Although it nominally exists alongside the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, it maintains a unitary government and has centralized control over the state, military, and media.

The CPV was aligned with the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War, and implemented a command economy in Vietnam, before introducing economic reforms, known as Đổi Mới, in 1986.

While continuing to nominally hold to Marxism–Leninism, most independent sources have argued that it has lost its monopolistic ideological and moral legitimacy since the introduction of a mixed economy in the late 1980s and 1990s.

[3] De-emphasising Marxism–Leninism, the party has placed emphasis on Vietnamese nationalism, developmentalism, and ideas from the American and French Revolutions, along with Hồ Chí Minh's personal beliefs.

[8] In 1928 the headquarters of the Youth League in Canton (present-day Guangdong), China, were destroyed by the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and the group was forced underground.

[11] On 17 June 1929, more than 20 delegates from cells throughout the Tonkin (northern) region held a conference in Hanoi, where they declared the dissolution of Youth League and the establishment of a new organization called the Communist Party of Indochina (Đông Dương Cộng sản Đảng).

[12] The other faction of the Youth League, based in the Cochinchina (southern) region of the country, held a conference in Saigon and declared themselves the Communist Party of Annam (An Nam Cộng sản Đảng) in late 1929.

[citation needed] In the mid 1930s the party was forced publicly to abandon much of its opposition to French colonialism as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin cared more about strengthening a left-inclined government in France.

After an uprising in Cochinchina in 1940, most of the Central Committee, including Nguyễn Văn Cừ (general secretary) and Hà Huy Tập, were arrested and killed, and Lê Hồng Phong was deported to Côn Đảo and later died.

These included Hồ Hữu Tường and Phan Văn Hùm who, protesting a leadership of "Moscow trainees", had formed an Indochinese group within the Communist League (Liên Minh Cộng Sản Đoàn), the French section of the International Left Opposition, in Paris in July 1930.

[24] Tường was joined in endorsing Leon Trotsky's doctrines of "proletarian internationalism" and of "permanent revolution" by Tạ Thu Thâu of the Annamite Independence Party (Đảng Việt Nam Độc Lập).

Rejecting (in the wake of the Shanghai massacre) the Comintern's "Kuomintang line", Thâu argued against a nationalist accommodation with the indigenous bourgeoisie and for immediate "proletarian socialist revolution".

The two groups published a common paper, La Lutte ("The Struggle"), and presented joint "workers' lists" for Saigon municipal and colonial-council elections.

[26][27][28] After they rallied in August 1945 with other non-Communist forces demanding arms against the French, the Trotskyists were systematically hunted down and eliminated by their former party collaborators under the direction of Tran Van Giau,[29] a fate shared by large numbers of Caodaists, independent nationalists and their families.

In response to French attempts to sow disunity within the Viet Minh, the ICP was officially dissolved and was downgraded to the "Institute for Studying Marxism in Indochina" (Hội Nghiên cứu Chủ nghĩa Marx tại Đông Dương).

By 1955, they had launched a significant campaign to promote personnel with a background in class struggle, at the cost of communists whose claims to authority were based on their leadership in the resistance against the French.

[40] The party explained that the merger and name change was made in light of the "strengthened proletariat dictatorship, the development of the leadership of the working class ... a worker-peasant alliance".

[43] While Lê Duẩn continued to believe in the goals set in the Third Five-Year Plan,[44] leading members within the Communist Party were losing their trust in the system.

At the June 1997 Central Committee meeting, both Lê Đức Anh and Võ Văn Kiệt confirmed their resignations to the ninth National Assembly, which was dissolved in September.

[59] In 2021, General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, was re-elected for his third term in office, meaning he is Vietnam's most powerful leader in decades.

The general secretary presides over the work of the Central Committee, the Politburo, the Secretariat, is responsible for issues such as defence, security and foreign affairs, and chairs meetings with important leaders.

[84] The CPV's claim to legitimacy was retained after the collapse of communism elsewhere in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 by its commitment to the thoughts of Hồ Chí Minh, according to Sophie Quinn-Judge.

Still others see Hồ Chí Minh Thought as a political umbrella term whose main function is to introduce non-socialist ideas and policies without challenging socialist legality.

[4] Minh himself stated that what originally attracted him to Communism was not its doctrines, which he did not at that time understand, but the simple fact that the Communists supported the independence of countries like Vietnam.

While national liberation is the means of taking power, the establishment of a people's democratic regime requires the total destruction of the feudalist, colonialist and imperialist society.

Lai Quoc Khanh, a journalist in the theoretical Tạp chí Cộng Sản wrote: "The people's democratic regime is an objective necessity in the development course of Vietnamese society".

[88] The platform of the 11th National Congress held in January 2011 stated: "This is a profound and thorough revolutionary process and a complicated struggle between the old and the new for qualitative changes in all aspects of social life.

[93] According to the party, the real value of The Communist Manifesto is not that it can provide answers to present revolutionary problems, but the way it explains the gradual liberation of the working class and labourers.

According to Tô Huy Rứa, currently a member of the 11th Politburo: "By participating in the process of globalization complete with its opportunities and challenges, as was predicted by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, the Vietnamese Communist Party and people will further find guidelines for a precious world outlook and methodologies.

Relations with other communist and workers' parties are very important and built on "solidarity, friendship, mutual support in the struggle for socialism in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism and pure internationalism of the working class".