Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party

Political party in South Vietnam

| position = Syncretic
| religion =
| colours = Green
| slogan = Labor – Revolution – Personalism(Cần lao Cách mạng Nhân vị)
| country = Vietnam
| flag = Flag of the Cần Lao Nhân Vị Cách Mạng Đảng (Parti Révolutionnaire Personnaliste du Travail) Indomemoires. png

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.

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 Workers and Peasants" (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. When he came back from France, Nhu was passionate about the Personalism of Emmanuel Mounier, a prominent French Catholic philosopher, and believed that Mounier's ideology which rejected Liberalism and Communism (materialism) could be a "third path" to be applied for social development (and Spiritualism) in Vietnam. The Ngô brothers also believed that Personalism could go well with their Third Force which was not in line with French colonialism or the communism of the Việt Minh. For Diệm's regime, Personalism was treated as the only doctrine which restored the best traditional values of Asia and combined them with Western values to innovate the state and serve public interests. It can be a counterbalance to communist doctrine. From April 1952, Nhu's ideas on Personalism were delineated in his speech at Vietnamese National Military Academy in Đà Lat. He contended that, initially, Personalism was a Catholic ideology, though it had universal relevance and was compatible to Vietnam, which had to suffer from the devastation of wars. For Nhu, Personalism was a form of Revolution which was more transformative than Marxist socialism, and he described himself as an advocate of "personalist revolution". Ngô Đình Diệm also understood the term "Personalism" in the etymology of nhân vị, which could mean either "humanity" or "human being". The Ngô brothers used the term Personalist Revolution to frame their nation building programs. Nevertheless, according to some scholars, Nhu's personalism was evaluated as "a vague mish–mash of ideas" or "a hodgepodge" because "it was a mixture of Catholic teachings, Mounier's Personalism, Confucius' humanism, some factors of Capitalism and anti communist spiritualism" and its actual substance was "maddeningly opaque". Thus, even the Vietnamese intellectuals could not understand Nhu's doctrine; neither could Americans, who spent much time in examining his doctrine and gave up. Lately, the values of Personalism (Chủ nghĩa nhân vị) of the Ngô brothers has been revised. According to Nguyễn Ngọc Tấn, their Personalism, along with their Democratic Ethical Regime based on Personalism as a combination of the quintessence of Western values and Asian values, was a contribution to political science, especially in resolving the democratization issue in developing post colonial countries, such as Vietnam today. Nguyễn Lập Duy, on the other hand, has argued that Personalism can be characterized as a form of Marxist humanism.

Initially, the party acted secretly, with networks of cells and members only knowing a few members' identities; when necessary, the party could replace the role of the government. It also included any factors that could help its agents to penetrate the army, national assembly, police, educational system and the media. Fall describes the party as "a state within a state" in its own governmental mechanism, which was what a Communist party would do. In the early years of 1950s, Diệm and Nhu used the party to mobilize support for Diệm's political movements. The cadres of the party were Catholic organizations such as the Union of Catholicism, Catholic Youth and Catholic Society, with Catholic dignitaries and followers, officers in the army. Ngô Đình Nhu was the general secretary of the Central Committee Board including Trần Trung Dung, Nguyễn Tăng Nguyên, Lý Trung Dung, Hà Đức Minh, Trần Quốc Bửu, Võ Như Nguyện and Lê Văn Đông. The party also declared the goals of struggling for the revolutionary ideology: Personalism; constructing the nation in four aspects: spirit, society, politics and economy. The principle of the party was centralized democracy. In its political manifesto, it criticized both Capitalism and Communism. On 26 October 1955, Diệm declared the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam. On 29 October 1955, Diệm promulgated the decree 4 TPP to establish the first government, which embraced most of the Can Lao party's members in key positions. The party had 112/123 positions in the National Assembly. In 1956, Diệm and Nhu established the Personalism Training Center in Vĩnh Long Province, administrated by the bishop Ngô Đình Thục, to train the key personnel for propagandizing Personalism in South Vietnam. The administrative and teaching staff included Catholic priests and followers. On 31 December 1957, Diệm forced the administrative and military personnel in the government to join the training on Personalism. From 1956–1963, the Center trained about 25,000 personnel for the government. In 1961, the party formed a women's wing, the "Women Solidarity Movement", led by First Lady Madame Nhu. The organization formed also military training for women, and organized charity initiatives, like blood donation, distribution of medicines to the village and visits to soldiers on the frontline. During the military coup in November 1963, Diệm and Nhu were assassinated and the party was subsequently banned and dissolved. The party was later rebuilt as in 1965.