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 international "anti-fascist" alliance.
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."
Once considered "the theoretician of the Vietnamese [Communist Party] contingent in Moscow,"[3] Ho Huu Tuong had become a leading light in the Left-Opposition group Thang Muoi (October).
[4] In 1936 Ngô Văn parted with comrades willing to continue cooperation with "Stalinists" around the weekly, La Lutte and in the presentation of a common "Workers' List" in Saigon municipal, and Cochinchina council, elections.
This produced a weekly Le Militant (which carried Lenin's Testament with its warnings about Stalin, and Trotsky's polemics against the strategy of Popular Front) and an agitational bulletin, Thay Tho (Wage and Salary Workers).
[5] Committed to the notorious Maison Centrale in Saigon, Ngô Văn was disturbed by the case of Nguyen Trung Nguyet, the longest serving female prisoner.
In April 1939 he was back out on the streets, able to celebrate what a later reviewer of his history described as "the only instance prior to 1945 in which the politics of 'permanent revolution' oriented to worker and peasant opposition to colonialism won out, however ephemerally, against Stalinist 'stage theory' in a public arena.
"[8] In elections to the colonial Cochinchina Council a "United Workers and Peasants" slate, led by Ta Thu Thau of the now wholly Trotskyist La Lutte grouping, triumphed alike over the Communist Party's Democratic Front and the "bourgeois" Constitutionalists.
The election had been primarily a tax protest, a rejection of the new French Indochina defence levy that the Communist Party, in the spirit of Franco-Soviet accord, had felt obliged to support.
The lack of connection was made "painfully clear" when they found they had "no way of finding out what was happening" following reports that in the Hongai-Camphai coal region north of Haiphong 30,000 workers (under the indifferent gaze of the defeated Japanese) had elected councils to run mines, public services and transport, and were applying the principle of equal pay.
In Saigon itself, the initiative lay with the Communist-front Viet-Minh supported, Ngô Văn records, by the leadership of the Jeunesse d'Avant-Garde/Thanh Nien Tienphong (Vanguard Youth, a "formidable" movement that had contributed to civil defence and policing under Japanese).
As Ngô Văn's Militia group fell back from the city, they reached out to local peasants: "we explained to them that we were fighting not only to 'drive out the French' but also [drawing the distinction with the Viet-Minh] to get rid of the indigenous landlords, to end the forced labour in the rice fields, and to liberate the coolies."
But for a timely rescue, Ngô Văn, captured on reconnaissance, would likely have been executed by Viet-Minh alongside a surveyor (and La Lutte supporter) condemned for having helped peasants divide expropriated land.
[15] "Harassed by the Sûreté in the city and denied refuge in a countryside dominated by the two terrors, the French and the Viet-Minh," and suffering from tuberculosis, in the spring of 1948 Ngô Văn took the decision to board a merchant ship bound for Marseille.
With his fellow exile Nguyễn Văn Nâm he was persuaded that once in power "so-called 'workers' parties'" form "the nucleus of a new ruling class and bring about nothing more than a new system of exploitation.
Having split with the Trotskyist Parti Communist Internationale over their "defence of the USSR" as a "degenerated workers’ state," the UOI supported Văn in taking issue with his exile community.
When the officials insisted that the red flag workers had mounted on the gate be paired with the tricolour, Van took it as a signal that he would, again, be witness to a sacrifice of class interests to national party-political ambition.
[25] He covered the years of his own engagement both in a substantial history, Việt Nam 1920-1945, révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale [Vietnam 1920–1945, Revolution and Counterrevolution under Colonial Domination] (1996), and in a personal memoir, Au pays de la cloche fêlée : Tribulations d'un cochinchinois à l'époque coloniale [In the Land of the Cracked Bell: Tribulations of a south Vietnamese in the Colonial Era] (2000).
Ngô Văn's last completed work, written in 2004 when he was 91 years old, was an introduction to the history of peasant revolts in China, with special emphasis on their Taoist origins and utopian and libertarian inspirations.