Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 06:19:19 +0100 (MET)
Subject: M-G: UNITE! Info #30en: 1/2 Albania - briefly on present, past


UNITE! Info #30en: 1/2 Albania - briefly on present, past
[Posted: 25.03.97]

Note / Anmerkung / Note / Nota / Anm=E4rkning:
On the UNITE! / VEREINIGT EUCH! / UNISSEZ-VOUS! /
=A1UNIOS! /  F=D6RENA ER! Info en/de/fr/es/se series:
See information on the last page / Siehe Information auf der
letzten Seite / Verrez information =E0 la derni=E8re page / Ver
informaci=F3n en la =FAltima p=E1gina / Se information p=E5 sista sidan.


INTRO NOTE:
This as usual is sent to some newsgroups as well as to the
Marxism-General mailing list managed by the Spoon Collective.
On the latter, there has already been a certain discussion on
the present situation in Albania, one in which I so far haven't
taken part. Below, I shall firstly rather briefly state my support
of some IMO quite sensibe postings made by Vladimir Bilenko in
the course of that discussion, and secondly go into a few points
concerning the recent history of that country - namely above all
those which have to do also with the history of the international
Marxist-Leninist movement.


WHAT'S TAKING PLACE NOW IN ALBANIA?

As the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, with its Super
Cobra attack choppers, Harrier jump jets and 1000 Marines is
leaving the waters off Albania for those off Congo/ Zaire, I'm
going in the other direction, so to speak, and want to turn my
attention away for a while from the latter theatre of international
class struggle, which I've been trying to get to know a little about
in recent months (see postings to M-G list) and to the former,
which at least some 20-30 years ago or so was quite an important
such theatre.

Since small and still poor Albania at that earlier time was the
only country in Europe that quite officially opposed the treason
against socialism and the exploitation and oppression of the
workers and the bullying, infitration and open aggression against
other countries perpetrated by the leaders of what then became
known as Soviet revisionism and social-imperialism, Chrushchev
annd Brezhnev, and the only country on this continent to acclaim
Chairman Mao Zedong in China as the great and correct contiuner
and developer of Marxism-Leninism that he was, it's to be
expected that people will ask:

Now what are the present adherents of Marxism, Leninism and Mao
Zedong Thought saying about events in Albania in more recent
years, and in particular, those in the last months and weeks?

As far as I've seen, no others of those claiming to be such
adherents have "reported for duty" on this until now, at least
not on the Net.  - Well, there (at the moment!) aren't that many
of us either.

And sorry, I can contribute nothing in the way of extra information
on what's taking place in Albania now. But I think that one should
realize, and make clear to others, that as far as any steps in the
direction of proletarian revolution are concerned, one should *not*
at the present time expect such things in that country.

Yes, much of the people has armed itself, and this of course is
one thing the Marxists have always advocated. But it's also the
case that "politics command the gun", and of political develop-
ments in that country, as good as none unfortunately have been
visible in that country lately - from here, at least - except
tendencies towards decay and despair.


SOME SENSIBLE STATEMENTS BY VLADIMIR B.

So when, a couple of weeks ago, some Trotskyite organizations
and some individual Trotskyites, writing to the M-G list, were
beating the drum in a big way about "conditions ripening for a
red revolution" in Albania, or even pretending that such a thing
was under way, and advancing slogans one "loftier" than the
other for it, and another writer, Vladimir Bilenkin - though
defining himself as a Trotskyite himself, as far as I understand -
contradicted this and said approximately that they were talking
bullshit, were "recommending to a drowning man that he take
his vacation next year at Brighton" etc and in fact were mis-
informing people about the true situation, this latter absolutely
should be supported as showing some good sense on his part.

Vladimir in fact even drew the conclusion from the behaviour in
this connection of those others that "there is something rotten in
the house of Trotskyism". Quite correct too! In fact, there always
was, very much so. But I shall not at this time try to argue why,
in the historical conflict that gave rise to the particular
political trend of Trotskyism, Stalin was basically right and
Trotsky on all main points clearly wrong, eventually turning into
a traitor. This because there actually are some questions here on
which we Mao Zedong adhererents so far have not known, let alone
informed people in general about, the full truth, and much of that
history still remains to be investigated and analysed properly.


ONE BRIEF NOTE ON THE USE, HERE AGAIN, OF THE
SYSTEMATICALLY CONFUSING TERM "STALINISM"

In connection precisely with Albania and its recent history, once
more the very typical, and completely confused and confusing,
Trotskyite/openly-bourgeois term "Stalinism" has been bandied
about, the entire former Albanian regime, or regimes, under
once-Marxist Enver Hodxa being characterized as "Stalinist",
this *both* referring to the time when this regime actually was
socialist - until, approximately, 1976-1978 - and  *also*
referring to that later time when it had clearly degenerated into
a revisionist, in reality bourgeois, regime, which e.g. started
vilifying Mao Zedong openly in 1978 and as all know made a
complete mess of everything economically, suppressing the
masses under hypocritical, phoney, references to "Marxism" etc
and finally being overthrown in 1991, to hardly anybody's regret.

Marxists differentiate between proletarian revolutionary politics
on the one hand, and openly-bourgeois or else revisionist on the
other, as irreconciliably opposed to each other. They analyse
the regime of a country as being either a dictatorship of the
proletariat - socialism, under which the majority of people really
has the decisive say - or a dictarorship of the bourgeoisie, which
may be a revisionist one, i.e. masquerading as "socialism".

The term "Stalinism" systematically confounds those things. Its
users apply it *both* to actual socialism *and* to revisionism.
The system in the Soviet Union in the 1930:s - which in fact was
socialist though with some serious deformations - they say was
"Stalinist", and precisely the same thing they say about the
quite obviously revisionist, social-imperialist regime in that
country from the 1960:s on and until 1991. Both systems, they
claim, actually were some form of "socialism", only, in both
cases, "bureaucratically deformed".

Thus, the really important historical facts, such as the bourgeois
(revisionist) restoration that took place, respectively was
completed, in the Soviet Union in the mid-late 1950:s, for
instance, get to be concealed, are transformed into "non-facts",
by the systematic use of that terminology. Corresponding
confusion is created about the modern history of China and
also that of Albania. Trotskyism above all is about confusing
people, not least the members of Trotskyite organizations, and
depriving them of the very instruments with which to think, in
practice, as fact after fact after fact have shown, it has always
been an ideology of licking the boots of the very worst
reactionaries that can be found in the world at any given time.

That stupid babble by a number of those Trotskyites concerning
Albania which one self-proclaimed member of their community,
much to his credit, squarely denounced, is one more example
of this.


WHAT ACTUALLY DID TAKE PLACE IN ALBANIA IN
RECENT DECADES?

In 1948, there was a break between Stalin in the Soviet Union,
in the one hand, and Tito in Yugoslavia, on the other. Stalin, in
the main at least, was in the right. Tito's "League of Communists"
became the first party to embark on what became known as "modern
revisionism". It basically sold out to US imperialism.

Among other things, Tito apparently had some chauvinistic-
expansionist regional designs, though I must admit I don't know
the exact facts on this. At any rate, I on the train to my then
comrades in Berlin(West) at one time in the 80s talked to an
Albanian, who - unusual to hear from anybody at that time - had
something positive to say about Stalin, namely, that he in the
late 40s had helped prevent Tito from getting all Albanians -
a minority of which lived and live in the (ex-)Yugoslav province
of Kosovo - in under Yugoslav rule. This may well be correct.

Later, the revisionist Chrushchev stopped Soviet criticism of
Yugoslavia and made believe that that country was "socialist"
after all, which was one of the things that earned him the just
open criticism both by the Chinese and also by the Albanian
communists starting from approximately the year 1960. One
of the Chinese articles in the famous Sino-Soviet "Great
Polemics" in the early 60s was entitled "Is Yugoslavia a
Socialist State?". Conversely, the Soviet revisionists in the
beginning made "the erring Albanian party" a main target of
their unjust attacks, which they at first were reluctant to
direct against the much bigger Chinese party and country.

In the early-mid-70s, Albania not undeservedly was one of the
"model countries" for many leftists, with or without quotation
marks, e.g. in Europe. Led by Enver Hodxa and his Albanian
Party of Labour (APL), it had in fact told Chrushchev off and
did at least make some economic progress. Precisely how great
that was I cannot tell, but visitors at the time could see that
people in general at least were managing.


CLEAR - AND NOT UNSURPRISING - WEAKNESSES IN THE
ALABANIAN PARTY AS COMPARED E.G. TO THE CHINESE

The Albanian communists however never developed that grasp
of ideological struggle, of continuing the revolution under the
dictatorship of the proletariat, of the necessity of making
cultural revolution and of relying on the masses of people that
the Chinese communists did under Mao Zedong's leadership.

This among other things was reflected too in the APL:s analysis
of the international situation at that time, in which there were
some not unimportant errors. There was a criticism, for instance,
of this, without any names being mentioned, in one very vital
article that Klaus Sender, the chairman of the small German
party KPD/ML(NEUE EINHEIT) (comrades of mine 1974-1990, during
which time I learned some of the most important things, I'd
say, that I know today), wrote in his exile here in Malmoe,
Sweden, in 1973 and to whose later translation into English (too)
I contributed: "The International Situation, Europe and the
Position of the Marxist-Leninist Parties". And sorry I haven't yet
put that still today illuminating text on the Net - here's a quote
>from p. 11 of its English translation, eventually published in the
UK in 1976, which i.a. criticized the then comrades in Albania:

"Here there also are a number of erroneous views among the
Marxist-Leninists, which quite definitely must be eliminated, e.g.
that view that puts into the foreground - absolutifyingly - the
contest for influence in Eastern Europe between the Western
imperialists and Soviet revisionism, but which either left out or
put into the the background the fact that the ambitions of Soviet
revisionism are directed against the oppressed nations and
people, against the movement for disengaging from the super-
powers by nearly all countries, and this including the European
countries and including the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany]."

"Or for instance that view which systematically denies the danger
of an imperialist aggression or a seizure of influence in Europe,
and this including the FRG, by means of threats and extortion by
the Soviet Union. This is all the more important, as the aim of
Soviet revisionist social-imperialism has been, and still is today,
to obtain a breakthrough in Europe, to get the whole of Europe
as far as possible under its control, as a key link in its plans
for world domination."

"For our Party, however, it is essential to oppose these
ambitions of the social-imperialists and the attempts at linking
up with them, to take our stand in the international showdown and
support the struggle for independence. The international
revolutionary proletariat must enter the scene and fight the
dangerous, aggressive ambitions of Soviet revisionist social-
imperialism".

This last element, which was equally stressed in the propaganda
emanating from the Communist Party of China under the leader-
ship of Mao Zedong at that same time, was conspicuously absent
in that emanating from Hodxa's Albanian Party of Labour.

[Continued in part 2/2]



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