Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Hoxha book reminiscent of Trotsky’s ’leftism’

First Published: The Call, Vol. 8, No. 21, May 28, 1979.

Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba

Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain

Submitted by an observer–

Forty-five years ago, in the face of World War II, Leon Trotsky worked hand-in-glove with the Hitler fascists. He attacked the anti-fascist front from the “left” while the ruling circles in the West attacked it from the right.

Today, Enver Hoxha, leader of the Albanian Party of Labor (PLA), is playing Trotsky’s game under the conditions of the growing danger of another world war. His latest book, Imperialism and the Revolution, published in the U.S. by several small groups of Hoxha-followers, does its utmost to divert the working class away from unity with the third world, including socialist China. It attacks the growing united front against the hegemonism of the two superpowers. Using super-“left” rhetoric, sophistry and pseudo-Marxist formulations, Hoxha lays the theoretical foundation for his present open defense of the Soviet Union’s expansionist actions in Asia and throughout the world.

Among the main points of Hoxhaism to be found in Imperialism and the Revolution are the following:

“U.S. imperialism has not been weakened in the least” over the past two decades, and the two superpowers are completely equal “to the same degree” in posing a threat to the world’s people. Hoxha asserts that to make distinctions between “less aggressive” and “more aggressive” imperialist powers, as Lenin and Stalin did, amounts to revisionism.

China is a capitalist country that in fact has never been socialist or Marxist. Hoxha claims that the Communist Party of China (CPC) went bad in 1935 when Mao Zedong was placed in leadership. In other words, Hoxha supports the ultra-“left” policies of Wang Ming which led to the near total defeat of the CPC and the People’s Liberation Army. Wang’s line cost more than 90% losses and forced the Long March retreat.

Yugoslavia is the main revisionist enemy to Marxism today–even more so than the USSR. What’s more–Yugoslavia is turning China into its “satellite.”

Any talk of a “third world” amounts to “class collaboration” because the peoples and countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America have no common interests or solutions to their problems.

The super “leftism” goes on and on, but in the end it all amounts to little more than a subtle defense of the Soviet position in the world. Any force that dares to stand up to Soviet hegemonism is the target of Hoxhaism, from the Kampucheans to the people of Zaire. The latter, claims Hoxha, were simply defending tyranny when they resisted the Soviet-backed invasion last year. Now that Hoxha has come out and openly defended the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Kampuchea, after initially pretending neutrality, the real aims of Hoxha’s polemic can be more clearly seen.

But Hoxha’s book, which was initially planned as a manifesto around which to form a “new Comintern” of anti-China splitters, has had barely any influence among the Marxist-Leninists around the world. Many groups who were initially taken in by his ultra-“left” verbiage have grown disenchanted, while what praise his writings do get comes largely from Radio Moscow.

Even the anti-China “leftists” in the U.S., like the Revolutionary Communist Party, find Hoxha’s open attacks on Mao Zedong and on the whole history of Chinese revolution too blatant for them. The RCP was forced to disassociate themselves from the book admittedly before even reading it. If they had read it, they would have found some common ground with their own version of modern-day Trotskyism, such as their joint attack on Mao Zedong’s theory of three worlds.

Perhaps the thing that confuses those who still follow Hoxha is the positive role Albania and the Party of Labor played in the fight against Khrushchev revisionism in the ’60s. (Hoxha, by the way, takes complete credit for this fight in his book, claiming that the Chinese were “vacillators” in the struggle.)

I would only advise those who are confused to study the writings and speeches of Mao Zedong from 1956 and after regarding the revisionist line of the 20th Congress of CPSU. Compare them with Hoxha’s own outspoken support for the line of “peaceful transition to socialism” and a world “without war” under imperialism and see who the real vacillator was.

It is true that the PLA belatedly took up the struggle in 1960, but in no way can it be claimed that Hoxha was the “leader” or that the Chinese wavered. The problem is that when the PLA finally did oppose Khrushchevism, it did so from a shaky theoretical foundation. This, under the conditions of the present period, has led them down the road of super-“leftism,” a road which while differing outwardly from Moscow finds a common meeting ground. Today that meeting ground is hysterical anti-“Maoism” and backing for Soviet aggression.