Enver Hoxha

Dagoth Ur wrote:

Maybe Trotsky himself was but Trots have always fallen incredibly short of their master.

Mabool wrote:

lol dude we've been exposing revisionism since before Hoxha even read the Manifesto...

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The Trot narrative is pretty much pro-revisionist, as typified by Cannon's comment: "The Moscow bureaucrats have made a start — that cannot be denied, or ignored. They have confessed something, but they haven't confessed enough yet." And before that: "Whatever the reason for this action of the Soviet congress, the repudiation of Stalin by his heirs is big news and good news — the biggest news and the best news since the death of Stalin himself three years ago."

I am reminded of the December 18, 1961 issue of The Militant which stated that, "Regardless of motivation, the Kremlin's exposure and denunciation of the savagely repressive regime in Albania furthers the process of democratization within the Soviet bloc and the Communist parties internationally." Isn't it amazing how "regardless of motivation" the Soviet revisionists keep on undertaking allegedly good deeds?

In fact the Trots and Soviet revisionists in some cases had the same lines, such as Khrushchev claiming that class struggle no longer existed under socialism, which practically echoed Trotsky's claim in The Revolution Betrayed.

The Trot narrative fails to recognize the counter-revolutionary role of the "secret speech," which was part of the effort to restore capitalism in the USSR by attacking fundamental aspects of Marxism-Leninism under the cover of attacking the "cult of the individual," "dogmatism" stemming from it, etc. They offer no real analysis of why the speech was made.

Mabool wrote:

Mandel was a moron who also said you could forget the French working class for the next 20 years just weeks before May 1968. Also the Revolution Betrayed doesn't say there's no class struggle in the USSR (on the opposite, it correctly characterizes it as a special form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, where class struggle is pretty much implied, and also the entire concept of bonapartism that is used to characterize the USSR is logically contingent on the existence of struggling classes). It just makes fun of the contradiction in claiming "aggravation of class struggle under socialism", he's saying "because there is class struggle, there is no socialism, so stop lying to people about having reached socialism".

Also the SD claim is just funny. It should by obvious to everyone that Stalin stood very much to the right of Trotsky.

Mabool wrote:

It's called proletarian bonapartism. (Which, as I recently understood in a moment of sudden epiphany, explains the name of the pig Napoleon in Orwell's "Animal Farm".)

Mabool wrote:

What do you disagree on?

Dagoth Ur wrote:

Trots have always fallen incredibly short of their master.

Central Committee of the CPNZ wrote:

Before Enver Hoxha died in April 1985, the PLA leadership declared itself in support of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But close study shows that the terms “people’s power” and “people’s state power” were used as virtually interchangeable terms with the dictatorship of the proletariat by Hoxha and other PLA leaders.

In Hoxha’s report to the 8th PLA Congress in 1981, for instance, he declared: “People’s state power is the greatest victory and the most powerful weapon of the working class and the other working masses for the construction of socialism and the defence of the homeland.”

This is just a random selection of one example amongst many. The term “people’s state power” occurs repeatedly throughout Hoxha’s works alongside the term “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

As we have seen, it is nonsensical to use the term “people’s state power”, since all state power rests on “the dictatorship of a single class” (as Lenin put it). State power can never rest on all “the people” belonging to the different classes which still exist after the socialist revolution right up until the era of classless society (i.e. communism). In hindsight, therefore, we must conclude that even in Hoxha’s era the PLA leadership showed theoretical confusion in its defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And this theoretical confusion about the nature of the Albanian state must express a degree of separation between the PLA and the Albanian working class. In practical terms, the Albanian working class cannot have fully consolidated itself as the ruling class in Hoxha’s era, nor can the PLA have completely become the instrument of the proletarian dictatorship.

Given such theoretical and practical weaknesses in creating the dictatorship of the proletariat, it logically follows that socialism must have always been on shaky ground in Albania, despite the outward appearance of good progress being made in Hoxha’s era...

Our research indicates that socialism couldn’t be consolidated in Albania because the leading role of the working class was never brought into full play by the PLA which was hamstrung by the concept of “people’s power”...[1]

Contrary to what Hoxha suggested, state power can never rest on all “the people” – industrial workers, collective farmers, intellectuals, state officials, rural labourers, self-employed tradesmen, etc – who still exist as very different layers of the social strata after the socialist revolution right up until the era of classless society (i.e. communism).[2]

Ray Nunes wrote:

...the Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, lacking any understanding of dialectics, ascribed the rise of revisionism simply to the actions of Khrushchev. As he publicly declared, Stalin made no mistakes. Therefore, Soviet revisionism must have come into the world already fully grown, for it was only 3 years after Stalin’s death that the 20th Congress of the CPSU began the restoration of capitalism. According to Hoxha’s un-Marxist view, just as Minerva sprang into existence fully-grown from the head of Jupiter, so revisionism sprang into existence fully-grown, from the head of Khrushchev. As any person with even a scanty knowledge of Marxism knows, this is sheer nonsense...[3]

To the dogmatist Enver Hoxha therefore, only the formula of the Russian revolution could be applied to any revolutions. If they did not proceed according to this formula, they could not be genuine socialist revolutions. In spite of this, the Chinese revolution did not proceed according to Hoxha’s metaphysical formula, yet it succeeded. Hoxha asserts that it was never a socialist revolution. And yet Stalin, who was claimed by Hoxha to have made no mistakes, called China a socialist country in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR in 1952.

In fact, Hoxha drew most of his lines of attack on Mao from the Russian revisionists, thereby showing that dogmatism and revisionism can turn into each other.[4]

Ray Nunes wrote:

This programme [Lenin’s article On the Question of Dialectics] appears to have been missed by Stalin. For he makes only a brief summary of the law of contradiction in his pamphlet, the law is placed last in his exposition of dialectical laws, and it is not treated as the basic law.

In his treatment of the dialectical method, Stalin expounds four laws. (1) The law of interconnection and interdependence of phenomena; (2) the law of continuous change and development through the supersession of the old by the new; (3) the law of the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa, and (4) the law of the unity and struggle of opposites.

As can be seen, these laws differ from the three ‘classical’ laws, which make no mention of any law of interconnection, though certainly classical dialectics recognises the interconnectedness of phenomena, and is itself a logic of motion and development, in contradistinction to metaphysics.

But the internal content of motion is, as we have seen, contradiction, and the interconnection of a given thing or process with surrounding phenomena is no less attributable to the development of contradictions.

The ‘negation of the negation’ is not mentioned by Stalin. However, it must be said that in regard to change and development, he sees the content of this as the supersession of the old by the new, though he does not use this exact formulation. In connection with the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa, Stalin gives this the status of a distinct law of dialectics, a major law. This is the more surprising as, in spite of quoting from Lenin’s ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, he apparently completely misses Lenin’s view, contained in his (previously-quoted) 16-point summary of the dialectical method which figures prominently in the ‘Notebooks’, namely, that this law of transition is actually a particular case of contradiction.

It is evident from his exposition that Stalin did not realise the overriding importance of the law of contradiction for dialectics and hence was bound to make errors in analysing things...[5]

...Stalin had erred in stating in the Constitution of the USSR in 1936, that there were no longer antagonistic classes in the Soviet Union. In fact the new bourgeoisie was an antagonistic class. It was already in existence then, and grew rapidly in the post-war period, enabling Khrushchev, its foremost representative, to gain support for a usurpation of power, leading to the restoration of capitalism.[6]

Foto Çami wrote:

A similarly great role is played also by the unity of the party, the people, society, which becomes a new motive force that promotes the development of the country. This is connected with the character of the contradictions which exist in the context of unity, mainly as non-antagonistic contradictions, in which the opposites are not in irreconcilable struggle with each other (My emphasis. C.S.R.), as is the case of contradictions under capitalism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Here we have to do mainly with a unity of opposites in which both sides of the contradiction are generally progressive, and their essential interests coincide. Such unity helps society advance, because it assists, creates favourable conditions to give solution to various contradictions existing in this unity, which, thus, is raised to a higher level...

On the other hand, we must not forget that the non-antagonistic contradictions may turn antagonistic. This our enemies are trying to achieve by spreading their ideology, culture and decadent way of life, by encouraging liberalism and bureaucracy, discord and discontent, theft and embezzlement, etc. And this happens whenever the stand towards the class enemy, its ideology and activity, are opportunist and liberal, when vigilance and the stern struggle against it are weakened or altogether neglected, when a wrong policy in connection with the relationships between various classes and strata in society, between cadres and masses, etc., is followed. If Albania did not go through the retrogressive process which occurred in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, this is accounted for by the fact that our Party has known how to treat correctly the two types of contradictions, and has not allowed non-antagonistic contradictions to become antagonistic contradictions. (My emphasis. C.S.R.)[7]

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What is People's Democracy? It contains at least such features as: 1) Political power being in the hands of the proletariat; 2) nationalisation of the industry; 3) the guiding role of the Communist and Working Peoples' Parties; 4) the construction of Socialism not only in the towns but also in the countryside. In China we cannot even talk about the building of Socialism either in the towns or in the countryside. Some enterprises have been nationalised but this is a drop in the ocean. The main mass of industrial commodities for the population is produced by artisans. There are about 30 million artisans in China. There are important dissimilarities between the countries of Peoples' Democracy and the Peoples' Republic of China: 1) In China there exists a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, something akin to what the Bolsheviks talked about in 1904-05. 2) There was oppression by a foreign bourgeoisie in China, therefore the national bourgeoisie of China is partially revolutionary; in view of this a coalition with the national bourgeoisie is permissible, in China the communists and the bourgeoisie comprise a bloc. This is not unnatural. Marx in 1848 also had a coalition with the bourgeoisie, when he was editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung , but it was not for long. 3) In China they still face the task of the liquidation of feudal relationships, and in this sense the Chinese revolution reminds one of the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. 4) The special feature of the Chinese revolution is that the Communist Party stands at the head of the state. Therefore, one can say that in China there is a Peoples' Democratic Republic but only at its first stage of development.

Revolutionary Communist Party of Turkey wrote:

The collapse of socialism in Albania (the only socialist country in the world since the 1960s) towards the end of the 1980s, was the last link in the defeat inflicted in the second half of the 1950s and constitutes the latest victory of the bourgeoisie and imperialism". (p. 9)

"Albania, as a small socialist country, skillfully exploited the opportunities provided by the conflict between the two imperialist blocs from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. It managed to maintain socialist construction in spite of its small size.

The agreement that was concluded in the mid-1980s between the Gorbachevite revisionist bourgeoisie and the western capitalist bourgeoisie was a straightforward conclusion against the proletariat, the peoples and socialism....

The new global conditions left Albania face to face with a unified imperialist blockade, siege, isolation and aggression....

But the PLA did not understand the global changes that had been going on for a long period of time... and the PLA leadership did not display the skills needed for a revolutionary outcome from these grave conditions.... On the contrary, they panicked. They tended to assume an opportunistic position which succumbed to imperialist pressure and threat, and to reactionary internal uprisings. Obviously, this orientation meant taking the road leading to the destruction of socialism.... Socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat were liquidated". (p. 18-20)

csrothach wrote:

Why, then, did "people's state power"

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produce the revisionist clique of Ramiz Alia? What conditions lead to these counterrevolutionaries being able to seize power, when the PLA claimed to be successfully rooting out revisionism?

lalando wrote:

Hoxhaism is funny.

Ismail wrote:

Any particular reason?