Ngô Văn Xuyết

Ngô Văn Xuyết (Tan Lo, near Saigon, 1913–Paris, 1 January 2005), alias Ngô Văn was a Vietnamese revolutionary who chronicled labour and peasant insurrections caught “in the crossfire” between the French and the Indochinese Communist Party of Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Ho Chi Minh). As a Trotskyist militant in the 1930s, Ngô Văn helped organise Saigon's waterfront and factories in defiance of the Party's “Moscow line” which sought to engage indigenous employers and landowners in a nationalist front and the French in an “anti-fascist,” anti-Japanese, alliance. When, after 1945, further challenges to the Party met with a policy of targeted assassination, Ngô Văn went into exile. In Paris experiences shared with anarchist and Poumista refugees from the Spanish Civil War suggested “new radical perspectives.” Drawn into the Council Communist circles of Maximilien Rubel and Henri Simon, Ngô Văn “permanently distanced” himself from the model of “the so-called workers's party.”