former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1907–1988)
Trường Chinh (born Đặng Xuân Khu; 9 February 1907 – 30 September 1988) was a Vietnamese communist political leader and theoretician. He was one of the key figures of Vietnamese politics. He played a major role in the anti-French colonialism movement and finally after decades of protracted war in Vietnam, the Vietnamese defeated the colonial power. He was the think-tank of the Communist Party who determined the direction of the communist movement, particularly in the anti-French colonialism movement. During the transitional period in Vietnam between 1941 and 1956, Trường Chinh was the General Secretary of the Communist Party as well as the real leader of the communist party in terms of designing strategies as well as implementing them. In 1957, after the failure of the Land Reform program, he was dismissed from his post of General Secretary and had less power. Hồ Chí Minh selected Lê Duẩn to succeed him as the General Secretary and he became the most powerful person after the 1960s. However, Trường Chinh was still an influential thinker in the Party during the Second Indochina War and after the reunification of Vietnam; he was head of state of Vietnam from 1981 to 1987. Following the death of Lê Duẩn in 1986, he succeeded Duẩn as top party leader. His last vital role was to carry forward the Đổi Mới renovation that still affects Vietnam to this day.
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If we want our revolution to be successful and our patriotic war and national construction to be victorious, we must rely mainly on the workers and the peasants, of whom the peasants make up the overwhelming majority. The aspiration of tens of millions of peasants of our country at present is national independence and the distribution of land to the tillers.
As a matter of fact, we must clearly see that imperialism is the foremost enemy of our people, because it is the more brutal. It brings troops to invade our country and massacre our fellow countrymen. For this reason, the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal tasks are twin main tasks, but the anti-imperialist task is the foremost task.
Imperialism and feudalism, the two most reactionary forces, have dominated Viet Nam in collusion for more than 80 years now. It was the feudalists of the Nguyen dynasty who sold our country to the French imperialists, and who became the puppet administration, lackeys to the French imperialists who then occupied our country.
Since the beginning or French imperialist rule in Vietnam, the Vietnamese landlord class has relied on the imperialist forces to oppress and exploit the Vietnamese peasants still more harshly. A considerable number of peasants toil all the year round and yet do not ·have enough to eat and to wear. Under the colonialist and semi-feudal regime, when any natural calamity occurred enormous· numbers of labouring peasants would die of starvation. At the end of 1944 and early in 1945, two million of our peasants died of starvation not only due to savage exploitation by the feudal landlord class, but also because the Japanese fascists and the French imperialists brutally robbed them of their resources. This has aroused deep hatred in. the hearts of every peasant in our country.
Land reform is the immediate and major method of accelerating the development of the national economy. Only if the national economy is developed can supplies to the front and the rear area be guaranteed, the people's strength be replenished, and only then will we have enough manpower and material resources to carry on a protracted war of resistance until final victory.
Our people. the overwhelming majority of whom are peasants, are making revolution, are fighting against the aggressors, and are building the country. To bring both our patriotic war and our national construction to victory, we must wipe out the imperialist aggressors and liberate our peasants from the feudalist yoke.
Parallel to these two revolutions and with a view to effectively serving them, we carry out an ideological and cultural revolution. In the field of ideology, we must foster and strengthen proletarian ideology, fight all forms of bourgeois ideology, criticize petty-bourgeois ideology and continue to do away with all vestiges of feudal and other erroneous ideologies. In the field of culture, we inherit in a critical way the national culture, and build for Vietnam a new culture, socialist in content and national in character.
With a view to the implementation of this general line, our Party's policy is on the one hand to strengthen dictator-ship over the enemy of the people, repress the counter-revolutionaries, maintain order and security; on the other, to develop democracy with regard to the people, put their democratic rights into effect in a correct fashion, gradually build and consolidate socialist legality, and create conditions for the people to participate in a concrete manner in the. management of the state.
To overthrow the imperialist aggressor, stress should be laid on the question of national liberation. An anti-imperialist national united front should be founded, and the fire of revolutionary struggle should be concentrated on the imperialist aggressors and the feudalists, their devoted agents, in other words the king, mandarins and village tyrants.
Today, the world socialist system, which consists of thirteen countries in three continents, with a population of more than a thousand million, has been established. The movement of the working class and labouring people in the capitalist countries for democracy and social progress and the national liberation revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America are vigorously growing. The colonial structure of imperialism is swiftly sliding towards disintegration with a momentum that no reactionary force can halt.
The cogency of Marxism precisely resides in its ability to reflect accurately the objective laws of historical development; and to represent the most advanced class, the most revolutionary class of modern society, the proletariat, and hence strike roots into the broad masses, to win the hearts and minds of millions and millions of people, and stir them into an implacable and uncompromising fight against the enemy of their class, against world bourgeoisie, and into the building of a classless, communist society.
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Capitalist primitive accumulation, the emergence of capitalism in the course of history, means essentially savage and ruthless despoliation of small producers by the bourgeoisie. Capitalism came about by the elimination of small production, the abolition of small producers' private owner-ship based on individual labour and its replacement by capitalist private ownership based on exploitation of the labour of the proletariat through the agency of the wage system.