This article will be my brief critique of Albanian socialist leader Enver Hoxha & his modern followers.
Enver Hoxha was a great Marxist-Leninist & anti-revisionist. His works are a valuable contribution to anti-revisionism and the practical application of Marxism-Leninism. This ought to be recognized by every communist.
The critical comments I’m about to make should not be interpreted as a condemnation of Hoxha’s significant work.
WHEN HOXHA WAS CORRECT
Hoxha perhaps most well known for his firm critique of Khrushchevite Revisionism:
“The true Marxist-Leninists will intensify their principled struggle for the exposure of the Khrushchevite and other modern revisionists”
(Hoxha, Reject the Revisionist Thesis of the 20th Congress)
As well as his outstanding work against Yugoslav revisionism:
“The Yugoslav renegades abandoned the scientific theory of Marxism-Leninism on the socialist state right from the beginning…”
(Hoxha, Yugoslav “Self-Administration”)
However he also began to be very critical of Mao Tse-Tung’s China and this is where I feel he fell into serious errors. I will be writing a similar short article giving my thoughts on Maoism as well as the Juche Idea later. But for the time being let us point out that Mao also made mistakes, especially in the so-called “Three Worlds Theory” and it was entirely justified to point this out. In fact this was done by many supporters of Mao also.
One such pro-Mao communist was Harry Haywood who criticized the “incorrect strategic line of the Three Worlds Theory” in his article “China and its Supporters Were Wrong About USSR”. I will discuss the specifics of this issue in my future article on Mao.
WHEN HOXHA WAS WRONG
Let us now focus on Hoxha’s other criticisms of Maoist China.
1. The Peasant Question, People’s War
Hoxhaism claims that Mao gave up the leading role of the Proletariat to the Peasantry:
“Although he talked about the role of the proletariat, in practice Mao Tsetung underestimated its hegemony in the revolution and elevated the role of the peasantry.”
(Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution)
However, he in my opinion presents insufficient evidence to support this. Mao employed a worker-peasant alliance under the leadership of the Proletariat & the Communist Party as Lenin and Stalin did. Hoxha claims that in Mao’s case this was mere rhetoric and not true, and that in reality the Proletariat was never the leader, but I find this unconvincing.
Is there any doubt that the Communist Party was at the head of the Revolution? Is there any doubt that Communism is first and foremost a working class & not a peasant ideology? Hoxha’s best evidence seems to be the numerical superiority of the peasants, but the same argument was frequently made against Lenin by dogmatists.
Hoxha’s second piece of evidence is Mao’s slogan of ‘the countryside encircling the cities’. Hoxha claims that this was not merely a tactic but a deviation from Marxism-Leninism. In my opinion he fails to justify this. The soundness of the strategy was proven by the fact that they won. Are all guerrilla movements which hide in the countryside, mountains and forests going against Marxism-Leninism? Surely not.
Mao’s military strategy was based on Marxist-Leninist analysis & popularizing previous military writings, Sun Tzu’s Art of War in particular.
2. National Liberation, United Fronts, New Democracy
Hoxha argues that Mao was a class-collaborator:
“The revisionist concepts of Mao Tsetung have their basis in the policy of collaboration and alliance with the bourgeoisie”
(Hoxha, ibid.)
This is based on the fact that the Chinese Communist Party allied with all patriotic elements against the Japanese invasion in a nationwide united front. Does Hoxha denounce all united fronts? No he doesn’t, he cannot do that as united fronts are an accepted Marxist-Leninist tactic. Therefore Hoxha only denounces this particular united front.
Hoxha attacks the Maoist policy of ‘New Democracy’ as class collaboration, as the New Democratic State allowed the existence of not only workers but also capitalists & peasants under the leadership of the Communist Party. Hoxhaists might point out that the other classes also had some representation in the government, but to claim that the Proletariat & the Communist Party were not leading the State is quite frankly ridiculous.
The New Democratic State was designed as a transition from semi-feudalism & semi-colonialism to Socialism. The other socialist countries; ‘People’s Democracies’ in Eastern Europe as well as the Soviet Union during the NEP policy, grappled with these issues. Hoxha doesn’t denounce all of them, only Mao.
Hoxha attacks Mao for his idea that there are antagonistic & non-antagonistic class contradictions, i.e. that some class differences can be solved relatively peacefully in the context of the Worker’s State. It was necessary to violently overthrow the KMT, compradors & landlords. However the peasantry & patriotic forces that supported the Communists do not need to be dealt with in the same way.
The Bolsheviks did not immediately wipe out all the capitalist elements, instead they allowed them to exist in a restricted form during the NEP. The Bolsheviks first secured the gains of the Democratic Revolution and only later constructed Socialism. During the Collectivization of Agriculture the Bolsheviks wanted to “win over the middle-peasant” (and isolate the Kulak). This would be solving the contradiction between the workers and poor & middle-peasants in a peaceful non-antagonistic way. For some reason Hoxha doesn’t consider this to be class collaboration in the same way.
Considering that China was semi-colonial & even more backward then the Soviet Union, it should be expected that more compromises would have to be made with the classes with different but not antagonistic interests like the petit-bourgeois peasants. It would take longer to get rid of these social classes then in countries with more favorable conditions. Still the landlords were gotten rid of, agricultural collectivization was implemented, industry was nationalized.
MISTAKES OF MODERN HOXHAIST PRAXIS
I consider Hoxhaists my comrades. I am non-sectarian enough to support Hoxhaist parties such as the Brazilian PCR as based on the information from my Brazilian comrades they are the best party of their country. However there are elements in modern Hoxhaism which I’d prefer not to be there.
Hoxhaists have seem to have an ultra-left tendency of seeking “ideological purity” over all else. This means sectarianism, isolating themselves from others, attacking non-Hoxhaist Marxist-Leninists as “revisionists” and deadly enemies.
In general Hoxhaists seem incapable of distinguishing between disagreement, deviation & revisionism. A deviation is a one-sided mistaken line in Marxism. Naturally there are different degrees of deviation, some of which are more harmful then others. Revisionism means an anti-marxist trend, a line that contradicts with the core of marxism.
In my opinion Maoism & Juche both show some signs of deviation, but not revisionism. What I consider the flaws of Maoism are in no way on the same level as the anti-Marxist tendencies of Khrushchevite, Trotskyite or Titoite Revisionism.
I shouldn’t have to explain what disagreement means, but it seems it is necessary. We will always have disagreement about the correct tactics, the correct policies, the correct slogans. It is not always Revisionist to have different views.
It should be obvious to everyone that China not only nationalized large industry but also implemented policies of agricultural collectivization similar to the Soviet Union. The notion that they were not constructing socialism is absurd and based on a nitpicking “left-communist” attitude. They don’t care about the big picture. If they can find some excuse to denounce something as Revisionism, they will.
This conduct is not different from “Left-Communist”, “Orthodox Marxists”, Trotskyists and other armchair revolutionaries who claim “the Soviet Union was state capitalist because it still used money instead of labor vouchers” or some such nonsense. Unfortunately many Hoxhaists boldly proclaim such absurdities; “China was never building socialism. Mao was a Revisionist”. I say this is nonsense.
HOXHAISM OR LENINISM?
The biggest danger for Hoxhaists is sectarianism. They openly admit that they are Marxist-Leninists, that Hoxha was an anti-revisionist and not someone who created new theory. Hoxha’s writings popularized & applied Marxism-Leninism just like Stalin did, and Hoxha never sought to create a new “ism”. Hoxhaists should agree with this.
So why do we have Hoxhaist parties? Why do we have Hoxhaism? Hoxhaists feel that if a Marxist-Leninist organization doesn’t identify as Hoxhaist then probably a new party should be created, though they might come up with some other excuse for this splitting action.
Maybe I am a hopeless centrist for not being a Hoxhaist nor a Maoist. Maybe I am centrist for thinking its counter productive to spend most of one’s time denouncing Maoism & the DPRK as revisionists, enemies, worse then capitalists etc., instead of actually trying to advance Communism.
Particularly small parties and groups have a tendency for sectarianism & isolating themselves. This is true of many Maoist groups as well and seems to be a serious danger for all Hoxhaist groups. The Brazilian PCR doesn’t seem to suffer from this quite as much as some others, but I’ve been criticized for being “pro-Mao” by some Brazilian Hoxhaists (in a friendly discussion) as if that is what we should be worried about at this point.
You don’t see Maoists or Marxist-Leninists focusing all their time on attacking Hoxha, yet Hoxhaists seem obsessed with attacking us non-Hoxhaist M-Ls. This is wrecking activity and harms our movement.
Should there in my opinion exist specifically Hoxhaist parties? Absolutely not. We need Marxist-Leninist parties. Everyone should recognize the positive contribution of Hoxha and all the times when he was correct, we don’t need to be “Hoxhaists” to do that.
If some comrades insist on labeling themselves “Hoxhaists” then so be it. But that is not a big enough issue to split over, not from their point of view or mine. Like Hoxha, I call for ‘true Marxist-Leninist unity’.
Unity cannot be unprincipled, we cannot achieve unity by merely proclaiming that we have it and then still continue to have big differences which are brushed aside, we all know this. However to have disunity or split over minor questions is sectarian. The Hoxhaist vs. M-L split is obviously just such a minor question, to claim the opposite only proves my point.
The quest to have specifically Hoxhaist organizations, to have Hoxha’s face and name always visible as a priority, to split with those who don’t agree with Hoxha on everything is obviously sectarian.
“Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918) was one of the first Russian Marxists. There are three stages in his activity: from 1875 to 1883 Plekhanov was a populist; from 1883 to 1903 he was a Marxist; since 1903 Plekhanov turned to the right: he became a Menshevik, a leader of Bolshevism, he betrayed revolutionary Marxism. In emigration (went abroad in 1880) he broke with populism and in 1883 organized the first Russian Marxist group, Emancipation of Labor, abroad. The group members translated into Russian a number of works by Marx and Engels, printed them abroad and secretly distributed them in Russia. For the perception of scientific socialism, Plekhanov was prepared by the revolutionary ideas of Herzen, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. His theoretical work related to this period was of immense benefit to the Russian labor movement. Plekhanov devoted his talents, his exceptional literary abilities to the justification and defense of Marxism, its spread in Russia.
His works such as Socialism and the Political Struggle, Our Differences, On the Development of a Monistic View of History, cleared the way for the victory of Marxism in Russia. Plekhanov was the first Russian Marxist to oppose the Narodnik theory. With his labors, he dealt a serious blow to populism. On the basis of an analysis of the economic relations of post-reform Russia, he showed all the harmfulness and groundlessness of the Narodnik theories about Russia’s transition to socialism through the peasant community, about the non-capitalist path of Russia’s development. But Plekhanov and the Emancipation of Labor group as a whole, had serious mistakes. The group’s program also contained remnants of populist views. So, for example, they accepted the tactics of individual terror.
The final ideological defeat of Narodism was completed in the 1890s by Lenin. Plekhanov did not understand that only in alliance with the peasantry would the proletariat triumph over Tsarism. In some of his works, he did not take into account the peasantry at all. “Apart from the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,” he said, “we see no other social forces” on which one could rely in the revolution. Plekhanov saw the liberal bourgeoisie as a force capable of supporting the revolution. These mistakes were the embryo of his future Menshevik views, the starting point of his denial of the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic Russian revolution.
When the draft of the party program was being worked out inside Iskra, Plekhanov tried to replace the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat put forward by Lenin with the vague slogan “dictatorship of the working people and the exploited.” After the Second Congress of the RSDLP, Plekhanov adopted a position of conciliation towards the opportunists, and then he himself slipped into opportunism and joined the Mensheviks. In 1905, he took liberal positions on the question of revolution and fought against the Leninist tactics of the Bolsheviks. During the years of the Stolypin reaction, he was in a bloc with the Bolsheviks against the anti-party August bloc. Later, Plekhanov finally went over to the camp of opportunism. During the world imperialist war (1914-1918) he defended the Menshevik defencism tactics. He was hostile to the Great October Revolution.
His political evolution was reflected in his theoretical works. All the best that Plekhanov wrote on the philosophy of Marxism belongs to the period 1883-1903, before his turn to Menshevism. “His personal merits are also enormous in the past. Over the course of 20 years, 1883-1903, he produced a mass of excellent writings, especially against the opportunists, Machists, and Narodniks.” His great merit is his struggle for philosophical materialism, against idealism, against numerous attempts to combine Marxism with. Kantianism. Plekhanov sharply criticized Bernstein’s revisionism. His works contain a serious Marxist elaboration of certain questions of the materialist understanding of history, such as the question and the role of the individual in history. Lenin also pointed out major shortcomings and errors in his philosophical works.
Plekhanov, for example, made a grave mistake in supporting the idealistic theory of cognition, opposed to the Marxist theory of knowledge, separated the theory of knowledge from dialectics, not seeing their unity, not understanding that dialectics is the theory of knowledge of Marxism; vaguely distinguished between materialistic and idealistic understanding of experience, leaving a loophole for idealism; reduced the laws of dialectics to the sum of examples; overestimated the role of the geographic environment in the socio-historical process; often portrayed the great Russian thinkers of the 19th century, the revolutionary democrats, as simple imitators of Western European philosophers.
His criticism of the Machians was abstract. He did not see the connection between Machism and the crisis in natural science. The theoretical roots of his mistakes lay in his underestimation of the qualitatively new that was introduced into philosophy by the founders of Marxism. The social roots of his mistakes are the influence of bourgeois liberalism and Western European opportunism on him. Plekhanov did not take the position of creative Marxism, he approached Marxist theory dogmatically, did not see the movement of the center of the revolutionary movement to Russia, did not take into account the peculiarities of the country’s development in the new concrete historical conditions of the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions.
Plekhanov was a talented literary critic and did much to expose the idealistic, anti-scientific understanding of literature and art. The views of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky had a great influence on the development of his aesthetic views. Plekhanov worked out a number of questions of Marxist aesthetics. He fought against the idealistic understanding of art, against the decadent slogan “art for art” and in his literary-critical articles defended the requirement of ideology in artistic creation. His most important works: Socialism and Political Struggle (1883), Our Differences (1885), On the Development of a Monistic View of History (1895), Essays on the History of Materialism (1896), On the Materialist Understanding history (1897), On the question of the role of the individual in history (1898).” (Pavel Yudin and Mark Rosenthal, Short Philosophical Dictionary, 5th ed., 1954)
Italian Communist leader and major theoretician. Gramsci was imprisoned when the Fascists came to power in Italy but continued his work in prison and wrote a vast amount of political writings during this time.
Important Finnish & Soviet Communist leader & theoretician. Kuusinen was one of the leaders of the Finnish Revolution of 1918. After the failure of the revolution he fled to the USSR where he was among the founders of the Finnish Communist Party the same year.
In the 1920s Kuusinen became a Comintern Leader and a collaborator with Lenin. In 1939 he led the Soviet backed Finnish People’s Government in the Winter War. After the war he was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Karelo-Finnish SSR until Khrushchev’s coming to power in 1956. Unfortunately during the time of de-stalinization Kuusinen accepted erroneous revisionist theoretical positions, mainly the “state of the whole people”.
“Die Jugendjahre” (1939) [In German but auto-translate works pretty well. This text autobiographical text about Kollontai’s youth has also been published in English as “And dreams came true”, as well as in Swedish and Finnish. An expanded version of this text has been published in Finnish as “Hetkiä elämästäni” and in Russian as “Летопись моей жизни”]
A Great Love [includes “A Great Love”, “Sisters”, “The loves of three generations”]
A Great Love [includes “A great love”, “Thirty-two pages”, “Conversation piece”. This is translated by anti-communist writer Cathy Porter and includes a slanderous introduction by her]
On the Character of Our People’s Democracy (text) (audiobook) The activities of the C.C. of the Hungarian Communist Party (text) (audiobook) Lukacs and Socialist Realism: A Hungarian Literary Controversy (text) (audiobook)
“Georgy Dimitrov”[In Russian, but you can read it with auto-translate] “Dimitrov’s death” By Dominique Desanti (1949) [In Spanish, but you can read it with auto-translate]
“Babeuf, Gracchus. (François Noel Babeuf). Born Nov. 23, 1760, in St. Quentin; died May 27, 1797. French revolutionary Utopian communist, leader of the movement for equality under the Directory. Born into the poverty-stricken family of a former soldier.
In 1780, Babeuf became commissaire a terrier (jurist). The social conditions around him filled him with a passionate hatred against the feudal regime. Acquaintance with the ideas of Rousseau and Mably (and later Morelly) turned Babeuf into a fervent proponent of a society of “absolute equality” where there would not be any private property. As early as 1785, Babeuf drew up a plan for creating “collective farms” that were to replace big landed estates. He played a prominent role in the revolution in Picardy; while never losing sight of his final ideal, Babeuf displayed an excellent political intuition in using the events of the day-to-day struggle to mobilize the popular masses. In 1790, Babeuf was incarcerated in the Paris prison for organizing a movement against indirect taxes but was released with the assistance of J.-P. Marat. In the following years Babeuf drew up a bold agrarian program: complete liquidation of feudal rights without compensation, elimination of large land holdings, distribution of confiscated church property for long-term lease instead of sale, division of communal land, and, finally, an “agrarian law” that he had formulated in 1789 in the book Perpetual Cadastre. At the time of the flight of the king in 1791, Babeuf proposed the establishment of a republic. In 1793 he was secretary of the provisions committee of the Commune of Paris. Throughout the revolution Babeuf was a consistent defender of the interest of the propertyless classes, especially the strata of the factory proletariat who still lived in the village but who came to depend on the wage as their sole means of livelihood. He criticized the Jacobin Convention and even Marat for insufficient attention to the “welfare of the propertyless class.” The experience of the Jacobin dictatorship and of the distribution of food in the capital convinced Babeuf of the practical possibility of a society of absolute equality. In late 1793–94, Babeuf was imprisoned on a false accusation of forgery. Released just in time for the Ninth Thermidor, he became a few weeks later a resolute opponent of the Thermidor Convention and attacked it in his newspaper, Journal de la liberté de la presse, later renamed Le Tribun du peuple. In February 1795, Babeuf was again arrested. Released on amnesty in October 1795, he resumed the publication of Le Tribun du peuple. In the same year he set up, jointly with F. Buonarroti, A. Darthé, C. Germain, and others, the communist movement for equality and became one of its leaders. In spring 1796 he led the Secret Directory for an Uprising and prepared a mass action. Following betrayal by Grisel, one of the members of the movement, all the leaders of the movement were arrested. Babeuf was sentenced to death and executed in Vendóme.
Babeuf and the Babouvists, as his followers are called, hold an important place among the forerunners of scientific communism. The course of the French Revolution convinced Babeuf that pure democracy cannot be put into effect at once and that a temporary revolutionary dictatorship must be established during the transition from the old society to the communist society. The recognition of the need for a dictatorship is one of the most important elements in the ideological heritage of Babouvism. In case the uprising would be successful, Babeuf and his allies envisaged several expedient economic measures to improve the conditions of the masses and had a plan for creating a national commune that was to replace private enterprise. The weak aspect of their views was a “primitive leveling,” which Marx and Engels condemned. On the whole Marx and Engels had a high opinion of Babeuf’s role and, in the Communist Manifesto, characterized his works as literature that “expressed the demands of the proletariat” (Works, 2nd ed., vol. 4, p. 455).
WORKS Correspondance de Babeuf avec l’ Académie d’Arras (1785–1788). . . Paris, 1961. Pages choisies de Babeuf recueillies . . . Edited by M. Dommanget. Paris, 1935. REFERENCES Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik, 1960. Moscow, 1961. Pages 5–278. Buonarroti, F. Zagovor vo imia ravenstva[2nd ed.], vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1963. (Translated from French.) Volgin, V. P. Frantsuzskii utopicheskiikommunizm. Moscow, 1960. Dalin, V. Grakkh Babef nakanune i vo vremia Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii (1785–1794). Moscow, 1963. Advielle, V. Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du babouvisme, vols. 1–2. Paris, 1844. Babeuf et les problémes du babouvisme. Paris, [1963]. Dalin, V., A. Saitta, and A. Soboul. Inventaire des manuscrits et des imprimés de Babeuf. Paris, 1966. Dommanget, M. Babeuf et la conjuration des Egaux. Paris, 1969.” (The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979, article by V. M. Dalin)