Thousands of students in Tirana pulled down the giant statue of the late Albanian leader Enver Hoxha on February 21 in their campaign to push the country even faster down the road of capitalism.
The students were in the third week of a boycott of lessons. They were demanding the removal of the name of Enver Hoxha from the title of Tirana University. After the statue was toppled, the students rolled its head through the streets to the university, and then urinated on it.
A few hours later, the Albanian Government issued a brief statement agreeing to remove Hoxha’s name. This was met with jubilation by the students who opposed Hoxha because of his reputation as a Stalinist who defended socialism.
Tirana’s students founded the Democratic Party last December on an openly capitalist platform of creating a “free market” economy, restoring private ownership of industry, commerce and farming, integrating Albania with the big powers of Western Europe, creating a capitalist Parliament devoid of any working class influence, etc.
Ramiz Alia and other leaders of the Party of Labour of Albania (PLA) had decided to allow the formation of opposition parties dedicated to turning Albania into a capitalist state. This followed student demonstrations calling for “political pluralism”.
Alia & Co openly came out as the gravediggers of socialism in Albania. Their promotion of “political pluralism” gave free rein to all capitalist trends, while the working class was gagged and bound by such measures as turning all official positions within the PLA over to opportunists, vastly increasing the power of management over workers in state enterprises, and severely restricting the right to strike.
Alia & Co have engineered Albania’s slide into capitalism. They have come out as open enemies of communism since purging the PLA’s Politburo of their opponents in July and December last year. But the rot had set in before Enver Hoxha died in 1985.
Hoxha was an incomplete Marxist. He genuinely tried to apply the principles of communism and, therefore, defended Stalin as a great Marxist. However, Hoxha fell down on some of the fundamentals of communism. In particular, the leading role of the working class in Albania was undermined by Hoxha’s promotion of the anti-Marxist concept of “people’s power”.
It is a fundamental communist thesis that every class society is ruled by a single class. This can be illustrated by capitalist New Zealand where big business sets the agenda of both the National and Labour parties behind the “democratic” facade of Parliament.
In a socialist country, the working class must hold state power in order to protect social ownership of industry, commerce and farming. But the rule of the working class couldn’t be consolidated in Albania because Hoxha and other PLA leaders were caught up in the concept of “people’s power”.
The working class must organise itself around its own communist party and lead all other sections of “the people” – such as farmers, intellectuals, self-employed, small business people and rural labourers – along the road of socialism. If the rule of the working class is undermined, then this opens the way for the sort of capitalist counter-revolution that now grips Albania.
Alia & Co hid behind the concept of “people’s power” to destroy all working class influence in the Albanian state and boost the political clout of the students and intellectuals. Over recent times, therefore, the PLA’s leaders began praising the pro-capitalist intelligentsia as the most important force and ordering the removal of all statues of Stalin. One of the inevitable results of this counterrevolutionary alliance between Alia and the students was the tearing down of Enver Hoxha’s statue.
The capitalist news agency Reuters described the student protest that toppled Hoxha’s statue as “people’s power”. Both the capitalist media and Alia & Co therefore use the concept of “people’s power” to justify Albania’s slide into capitalism. This in itself reveals that any weakening of working class rule leads to the destruction of socialism.
But hand-in-hand with the counter-revolution come all the usual crises of capitalism stemming from the antagonistic struggle between different classes. President Alia’s address to the nation after the student rampage in Tirana began with an admission that “the country is reaching crisis point”.
Alia went on to announce that “I have decided to assume the direction of matters of state myself”. Adopting such dictatorial powers will allow Alia to speed up the tempo of the counter-revolution. The Albanian working class can expect more vicious attacks from Alia & Co in the days ahead.