2. Twenty-four hours after the agreement is signed all bombing and mining of North Vietnam will end and a ceasefire will take effect in South Vietnam. All American and Allied troops will be withdrawn within 60 days.
This represents the most significant advance for the Indochinese revolutionaries as it gives them a badly-needed breathing space and enables them to regroup and strengthen the liberation forces, It should be recalled that Thieu's army was only saved from complete and total disaster by massive bombing raids and the blockade. 3. After signing, steps will be taken for the immediate return of prisoners of war held by both sides.
The Vietnamese have argued that all political prisoners in South Vietnam are "prisoners of war" and provided this definition is adhered to it further weakens the limited credibility of the puppet apparatus. 4. At ceasefire, the two administrations in South Vietnam (the pupper Thieu regime and the PRG) will negotiate with each other to set up elections for a national coalition government. The two administrations will also negotiate with each other on disposition ind reduction of the troops on each side. This is the most tricky and ambiguous of the pooposals and therefore the most important. How the apparatus of the puppet regime is finally destroyed is an extremely important question and the above clause avoids the issue. It is obvious, however, that a situation of dual power cannot last indefinitely. Given the balance of forces the liberation army is placed in a very strong position after the withdrawal of imperialist and allied personnel. 5. Unification of North and South Vietnam will be realised gradually by peaceful means Fine. Of course a prerequisite being that the question of power will have been resolved in the South prior to reunification. 6. An international committee on military control and supervision will be formed, and an international conference on Vietnam will be called within 30 days of the signing of the peace agreement.
Without any further details on this point it is not possible to make any comments, but the functioning of the International Control Commission set up by the Geneva Conference in 1954 shows that these bodies are useless. 7. The sovereignty and neutrality of Cambodia The broadcast by Hanoi radio on 26th October shows that the fate of the revolution has been the subject of serious negotiations.
Unfortunately, many militants will substitute their own moods and impressions for a clear analysis of the terms of agreement and of the balance of forces in Indo-China. Some childish people regard any negotiations as a sell-out, while others have been overwhelmed by the scale of U.S. bombing, the betrayals of Moscow and Peking and the weight of bourgeois propaganda claiming that the NLF has been defeated. They will see agreement as a mark of that defeat.
The Indo-Chinese people have indeed been terribly isolated during recent months. Small wonder that the Hanoi paper, Nhan Dhan, wrote recently in a tone of suppressed fury: *The vitality of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism shows itself first of all in revolutionary deeds, not in empty words. Compared to capitalist nationalism and national selfishness, proletarian internationalism is like light compared to darkness. The road to revolution is full of fragrant grass and flowers; opportunism is a stinking swamp." But the last few months have also seen the smashing Nixon's "Vietnamisation" policy. leaving nothing but American fire-power to save the puppet regime from disaster. Secondly. the North Vietnamese offensive in the northern region has enabled the NLF to rebuild its power in the politically decisive Mekong Delta and around Saigon. The situation in Laos and Cambodia is also now extremely favourable to the revolutionary forces. In other words, in spite of the criminal betrayals by Brezhnev and Mao, there is a regime of dual power in Indo-China which can rapidly disintegrate the puppet regimes once U.S. military support is withdrawn. Finally, a first analysis of the agreement terms suggests that it is the Americans who have substantially modified As the Anti-Internment League enters their positions and not the Provisional Revolutionary Government.
CENTRAL QUESTION Nevertheless, the PRG's demands evade the central question deciding the fate of the revolution which, as the theoretical organ of the Vietnamese Workers" Party, Hoe Tap. explains, is "a violent overthrow of the bourgeois state apparatus from top to bottom, which can ensure the real subordination of the whole class of exploiters." This means that the victory of the revolution requires the smashing of the puppet armies in Indo-China. Hoe Tap goes on to show the futility of and a two-day picket of Owen Owen's imagining that the state can be smashed via "democratic elections": "Revisionists in the past as in the present have made great efforts to sing the praises of the bourgeois parliamentary system. They have made a big fanfare about the entry of socialism through the parliamentary road'. As a matter of fact democratic rights under the bourgeois parliamentary system are, as Marx put it, nothing more than the right to decide once every three or five years who from the ruling classes should represent' the people in parliament and oppress them."
Provided that the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatuses in Indo-China in other words the puppet armies - is only temporarily