The November 8th Publishing House (NEPH) was established on November 8, 2021, eighty years after the founding of the Communist Party of Albania (later the Party of Labour of Albania) on November 8, 1941.
That watershed moment will remain in the annals of the Albanian people and world proletarian revolution forever. As Comrade Enver Hoxha sets the scene in his book of memoirs When the Party Was Born:
I declared: “The Communist Party of Albania has been founded unanimously. Long live the Communist Party of Albania!”… Happy and deeply moved all of us rose to our feet, raised our clenched fists in salute and under the light of the kerosene lamp sang The Internationale, keeping our voices low, and then cheered and cheered for the Communist Party of Albania, but always in an undertone: “Long live the Bolshevik Party!”, “Long live Stalin!”, “Glory to Marx, Engels, Lenin!”, “Long live the Communist Party of Yugoslavia!”, “Down with fascism!”, “Long live our heroic people!”
That day marked the beginning of the conscious activity of the Albanian workers and labouring peasantry, vested in their vanguard party, for their national and social liberation. In a mere matter of months, they launched the National Liberation Front and set up partisan çetas (detachments) who at first had nothing but 1920s guns and a few bullets in their pockets, and by their own effort ended the Italian fascist occupation in 1943. But their biggest challenge was yet to come in the form of the nazi German occupation — a total of 100,000 soldiers were deployed to small Albania, committing barbarous tortures and killings, razing down entire villages. Such brutality had not been known to the Albanian people at any point in their history. But the masses, rallied in the spirit of a new type, the Leninist party-people unity, swelled the ranks of their national liberation army to 80,000, becoming the largest army per capita in Europe and driving out the nazis from their beloved Homeland. No foreign soldiers stepped foot on Albanian soil — their liberation was entirely their own making. One can thus see how historic November 8, 1941 was.
November 8, also, of course, carried the namesake of the primary state publishing house of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, the “8 Nëntori” Publishing House. As the book Albania: General Information described it:
The “8 Nëntori” Publishing House publishes political and scientific books. Its activity has steadily increased from year to year. It has published the most important works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism. This publishing house devotes a special place to the publications of the Party of Labour of Albania and the Works of Comrade Enver Hoxha, prepared by the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania. Worth mentioning among them are the volumes of Principal Documents of the PLA, the forty-two volumes of the series of Works and the series of Selected Works of Comrade Enver Hoxha in foreign languages. In recent years it has published a number of Works by Comrade Enver Hoxha, which have been translated in some foreign languages: “Yugoslav ‘Self-Administration’ — A Capitalist Theory and Practice,” “Imperialism and the Revolution,” “Reflections on China” in two volumes, “With Stalin,” “Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism,” “The Khrushchevites,” “The Anglo-American Threat to Albania,” “The Titoites,” “Reflections on the Middle East,” etc.
A great number of books of a political, philosophical and scientific character of different fields, bilingual and plurilingual dictionaries of different branches of natural sciences have been published.
Today the November 8th Publishing House hopes to carry on its work in the same vein, with the same aim, that is, to publish revolutionary Marxist-Leninist literature and preserve our traditions and struggles as teaching moments for the workers and oppressed peoples the world over, and first of all, the class conscious and vanguard elements, the Marxist-Leninist communists.
If you have any comments, suggestions or corrections, send an email to: info@november8ph.ca.
