The People's (Socialist) Republic of Albania
Partly adapted from our in-progress book
Today, January 10th (in CET), is the 77th anniversary of socialist Albania's founding. The Albanian people struggled during World War 2 against feudalism, bureaucratic-comprador capitalism, and imperialism, in particular the imperialism of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Party of Labor of Albania courageously led the partisans of its country in the great war against fascism, and it liberated the nation with little foreign support! After this, and after the masses constructed a People's Democracy, the People's Republic of Albania was proclaimed. Its neighbor, Yugoslavia, also had a People's Democracy, but it quickly turned revisionist after being founded.
For the next 10-15 years, Albania was allied with the other People's Democracies of Europe: the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Czechoslovak Republic, German Democratic Republic, Hungarian People’s Republic, Polish People’s Republic, and Romanian People’s Republic. The USSR and other People's Democracies were allied with Albania for this time, too. Albania's socialist construction was going well, for the workers and peasants seized the means of production from landlords and comprador capitalists, and eventually the national bourgeoisie's property went to the workers' state as well. With these relations of production advancing, the productive forces could expand. Chapter 12 of Pickaxe and Rifle says this:
Bridges and highways were rebuilt and lines of communication were quickly re-established. During 1945 workers got some of the factories, power stations and mines back into operation. Peasants were mobilized to sow the plowed land and make a start on rebuilding the burned-out villages. A wave of enthusiasm for work swept the country and young people in their thousands from town and country joined the voluntary labor brigades and worked tirelessly at the tasks of reconstruction. …
Up to 12 acres of land were allotted to the head of each family, and the buying, selling, and leasing of land was prohibited. Committees of poor peasants were set up to supervise the distribution of land and to organize resistance against those who tried in various ways to circumvent agrarian reform. These committees became centers for raising the level of political consciousness in the countryside and took the lead in the movement to form agricultural cooperatives.
Part of the expropriated land was not distributed but turned into state farms which established a socialist sector in agriculture. Forests, springs, water supplies, and all subsoil riches were proclaimed common property of the people while most of the land cultivated by agricultural workers, their implements, and farm animals were the property of cooperatives. ...
As a result of these measures all the means of production in Albania became social property belonging either to the whole people or to workers combined in handicraft or agricultural cooperatives. State property, the higher form of socialist relations of production, was dominant in the industrial sector in which cooperatives of handicraft workers were marginal; but the agricultural sector was predominantly cooperative with state farms making up a small but influential proportion of the whole. This reflected the basically small scale nature of agriculture and the large scale nature of industrial production. Both forms of ownership had a socialist character in that exploitation was eliminated and distribution was based on the amount of work done. ...
From a primitive agrarian country, probably the most backward in Europe, Albania was to be turned into an agricultural-industrial country with the emphasis increasingly on the development of industry till, eventually, it would become an industrial country with an advanced agriculture. ...
The economic base was able to sustain increasingly large units of production like the big oil refineries, mechanized copper, chrome and iron-nickel mines, the great Stalin and Mao Zedong textile mills, the Hammer and Sickle knitting mills, huge cement factories and chemical works for the production of fertilizers, the tractor spare parts factory at Tirana and gigantic hydro-power stations like the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels plants in the north, and Joseph Stalin in the soutli and the new Vau i Dejes (Deja Ford) station on the Drin River which produces over one billion Kw/ll. [Source]
However, the Soviet bourgeoisie seized power in the USSR in the mid-1950s, making it a capitalist-imperialist power; most of the People's Democracies became compradors to the new state. At that point, Albania was the last socialist state in Europe. While the US and its reactionaries allies and compradors continued their attacks on the socialist state, the new imperialists in a "red" cloak wanted to subjugate it as well. Albanian workers and their vanguard party understood what the Soviets really wanted and who they really were, though; they saw that the Soviet leadership was revisionist, and they knew that the state capitalists wanted Albania to be a semi-colony like the other comprador states. That is why Albania resisted Soviet imperialist aggression and stayed on the socialist road even when the Soviets imposed an embargo on the tiny country.
Despite the difficulties they faced, the Albanian people were able to build a functioning and successful example of socialism. It provided healthcare, education, housing, employment, electricity, transportation, and much more to its people. Under Enver Hoxha, life expectancy increased by 30 years, and the quality of life improved for that. The country was self-sufficient in socialism, and its military was strong enough to keep both camps of capitalist-imperialism (the US's camp and the USSR's) away. There was genuine democracy in Albania, unlike in the capitalist countries around it. Chapter Nine of Pickaxe and Rifle explains:
The real question of politics is who rules whom, who enjoys state power and how is that power maintained. The essential political problem of a socialist society is that of vesting real state power in the hands of the masses of people in town and countryside, headed by the. working class, and keeping it there. A socialist society is not simply created for the working masses; it must be created and preserved by the working masses. If this does not continue to be the case, state and society will soon degenerate from socialism into some form of capitalism with a consequent restoration of exploitative relations of production.
The Constitution of the People’s Republic of Albania, adopted on March 14, 1946, by the Constituent Assembly brought into being by the first democratic election ever held, is short, straightforward and democratic in the fullest sense. The whole document of fewer than a hundred articles takes up only 40 pages of a very small book. This conciseness and simplicity stem from the fact that, unlike most constitutions, there are no ruling class interests to be concealed in elaborate verbiage, no complicated divisions of power to check the state’s interference in business and finance, no pseudo democratic formulations designed to give people the illusion of governing themselves. …
People’s power as embodied in the Albanian Constitution was not, therefore, grafted on to the institutions of pre-war society nor even developed as a radical modification of them. It was established after a clean sweep in which the whole governmental apparatus of the old ruling class had been brushed aside. …
All the major democratic organizations which enable the Albanian working masses to exercise state power originated and developed in the heat of national struggle. As they came into being in answer to the national need they were tested in the fires of the liberation war involving the whole people. Out of the National Liberation General Council grew the People’s Assembly; and the National Liberation Committee appointed by the Council became the Government, Prime Minister and Cabinet, elected by the Assembly. The National Liberation Councils at village, district and city levels developed into the People’s Councils which are the local organs of state power. [Source]
Proletarian dictatorship in Albania was able to advance the country's superstructure, and it did so very well in its Cultural and Ideological Revolution. Of course, there were mistakes and excesses in this revolution (such as the staunch anti-theism that was supported, and the destruction of religious symbols and relics), but Albania's superstructure caught up to its advanced economic base.
In spite of the dictatorship of the proletariat’s existence in Albania, socialism was overthrown after capitalist-roaders took power. First, Enver Hoxha and the vanguard party made mistakes in the 1970s. They condemned socialist China when Mao met with Richard Nixon in 1971-72, and they accused Mao of being a bourgeois leader after he died. In addition, in the 1976 constitution (which renamed the country to the People's Socialist Republic of Albania), Albania became the first state in modern history to be explicitly anti-theist; the measures taken after this declaration were too extreme and damaging, and they were unnecessary. They simply made the masses unhappy with the state they were meant to control. These errors were arguably not as big as Hoxha's mistake in 1978 when he claimed that Albania was classless. This grave mistake reduced the Albanian people's supervision of the state and the vanguard party, allowing the closet revisionist Ramiz Alia to get powerful enough to be elected as Hoxha's successor. His taking power was followed by the Albanian state becoming a bourgeois, not a proletarian, state.
Alia weakened the link between the Party of Labor of Albania and the working class. Like all revisionists, he used paternalistic rhetoric to justify the reduction and destruction of workers’ power; the Albanian capitalist-roaders wanted to seem like good leaders who “took care of” the people, rather than actual leaders who taught the people to rule society. In this way, the link between the Party of Labor of Albania and the workers was broken, with the workers’ party becoming a capitalist party.
The Revisionist Alia and Co.—Enemies of the Albanian People covers this topic marvelously. In Chapter 1, “The Working Class has Lost its Vanguard Party”, it says:
The PLA today has radically abandoned any thought of empowering the working class to take a leading position in society; not even phrases are left of it. In the election programme, the PLA declared that “its basic aim is to take care of the people, their prosperity, the creation of necessary conditions to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the people”.
In other words: the party “takes care of the people” instead of aiming at the self-activity of the members of society, instead of fighting for every cook to be able to govern the state, as Lenin demanded. Just like Ulbricht and Honecker, Alia and co. could not imagine and did not want a future in which all social decisions were not monopolized in their hands.
This is diametrically opposed to Lenin's demand: “Communism says: The vanguard of the proletariat, the Communist Party, leads the non-party mass of the working people by enlightening, training, educating this mass, first the workers and then also the peasants (‘school of communism’) so that they can reach and really reach the point of concentrating the management of the entire national economy in their hands.” (Lenin, Works vol. 32, p.34)
The idea of the party "taking care of the masses" is instead reminiscent of the Polish revisionist Gierek's saying: “We will govern well and you will work well.”
And since the revisionists Alia and Co. have abandoned any thought of mobilizing the working class for the social planning, management and control of production, they consequently regard socialism as an “outdated model”. The PLA is fighting for power, but the preservation of power is an end in itself, is only meant to defend the sinecures of a privileged class, and no longer has the slightest thing to do with the interests of the working class, with the defense of socialism. [Source]
Because of the crimes of these revisionists, there were numerous protests against the government, and it was dissolved in 1992 after most of the other revisionist states in Europe were overthrown. We understand that Albania prior to the revisionist takeover was an example of socialism succeeding in a small country despite all odds being placed against it; China had similar struggles, but it had a large supply of labor-power and plenty of resources, things Albania lacked, but Albania did very well given its conditions. Unlike what anti-communists claim, socialist Albania was only proof that socialism can and does succeed!