«The party should not be a party of the old type, a party similar to that of the Social-democrat Second International infested with decay, inactivity, nepotism, factionalism and betrayal of the interests of the working class. We want a party… capable of leading the working class in struggle to victory…» (Resolution of the Meeting of the Communist Groups, 8 November 1941, in: Principal Documents of the PLA, vol. 1, p. 23, Alb. ed.)
Today — 8 November 2021 — marks 80 years of the founding of the historic Communist Party of Albania, later Party of Labour of Albania. On this date, the Korça and Shkodra groups, led by Comrades Enver Hoxha and Qemal Stafa respectively, united in one Party to fight in a National Liberation War for the emancipation of the long-oppressed Albanian people.
The Party of Labour, a Party tempered in steel through some of the most difficult conditions any Communists have ever faced, found themselves a heavy opponent in the savage Italian fascists and barbarous German nazis. A long-oppressed nation under all sorts of imperialist rule — with the short exception of the 6 months following the June Revolution in 1924 — the Albanians knew the importance of the complete and total liberation of the country. Thousands of Albanian patriots — patriots who stood up to the fascist war machine — lost their lives fighting with this glorious Party in the lead, including Qemal Stafa. The art of military strategy, learned and applied with consistency by the Party and Enver Hoxha, in joint collaboration with the glorious Red Army and its Marshal Stalin, never bowed for one second to the occupiers, nor their Zogite-Ballist collaborator lackeys. It was this military strategy that defeated the armies of Mussolini and Hitler. Enver Hoxha’s speech in Tirana after the liberation of the capital remains one of the most monumental artifacts in Albanian history. On this occasion, he said: «Today another page is being opened in our history, a page which it is in our power to write, and which we shall make as glorious as our war against the occupiers: this is the battle to reconstruct Albania, restore the economy, raise the culture and education of our people, and raise their social, economic and political level.» (Enver Hoxha: Speech Delivered on Independence Day and on the Arrival of the Democratic Government in Tirana, 28 November 1944, in: Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 406–407, Eng. ed.)
But the war was not yet over — the international policy of the Party was its greatest merit. Enver Hoxha, in complete solidarity with the national liberation war the fraternal Yugoslav peoples were waging, ordered two divisions of the Albanian national liberation army to help liberate Yugoslavia. No small task, Enver personally entrusted these divisions to be commanded by the then 19-year-old political commissar Ramiz Alia. Under the command of Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia, the Albanian national liberation army liberated entire regions of Montenegro and Bosnia. Thousands of Albanian suffered casualties fighting with the heroic Yugoslav peoples, of whom were represented by the Chief of the Supreme Staff, Arso Jovanović. This help was proclaimed as a great internationalist aid at the time, but the Titoites would later proclaim that they liberated their territories without any outside help in a campaign of nationalism. But it did not matter to the Party of Labour, their principled policy needed no revisionist approval. Helping Yugoslavia in its liberation was a matter of conscience, and the Party knew how much their help meant to the Yugoslav peoples, regardless of whether or not the Titoites denied that this help ever occurred. Thus was the internationalist nature of the Party of Labour of Albania!
When the Yugoslav renegades turned against the Soviet Union and the countries of People’s Democracy, the policy of the Party of Labour, protected and guaranteed by the great Bolshevik Party, with J.V. Stalin at the head, was held up in steel-like unity with the people. The Albanian people and Party knew how to recognize the savage Great-Serb policy of oppression pursued by the Tito-Ranković clique, it was the same as that pursued by their predecessors, the Karadjordjević monarchists. Their emissary Koçi Xoxe, trained personally by Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, was the «chosen one» to take control of the Party and State. They pursued a policy of manipulation and intrigue (proved fully in the transcripts of the Rajk trials) so thoroughly that they established themselves multiple spy cliques within the Albanian Party and four main spies. That of the aforementioned Koçi Xoxe, Sejfulla Malëshova, Nako Spiru, and Mehmet Shehu. The second was the first to go, used as a scapegoat, being an obvious rightist and disciple of the enemies the USSR fought against in the 1930s, the bloc of the Trotskyites and Rights. Nako Spiru was second; after the Titoites turned against him, he tried to cozy up to the Marxist-Leninist leadership and especially the Soviet Union. He went so far as to almost expose all the intrigues and plots of the Titoite revisionists, but to save their reputation, the Titoites blackmailed him with his own links with imperialism. Nako Spiru had no easy way out and ended up committing suicide. Koçi Xoxe eventually gained a majority on the Political Bureau, but just at the right time, he was exposed after the historic letters of the CPSU(b) to the Yugoslav Party. In his trial, he confessed to espionage on behalf of American and British imperialism, as well as Yugoslav revisionism. The last card of the Titoites, a disciple of Nako Spiru, Mehmet Shehu was not utilized so quickly. He was saved as an undercover agent for 40 years, finally dragged out when the topic of the assassination of Enver Hoxha became urgent for the imperialists. But it all came for not, he ended his life just the same as Nako Spiru. Throughout all those years, the policy of the Party against Yugoslav revisionism was principled and correct, never forgetting the betrayal which the Titoites made against the Yugoslav peoples, the Albanian peoples, and the proletariat of all countries. It may be said that it was the only ruling party in the world that continued the principled struggle that J.V. Stalin and the Cominform outlined against the first Trotskyites in power — the Titoites — was the Party of Labour of Albania. It was this struggle that was recognized by the internationalist Yugoslav Communists, Vlado Dapčević among them, who has stated that the best Party post-Stalin was the Party of Labour of Albania.
It need not be mentioned the historic fight against the Khrushchevites, of which the Party of Labour of Albania was renowned. Carrying forward the Lenin-Stalin line of the socialist USSR, the Party fought against the revisionist theses of the 20th and 22nd Congresses of the CPSU and exposed them as manifestations of bourgeois ideology in the workers’ movement. Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech at the Meeting of 81 Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow during November 1960, a speech in which he defies the revisionist theses of the Khrushchev group and defends the figure of Stalin, remains perhaps the most courageous speech of any Marxist ever. For the Party of Labour, the fight against Khrushchevite revisionism was a daily fight, not only against the external savage Soviet blockade but against internal revisionists such as Liri Belishova and Koço Tashko who attempted to overturn the line of the Party. When the Party-People unity firm held once again, the Soviet revisionists turned to a policy of suffocation, of blockading Socialist Albania, just as the U.S. imperialists did.
Chinese revisionism, which makes the Party of Labour of Albania stand out as the only ruling Marxist-Leninist Party since the 20th Congress of the CPSU, was also exposed thoroughly. Mao’s vacillancy in the face of Khrushchevite and Titoite revisionism was evident from the very beginning, when he hailed Khrushchev as the «Lenin of our time» (see: Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China, vol. 2, p. 186) and when he apologized to the Titoites for Stalin’s principled and correct struggle against them. Left to right, like a pendulum, that was the policy pursued by the Communist Party of China, headed by Mao Zedong. One minute Tito and Khrushchev were friends, then fascists and Hitlers, then reasonable people who had differences of opinion, in no specific order and always shifting back and forth. When the mask openly came off after the «Cultural Revolution», Mao’s eclecticism subsided and the pro-American sentiments came to light. Simple Albanian delegations were rejected for years from coming to Beijing, but in the same city, they staged grandiose welcomes for social-fascists like Nicolae Ceausescu and Džemal Bijedić, honouring them as «Marxist-Leninists.» And by 1972, Enver Hoxha wrote that the leadership in China was beginning to embody great-state chauvinism, that it was not a socialist country. In 1978, China too would enact an imperialist blockade on Albania, joining the chorus of world imperialism. Here I will not deal with the question of whether or not the Party should have come out openly against China sooner than they did, but I will say that when China was exposed, the works produced by Enver Hoxha were of high theoretical content and of valuable use for the Marxist-Leninists worldwide. The Party of Labour of Albania was the first major organization to recognize the road that China was proceeding on and what would come of it. Their struggle against Chinese revisionism is of tremendous use to this very day.
The greatest internal threat in the history of the Party came at the hands of the undercover imperialist superagent Mehmet Shehu. This Trotskyite, on the instruction of the American and British intelligence, was a hidden enemy within the Party for 40 years. The typical Titoite, in even death he spun the truth in imaginable ways. Today, we have U.S. embassy documents proving that Mehmet Shehu had an imperialist-backed plan to assassinate Enver Hoxha, eliminate his followers, and take control of the Party and State. But in his suicide note, in an attempt to place the blame for the imperialist intrigues within the Party, he accused Ramiz Alia of being an «Albanian Khrushchev.» He could twist reality however he wanted to, but Marxist-Leninist truth always prevailed in the Party of Labour, and Ramiz Alia played a principal role in the exposure of not only Mehmet Shehu, but the entire Shehu espionage family and their associate Kadri Hazbiu. There is no evidence of the claim that Ramiz Alia was an undercover agent (other than the later mistakes of the Party under his leadership, which is not evidence at all), but we have a mountain of evidence leading to the conclusion that Mehmet Shehu was a superagent, down to the UDB order in 1981 found in his vault to assassinate Enver Hoxha. I may allow the reader to decide who was in the right: Enver Hoxha, Ramiz Alia, and the Party, or Mehmet, Feçor, and Fiqrete Shehu, spies and traitors to the homeland. This experience tempered the Party for greater battles to come and proved the level of vigilance required for a real proletarian party to survive in a sea of counter-revolution. Marxist-Leninist vigilance must be made sharper, steel-like, and always taken to a higher level.
The experience of the Party of Labour of Albania in socialist construction remains the main tenet of all its achievements. For 45 years, it heroically built socialism higher and higher, towards the most advanced society humanity has ever known. Through the socialist construction and the scientific thinking of the Party, they applied Marxism-Leninism and raised it with new achievements. The crown jewel of all these achievements came about due to the reality of international circumstances, the savage imperialist blockade, and that is the Marxist-Leninist policy of self-reliance. Through this practice, it was discovered that the only way an encircled socialist society will be able to maintain itself is through self-reliance, through its internal reserves and advancing on their own forces. In doing so, the Party debunked and discredited further the well-known Trotskyite theory of permanent hopelessness, the claim that socialism cannot be built in one country. Today, the modern Trotskyites claim that the Leninist-Stalinist USSR and Socialist Albania were «isolationist», and thus the need for «socialism» to integrate with the world economy. For experienced Marxist-Leninists, these revisionist illusions can be spotted from a mile away, whether from the Trotskyites or the neo-Trotskyites (Khrushchevites, Titoites, Dengists, or other modern revisionists). It plainly means: «Accept the fascist conductor’s baton because there is no other option. After all, capitalism is stronger than socialism, and it will always be!» But the revolutionary proletariat and peoples will never think this way. Self-reliance, proved demonstrably every day by the practice of the objective laws of socialist society, is an absolute law of socialist construction in one country. This is the main teaching which the Party of Labour of Albania, with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, brought to the international theory and practice of socialist construction.
But perhaps the greatest gift given by the Party of Labour of Albania to us today is, ironically, its mistakes. With the rise of the sweeping counter-revolution through Europe, the Party knew that they had to make adjustments. They knew what they were facing was to be the most difficult international struggle yet, and they correctly analyzed these phenomena, exposed the ultra-revisionist Gorbachev as a hired thug in the pay of American capital. Their situation forced major changes in the socio-economic-political system, and their analysis of the international situation was entirely correct. They needed a profound debureaucratization in the economy if they wanted to survive, and it cannot be said that this need was unforeseen by the Party, with Ramiz Alia at the head. The Party, short on time and witnessing the dastardly results of the events in Romania, implemented a policy of decentralization over production, the death mark of socialism in Albania. In an attempt to give more power to the workers at the base, the liberal economic managers quickly usurped control and the Party was left defenceless in the field of the economy, became a slave to liberal politics. The Party then approved a hundred flowers type campaign, believing that socialist ideas would inevitably defeat bourgeois ideas. It can be said that even the strongest Marxist-Leninists approved these measures in good faith; it was not a case of a traitorous coup of the Party, as some claim. The rest was history, but we can learn from the greatest mistakes in the history of the Party, their mistakes in socialist construction prove to us the importance of democratic centralism and strengthening it on all organs every day, every hour, every second.
In conclusion, it can be said that the Party of Labour of Albania, the leader of the Albanian people for nearly 50 years, was at the forefront of both national and international development. Albania was not «isolated», as the bourgeoisie and the revisionists claim, in fact it was deeply entrenched in the problems facing our epoch. It was a Party that at every step, fought for the freedom-loving peoples against the bourgeoisie and the revisionists. It was the Party of Labour of Albania that supported all the anti-imperialist struggles occurring worldwide. The Party emphasized struggles for independence, such as in the ones in Vietnam and Burkina Faso. Reciprocally, on the occasion of the death of Enver Hoxha, both Vietnam and Burkina Faso declared two days of national mourning. (Albania Report, Bulletin №63, September 1985) The Party of Labour of Albania was a symbol of all peoples oppressed by colonialism and imperialism, and although it has since ceased to exist, it still lives on in the minds and hearts of Marxist-Leninists worldwide who see it as a genuine inspiration, 80 years after its founding. The banner of the Party of Labour of Albania is the banner of Marxism-Leninism, and like Marxism-Leninism, it will inevitably triumph.
In concluding his well-known book, The Titoites, Comrade Enver Hoxha so rightly said: «So, with the Party at the head, having its Marxist-Leninist line as our guiding compass, we will always go on working vigilantly, further tempering unity, marching ahead, with the Party and people united as one, so as to keep the name of our heroic Party always honoured, to raise the prestige of socialist Albania ever higher, to preserve the sacred independence of our Homeland intact. This has been and remains the lofty mission of our Party of Labour. To this mission, to the good of the people and socialism, we have devoted and will devote all our life, all our forces and energies.» (Enver Hoxha: The Titoites, p. 633)
Glory to the Party of Labour of Albania!
Lavdi Partisë së Punës së Shqipërisë!
November 8th, 2021