Description
In this short but decisive exposition, Comrade Enver Hoxha lays down a sharp line of demarcation between Marxism-Leninism and the anarchist, anti-Marxist pseudo-socialism of the Titoites. Written in response to Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s chief “theoretician,” Enver Hoxha begins by recalling the repeated acts of hostility which the Yugoslav leaders had directed against Albania and the entire socialist camp. From there he demonstrates with clarity that the entire edifice of “self-management” is capitalist in essence, a facade designed to conceal exploitation behind communist slogans.
Enver Hoxha exposes the claim that “self-management” represents a higher form of socialism, contrasting it to the genuine Marxist-Leninist principle of centralization, without which no proletarian state can survive or build socialism. The Yugoslav model, he shows, breeds nothing but anarchy and chaos, identical to the disorder of liberal-bourgeois economies, while opening wide the doors to private property, kulaks and foreign capital. He denounces the Titoite assertion that the state has withered or is withering away within one country and unmasks the anarchist underpinnings of such theories.
The book further demonstrates how the Yugoslav leadership negated the leading role of the Party, transforming it from a vanguard of the working class into a hollowed institution subordinated to the police apparatus, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of “political pluralism.” Enver Hoxha proves that such pluralism is nothing more than a bourgeois deception, a cover for the domination of a new capitalist class. Kardelj himself, he notes, went so far as to say that the closest political order to Yugoslavia’s is that of the United States.
Socialism, Enver Hoxha insists, requires the dictatorship of the proletariat, the centralization of the economy, the abolition of private property and the guiding role of the Party. To abandon these principles is not to advance beyond socialism towards communism, but to return to capitalism under the mask of “workers’ self-management.”