Ho Chi Minh
A theoretical synthesis forged in revolutionary practice
Ho Chi Minh discerned that it was not a question of class exploitation versus national domination. He understood that there is a double axis of domination, in which both class exploitation and national domination are intertwined, and that liberation requires the transformation of both forms of domination. Furthermore, Ho understood that the whole world was in need of liberation, and that the full liberation of the workers of the West would require their solidarity with the Third World anti-colonial movements of national liberation.
The forming of Nguyen the Patriot
Nguyen Sinh Cung, the original name of the historic figure known as Ho Chi Minh, was born on May 19, 1890, in the protectorate of Annam in French Indochina. His father, Nguyen Sinh Sac, became a Confucian scholar, even though he came from a family of poor peasants. After years of study and retaking the rigorous examinations, Nguyen Sinh Sac attained the degree of doctorate of the second class in 1901, an unusual distinction for a person from a small village. However, he did not pursue a career in the imperial bureaucracy, because of his opposition to imperial collaboration with French colonialism; he established a small school instead. In 1906, he relented and accepted a position in the government, but he was dismissed in 1910 for releasing prisoners who had been arrested for participating in demonstrations, for protecting peasants from the demands of landholders, and for imposing harsh punishment on an influential local figure.
The child Nguyen Sinh Cung advanced quickly in his studies, and at the age of 11, his father gave him the name Nguyen Tat Thanh (meaning “he who will succeed”). Thanh was socialized in the environment of the anti-colonial nationalist movement formed by the Confucian scholar-intellectual class (see “The universal meaning of Vietnam: A heroic struggle for independence and socialism,” July 08, 2022). His teachers for most of his formal education as a child and adolescent were Confucian scholars. The renowned scholar and nationalist Phan Boi Chau was a close acquaintance of his father, and Phan asked Thanh to join his modernization movement, but Thanh declined, apparently having reservations in relation to its pro-Japanese orientation. Thanh also studied briefly at a Franco-Vietnamese academy, where he was influenced by anti-French teachers, but he was dismissed from the school for his political activities. At the age of 20, he taught in a patriotic nationalist school, but he disappeared after a year, fleeing colonial authorities.
In 1911, at the age of 21, Thanh obtained employment as a kitchen assistant on a French steamship, which enabled him to see Paris as well as cities in Spain and various African and Asian countries. His writing during these early travels shows that he was impacted by the level of poverty and inequality in Paris. And he noted the similarity of conditions in Africa to those of Vietnam, thus beginning to understand colonialism as a general global process. He also lived temporarily in the United States and London and later lived in Paris, working at various working-class jobs, such as servant, gardener, and vender of newspapers. In addition to his worldly experiences, he was a voracious reader, and his favorite works included Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Lu Xun, and Barbusse.
When Thanh arrived in Paris in 1917 at the age of 27, he immediately became politically active in the city’s significant Vietnamese émigré community. He was the guiding force in the creation of a new organization, the Association of Annamite Patriots, seeking to renovate Vietnamese nationalism, which had become stagnant in the émigré community during the Great War. Phan Chu Trinh, the most prominent member of the Vietnamese émigré community, was one of the directors of the new organization. On behalf of the organization, Thanh wrote a petition that was presented to the ministerial office of the Peace Conference in Versailles. The petition demanded Vietnamese autonomy; freedoms of association, press, and movement; amnesty for political prisoners; equal rights for Vietnamese; the abolition of forced labor; and the abolition of taxes on salt, opium, and alcohol. The petition, dated June 18, 1919, was signed by Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”), and thereafter Thanh would use this name. News of the petition spread quickly in the émigré community, galvanizing the cause of Vietnamese nationalism. At the age of 29, “Nguyen the Patriot” had become a prominent member of the Vietnamese émigré community in Paris.
The Conversion of Nguyen the Patriot to Leninism
Upon his arrival in Paris in 1917, Thanh began to attend meetings of the French Socialist Party. The author of the famous petition to the Peace Conference in Versailles, Nguyen the Patriot thereafter was received with great respect by French socialists.
Nguyen was attracted to socialism from the moment of his first encounter, approaching it from a vantage point principally defined by the colonial situation of the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa. At that moment, French socialism was divided ideologically between social democracy and the communism of Lenin. As he encountered this debate, Nguyen learned of Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Question,” which, by virtue of its affirmation of the importance of the national liberation struggles in the colonies, converted Nguyen into a Leninist.
It is hardly surprising that Nguyen the Patriot/Ho Chi Minh would be moved by Lenin’s thesis, which was among the documents published by the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. The essay demonstrates an advanced understanding, noting that the colonies provide markets, land, and raw materials for the Western imperialist powers, thereby providing material benefits that make possible concessions to workers, which are obstacles to the development of workers’ revolutionary consciousness in the Western countries. The essay maintains that the Western proletarian revolution and the anti-colonial revolution of the colonies must unite, forming a global anti-imperialist movement. The independence of the colonies, Lenin maintained, is the first step to the triumph of the proletarian revolution in the West.
In an article written in 1960, “The Path Which Led Me to Leninism,” Ho Chi Minh described his first encounter with Lenin’s analysis of the colonial question. Describing the debates in the French Socialist Party concerning whether the party ought to join Lenin’s Third International, Ho writes:
“What I wanted most to know—and this precisely was not debated in the meetings—was: Which international sides with the peoples of the colonial countries? I raised this question—the most important in my opinion—in a meeting. Some comrades answered: It is the Third, not the Second, International. And a comrade gave me Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Question,” published by l’Humanité, to read.
“There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness, and confidence it instilled in me. I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!’ After then, I had entire confidence in Lenin, in the Third International.”
The conversion experience had long-term consequences for the political and intellectual development of Nguyen the Patriot. He joined with those members of the French Socialist Party who voted on December 29, 1920, to form the French Communist Party and to affiliate with Lenin’s Third International. He subsequently became a part of the international communist movement, headquartered in Moscow.
Ho undertook various important activities in the name of the French Communist Party, as a representative of Indochina. In 1923, he was invited to Moscow to work for the Communist International (Comintern), where he was assigned to work for a commission dedicated to analyzing the situation of the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. He was in the Soviet Union from June 1923 to October 1924, during which time he took courses at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, the leading institute for training Asian revolutionaries invited to Soviet Russia to study; and he participated in various organizations established by the Russian Revolution, such as the Red Labor International, the Youth International, and the Women’s International.
Nguyen the Patriot, delegate of the colonized
As Nguyen the Patriot participated in the international communist movement, he did so as a true delegate of the colonized peoples, challenging the movement to fulfill in practice Lenin’s thesis on the colonial question. He endeavored to bring the international communist movement to a more advanced stage of genuine internationalism, moving it beyond a context defined by the movements of Western and Eastern Europe. He believed that the key was Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Question.”
Nguyen the Patriot’s effort to broaden the perspective of the international communist movement to include the perspective of the colonized was constant in the years following his conversion experience. In 1921, he was the driving force in the Communist Party’s forming of a new organization of colonial subjects living in France. In 1922, he founded a new journal dedicated to the interests of the colonized peoples of the French empire. As a delegate representing Indochina at the International Peasant Conference in Moscow in October 1923, Nguyen maintained that the Comintern “would become a genuine Communist International only when it included representatives of the Asian peasantry as active participants.” In an article published in 1924 in the International Press Correspondence, the official organ of the Comintern, Nguyen argued that it may appear that the question of Indochina is of little interest to European workers, but in fact the international capitalist class draws its strength from the exploitation of the colonies, from which it obtains raw materials for its factories, a reserve army of cheap labor, and markets for its manufactured products. In the same year, he wrote a report on the conditions of Annam, noting that the industrial proletariat comprised only 2% of the population; that the peasantry had revolutionary potential, because of its patriotism; and the intellectuals of the scholar-gentry class were the most politically active sector, all of which implied revolutionary strategies different from those of the West.
During his time in Moscow, Nguyen the Patriot wrote a book on the process of French colonialism (published in English as French Colonization on Trial), which he had started to write in Paris. He describes the exorbitant rents, taxes and fines and the forced labor imposed on the colonized in Vietnam and in other regions of the French colonial empire. He maintains that indiscriminate violence with impunity is a common practice in French colonialism, including patterns of violence against women. He contends that colonialism presents itself in accordance with the ideals of fraternity and equality in order to hide its exploitative nature. He asserts that French Catholic priests are among the abusers and exploiters.
Addressing the Fifth Congress of the Communist International on June 23, 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc asserted:
“I am here in order to continuously remind the International of the existence of the colonies. . . . It seems to me that the comrades do not entirely comprehend the fact that the fate of the world proletariat, and especially the fate of the proletarian class in aggressive countries that have invaded colonies, is closely tied to the fate of the oppressed peoples of the colonies. . . . You all know that today the poison and life energy of the capitalist snake is concentrated more in the colonies than in the mother countries. The colonies supply the raw materials for industry. The colonies supply soldiers for the armies. . . . Yet in your discussions of the revolution you neglect to talk about the colonies. . . . Why do you neglect the colonies, while capitalism uses them to support itself, defend itself, and fight you?”
In Nguyen the Patriot’s “Report on the National and Colonial Questions” at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International as well as other writings of 1924, he was critical of the communist parties of the West for lacking contact with the colonized peoples and for ignoring the colonial question, thus not following in practice the theory of Lenin on the colonial question.
Nguyen forges a theoretical synthesis in the context of political practice
Nguyen the Patriot possessed a double social and experiential foundation for his understanding. On the one hand, he was an intellectual and activist of the colonized world, formed in the tradition of the patriotic nationalism of the Confucian scholars. On the other hand, he had experienced encounter with Marxism-Leninism and the communist movement in Paris and Moscow from 1917 to 1924. This comprehensive study and political education provided him with the intellectual and moral foundation for forging a creative synthesis of the French Revolution, Marxism-Leninism, and a Vietnamese anti-colonial national liberation perspective.
In accordance with his emerging synthetic understanding, Nguyen saw domination in Vietnam as having a double axis of colonial domination and class exploitation. He believed that the full liberation of the people of Vietnam would require not only political independence from French colonial domination, but also the liberation of peasants from class exploitation by traditional Vietnamese and colonial French landholders. He understood that Third World nationalism alone, without communism, would not liberate the colonized peasant. And he discerned that peasants, while possessing an orientation toward spontaneous rebellion, were unaware of the communist understanding of history and class struggle; and therefore, the peasants needed to be organized, educated, and led to form an effective struggle. He saw the need to disseminate the ideas of communism among the peasants, workers, students, intellectuals, and merchants of the colonies.
At the same time, Nguyen grasped that the workers of the West also needed to be educated beyond what they could understand from their direct experience. He saw the need to educate Western workers and the Western communist parties on the importance of encounter and alliance with the anti-colonial struggles in the colonies, as a necessary condition for attaining their own liberation from capitalist exploitation.
From 1925 to 1945, Nguyen was the leading figure in the development of the Indochinese Communist Party, taking the name Ho Chi Minh in 1942, and in leading the people of Vietnam to a Declaration of Independence from French colonial rule in 1945 (see “The universal meaning of Vietnam: A heroic struggle for independence and socialism,” July 08, 2022).
During this stage of struggle, Ho Chi Minh advocated the forging of a global revolution through complementary movements of workers in the core and of national liberation in the colonized regions, working on a basis of alliance, solidarity, and mutual support. His understanding constituted a subtle reformulation of Lenin’s understanding. Lenin viewed support for national liberation movements as a tactic in the global transition to socialism, in which the decisive political moment would be the taking of political power by a proletarian vanguard in the West. Ho, however, viewed the global revolution as a having complementary dimensions: a proletarian struggle in the core, which would embrace and support national liberation movements; and national liberation struggles in the colonized region, which would seek not merely political independence but would pursue a class revolution within the nation. For Ho, they were different but equal partners, and they would support each other to kill the capitalist snake.
Ho Chi Minh’s view of the world socialist revolution also implied a reformulation of the concept of the vanguard, and here too Ho was subtle. Unlike many intellectuals and leaders in the tradition of Marxism-Leninism, Ho was not suspicious of the peasantry, for he saw the revolutionary spontaneity of the peasant. But he recognized that the peasants needed organization and leadership, and he thus grasped the need for the formation of a vanguard political party composed of enlightened members of the various popular sectors of intellectuals, peasants, and workers, in which education of party members would be a central dynamic.
In Ho’s reformulation, the vanguard of the Vietnamese revolution was formed by “workers,” as in Marxism-Leninism. But Ho had a dynamic concept of workers. In his view, during the transition to socialism, agriculture would be modernized, and peasants therefore would be transformed into agricultural workers. At the same time, intellectuals would learn to complement their intellectual work with manual labor (as Ho himself did during his life). Thus, peasants and intellectuals were “workers,” even though they were in practice workers in formation. But as potential workers, they could become part of the vanguard, if they possessed advanced political consciousness. In actuality, the Workers’ Party of Vietnam was composed of intellectuals, peasants, and workers, with intellectuals being in the majority, but with peasants and workers also playing a significant role.
Ho’s conceptualization constituted a subtle reformulation of the Marxist-Leninist concept of the proletarian vanguard, adapting it to the colonial situation of Vietnam, without it being announced as such. In the colonial situation, the peasants were in the great majority, and they possessed revolutionary spontaneity; and the petit bourgeoisie was the most politically active sector, with a spontaneous orientation toward revolutionary nationalism. The key was the marshalling of forces that emerged naturally from the colonial situation.
Ho always presented himself as a disciple of Lenin, and he was. But he reformulated Lenin’s insights in accordance with the colonial situation of Vietnam. Whereas Lenin envisioned a proletarian vanguard, Ho developed a vanguard consisting of enlightened intellectuals, peasants, and workers. Whereas Lenin distrusted the peasant as susceptible to bourgeois thinking, Ho discerned the revolutionary spontaneity of the peasant. Whereas Lenin experienced the betrayal of the revolution by petit bourgeois socialists, Ho experienced the central role of the Confucian scholar-gentry class in the origin and development of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism. Whereas Lenin saw patriotism as an instrument of the bourgeoisie in manipulating the working class into participating in imperialist wars, Ho saw genuine Vietnamese patriotism as a necessary component of the struggle against colonial domination.
In adapting Lenin to the colonial situation of Vietnam, Ho was following the recommendations of Lenin himself. In his message to the communist organizations of the East, Lenin asserted, “Relying upon the general theory and practice of communism, you must adapt yourself to specific conditions such as do not exist in the European countries. You must be able to apply that theory and practice to conditions in which the bulk of the population are peasants, and in which the task is to wage a struggle against medieval survivals and not against capitalism.”
For Ho Chi Minh, there was never a question of having to decide between nationalist and class revolutions, or between nationalism and socialism. His instincts were clear from the first moment of his encounter with French socialism in Paris: both traditions and movements were valid. The fulfillment of the one would require the fulfillment of the other. Although the two traditions had different assumptions and concepts, with different understandings of structures of domination and different proposed projects for human liberation, he believed that both had formulated self-evident truths. For a philosopher, this situation might have created an epistemological dilemma, requiring the study of philosophers of knowledge. But Ho Chi Minh, a political activist emerging as a known political leader on an international level, worked through the epistemological dilemma by developing a program of action, thus forging what we might call a “practical theoretical synthesis” of the two traditions.
Ho’s program of action was straightforward: national independence and national reunification, establishing the political independence of the nation and control over the territory of the Empire of Vietnam prior to French colonialism; agrarian reform, taking land from the landholders and distributing it to the peasants; people’s assemblies and people’s democracy, establishing structures that defended the political authority of the delegates of the people; a vanguard formed by the most politically conscious intellectuals, peasants and workers, in order to educate the people in the correct path; decisive state action to protect the social and economic rights of the people; and the formation of strategic alliances both within the nation and on an international plane, so that necessary support can be obtained as the revolutionary process unfolds. It was a program of action that incorporated the insights of both Western socialism and Third World anti-colonial nationalism.
Ho’s creative synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and a Third World anti-colonial perspective was appreciated by Fidel Castro, who also formulated a synthesis of Third World nationalism and Marxism-Leninism in the practical context of revolutionary struggle. In an address in Vietnam on September 12, 1973, four years after Ho’s death, Fidel declared:
¨President Ho Chi Minh, understanding the extraordinary historic importance and the consequences of the glorious October Revolution, and assimilating the brilliant thought of Lenin, saw with complete clarity that in Marxism-Leninism there was the teaching and the road that ought to be followed in order to find the solution to the problem of the peoples oppressed by colonialism.
“Comrade Ho Chi Minh, in a brilliant manner, combined the struggle for national independence with the struggle for the rights of the masses oppressed by the exploiters and the feudalists. He saw that the road was the combination of the patriotic sentiments of the peoples with the need for liberation from social exploitation.
“National liberation and social liberation were the two pillars on which his doctrine was built. But he saw, in addition, that the countries that had fallen behind due to colonialism were able to leap forward in history and construct their economy through socialist paths, sparing themselves from the sacrifices and the horrors of capitalism. . . .
“Comrade Ho Chi Minh knew how to adapt brilliantly the eternal principles of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete conditions of Vietnam. History has shown that he was right, because in no other manner would a people have been able to write a page as heroic and glorious as that written by the people of Vietnam, overthrowing first French colonialism and then Yankee imperialism.”
The construction of socialism in practice
The Geneva Accords of 1954 meant the withdrawal of French troops that had been operating north of the seventeenth parallel, and they established international recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the territory to the north of the parallel. From 1955 to 1957, the emphasis of the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was on the reconstruction of an infrastructure that had been severely damaged by the French Indochina War of 1946 to 1954.
At the same time, the first steps toward the construction of a socialist society were undertaken in 1954, and they were intensified and expanded beginning in 1958. A land redistribution program of 1954-1955 brought agrarian reform to a stage beyond the limited reform of 1946. Lower-level agricultural cooperatives were formed, encompassing 43.9 percent of peasant households by 1959. In addition, by December 1957, 40% of manufacturing and retail trade and nearly half of transportation were under collective or state ownership. State factories increased from 15 in 1955 to 107 in 1959. Moreover, fifty-three percent of artisans joined cooperatives by 1959.
In leading the nation in these transformations, Ho was guided by the classic understanding of socialism prevalent at the time, which places emphasis on land redistribution and cooperatives in agriculture; state ownership and workers’ cooperatives in industry; and state investments in infrastructure, education, and health.
On the base of this classic model, the socialist project of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam registered significant gains. Agricultural production increased from 3.6 million tons in 1955 to 5.2 million tons in 1959. Illiteracy was eliminated. School enrollment increased from 540,000 in all of Indochina in 1939 to 1,522,200 in North Vietnam alone in 1959-1960. University enrollment increased from 582 in Indochina in 1939 to 8,518 in North Vietnam in 1959-1960. The number of hospitals in North and Central Vietnam in 1939 increased from 54 in 1939 to 138 in North Vietnam alone in 1959; village health centers, from 138 to 1,500; doctors, from 86 to 292; and nurses, from 968 to 6,020. By 1959, North Vietnam had 169,000 public health personnel working in the countryside. It was yet one more example in the world of the capacity of the state to take decisive steps in defense of the needs of the people, when power over the state is in the hands of the delegates of the people.
Speaking to the National Assembly on December 18, 1959, Ho reported that class dynamics were developing favorably. The landlord class had been dislodged from power, and the working class was expanding in size and leadership capacity. Many peasants were forming cooperatives, and the worker-peasant alliance was strengthened. Revolutionary intellectuals were contributing to socialist construction, and for the most part the national bourgeoisie accepted socialist transformation.
In the address to the National Assembly, Ho reported on a draft of an amended Constitution. He noted that amendments to the Constitution were required, inasmuch as the Vietnamese Revolution was passing to a new stage. He described the one and one-half year process in the development of the Constitution. In July 1958, the first draft of the amended Constitution was presented for discussion by high- and middle-level leaders in the army, mass organizations, administrative departments, and the Party. Following changes introduced through this discussion, the draft was distributed for the entire people to discuss. For a four-month period beginning on April 1, 1959, the draft was discussed in government offices, factories, schools, and other organizations of the people, in the cities, towns, and countryside. This popular consultation led to further changes in the draft. The Committee for the Amendment of the Constitution also received many letters expressing the views of many people and organizations, including Vietnamese nationals residing abroad. The Committee was now presenting the draft of the amended Constitution to the National Assembly for consideration and approval.
In his report, Ho summarized the important characteristics of the draft of the amended Constitution. The Constitution recognizes the Vietnamese state as “a people’s democratic state based on the worker-peasant alliance and led by the working class.” The Constitution affirms that “The Democratic Republic of Vietnam will advance step by step from people’s democracy to socialism by developing and transforming the national economy along socialist lines, transforming its backward economy into a socialist economy with modern industry and agriculture and advanced science and technology.” Thus, the state will seek to eliminate, step-by-step and in accordance with practical possibilities, non-socialist forms of property, such as individual ownership by workers and ownership of means of production by the national bourgeoisie. The state will seek to expand socialist forms of ownership, in the form of state ownership, producer’s cooperatives in agriculture and craft industry, and joint ventures with national bourgeois merchants and industrialists. Ho noted that the formation of cooperatives as well as joint ventures is voluntary; the state encourages movement in this direction but does not mandate it.
In the development of the socialist project of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, we can observe the important components of socialism in practice: the development of new constitutions through a process of active popular participation; the development of structures of popular political participation, involving local citizens councils that elect delegates to provincial and national assemblies, which are alternatives to bourgeois representative democracy; agrarian reform, through which land is taken from an national agricultural capitalist class that, acting in alliance with the imperialist international bourgeoisie, orients production toward a peripheral role in the capitalist world-economy; the development of state ownership, cooperatives, and joint ventures, while at the same time leaving space for small-scale private ownership or even large-scale private ownership that is consistent with a national development plan; decisive state action to protect the social and economic rights of the people in such areas as education and health care; the development of a new citizen that understands and is committed to the revolutionary and socialist transformation; and the promotion of gender equality. It also is evident that socialism is a process that unfolds step-by-step, with each step taken insofar as national and international political conditions permit.
In my commentary of July 5 (“The advance of socialism in Vietnam: The Doi Moi policy renovates socialist construction,” July 5, 2022), I discussed the turn of Vietnam in the 1980s to the policy of Renovation (Doi Moi), which is characterized by a socialist-oriented market economy and by a mixture of capitalist and socialist modes of production, with planning and direction by the state, in accordance with socialist goals and objectives. This shift in direction was driven by three factors. First, in the North, the gains in productivity and standard of living were not sustained through the 1970s. The classic socialist transformations initially had stimulated enthusiastic work and an increase in productivity, but as they elevated the standard of living, the classic socialist structures had become disincentives to work and productivity. New structures that incentivized productivity in the context of a higher standard of living were now required. Secondly, following the reunification of 1975, many peasants in the South resisted the formation of cooperatives, which pointed to the need for a different approach in the South. Thirdly, in the world socialist movement, it was becoming increasingly clear that socialist transformation has to occur in accordance with the principles of the science of economics, if the gains of socialist transformation were to be sustainable in the long term.
Ho Chin Mini departed from this life on September 2, 1969, before the attainment of his lifelong goal of the reunification of Vietnam, and before the need for a change in economic direction became evident. One cannot possibly reflect on the changes of the 1980s without wondering what the greatest leader of the twentieth century would have thought. In my own personal view, inasmuch as he demonstrated throughout his life a persistent capacity to adjust ideals to practical possibilities, I find it difficult to imagine that he would not have agreed with the Doi Moi policies, and easy to imagine Ho Chi Minh patiently explaining to the people the need for the adjustments, if not as a permanent reformulation of the socialist road, at least as a manifestation of common sense intelligence in the current moment.
Conclusion
The Vietnamese road of Renovation, constructed on the foundation of the socialist revolution for national liberation and reunification led by Ho Chi Minh, is the road being taken by the socialist projects of our time, which are offering hope to human civilizations in crises. It is the road of state planning and direction of economies with mixed modes of production, seeking to elevate productivity and to orient production to the satisfaction of the needs of the people. It is the road of states under the political control of delegates of the people, with patriotic affection for the nation and with respect for all the nations of the world as equal partners in the construction of a sustainable and prosperous future for humanity.
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To all on this chain, Vijay Prashad has come out with an edited volume of Ho Chi Minh's writings called, Selected Ho Chi Minh. Those interested might want to look into it also.