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world. It emerged from a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The party led the 1917 October Revolution that overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and established the world's first socialist state. Given the central role under the Constitution of the Soviet Union, the party controlled all tiers of government in the Soviet Union and did not tolerate any opposition.

Its organization was subdivided into communist parties of the constituent Soviet republics as well as the mass youth organization, Komsomol. The party was also the driving force of Comintern, maintained organizational links and supported communist movements in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. The party ceased to exist with the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt failure in 1991 and was succeeded by the Communist Party of the Russian f
ederation in Russia and the communist parties of the now-independent former Soviet republic.In theory, supreme power in the party was invested in the Party Congress. However, in practice, all executive power was in the hands of the General Secretary.
The governing body of the CPSU was the Party Congress which was held once in 1-5 years, depending on the historical period, with an exception of a long break from 1939 to 1952. Party Congresses would elect a Central Committee which, in turn, would elect a Politburo. Under Stalin the most powerful position in the party became the General Secretary who was elected by the Politburo. In 1952 the title of General Secretary became First Secretary and the Politburo became the Presidium before reverting to their former names under Leonid Brezhnev in 1966.
Membership in the party ultimately became a privilege, with a small subset of the general population of Party becoming an elite class or nomenklatura in Soviet society. Nomenklatura enjoyed many perquisites denied to the average Soviet citizen. Among those perks were shopping at well-stocked stores, access to foreign merchandise, preference in obtaining housing, access to dachas and holiday resorts, being allowed to travel abroad, sending their children to prestigious universities, and obtaining prestigious jobs (as well as party membership itself) for their children.
In 1918 it had a membership of approximately 200,000. In the late 1920s under Stalin, the party engaged in a heavy recruitment campaign (the "Lenin Levy") of new members from both the working class and rural areas. This was both an attempt to "proletarianize" the party and an attempt by Stalin to strengthen his base by outnumbering the Old Bolsheviks and reducing their influence in the party. By 1933, the party had approximately 3.5 million members but as a result of the Great Purge party membership was cut down to 1.9 million by 1939. In 1986, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had over 19 million members or approximately 10% of the USSR's adult population.
In 1989 Gorbachev allowed other political associations (de facto political parties) to coexist with the Communist Party and in 1990 obtained the repeal of Article Six of the USSR constitution which gave the party supremacy over all institutions in society, thus ending its vanguard status. The Communist Party's power over the state formally ended that same year with the newly-created Soviet Presidency, whose first and only President was Party General Secretary Gorbachev. The growing likelihood of the dissolution of the USSR itself led hardline elements in the CPSU to launch the August Coup in 1991 which temporarily removed Gorbachev from power.

On August 19, 1991, a day before the New Union Treaty was to be signed devolving power to the republics, a group calling itself the "State Emergency Committee" seized power in Moscow declaring that Gorbachev was ill and therefore relieved of his position as president. The coup dissolved because of large public demonstrations and the efforts of Boris Yeltsin who became the real power in Russia as a result. Gorbachev returned to Moscow as president but resigned as General Secretary and vowed to purge the party of hardliners. Yeltsin had the CPSU formally banned within the Russian SFSR on August 26. The KGB was disbanded as were other CPSU-related agencies and organizations. Yeltsin's action was later declared unconstitutional but by this time the USSR had ceased to exist. Actual political power lay in the positions of President of the Soviet Union (held by Gorbachev) and President of the Russian SFSR (held by Yeltsin). Ivashko remained for five days as acting General Secretary until August 29 when the party's activity was suspended by the Supreme Soviet.

The CPSU had party organizations in fourteen of the USSR's 15 republics. In the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic itself there was no separate Communist Party until 1990 as affairs were controlled directly by the CPSU.In 1989 Gorbachev allowed other political associations (de facto political parties) to coexist with the Communist Party and in 1990 obtained the repeal of Article Six of the USSR constitution which gave the party supremacy over all institutions in society, thus ending its vanguard status. The Communist Party's power over the state formally ended that same year with the newly-created Soviet Presidency, whose first and only President was Party General Secretary Gorbachev.
II.HISTORY OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY

II.1. The vanguards

At the turn of the century, the Qing Dynasty (清朝) and Chinese people had suffered a series of humiliating military defeats against the colonial foreign powers, namely the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the war against the Alliance of Eight Nations in the 1901 Boxer Rebellion. Moreover, the French Revolution , Marxism and the Japanese Renovation influenced Chinese people. Therefore a lot of Chinese intellectuals such as Kang Youwei (康有為),Liang Qichao (梁啟超), Hu Shih (胡適) were strongly against feudalism, raised a strong sense of patriotism and instigated people to fight for their freedom. They also called for many institutional and ideological changes such as getting rid of corruption and remodeling the state examination system.

Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were the first communist leaders in China.

II.1.1. Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀; (1879 – 1942)
He was born in the city of Anqing (安慶) in Anhui (安徽) province. In 1898, he passed the entrance exam and became a student of Qiushi Academy (currently Zhejiang University) in Hangzhou. He moved to Shanghai in 1900 and then to Japan in 1901. It was in Japan where Chen became influenced by socialism and the growing Chinese dissident movement.

He was a leading figure in the anti-imperial Xinhai Revolution and the May Fourth Movement for Science and Democracy. Along with Li Dazhao, Chen was a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He was its first Chairman and first General Secretary. Chen was an educator, philosopher, and politician. His ancestral home was in Anqing (安慶), Anhui, where he established the influential vernacular Chinese periodical La Jeunesse.Influenced by his time in Japan, Chen founded the Anhui Patriotic Association (安徽愛 國會) in 1903 and the Yuewang Hui (岳王會) in 1905. He was an outspoken writer and political leader by the time of the Wuchang Uprising (武昌起義) of 1911, which led to the abdication of the last Qing emperor and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. Chen fled to Japan again in 1913 following the short-lived "Second Revolution"of Yuan Shikai (袁世凱), but returned to China in time to take part in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In 1921, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and other prominent revolutionary leaders founded the Chinese Communist Party (中國共産黨).

At the First Congress of the Communist Party in Shanghai, Chen was elected (in absentia) as the party's first general-secretary, and with the assistance of Li Dazhao, he developed what would become a crucial co-operative relationship with the international communist movement, the Comintern. However, this co-operation with the Comintern would prove to be a problem for the fledgling CCP over the next decade, as aggressive foreign Comintern advisors would try to force policy according to the wishes of Moscow and against the will of many prominent CCP leaders. At the direction of the Comintern, Chen and the Chinese Communists formed an alliance with Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang in 1922; almost every prominent member of the CCP was against this decision. Chen was forced to resign as secretary-general in 1927 due to his dissatisfaction with the Comintern order to disarm during the April 12 Incident, which had led to the deaths of thousands of Communists, and his disagreement with the Comintern's new focus on peasant rebellions.

Afterwards, Chen became associated with the International Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky. Like Chen, Trotsky opposed many of the policies of the Comintern. Chen eventually became the voice of the Trotskyists in China, which caused him to be forced out of the pro-Comintern CCP in 1929. Chen continued to oppose measures like "New Democracy" and the "Bloc of Four Classes" advocated by Mao Zedong. In 1932, Chen was arrested by the Nationalist-controlled government during the anti-Communist purges of President Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石. Chen was released in 1937, but his political organization had been shattered in interim. Both the supporters of Chen and the pro-Comintern leaders who opposed him had been either killed or fallen out of favor with the Communist membership. The Chinese Communist Party only managed to survive the purges by fleeing to the Northern frontier in the Long March of 1934, under the leadership of a new party chairman, Mao Zedong.

For the last decade of his life, he faded into obscurity. Chen Duxiu died in 1942 at the age of 62 in Sichuan province, and is today buried at his birthplace of Anqing.

II.1.2. Li Dazhao ( 1888 - 1927)

Li was a Chinese intellectual who co-founded the Communist Party of China with Chen Duxiu in 1921.Li was born in Laoting (a county of Tangshan), Hebei province to a peasant family. From 1913 to 1917 Li studied political economy at Waseda University in Japan before returning to China in 1918. As head librarian at the Peking University Library, he was among the first of the Chinese intellectuals who supported the Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union. He also wrote in Chen's New Youth and his works had a major influence on other Chinese as well. Mao Zedong was an assistant librarian during Li's tenure at the library, and Li was one of Mao's earliest and most prominent influences. After the events of the May Fourth Movement and the failures of the anarchistic experiments of many intellectuals, like his compatriots, he turned more towards Marxism. Of course, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution was a major factor in the changing of his views.

Under the leadership of Li and Chen, the CPC developed a close relationship with the Soviet controlled Comintern. At the direction of the Comintern, Li and Chen were inducted into the Kuomintang in 1922. Li was elected to the KMT's Central Executive Committee in 1924. With the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War, Li was captured during a raid on the Soviet embassy in Peking (Beijing) and, with nineteen others, he was executed on the orders of the warlord Zhang Zuolin on April 28, 1927. In June 1920, Comintern agent Grigori Voitinsky was sent to China, and met Li Dazhao and other reformers. He financed the founding of the Socialist Youth Corps. The Communist Party of China was initially founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in the French concession of Shanghai in 1921 .

The official beginning was the 1st Congress held in Shanghai and attended by 53 men in July 1921, when the formal and unified name Zhōngguó Gòngchǎn Dǎng (Chinese Communist Party) was adopted . The key players were Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, Chen Gongbo, Tan Pingshan, Zhang Guotao, He Mengxiong, Lou Zhanglong and Deng Zhongxia. Mao Zedong was present at the first congress as one of two delegates from a Hunan communist group. Other attendees included Dong Biwu, Li Hanjun, Li Da, Chen Tanqiu, Liu Renjing, Zhou Fohai, He Shuheng, Deng Enming, and two representatives from the Comintern, one of them being Henk Sneevliet (also known by the single name 'Maring'. Notably absent at this early point were future leaders Li Lisan, Zhou Enlai and Qu Qiubai.


II.2. Mao Zedong's regime
The death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925 created great uncertainty. The Left Kuomintang at Wuhan kept the allience with the Communists. Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking grew increasingly hostile to them and launched a campaign against them. Chiang Kai-shek launched a further campaign which succeeded. The CPC had to give up their bases and started the Long March (1934-1935) to search a new base. During the Long March, the native Communists, such as Mao Zedong and Zhu De gained power. The Comintern and Soviet Union lost control over the CPC. During the Second Sino-Japanese war(1937-1945), the CPC and KMT were temporarily in alliance to fight their common enemy. After the conclusion of WWII, the civil war resumed between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Despite initial gains by the KMT, they were eventually defeated and forced to flee to off-shore islands, most notably Taiwan. Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China in Beijing on October 1, 1949.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the CPC experienced a significant ideological breakdown with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev and their allies.

Like Stalin, Mao committed goenocide:
+ About 1934, in Jiangxi, Mao's authoritative domination, especially that of the military force, was challenged by the Jiangxi branch of the CPC and military officers. Mao's opponents, among whom the most prominent was Li Wenlin, the founder of the CPC's branch and Red Army in Jiangxi, were against Mao's land policies and proposals to reform the local party branch and army leadership. Mao reacted by killing Li Wenlin and his comrades. A confidential report found that a quarter of the entire Red Army under Mao at the time was slaughtered, often after being tortured.The estimated number of the victims amounted to 'tens of thousands' and could be as high as 186,000.Critics accuse Mao's authority in Jiangxi of being secured and reassured through the revolutionary terrorism, or red terrorism.
+Mao's troops invaded Tibet in 1950.
+Mao's Second Five Year Plan, and the Great Leap Forward, between 1959 and 1962 caused 20 million deaths of starvation or diseases related to starvation.
+The Hundred Flowers movement led to the condemnation, silencing, and death of many citizens, also linked to Mao's Anti-Rightist Movement, with death tolls possibly in the millions.
+The Cultural Revolution (1956-1976) caused in rural China some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured. In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution.

That movement was not a revolution, but a vengeance of a cruel king in order to destroy his enemies who had criticized his policies on the Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap. At the end of this tragedy, Liu Shaoqi was sent to a detention camp, where he later died in 1969; Deng Xiaoping, who was himself sent away for a period of re-education three times, was eventually sent to work in an engine factory; Peng Dehuai was brought to Beijing to be publicly displayed and ridiculed. At last, Lin Biao, Mao's chosen successor, became the most prominent figure during the Cultural Revolution following 1968, but in September 1971 was shocked when a plane in which Lin Biao was believed to be traveling crashed in Mongolia.

The most gruesome aspects of the campaign were the numerous incidents of torture and killing, and the suicides that were the final option of many who suffered beatings and humiliation. One of the most famous cases was communist leader Deng Xiaoping's son Deng Pufang who jumped/was thrown from a four-story building during that time. Instead of dying, he became a paraplegic.

During the Destruction of Four Olds campaign, religious affairs of all types were persecuted and discouraged by the Red Guards. Many religious buildings such as temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, and cemeteries were closed down and sometimes looted and destroyed.

II.3. Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平 (1904 – 1997)

Deng Xiaoping was a prominent Chinese politician, was born into a Hakka family in Guang An county in Sichuan province. He was educated in France, as were many notable Asian revolutionaries (such as Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai, and Pol Pot), where he discovered Marxism-Leninism.

In 1928 Deng led the Baise Uprising in Guangxi province against the Kuomintang (KMT) government. The uprising soon failed and Deng went to the Central Soviet Area in Jiangxi province. He was a veteran of the Long March, during which Deng served as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1956, at the Party's Eighth National Congress, Deng made the report on the revision of the Party Constitution, and at the First Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee, he was elected member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau and General Secretary of the Central Committee. Thus, at the age of 52 he became one of the chief leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, together with Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chen Yun. For the next ten years Deng Xiaoping was General Secretary, directing the routine work of the Secretariat. In 1961, at the Guangzhou conference, Deng uttered what is perhaps his most famous quotation: "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice".

Deng gradually emerged as the de-facto leader of China in the few years following Mao's death in 1976. Deng then repudiated the Cultural Revolution and, in 1977, launched the "Beijing Spring", which allowed open criticism of the excesses and suffering that had occurred during the period. Meanwhile, he was the impetus for the abolishment of the class background system. Under this system, the CCP put up employment barriers to Chinese deemed to be associated with the former landlord class; its removal therefore effectively allowed Chinese capitalists to join the Communist Party.The CPC under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping moved towards Socialism with Chinese characteristics and instituted Chinese economic reform.
In September 1982, following the initial successes in socialist modernization and in implementation of reform and the open policy, the Party held its Twelfth National Congress. At that Congress Deng summed up China's recent historical experience and drew a basic conclusion: the universal truth of Marxism must be integrated with the concrete realities of China, and China must blaze a trail of its own, building socialism with Chinese characteristics.

As part of Jiang Zemin 's nominal legacy, the CPC ratified the Three Represents into the 2003 revision of the Party Constitution as a "guiding ideology", encouraging the Party to represent "advanced productive forces, the progressive course of China's culture, and the fundamental interests of the people."




Deng Xiaoping is generally credited with advancing China into becoming one of the fastest growing economies in the world. But Chinese people still have no freedom, and democracy, and the antagonism between the new class and poor people is more serious.

Like Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping committed crimes:
+Occupation of Vietnam in 1979.
+Massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989 .

Like the Soviet Communist party, the Chinese Communist party has followed the dictatorship , so the human rights were violated. And like Soviet Communism, Chinese communism is a kind of new imperialism.


III.HISTORY OF THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNIST PARTY

III. 1.Vietnamese Revolution

When French colonialists occupied Vietnam, Vietnamese people such as Phan Đình Phùng, Đinh Công Tráng, Trương Định, Nguyễn Thiện Thuật struggled against the invaders to protect their country, but at last they were defeated by their enemies.

III.1. 1. The Nationalists

Later, by the influence of French revolution, the Japanese Renovation and Marxism, a lot of Vietnamese intellectuals continued to revolt against French colonialists. They formed the politic organizations for freedom and independence of Vietnam. The first Vietnamese party was Việt Nam Duy Tân Hội (Vietnam Modernization Association) created by Phan Bội Châu in 1904. In 1912, after the Chinese revolution, Phan Bội Châu and Cường Để formed Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội (The Restoration League) in China.
Phan Bội Châu
III.1.1. 1. Phan Bội Châu 潘佩珠 ( 1867–1940)
He was a pioneer of Vietnamese twentieth century nationalism. Phan was born as Phan Văn San (潘文珊) in the village of Sa Nam, in Nam Dan district of the northern central province of Nghe An. His father Phan Văn Phổ descended from a poor family of scholars. In 1900, Phan passed the regional exams with the highest possible honors in Nghê An.In 1903, he formed a revolutionary organization called the Reformation Society (Duy Tân Hội). From 1905 to 1908, he lived in Japan where he wrote political tracts calling for the liberation of Vietnam from the French colonial regime. After being forced to leave Japan, he moved to China where he was influenced by Sun Yat-Sen. He formed a new group called the Vietnamese Restoration League (Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi), modeled after Sun Yat-Sen's republican party. In 1925, Hồ Chí Minh betrayed him and sold him with the price of 100,000 piastres (Indochinese dong ) so French agents seized him in Shanghai. He was convicted of treason and spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Huế. He died on the 29th of October, in 1940 about a month after Japan invaded northern Vietnam.
III.1.2.Nguyễn Thái Học (1902-1930)


He was born in the village of Thổ Tang , Vĩnh Tường district, Vĩnh Yên province. He was a student of the Colege of Business in Hanoi, and founded The Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (The Vietnamese Nationalist Party) in 1927. He was captured and executed with his 12 comrades by the French colonial authorities after the failure of the Yen Bai mutiny in 1930.

III.2. The Trotkyists in Vietnam

III.2.1. Tạ Thu Thâu (1906–1945)

Tạ Thu Thâu a Vietnamese Trotskyist and the leader of the Fourth International in Vietnam, was born in a small hamlet in Tan Binh, 17 km south of Long Xuyen, the capital of An Giang Province in Southern Vietnam. His family were poor and leading a semi-peasant lifestyle. He was a brilliant student who went to France for university studies in 1927. Like many of his generation he lived a time when Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism was passing over to Marxism and communism.
Arrested during a protest demonstration against the execution of the Yen Bay rebels in front of the Elysee Palace on 22 May 1930, he was arrested and expelled back to Vietnam. Several left opposition groups were formed - the Communist League in Western Saigon in May 1931, Left Opposition and Indochinese Communism. These groups united and Ta Thu Thau was acknowledged as the most notable leader of the Trotskyists in Vietnam. In 1932 the French Colonial authorities arrested many members of the Stalinist Indochinese Communist Party and the Trotskyists. All left-wing activity in Indochina was clandestine.

III.2.2. Phan Văn Hùm
Phan Văn Hùm (1902 - 1946), pen name , Phù Dao, was a scholar as well a leader of Trotskyism in Vietnam. He was born in Binh Dương province, graduated from the College of Construction in Hanoi (1924-1925) and worked for the Construction Office in Hue but later he was fired because he participated in the protest agaisnt French colonialists. In 1929, he was arrested and imprisonedhe hit a policeman. In September 1929, he went to France, and continued his education at the Sorbonne Univercity.He graduated from this University , and received a MA. in Philosophy degree. He came back to Saigon in 1933, and corporated with Tạ Thu Thâu, Trần Văn Thạch, Lê Văn Thử, Hồ Hữu Tường to build the magazine La Lutte.

However, in 1933 the Saigon Trotskyists and Stalinists formed an electoral bloc for the elections to the Saigon Municipal Council. The joint 'workers slate' was successful and the Trotskyists Tran Van Thach and Stalinist Nguyen Van Tao scored the highest votes. Though struck down by the Colonial authorities, this success indicated the growing popularity of the revolutionary groups. The other main activity of the united front was the publication of the legal newspaper La Lutte. The united front split in 1937 over the issue of the 'popular front' policy of the Comintern and under pressure from the Stalinist Comintern via the French Communist Party.
La Lutte became an openly Trotskyist paper and in 1939, the Trotskyist candidates, Ta Thu Thau, Tran Van Thach and Phan Van Hum scored 80% of the vote, defeating three constitutionalists, two Stalinists and numerous independents. The Indochinese Communist Party vote in this election was one per cent. The Saigon Stalinists split, and so did the Trotskyists. When the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed in the summer of 1939, the French authorities declared the Communist Party illegal and in Indochina, all the Communists and the Trotskyists leaders were rounded up. The revolutionary movement was decimated. The larger of the two currents, the communists managed to continue their underground activity and began rebuild. The Trotskyists were virtually eliminated as a political force. Ta Thu Thau was arrested and incarcerated in Poulo-Condore during the war.

After the end of World War II, Ta Thu Thau reconstituted the 'La Lutte' (The Struggle in English) group and became the foremost leader of Vietnamese Trotskyism, but in the events of the August Revolution of 1945, and under the impact of the re-establishment of French colonial rule and repression from the Communist led Viet Minh, the Trotskyists experienced a lot of dangers.
On 23 September 1945, a violent seizure of power by French imperialism, assisted actively by the British army and passively by the Japanese military police, the Central Committee of La Lutte was completely dispersed for several days. Among the Central Committee members present at headquarters were:
1. Tran Van Thach, a lawyer and former editor of the paper La Lutte.
2. Phan Van Hum, author and philosopher.
3. Phan Van Chanh, a university lecturer.
4. Ung Hoa, the group's General Secretary.
5. Nguyen Thi Loi, a schoolteacher.
6. Nguyen Van So.
7. Le Van Thu, a journalist.
These were seven out of the 11 members of the Central Committee of La Lutte
At last, Ta Thu Thau, and other prominent Trotskyists such as Phan Van Hum, Tran Van Thach, Huynh Van Phuong, Phan Van Chanh and nationalists as Huynh Phu So, Bui Quang Chieu, Phan Van Giao, Pham Quynh were assassinated by the Viet Minh ( Stalinists) in 1945.
In the year of 20s, many Vietnamese intellectuals, especially the intellectuals in Cochinchina followed Trotskyism. Vietnamese Trotskyists were involved in the earliest efforts to build a revolutionary movement in Indochina. During the 1930s in Saigon the Vietnamese Trotskyists were a strong rival movement to the Indochinese Communist Party.


III. 3. The Stalinists in Vietnam

III.3.1.Ngô Gia Tự (1908-1935)

He was a prominent revolutionist in the 30s. He was born in Bắc Ninh province to a Confucian family. According to Wikipedia, before 1929, he attended a conference of the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association held in China, and he proposed the idea to create a communist party in Vietnam, but his idea was not accepted. Ngô Gia Tự and his comrades said goodbye to Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association. Ngô Gia Tự and his comrades came home and decided to form a branch of communist party in Tonkin in March 1929 at No 5D Hàm Long street, Hà Nội, and Trần Văn Cung (Quốc Anh) became secretary .It was the first conference of the Vietnamese communists including 7 members of The Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association. They were Ngô Gia Tự,Nguyễn Đức Cảnh,Trịnh Đình Cửu,Trần Văn Cung,Đỗ Ngọc Du,Dương Hạc Đính and Nguyễn Tuân (Kim Tôn). Their first conference was hold on Ngô Gia Tự was perhap the chairman of this party. In the second conference was help on 17th june 1929 at 312 Khâm Thiên, Hanoi , they decided to create The Indochinese Communist Party with its manifesto, rules, and magazine " Búa Liềm"
(Hammer and Sickle), and delegated an executive committee included Trịnh Đình Cửu, Nguyễn Đức Cảnh, Ngô Gia Tự, Trần Vǎn Cung, Nguyễn Phong Sắc, Trần Tư Chính, Nguyên Vǎn Tuân (Kim Tôn). After February 1930, Ho Chi Minh controled The Vietnamese Communist Party including The Indochinese Communist Party, Ngô Gia Tự became a secretary of Communist party in zone of Indochina. He was was arrested and incarcerated in Poulo-Condore by the French authotities. He tried to escape but he was drowned in 1935.
(Wikipedia)

III.3.2. Châu Văn Liêm (1902 - 1930)

Châu Văn Liêm was born in Cần Thơ province to a Confucian family. He graduated from the College of Education in Hanoi in 1924, and became a teacher at Long Xuyên School, then An Giang School. He was a teacher as well a revolutionist. He founded An Nam Cộng Sản đảng (Vietnamese Communist Party) in July 1929 and he was general secretary of this party. In February 1930, Ho Chi Minh controled The Vietnamese Communist Party included his An Nam Cộng Sản đảng, then in May 1930, in a protest against French colonialists in Cho Lon, Saigon, he was shot by French policemen.



III.3.3. Đào Duy Anh (1904 -1988)

He was born in Thanh Hóa province . He was a teacher as well a scholar. Đào Duy Anh was the general secretary of the New Vietnam party, and Đào Duy Anh's Quan Hải Tùng Thư - a book store and publisher in Huế- became a secret center of Tân Việt party.
But later, the Vietnamese communists took control of this party, so New Vietnam party was changed into Đông Dương Cộng sản Liên đoàn (The Indochine Communist League ) in February 1930. The first members of the Indochine Communist League were Trần Hữu Chương, Nguyễn Khoa Vǎn ( Hải Triều), Nguyễn Xuân Thanh, Trần Đại Quả, Ngô Đức Đề, Ngô Đình Mãn, Lê Tiềm, Lê Tốn. But on the day of conference , the French policemen seized all the members, therefore this party had no the executive commitee.



III.3.4. Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969) and the Vietnamese Communist Party

Ho Chi Minh 's given name was Nguyễn Sinh Cung[5] (1890 – 1969), born in Nghê An province, Việt Nam. His father, Nguyễn Sinh Sắc, was a Confucian scholar, small time teacher and later an imperial magistrate in a small remote district Binh Khe (Qui Nhon). He was later demoted for abuse of power after an influential local figure died several days after receiving 100 canes as punishment. On 5 June 1911, Nguyễn Sinh Cung left Vietnam on a French steamer, Amiral Latouche-Tréville, working as a kitchen helper. Arriving in Marseille, France, he applied for the French Colonial Administrative School but his application was rejected. He participated in the French Communist Party and spent much of his time in Moscow in 1924, and he became the Comintern's Asia hand.

In 1924, Phan Boi Chau help a meeting in Canton with political refugees among who was Lý Thụy (Hồ Chí Minh), a Komintern interpreter who had just arrived from Moscow. In May 1925, to replace Viet Nam Quang Phục Hội, Viet Nam Thanh Niên Đồng Chí hội (The Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association), or Thanh Niên for short, was found in Hongkong with Phan Bội Châu as president, Nguyễn Hải Thần as advisor, and Lý Thụy as general secretary.

In June 1925, Lý Thụy betrayed Phan Bội Châu, head of a rival revolutionary faction, by selling him to French police in Shanghai for 100,000 piastres. Thus Nguyễn Ái Quốc seized the control of Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association.[1]

In June 1931, he was arrested in Hong Kong. To reduce French pressure for extradition, it was announced in 1932 that Nguyễn Ái Quốc had died. But today, in a book entitled" Life of Ho Chi Minh ", Hồ Tuấn Hùng 胡俊熊, a Taiwan scholar revealed that Hồ Chí Minh was a Chinese.[2]



The second Vietnamese communist party, An Nam Cộng Sản đảng (Vietnamese Communist Party), was formed in July 1929. The first conference was help in August 1929 at N0 1 Philippini street (Nguyễn Trung Trực), Saigon. In November 1929, a temporary executive committee was founded with Châu Văn Liêm (Việt) as general secretary, and a temporary Central Committee including Châu Vǎn Liêm (Việt), Nguyễn Thiệu, Trần Não, Hồ Tùng Mậu, Lê Hồng Sơn, Nguyễn Sĩ Sách.



The third Vietnamese communist party was Đông Dương Cộng sản Liên đoàn (The Indochine Communist League ). At first, Tân Việt đảng ( New Vietnam Party), a nationalist party, was formed in 1925 -1928 in Huế, the Center of Vietnam. A lot intellectuals such as Đặng Thái Mai, Trần Huy Liệu, Đào Duy Anh partipated in Tân Việt Party.

Therefore, in the year of 30s, Vietnam had three Vietnamese Communist Parties following the Stalinism. They fighted each other violently such as Hà Huy Tập critized Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Ho Chi Minh) .

Konmintern decided to unify them. Therefore in February 1930, Ho Chi Minh formed The Vietnamese Communist Party at a conference in Hong Kong with the attending of two competing communist factions, Indochinese Communist Party (Đông Dương Đảng Cộng Sản) in Tonkin and the Communist Party of Annam (An Nam Đảng Cộng Sản) in Cochinchina. Although the third Vietnamese communist group, the Indochinese Communist League (Đông Dương Cộng Sản Liên Đoàn) in Annam, had not been invited to the Hong Kong conference because at that time, Communists did take control yet the Tân Việt party. The Hong Kong conference (held in Kowloon City) elected a nine-member Provisional Central Committee, consisting of 3 members from Tonkin, 2 from Annam, 2 from Cochinchina, and 2 from the overseas Chinese community. Soon thereafter, at its first plenum the party changed its name to the Indochinese Communist Party (Đảng Cộng Sản Đông Dương), on directions from Comintern. The First National Party Congress was held in secret in Macau in 1935.

At the same time, a Comintern congress in Moscow adopted a policy towards a popular front against fascism and directed Communist movements around the world to collaborate with anti-fascist forces regardless of their orientation towards socialism. So, the party was formally dissolved in 1945 in order to hide its Communist affiliation and its activities were folded into the Marxism Research Association and the Viet Minh, which had been founded four years earlier as a common front for national liberation. The Party was refounded as the Vietnam Workers' Party (Đảng lao động Việt Nam) at the Second National Party Congress in Tuyen Quang in 1951. The Congress was held in territory in north Vietnam controlled by the Viet Minh during the First Indochina War. The Third National Congress, held in Hanoi in 1960 formalized the tasks of constructing socialism in what was by then North Vietnam, or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and committed the party to carrying out the revolution of liberation in the South. At the Fourth National Party Congress held in 1976, the Worker Party's of North Vietnam was merged with the People's Revolutionary Party of South Vietnam to form the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Membership in the party doubled from 760,000 in 1966 to 1,553,500 in 1976, representing 3.1 percent of the total population of the country, and was close to two million by 1986. The title President of the Central Committee, existing during 1951 - 1969, was nominated for Ho Chi Minh. This position is considered to be that of the supreme leader of the Party.
The Communist Party of Vietnam is the currently ruling, as well as the only legal political party in Vietnam. The Party was founded by Hồ Chí Minh and other exiles living in China as the Vietnamese Communist Party (Việt Nam Đảng Cộng Sản) at a conference in Hong Kong February 1930. At the Hong Kong conference two competing communist factions, Indochinese Communist Party (Đông Dương Đảng Cộng Sản) in Tonkin and the Communist Party of Annam (An Nam Đảng Cộng Sản) in Cochinchina, merged. Although the third Vietnamese communist group, the Indochinese Communist League (Đông Dương Cộng Sản Liên Đoàn) in Annam, had not been invited to the Hong Kong conference its members were allowed to become members of the new united party.
The Hong Kong conference (held in Kowloon City) elected a nine-member Provisional Central Committee, consisting of 3 members from Tonkin, 2 from Annam, 2 from Cochinchina, and 2 from the overseas Chinese community. The latter group had previously been organized within the South Seas Communist Party.
Soon thereafter, at its first plenum the party changed its name to the Indochinese Communist Party (Đảng Cộng Sản Đông Dương), on directions from Comintern.
The First National Party Congress was held in secret in Macau in 1935. At the same time, a Comintern congress in Moscow adopted a policy towards a popular front against fascism and directed Communist movements around the world to collaborate with anti-fascist forces regardless of their orientation towards socialism. This required the ICP to regard all nationalist parties in Indochina as potential allies.
The party was formally dissolved in 1945 in order to hide its Communist affiliation and its activities were folded into the Marxism Research Association and the Viet Minh, which had been founded four years earlier as a common front for national liberation. The Party was refounded as the Vietnam Workers' Party (Đảng lao động Việt Nam) at the Second National Party Congress in Tuyen Quang in 1951. The Congress was held in territory in north Vietnam controlled by the Viet Minh during the First Indochina War. The Third National Congress, held in Hanoi in 1960 formalized the tasks of constructing socialism in what was by then North Vietnam, or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and committed the party to carrying out the revolution of liberation in the South. At the Fourth National Party Congress held in 1976, the Worker Party's of North Vietnam was merged with the People's Revolutionary Party of South Vietnam to form the Communist Party of Vietnam.

The CPV is a Marxist-Leninist party run on democratic centralist lines. The supreme leading body is the Politburo (Political Bureau) headed by the Secretary-General. The Politburo is elected by the Central Committee, and the Central Committee is elected by the National Congress. In 1976, as a result of the unification of North and South Vietnam, the Central Committee was expanded to 133 members from 77 and the Politburo grew from 11 to 17 members while the Secretariat increased from seven to nine members.
Membership in the party doubled from 760,000 in 1966 to 1,553,500 in 1976, representing 3.1 percent of the total population of the country, and was close to two million by 1986.
The title President of the Central Committee, existing during 1951 - 1969, was nominated for Ho Chi Minh. This position is considered to be that of the supreme leader of the Party.

The National Congress of CPV is to be held every five years (since 1976). Due to the war footing during the wars against French and U.S. troops, the first 4 congresses were not fixed to the common time schedule. After the Foundation Conference, 10 national congresses of CPV have been held.
Hồ Chí Minh is Chairman of the Communist Party of Vietnam from 1951 to 1969. Ten people have held the First Secretary (1960-1976) and/or General Secretary (1930-1960 and 1976-Present) positions of the CPV, namely:
  • Trần Phú (1930-1931)
  • Lê Hồng Phong (1935-1936)
  • Hà Huy Tập (1936-1938)
  • Nguyễn Văn Cừ (1938-1940)
  • Trường Chinh (1941-1956 and 1986)
  • Lê Duẩn (1960-1986)
  • Nguyễn Văn Linh (1986-1991)
  • Đỗ Mười (1991-1997)
  • Lê Khả Phiêu (1997-2001)
  • Nông Đức Mạnh (2001- present).


Like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh was a crafty and brutal man. He and his communist party have been the origin of the sufferance of Vietnamese people.

In a word, Communism has been the disaster for human kind but more dangerous and cruel than Imperialism and Fascism.



_____

[1]. Hồ Chí Minh: Ho's given name at birth was Nguyen Tat Thanh or Nguyễn Sinh Cung. He also had another name - Nguyen Van Ba. Ho used this name when he worked as a steward in a ship, the La Touche Treville, on his overseas trip from Saigon to Marseilles, France. He changed back to Nguyen Tat Thanh after his arrival in France. Ho has been known by many aliases. His first alias, second well-known after Ho Chi Minh, was Nguyen Ai Quoc. This alias was picked by Phan Chu Trinh, a famous patriot, and used as a joint pen-name of four others: Phan Van Truong a lawyer; Nguyen The Truyen , an engineer who married to a princess of Belgium; Nguyen An Ninh , a journalist, and Phan Chu Trinh. However, Ho was the only one that publicly used the name Nguyen Ai Quoc. Contradictory to his official biography, Ho could not write very well in French (according to Nguyen The Truyen, to the owner of Khanh Ky Photo Shop, Paris, and J. H Roy - an Indian communist, who was Ho's classmate in Moscow). Ho dropped the name Nguyen Ai Quoc after betraying Phan Boi Chau's whereabouts to the French authorities for Hong Kong $10,000. (Phan Boi Chau was the most well-known Vietnamese activist at the early half of 1900's who peacefully struggled for independence of Vietnam from French). Ho also had around ten other aliases such as: Ly Thuy, Vuong, Tran, etc. Those names however, were not very well-known. In fact, Ho Chi Minh was a real name of an old Chinese man who was believed to be a beggar.with unlocated relatives. When he died, he left nothing but his identification card. Later, Nguyen Tat Thanh bought this document. Using identification card of the dead was quite popular in Chinese outlaw society at that time. When Ho was arrested by the Chinese Kuomintang, he used this name - Ho Chi Minh.The patriot Nghiem Ke To broke the news of Ho's incarceration to Nguyen Hai Than, a Vietnamese nationalst leader who contributed great assistance to the Kuomintang government and won deep respect from Chinese leaders, including the Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek. Nguyen Hai Than promptly requested Chang Kai Sheik to release Ho. After the release, Ho still used the name Ho Chi Minh to work with the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Kunming, capital city of Yunnan Province, China, according to Vu Hong Khanh, a Vietnamese National Party leader who was put in re-ed camp after April 1975 and later died in exile at his place of birth in 1992. While being the Party leader and president of North Vietnam, Ho used another alias Tran Dan Tien to extol himself through a biography in which Tran Dan Tien as a writer, interviewed Ho Chi Minh . Thus Tran Dan Tien was intended for a pen name but turned out to be an alias.
[2]..台版】胡志明生平考-胡俊熊-白象文化-平装352页 http://store.pchome.com.tw/elephantwhite/M03754204.htm

CRITIQUE OF COMMUNISM III * THE CLASS STRUGGLE

                                                                      CHAPTER III

                                                           THE CLASS STRUGGLE

The class struggle is an important key to understanding Marxism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels comment that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO I, 1)

I. What is the social class?

Class is a complex term, in use since the late eighteenth century, and employed in many different ways. In society, there are many groups of people holding similar roles in the economic processes of production and exchange, and there were many ways to classify the social classes. The popular class distinction is between the powerful and the powerless, landowner and tenant, employer and employee, leaders and followers, strong and weak, rich and poor, etc.
One's class is determined largely by:
+personal or household per income or wealth
+occupation education and qualifications
+family background

There are 9 social classes in United Kingdom:

(1).Upper class: Generally holders of titles of nobility and their relatives, some with substantial inherited wealth. Men will almost always speak with some variant of Received Pronunciation. It is nearly impossible to join this class after birth.
(2).Upper middle class: Generally professionals or businesspeople with both good university degrees and professional qualifications, usually with a public school education. A significant proportion of their wealth is often from inheritance, but with earnings this class has the richest and most successful people.
(3).Upper middle class:
Generally professionals or businesspeople with both good university degrees and professional qualifications, usually with a public school education. A significant proportion of their wealth is often from inheritance, but with earnings this class has the richest and most successful people
(4).Middle class:
Similar to the upper middle class but usually from a less establishment-based background and education. Generally professionals or businesspeople with a university degree, perhaps from a "new university". Will normally own their own home and earn well above the national average.
(5).Lower middle class:
May not hold a university degree but works in a white collar job and will earn just above the national average.
(6).Upper working class:
Generally does not hold a university degree and works in skilled or well experienced role such as supervisor, foreman, or skilled trade such as plumber, electrician, joiner, toolmaker, train driver.
(7). Working class:
Generally has low educational attainment and works in a semi-skilled or unskilled blue collar occupation, in fields such as industrial or construction work. Some examples would be a drill press operator, car assembler, welding machine operator, lorry driver, fork-lift operator, docker, or production labourer. Disappearing fast due to de-industrialisation and automation.
(8).Lower working class: Generally works in low/minimum wage occupations, such as cleaner, shop assistant, bar worker. Often employed in the personal service industry.
(9).Underclass: Reliant on state benefits for income, described by Marx as the lumpenproletariat. (Wikipedia)

We also have five social classes in the United States:
(1).Upper class:
Those with great influence, wealth and prestige. Members of this group tend to act as the grand-conceptualizers and have tremendous influence of the nation's institutions. This class makes up about 1% of the population and owns about a third of private wealth.
(2).Upper middle class:
The upper middle class consists of white collar professionals with advanced post-secondary educational degrees and comfortable personal incomes. Upper middle class professionals have large amounts of autonomy in the workplace and therefore enjoy high job satisfaction. In terms of income and considering the 15% figure used by Thompson, Hickey and Gilber, upper middle class professionals earn roughly $62,500 (€41,000 or £31,500) or more and tend to reside in households with six figure incomes.
(3). (Lower) middle class:
Semi-professionals, non-retail salespeople, and craftsmen who may have some college education. Out-sourcing tends to be a prominent problem among those in this class who often suffer from a lack of job security.Households in this class may need two income earners to make ends meet and therefore may have household incomes rivaling the personal incomes of upper middle class professionals such as attorneys.
(4).Working class:
According to some experts such as Michael Zweig, this class may constitute the majority of Americans and include those otherwise referred to as lower middle. It includes blue as well as white collar workers who have relatively low personal incomes and lack college degrees with many being among the 45% of Americans who have never attended college.
(5). Lower class:
This class includes the poor, alienated and marginalized members of society. While most individuals in this class work, it is common for them to drift in and out of poverty. (Wikipedia)

According to Marx and Engels, the main classes in capitalism are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.They said:
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat. (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO I, 1)
The bourgeois class is the highest class of people in the modern time, the time after the Industrial Revolution and the discovery of America.The capitalists are the owners of capital.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
(COMMUNIST MANIFESTO I, 1)

On the contrary, the proletariat class is the class of wage earners, esp. those who earn their living by manual labor or who are dependent for support on daily or casual employment. The working class, the proletariat class is the lowest or poorest class of people, possessing no property, esp. in ancient Rome.
In Marxist theory, the proletariat class is the class of workers , the industrial wage earners, who do not possess capital or property and must sell their labor to survive. Proletarians are wage-workers, while some refer to those who receive salaries from the capitalists.
In Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels stated by bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. (Note by Engels - 1888 English edition)
Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie (capitalist class) as occupying conflicting positions
However, other classes such as landlords, petty bourgeoisie, peasants, and lumpen proletariat also exist, but are not primary in terms of the dynamics of capitalism.

II. Is the history of all hitherto existing society the history of class struggles?
According to Marx, in the primitive communist epoch, people lived in peace and in
equality therefore there was no social class distinction and no class struggle during that time. Since prehistory, all societies have struggled each other, and they were the wars between strong and weak, good and evil. We couldn't see the class struggles but the wars caused by the Imperialists or the Colonialists. The World War Two was the war between the Capitalists and the Fascists. And the war between Vietnam and China in 1979 was the war between the Communist comrades, not the class struggle!

III. Did Russia, China and Vietnam have capitalist class and proletariat class before the Communist Revolution?
After the Industrial Revolution, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, United States became the developed countries while Russia, China and Vietnam were the undeveloped countries. It means that before the Communist Revolution, there were no bourgeois class and proletariat in those countries.
According to Nguyễn Thế Anh , under the French domination, Vietnam had around 200,000 workers included children who were about 1% of the population .
( Việt Nam Dưới Thời Pháp Thuộc, Lửa Thiêng, 1970, 256). Russia and China were also the agrarian countries, and had no capitalists and proletariats.
Therefore, the Marx's theory should not be applied to Russia, China and Vietnam.

IV. Who were the communists?
At the beginning, the communists were the intellectuals, sons of the feudal mandarins, or the capitalists such as Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Lol Nol, etc. They
were not the workers, but they used the mask of proletariat class for their profit. They guided the workers and pushed them struggle against the capitalists following Marx and Engels 's theory:
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO II ,1)
Communists are minority in USSR, China and Vietnam. In Vietnam there are about 3 million party members, but in fact, 20 members of the Politburo have the power to control the state, and they can do everything if they want. The communists formed a new class while people live in sufferings. The communists are the enemies of their people.
V. What did the communists do?
V.1. Did they work for the proletariat class?
In the communist regime, the Vietnamese workers have to work hard:
Làm ngày không đủ,
Tranh thủ làm đêm
Làm thêm ngày nghỉ.
The Vietnamese workers always
Work night and day
They have no rest
Even Saturday and Sunday
In Russia, in 1933 workers' real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. In January 1958, Mao Zedong launched the second Five-Year Plan known as the Great Leap Forward, a plan intended as an alternative model for economic growth to the Soviet model focusing on heavy industry. Unfortunately, the net result was that the rural peasants were not left enough to eat and many millions starved to death in what is thought to be the largest famine in human history. This famine was a direct cause of the death of tens of millions of Chinese peasants and workers between 1959 and 1962. Further, many children died shortly after the Great Leap Forward came to an end in 1962 (Spence, 553). (Wikipedia)

The communists exploited the workers more than the capitalists did. Today, the proletariat class in China and Vietnam have been still poor even poorer when the red capitalists richer. Their fate did not change under the communist regime excepted some of them becoming the important persons of the communist party. The proletariat class was only a tool in the communist hand.
V.2. Did the communists work for their people?
Karl Marx declared that the communists were the majority working for the majority of people:
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.
(COMMUNIST MANIFESTO I , 1)
Communists are the minority and they work for their interest, not for the the interest of the immense majority. By 1933, the party had approximately 3.5 million members but as a result of the Great Purge party membership was cut down to 1.9 million by 1939. In 1986, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had over 19 million members or approximately 10% of the USSR's adult population. (Wikipedia)
Communists always classify their people into two categories: friends and enemies. Communists are their comrades, but sometimes they killed them such as Stalin killed Trotsky, Mao Zedong killed Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao.
How about their people? According to Marx and Engels, the upper class , the middle class and the lower class are their enemies :
The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.(COMMUNIST MANIFESTO I,14 )

Thus the majority of people were their enemies, their victims. Communists did not serve the interest of the immense majority as they said. On the contrary, they killed a great number of their people including the proletariat class. Lenin's the Red Terror which was official policy, was more systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes .The number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million [1]. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[2]

VI. Who were the bourgeois , and the landlords?

According to popular view even Marx's theory, bourgeois are the owners of the modern manufactures, and the landlords the owners of thousand hectare of land. But in USSR, China, Vietnam, they were really the peasants even the middle class of peasants or the small traders. The bourgeois, the landlords were the the caps they put on the head of the innocent people. In USSR, after the failure of the first years of collectivization, Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. These peasants who were about 60% of the population, were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge. Archival data indicates that 20,201 people were executed during 1930, the year of Dekulakization.[3]

In Vietnam, the year 50s were the most radical period in which many peasants were labelled as landlords and subjected to the confiscation of their land, and many Communist Party members purged from village-level party branches on the charges that they were landlords or landlord agents. Finally, there were about 500,000 peasants were executed. Following the order of Chinese advisers, 5% of Vietnamese population were considered as landlords , and at least in a small and remote village , a peasant must be labelled as landlord, although they were the simple peasants, and each of them had about 7,000 square metres, a half of animal, 6 tools, 500 kg of rice and 6,000 Vietnamese communist dong (USD$10) . After the Land Reform, a poor peasant family received about 2 acres [4] but about one year later, they lost everything, and they became the slaves because of the collectivization of agriculture. (Hoàng Văn Chí. From Colonialism to Communism)
Former Hanoi government official Nguyen Minh Can, told RFA’s Vietnamese service: “The land reform was a massacre of innocent, honest people, and using contemporary terms we must say that it was a genocide triggered by class discrimination”.Some reports said that up to 50,000 people were killed and another 500,000 died gradually in labor camps or from starvation. Almost 1 million of the North Vietnamese people uprooted and left the North to move South because of this event.(Land reform in Vietnam. Wikipedia)In China, the land reform was launched by the Communist Party of China in 1946. The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000 killed in the Zhen Fan campaign. According to Chang and Halliday, Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949–53.However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution", the number of deaths range between 2 million and 5 million. In addition, at least 1.5 million people were sent to "reform through labour" camps. Mao played a personal role in ordering these mass executions.He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.
Besides the Land Reform, from 1960 to 1961, Mao's Great Leap Forward resulted in widespread famine and many deaths. The official statistic is 20 million deaths, as given by Hu Yaobang. Various other sources have put the figure between 20 and 72 million (Mao Zedong. Wikipedia)

Thus, communists did not love their people, communism was a disaster for humankind. Shapiro asserts that "The refusal to come to terms with the socialists and the dispersal of the Constituent assembly led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker or peasant, who opposed Bolshevik rule." (Lenin. Wikipedia)

VII.
Classism
In the communist society, the class struggle leads to the classism. Marx and Engels classified all citizen into two main classes : the bourgeois class and the proletariat class.Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -bourgeoisie and proletariat (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO I, 1)

The bourgeois class is the enemy of the proletariat class
, but the lower class and the middle class are also classified as " the enemies of the people" . They are suspected by the communists because "they are not revolutionary, but conservative and reactionary!"
Classism is grounded in the Marxist system that pits individuals with differing socioeconomic statuses, and other class related divisions, against each other. This system leads to antagonisms and prejudices between members of various classes. In many countries, classism refers on a personal or individual level, either in behavior or attitudes, either conscious and intentional or unconscious and unintentional. But in the communist societies, classism is the fundamental factor of laws and governmental policy.

The intellectuals are classified to the middle class therefore they are imprisoned or killed in the communist countries. In USSR, about 40 million people, including intellectuals were killed by Stalin.Vladimir Putin said of those victims, esp. the intellectuals:
"Those who were executed, sent to camps, shot and tortured number in the thousands and millions of people
," Putin said. "Along with this, as a rule these were people with their own opinions. These were people who were not afraid to speak their mind. They were the most capable people. They were the pride of the nation. And of course over many years and today as well we still remember this tragedy. We need to do a great deal to ensure that this is never forgotten.[5]
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3048446

In Vietnam, the intellectuals were considered as the most important enemies that communists must destroy first (trí, phú, dịa, hào, đào tận gốc, trốc tận rễ) . Under the communist regime, the intellectuals shared with their people the suffering. After 1917, a lot of Russian intellectuals were killed, or imprisoned, and number of them fled to the foreign countries. The others stayed with Lenin and Stalin. Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. Many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (e.g. Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937). Lack of intellectuals, the Soviet Union used foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.

In Vietnam, communists followed the classism strictly, and there are many kinds of classism:
+Party classism:
In the Land reform movement, Communist Party members purged from the political position, the army, and village-level party branches on the charges that they were landlords, landlord agents or landlords 'son or daughters. It was the time the poor peasants became the party members, and important persons in every administrative and economical positions.
+Job classism:
The communists could have good jobs easily when the others did not.
+Institutional classism:
The landlords', son and daughters could not have permission to go to high school or university. After 1975, landlords, bourgeois, officers' sons and daughters of South Vietnam met a lot of difficulty at the entrance of university.
+Marriage classism:
The communist party members had to present their will to his party in advance of their wedding. They would be refused if their lovers related to the "the enemies of the people".

Trần Đức Thảo, a Vietnamese communist philosopher, wrote :
The notion of class is right, but do not consider it as an absolute truth, if so, we would negativate man, and the human kind in general. [6]
Trần Độ, a former general of Vietnamese Communist army, in his Diary, criticized the theory of class struggle:
The theory of class struggle and the policy of dictatorship of proletariat lead to the classism, which is very inhuman like Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. (TRẦN ĐỘ. Diary III, 1)

VIII. The Violent Struggle

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels confessed their aim :
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.


This is a violent struggle, which can cause the war in the country and in the world. Although Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho Chí Minh created successfully the communist parties , overthrew the feudal regime , won the invaders, and governed their countries in a long time , but their victory did not last long. Anyway, in USSR and in Eastern Europe, the communist parties were dissolved at the end of 20th century. In China and Vietnam, now communist leaders also quited the Marxism , Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism to follow the economic reform with the theory of "socialist market economy".

Many philosophers and socialists followed the peaceful struggle, so they opposed Marx and Engels such as George Bernard Shaw, Herbert George Wells, and E. Bernstein. Moreover, Communism could expand only in the undeveloped countries and in the colonies, but in the Western Europe and in the America, the workers negatived Marx and now many communist parties also dissolved.

In a word, there were many communist parties or socialist parties but the parties lead by Marx , Lenin, Stalin and Mao were the most strong and brutal communist parties. In the name of proletariat class, people, freedom and equality, they exploited the workers and people, they imprisoned and killed hundred million people around the world. Due to the theory of class struggle, they caused a lot of suffering to people and they commited "geocide"!


__
[1].Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls". http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin. See also: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, 1973–1976 ISBN 0-8133-3289-3 (Wikipedia)
[2].Stephen G. Wheatcroft, "Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word", Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 315-345, gives the following numbers: During 1921-53, the number of sentences was (political convictions): sentences, 4,060,306; death penalties, 799,473; camps and prisons, 2,634397; excile, 413,512; other, 215,942. In addition, during 1937-52 there were 14,269,753 non-political sentences, among them 34,228 death penalties, 2,066,637 sentences for 0-1 year, 4,362,973 for 2-5 years, 1,611,293 for 6-10 years, and 286,795 for more than 10 years. Other sentences were non-custodial.(Wikipedia)
[3].Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. Yale University Press, 24 December 2007. ISBN 0300123892 p. 2 (Wikipedia).
[4].According to Hoang Van Chi, the number 2 acres is not true, because every peasant had already public land, and communists had raised the number of land three to four times to tax the peasants during 1945-1956.

[5].http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/forum/story/2007/10/071031_putinrussianmemorial.shtml ;
http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iosif_Vissarionovich_Stalin#cite_note-1
[6].Trần Đức Thảo, Vấn Đề Con Người và Chủ Nghĩa Lý Luận Không có Con Người (Le Problème de l'homme et l'antihumanisme théorique, Saigon, 1988, 1989, 174 ,122).