April 30 this year is the 50^th anniversary of the liberation of Saigon, which was the last bastion of the South Vietnamese puppet government that had been used by the United States as diplomatic cover for its invasion of Vietnam. Millions of people around the world recognised the Vietnamese struggle as their own and organised massively in solidarity.

Those movements were crucial to rebuilding the traditions of anti-imperialist struggle and socialist organisation in many countries, especially within the imperialist heartland like the United States and Australia. Red Spark is a product of that movement.

One of the first acts of the liberation forces was to rename Saigon in honour of the great leader of Vietnamese Communism, Ho Chi Minh.

The April 30, 1975 victory marked the end of the Vietnam War. Accompanying the liberation was a dramatic evacuation of thousands of U.S. personnel and their South Vietnamese supporters.

US imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam and its resulting “Vietnam syndrome” held back US war mongering for decades. In this, the Vietnamese struggle was on behalf of all humanity and their victory is our victory.

Vietnam was formally reestablished as a unified country, named the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976.

The following article was published as the editorial in Direct Action, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party on May 2, 1975. It is reprinted here as a historical document. Further articles about the liberation (including how it was celebrated in Havana in 1975) can be seen at VietnamPlus.

A Victory for All Humanity

The fall of Saigon to the Vietnamese liberation forces is a decisive victory in the Vietnamese people’s three decades-long struggle for national self-determination. For 30 years the workers and peasants of Vietnam have fought against the imperialist counter-revolution spearheaded first by the French and then by the Americans.

This stunning reversal for imperialism is a great victory for the Vietnamese masses who have died in the hundreds of thousands and suffered in their millions to achieve national self-determination free from imperialist domination.

But their victory is also a victory for all of oppressed humanity. The indomitable struggle of the Vietnamese people against the American war of intervention has inspired the oppressed throughout the whole world. Their struggle has tied down imperialism, weakening it and enabling popular forces to advance in a whole number of countries. One of the key objectives of US policy in Vietnam was to show that American imperialism had the power to roll back “communist aggression” in any part of the world. And the people of the world will note very carefully the unplanned-for result of this demonstration.

Who can doubt that the oppressed masses of Latin America and Africa will derive a mighty impetus to their struggles from the victory of the popular masses in Vietnam. Who can doubt that the revolutionary masses in Portugal will take heart from the events in Vietnam.

The defeat of the imperialist intervention in Vietnam is also a victory for the international anti-war movement, above all the anti-war movement in the United States itself. The Vietnamese people and their liberation forces acquitted themselves with tremendous heroism on the Indo-China battlefields. But they were rendered decisive assistance by Washington’s inability to bring the full weight of its awesome military power to bear against them. The essential reason for this was that the American people tied the hands of their own rulers. Under the impact of the protracted struggle in Indo-China and the ever-larger demonstrations organised by the opponents of the war in the United States itself the vast majority of the American people came to oppose the war.

Finally, the Washington warmakers were faced with the choice of intervening to rescue their Saigon puppets and perhaps touching off a revolt at home so powerful that the very future of US capitalism might be called into question, or with abandoning the puppet regime to its inevitable fate. In that they chose the latter, their defeat is a victory for the American people who called into question a war which put the interests of a handful of monopolists above the needs of the rest of humanity.

A whole new levy of radical youth around the world, especially in the imperialist countries themselves were awakened to political life and received a basic anti-capitalist education in the struggle against the imperialist war of intervention in Vietnam. Many of these radicalised youth joined the revolutionary socialist movement.

Whatever happens in Vietnam now – whether the Communist-led national forces press forward to establish a workers state or whether some form of coalition government is set up on the basis of capitalist property relations – the recent events in Vietnam represent a massive defeat for US imperialism. Imperialism’s basic objective was to crush the liberation movement and establish a stable capitalist state in south Vietnam which could be used as a base for attacks on the Chinese and North Vietnamese workers states. This objective provides the measure of imperialism’s present defeat. In its magnitude and its implications the setback to US imperialism in Indo-China can perhaps be compared to the setback it suffered when it “lost” China in 1949.

The victory of the workers and poor peasants of Vietnam is a blow to the current “détente” between the USSR and the USA. The détente is a deal between the Kremlin bureaucrats and US imperialism to hold back the world revolution and preserve the status quo. The Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies’ policy of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism was responsible for severe setbacks to the Vietnamese people’s struggle (Geneva in 1954, for example) but in the end the dynamic of the colonial revolution proved stronger. The danger of subordinating the interests of the Vietnamese masses to peaceful co-existence with imperialism has not ended.

The sacrifices of the heroic Vietnamese people can only be redeemed by the liberation forces pressing forward and consolidating their victory by the establishment of a workers government which would dispossess the landlord-bourgeois forces, carry out a radical agrarian reform, nationalise industry, secure a monopoly of foreign trade, establish democratic liberties and begin the heavy task of national reconstruction. In such a course they will have the support of all progressive forces.