Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party

The Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party, often simply called the Cần Lao Party, was a Vietnamese political party, formed in the early 1950s by the President of South Vietnam Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother and adviser Ngô Đình Nhu. Based on mass-organizations and secret networks as effective instruments, the party played a considerable role in creating a political groundwork for Diệm's power and helped him to control all political activities in South Vietnam. The doctrine of the party was ostensibly based on Ngô Đình Nhu's Person Dignity Theory (Vietnamese: Thuyết Nhân Vị) and Emmanuel Mounier's Personalism. Formation According to Ngo Dinh Nhu, the party was the "fusion" of the groups which were founded by him in the early 1950s. In Northern Vietnam, he collaborated with Trần Trung Dung, a Catholic activist who then became South Vietnam's deputy minister of defense. In central Vietnam, Ngô Đình Cẩn's network of loyalists was Nhu's fulcrum. In early 1954, Cẩn established core groups of supporters inside the Army and civil service of the State of Vietnam. In southern Vietnam, Nhu established a group which served mainly as a roundtable for political debates of intellectuals linked to a journal entitled "Spirit" (Vietnamese: Tinh Thần). In 1953, Nhu allied with Trần Quốc Bửu, a trade unionist who headed the Vietnamese Confederation of Labour with tens of thousands of members. They began to publish a journal called "Society" (Vietnamese: Xã hội), which endorsed the creation of workers' and farmers' cooperatives and unionization rights for industrial laborers in Saigon. Through the alliance with Bửu, Miller argues that the Cần Lao program follows unionism and advocates the co-management of national industry by representatives of capitalists and labors, as well as workers' participation in interest and technological development of industries. According to decree 116/BNV/CT of the Republic of Vietnam, the Cần Lao Party was established on 2 September 1954. Nhu became the General Secretary of the party. Initially, the Party was named the "Personalist Revolutionary Party of Worker and Peasant" (Nông Công Nhân vị Cách mạng Đảng), then this name was replaced by "Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party" (Cần Lao Nhân vị Cách mạng Đảng). According to Miller, the name "Cần Lao" shows Nhu's profound concern in political potential of Vietnamese labors which related to French unionist ideology.