Ngô Văn Xuyết : Vietnamese Revolutionary and Advocate of Peasants and Workers

Ngô Văn Xuyết (Tan Lo, near Saigon, 1913–Paris, 1 January 2005), alias Ngô Văn was a Vietnamese revolutionary who chronicled labor and peasant insurrections caught "in the crossfire" [1] 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 organize 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."