Ngo Van

Ngô Văn Xuyết (Tan Lo, near Saigon, 1913–Paris, 1 January 2005), alias Ngô Văn, was a Vietnamese Trotskyist who became a writer in France. Born in Vietnam, he joined the Trotskyist movement as a young man. After the repression of Trotskyism in Vietnam in 1945, he moved to France, where he wrote about his experiences and recent Vietnamese history.

Ngo Van left his village at the age of 14 to work in a metallurgical works in Saigon, and soon became involved in the strikes and demonstrations and strikes that erupted periodically against the French colonial power in support of freedom of assembly, of the press, of travel and of education. There was already a history peasant revolts against colonialism, which were brually repressed, by the execution of leading activists, or their deportation to the infamous penal colony of Poulo Condore.

He was forced to end his formal education, but, enrolled under a false name, he read Marx in the Saigon municipal library after work. He came into contact with the Trotskyist left opposition group in Saigon opposed to the general line of the Indochinese Communist Party, emphasizing the importance of a movement based on the working class as against the nationalist oriented policy of Nguyen ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh).

In Saigon, the Trotskyists and Stalinists cooperated for three years (1933–36) in a united front around the legal newspaper La Lutte, which was published weekly in French to get around laws banning publications in the vernacular quoc nu or Vietnamese. Their candidates were elected to the municipal council. But after the French government signed a pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union in May 1935, the French, and soon the Indochinese, Communist Parties gave up their opposition to French militarism and colonialism. Following the October group led by Ho Huu Tuong, Ngo Van and some activists formed the League of Internationalist Communists for the Construction of the Fourth International, while other Trotskyists remained in the La Lutte alliance. Ngo Van set type for the new group’s clandestine literature.

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