Learning from Resistance in Vietnam 50 Years After the Fall of Saigon
Revisiting Giap's People's War, People's Army in the Age of Empire Collapse
Fifty years ago this week, the last U.S. troops were airlifted out of Vietnam. The world watched as helicopters hovered over the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evacuating diplomats and allies in a scene that would come to symbolize the end of America's longest war—until the next one. To many, it looked like a retreat. To others, it looked like justice long delayed.
But beyond the embassy walls and the urban chaos, the story of Vietnam was written in rice paddies, jungle trails, and mountain passes. It was carried on the backs of barefoot guerrillas and whispered through the villages that fed and sheltered them. It was a war not won by superior firepower, but by strategic patience, deep roots in the people, and a vision of liberation that outlasted empires.
At the center of that story stands Võ Nguyên Giáp—commander, yes, but also a philosopher of revolutionary war. His book, People’s War, People’s Army, isn’t just a manual for guerrilla tactics. It’s a blueprint for how oppressed people—under-resourced, outgunned, but determined—can outmaneuver overwhelming power through unity, discipline, and belief in the long arc of history. You can download a pdf copy at the bottom of this post.
Why Giáp’s Book Still Matters
People’s War, People’s Army was first published in the aftermath of Vietnam’s victory over French colonialism and at the dawn of what would become the full-scale American war. It is not a memoir or retrospective—it is a wartime document. A manifesto. A manual for how revolution is conceived, organized, and fought by those who have little but their will, their land, and each other.
Giáp wrote not to reflect on the past, but to prepare for what was coming. He laid out a framework for people’s war rooted in political clarity, mass participation, and strategic endurance. It was a call to arms—but just as much, a call to build consciousness, to forge a disciplined force not just militarily, but morally.
In the West, the book has been largely dismissed or misread—pigeonholed as Communist propaganda or dry military theory. But that’s a mistake. Giáp was not simply a general repeating Maoist slogans. He was a teacher, a student of history, and a strategist who grasped the unique conditions of Vietnam and shaped a resistance that could outlast and outmaneuver superior armies. To ignore his insights is to ignore one of the most successful revolutionary strategies in modern history.
What Giáp offers is not a manual to be imitated word for word, nor a relic to be honored and shelved. He offers something more dangerous—and more useful. He offers a way of thinking: a strategy rooted in clarity, humility, and the unwavering belief that people—not weapons, not states—are the decisive force in history.
His book doesn't demand that we repeat his war. It demands that we study our own.
Because what Giáp gives us is not a map—it’s a compass.
Not a blueprint—but a mindset.
A framework that thinks like revolutionaries do.
And that matters more than ever, because the terrain we’re fighting on today isn’t the same.
A Different Empire, A Different Terrain
Giáp’s war was against an occupier. Foreign boots on native soil. Colonial flags over ancestral land. The mission was brutally clear: drive the imperialists out, reclaim sovereignty, build a nation. The enemy wore different skin, spoke a different language, flew in from oceans away. It was a war of national liberation.
Today, the colonial empire wears a badge, signs your paycheck, runs your power grid, builds your roads, streams your entertainment, and lives in your mirror. We don’t face a distant empire—we live inside it. It’s not just a government or military—it’s a system, a culture, a set of infrastructures that mediate how we eat, move, learn, labor, and even think.
It’s industrial capitalism that extracts not just resources, but relationships.
It’s digital surveillance that maps our behavior, commodifies our desires, and weaponizes convenience.
It’s settler colonialism that erased Indigenous worlds to install fences, prisons, pipelines, and private property.
It’s fossil-fueled modernity that degrades the very biosphere we depend on, sold to us as “progress.”
There’s no foreign power to expel—because empire is the power grid. It’s the app. It’s the data center. It’s the zoning board and the grocery chain and the algorithm and the pension fund. It’s in our bodies, our cities, our language. This is not a war of borders. It’s a war of structures and stories.
And so, our terrain is radically different. It’s urban and dispersed, not rural and cohesive.
It’s fragmented by race, class, and ideology, not unified by national identity.
It’s networked, digital, and always watched, not hidden in forests and hills.
In this world, resistance is no longer territorial—it’s relational. It’s about how we organize our communities, where we place our loyalty, and what kinds of life we make possible amid collapsing systems. It’s not about redrawing maps—it’s about rewiring society.
This is a key distinction from Giáp’s context. He fought to build a state—we fight to disentangle from one. For us, victory is not seizing the machine, but learning how to live without it, beyond it, or in spite of it. The goal isn’t to take power—it’s to break the spell of domination and regenerate the commons from below.
Resistance Then and Now: Comparing Frameworks
Giáp’s Vietnam was a country in motion—colonized, rural, hungry for self-determination. Its people were poor, but united by language, land, and memory. The enemy was clear: foreign occupiers backed by tanks, aircraft, and imperial arrogance. Giáp’s framework thrived in this clarity. A centralized party could organize the countryside, rally the peasants, build parallel institutions, and transform guerrilla cells into a national army.
That was then.
Today, the context of resistance—especially in the United States and across the Global North—is far more complex and fragmented. The population is diverse, divided, and often disoriented. The terrain is digital as much as physical. The empire isn’t an occupying army; it’s the economy, the police, the newsfeed, the grocery store, the infrastructure of everyday life. Our oppression is not only external—it is internalized, automated, and algorithmically enforced.
This difference is not just logistical—it’s philosophical.
Movements like the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the Kurdish freedom struggle in Rojava echo some of Giáp’s strengths—territorial defense, deep community roots, and clear political education—but they also deviate profoundly. They reject the centralized state as the end goal. They organize through confederalism, assembly, and local autonomy, not Leninist hierarchy. Their resistance is not to build a party-led nation-state, but to reclaim communal life from the death grip of empire.
And in the U.S., the picture is even more fluid. There is no coherent national movement. No single party or ideology can unite the working class, the dispossessed, or the ecologically conscious. Instead, resistance sprouts in a thousand scattered fronts: mutual aid pods, land defense camps, labor strikes, community fridges, hacker collectives, forest occupations, and prison abolition networks. These aren't coordinated columns—they’re constellations.
So we must ask: Can a war fought in rice paddies teach us anything on asphalt and fiber optic cable?
The answer is yes—but only if we read Giáp not as a tactician of a past moment, but as a strategist of how people resist power under constraint. His vision must be translated, not transplanted. We need to know how his framework breaks under modern conditions—and where it still holds.
Because while the forms have changed, the stakes remain: How do we resist an empire that has made itself indistinguishable from daily life? How do we reclaim agency in a world designed to make us feel powerless? And how do we organize not just to survive the collapse—but to shape what comes next?
What Giáp Still Offers: Core Principles Across Time
Even as the landscape of struggle has shifted, Giáp’s framework continues to offer hard-won principles that outlast the specifics of time, place, and ideology. While we cannot copy his methods wholesale, we can study the architecture of his thinking—the strategic skeleton beneath the tactics. In that structure are lessons that remain crucial for today’s decentralized, regenerative resistance.
1. The People Are the Decisive Force
Giáp's most unshakeable belief was that power does not reside in weapons, governments, or elite institutions—it resides in the organized will of ordinary people. In his words, “Our army is the people's army. Our army fights for the people and is supported by the people.” Today, when resistance can feel isolated or overrun by spectacle, this principle is a grounding force: the legitimacy of struggle flows from connection with the people—not abstraction, not ideology.
2. Time Is a Weapon
Giáp viewed time not as a limitation but a tool. He practiced strategic patience, using the asymmetry of the struggle to his advantage. He knew that empires could win battles and still lose the war if they were worn down politically, morally, and logistically. In a culture of instant gratification and burnout, this is a radical proposition: revolution is not an event—it’s a rhythm. It’s won by those who can sustain, adapt, and outlast.
3. Terrain as Ally
For Giáp, terrain was never neutral—it was a weapon. He turned forests, rivers, and mountains into shields and traps, understanding how to fight on favorable ground. Today’s terrain includes urban zones, infrastructure networks, cyberspace, and even cultural memory. Resistance must adapt to each environment, moving fluidly and learning to make the landscape—whether digital or physical—work against empire, not for it.
4. Political Work Is Indivisible from Military Action
Every ambush, every supply line, every liberated zone was also a political classroom. Giáp saw revolutionary struggle as a form of mass education—raising consciousness, teaching discipline, modeling solidarity. In our time, where tactics often substitute for strategy, this is a crucial reminder: actions must not only disrupt the empire—they must illuminate a path forward.
5. Organization Beats Inspiration
Giáp understood that charismatic speeches don’t win wars—logistics, discipline, and structure do. His fighters operated in cells, moved with coordination, and were trained to sustain struggle even when cut off from central command. For today’s movements, which often celebrate decentralization, this doesn’t mean abandoning autonomy—it means investing in resilience, readiness, and mutual accountability.
These principles are not bound to any one revolution. They are the DNA of insurgency in a world tilted toward domination. And as empire reshapes itself, these principles become tools for new forms of resistance—not to recreate Vietnam, but to fight our own war on our own terms.
Guerrilla Logic in the Heart of Empire
Giáp’s people’s war followed a clear arc: strategic defensive → strategic equilibrium → strategic offensive. He understood that revolution begins from weakness, matures through endurance, and culminates in a decisive shift—not just in power, but in perception. His genius wasn’t only in battle planning—it was in knowing when to wait, when to strike, and how to turn time and terrain into tools of transformation.
But what does that look like inside the heart of an empire—where the enemy is not foreign troops, but a system embedded in our daily lives?
In today’s context, the strategic defensive might look like:
Building mutual aid networks, tenant unions, and solidarity economies.
Defending Indigenous lands, forests, and water from extraction.
Cultivating food sovereignty, neighborhood autonomy, and digital self-defense.
This is the stage of base-building—when the primary task is survival, support, and connection.
Strategic equilibrium emerges when resistance begins to deny the empire its total control:
Sabotaging infrastructure that sustains exploitation.
Coordinating mass refusals—strikes, blockades, walkouts.
Creating liberated zones of life and culture that defy commodification and surveillance.
This stage isn't about overpowering the empire—it’s about neutralizing its dominance, exposing its contradictions, and reshaping the narrative.
And what would strategic offensive mean in our context?
Not a march on the capital or seizing the state. But rather:
Withdrawing legitimacy from empire—so thoroughly that its claims to authority begin to collapse.
Scaling up alternative institutions that render domination obsolete.
Coordinating strategic disruption—targeted, precise, deeply moral, and collectively defended.
This is where the logic of a decentralized form of warfare enters. Not war in the conventional sense, but a campaign of refusal, resilience, and regeneration:
Refusal to participate in extraction.
Resilience through networks of care, healing, and mutual defense.
Regeneration of ecosystems, culture, and community from the ruins of industrial civilization.
In this view, the guerrilla is no longer just a fighter in the hills—it is the neighbor growing food on stolen land, the worker sabotaging the machine, the coder disrupting surveillance, the healer holding community together after the storm. The guerrilla thinks strategically, moves with discipline, and acts with love for life and freedom.
Giáp’s stages weren’t just military—they were metaphors for the rhythm of revolution. And even in the belly of empire, that rhythm can still beat.
A People’s War Without a Party
One of the most significant divergences between Giáp’s model and our current moment is the role of the party. For Giáp—and for most 20th-century revolutionary movements—the vanguard party was essential: it provided ideological clarity, strategic leadership, and organizational cohesion. It acted as both compass and engine for the revolution.
But today, particularly in the Global North, the party form feels less like a solution and more like a relic. Attempts to recreate the disciplined, top-down party structure often falter under the weight of internal conflict, state infiltration, and cultural dissonance.
So what fills that vacuum?
If we are to fight a people’s war without a party, we need new forms of coherence. We need ecosystems of struggle—interlinked, diverse, autonomous—but aligned by shared principles. Not a chain of command, but a web of trust. Not a centralized platform, but distributed infrastructure—where mutual aid, resistance, education, and healing can all reinforce one another.
In such a model:
Political education happens in book clubs, kitchens, and block parties—not just cadre meetings.
Strategy is shared through zines, encrypted group chats, and convergences—not five-year plans.
Discipline emerges from relationships and accountability, not dogma or hierarchy.
We must learn to combine spontaneity with intentionality, autonomy with coordination. This means developing codes of conduct, not just slogans. It means cultivating resilience, not just outrage. It means treating revolution not as a spectacle, but as a culture of practice.
Giáp’s emphasis on ideological clarity, morale, and organization still holds—but we must transpose those virtues into new instruments. The party was once the heart of revolutionary coherence. Today, perhaps it is the network, the commune, the node, the biome.
This is not to abandon strategy—it’s to re-root it in the reality of now. And to take seriously the idea that revolution can be disciplined, regenerative, and radically democratic all at once.
Let’s Get Started
“It is not the number of troops, nor the weight of weapons, but the justice of the cause and the unity of the people that determine victory.”
—Võ Nguyên Giáp
We are not peasants in a jungle. We are not led by a party. We do not have a single front, or even a single name for our struggle.
But we live under empire—one that alienates, exploits, and devours both people and planet. And like all empires before it, this one will fall. The only question is what we build in its place, and how many of us survive the collapse to do so.
Giáp offers no instructions for our exact conditions. But he offers something just as vital: a way of thinking, of resisting, of organizing for the long war—not with despair, but with courage and discipline. Not with illusions of victory overnight, but with a deep understanding that when people fight together with clarity and love, they can move mountains.
Let’s read his words not as a relic, but as a tool.
Let’s learn to fight—not to dominate, but to liberate.
Let’s begin.
Fantastic writing!