Poet Ho Chi Minh,
who punches from Vietnam
to all humanity.
No cannon will erase
the furrow of your rice field.
The right to live in peace.

So sang Victor Jara, the legendary Chilean singer-poet, on behalf of millions around the world who were inspired by the heroism of the Vietnamese people, and by their leader, Ho Chi Minh.

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh / We shall fight, we shall win!

For a revolutionary whose name is immortalised in songs and slogans worldwide, astonishingly little of Ho Chi Minh’s writing is available to a global readership. This volume seeks to fill that gap in some measure.

It is often said of Ho Chi Minh that he was not a theorist and that he did not leave behind a corpus of theoretical texts. This is a narrow and false judgment. Ho Chi Minh did not have the time to set out a major theoretical treatise on the nature of the Vietnamese Revolution, but the texts he left behind – a fraction of them collected in this volume – help us to understand the theory that enabled him to lead the Indochinese Communist Party and then the Workers Party to victory against imperialist aggression and to start the process of constructing socialism in Vietnam.

HO CHI MINH
Ho Chi Minh (19 May 1890-2 September 1969) was the foremost leader of the Vietnamese anti-imperialist resistance and revolution. He served as Prime Minister of Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1945 to 1955 and President from 1945 until his death.

VIJAY PRASHAD
Vijay Prashad is the author or editor of about thirty books, including The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World, and Washington Bullets. He is the Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Chief Correspondent for Globetrotter, and Editor at LeftWord Books.