#socialist albania

[lord-bajromi]

[katchwreck]

“With its private property, exploitation of man by man, economic and spiritual enslavement of man, the capitalist system has imposed a heavy burden on everyone, but especially and more barbarously on women. Women were the first slaves in human history, even before slavery. Throughout this history, not to mention prehistory, whether during the Hellenic civilization, Roman times, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or in modern times, whether in the contemporary bourgeois era of the so-called “refined civilization,” women have been and are becoming the most enslaved, oppressed, exploited and humiliated people in every respect. Laws, traditions, religion, masculine mentality oppressed them and allowed them to be oppressed. Ecclesiastes says; “I find woman more harmful than death,” while St. John Chrysostom has another opinion about women. He says; “Among the wildest animals, you will not find anyone more decadent than a woman”. The theologian and philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas, one of the most prominent philosophers of medieval reaction, defended the view that “woman's destiny is to live under the heel of men”. To complete these barbaric quotes, Napoleon said; “nature has made women our slaves”. Such were the views of the church and the bourgeoisie about women. Among the bourgeoisie, these views remain valid today. There are countless of philosophers and writers in Europe and all over the world who have made the superiority of men over women a mythological aspiration, norm and even demand. According to them, a man is strong, a warrior, brave and therefore smarter, therefore he is predetermined to rule, to lead, whereas a woman is by nature weak, vulnerable and timid, therefore she must be ruled and handled. Bourgeois theorists such as Nietzsche and Freud also defend the theory that man is active and woman is passive in the same way. This reactionary, anti-scientific theory has led to nazism in politics and sadism in sexology. Our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers suffered under this terrible slavery, they carried these physical and spiritual cruelties on their own backs. Now, when the revolution has triumphed, when socialism has been successfully built in our country, the Party sets before us as a great task, as one of the greatest tasks, the complete and final liberation of women from all the shackles of the painful past, the complete liberation of Albanian women. Marxism teaches us that the participation of women in production and their liberation from capitalist exploitation are the two stages of women's liberation. Our Party, which follows the principles of Marxism-Leninism and applies them faithfully, has liberated the people and especially women from capitalist exploitation through war and revolution and has included them in production.”

— Enver Hoxha, Selected Works, 4, p. 268

[21stcenturysovietsherlockian]

it's me a marxism lover and some sorts of gacha games lover too

[socialismforall]

Palestine Belongs to Palestinians (1970-1983) Part 1/2 by Enver Hoxha. #Marxist/#Communist Audiobook.

[mioritic]

Spiro Kristo (Albanian, 1936-2011)

“The Steeplejacks”

Published in New Albania, May 1975

[nando161mando]

"Albania's opposition tries to disrupt a parliament session in protest against ruling Socialists" using smoke bombs and chair barricades.

Associated Press:

[autonomistan]

Fotinika Serjani: Aviatori, 1976

[retroactivepixels]

Roadside socialist art remains; mural mosaic displaying socialist realism motifs.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

“The people’s power was born out of the barrel of a gun”

Sign in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, circa 1970

Via Lone Wolf

[mapsontheweb]

The territorial history of Armenia and Azerbaijan

“Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus”, Arthur Tsutsiev, Yale University Press, 2014

The Armenian historical view centers on the global threat associated with the expansion of Turkic-speaking tribal groups into former Armenian territories, including Artsakh (Karabakh). Today's Azerbaijan is itself largely the former Caucasian Albania, a land which became Christian in the middle of the 4th century, submerged from the 11th century by Turkish invasions and which, in the 19th century, completely disappeared, transformed into a territory Turkish and Muslim.

Azerbaijan comes from the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan of 1918-1920, created following Turkish intervention and taking its name from a Persian region located further south. This part of Eastern Transcaucasia, incorporated into Russia between 1803 and 1828, is in fact a former Persian territory with an indigenous sedentary Armenian population and a nomadic Turkish-Kurdish population who arrived later.

After the First World War, the Armenians would not have a state in the former Ottoman territories but a small formerly Russian territory around the city of Yerevan, southwestern part of the Transcaucasian Federative Democratic Republic (April -May 1918) which takes the name of the Democratic Republic of Armenia. From June 1920, the Kemalist Turkish nationalists began negotiations with the Soviets and the demarcation of the borders of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (born December 2) was ultimately to the detriment of the Armenians themselves, since it did not does not include Karabakh, included entirely in Azerbaijan, at the insistent request of the Turks.

From then on, the Armenians are a people who have the particularity of being deprived of a large part of their historical territory even though it dates back to the 9th century BC with the kingdom of Urartu and its territorial peak dates from the end of the 2nd century BC when King Tigranes dominated a territory stretching from the Caspian to the Mediterranean.

by cartesdhistoire

[flagwars]

Flag Wars Bonus Round

[lord-bajromi]

Shqiptarja e re, 1956

[autolenaphilia]

I think a lot of the uproar whenever socialists suggest abolishing family and religion of the kind that is best expressed in this sentence: “how can you abolish religion and family, how would we then preserve traditional culture, it would mean cultural genocide and imperialism” stems from a fundamentally idealist understanding of the world. One that misunderstands Marx’s materialist view of history.

I mean idealism in the sense that ideas and culture drive history and societal change. Basically the course of history is decided by a struggle of ideas. This conflict is either peaceful in the liberal sense that people use reason to convince other people of their views, or it is waged by military means, and these military conflicts are seen as motivated by ideology, with the winner imposing their views on the conquered.

This idea is also driven by essentialist ideas literally coming from nationalism and religious “family values” conservatism, that religion, the family and ethnic identity are fundamental to human existence. And the only way for them to go away is for some authoritarian state to force people to give them up.

This creates a fantasy that abolition of family and religion will mean a totalitarian “communist state” using violence to force religious people to give up religion and breaking up families. And I presume said state waging war to force the rest of the world to give up religion and family. Literal cultural genocide with death squads. This fantasy seems to be inspired in part by Hoxhaist Albania’s “state atheism” and European colonialism forcing christianity on Africa and the Americas.

This fantasy however badly misunderstands the Marxian materialist perspective on culture, including family, ethnicity and religion, which is the basis for our predictions about the end of family and religion.

The short version is that we believe that the mode of production determines culture. Cultural institutions like family and religion and all of culture is dependent on certain modes of production, whether that will be feudal, capitalist or socialist. “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. “ as Marx said. And that by removing the capitalist economic foundation on which family and religion as we now know it stands, a socialist revolution will lead to those institutions naturally being destroyed. People will want to abandon religion and the family because in the socialist system, it will no longer make any sense to them.

Religion acts as both moral justification of and consolation for the sufferings of a class society. A socialist society would not be “a condition that requires illusions” as Marx put it. And as Engels explained all the way back in 1847, communism will end the family “since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.“

One might object that the institutions of the family and religion have survived previous such revolutions, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Doesn’t that prove that they are permanent fixtures of human nature? But communism will be something radically different, as the The Communist manifesto explains:

“The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. “

It’s a contradiction in terms to want to “preserve culture” and also want to radically change the economic foundation on which culture stands, any type of “left-wing” position that claims to do both is ridiculous. A wish to “preserve traditional culture” can only lead to a reactionary position, one in which society is kept in stasis, or somehow returned to an earlier state, a stasis which preserves both the economic foundation and with it the culture.

And of course no such stasis has ever actually existed. No economic system and its cultural superstructure is truly static, as history proves. Every culture has gone through multiple cycles of death and rebirth, the most serious are periods of social revolution that transition from one mode of production to another. But between those periods there is usually a constant process of cultural evolution. In the end all cultures have gone though a ship-of-theseus-like total transformation multiple times.

As the manifesto puts it: “What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. “

In fact, because capitalism is not a static system, we can see changes already happening in existing societies. The widespread secularization in the most advanced capitalist countries in western Europe, for example, shows how the decline of religion can happen peacefully and naturally. It wasn’t violent repression that has caused Swedes to abandon the Lutherean Christanity that once heavily defined Swedish culture, it was because it no longer made any sense in an advanced capitalist society.

In a socialist revolution, there will probably be violence, but it would largely be the reactionaries who would cause it. There was revolutionary violence against the Orthodox Church in the Russian revolution and against the Catholic Church in the Spanish revolution, but that was because the churches sided with the forces of reaction. And the men who benefit from the family, actual patriarchs, will probably react with violence towards any attempt to lessen their power. Even as we speak, men often react to women divorcing them by stepping up their abusive violence.

As for the accusation of imperialism, it’s true that this revolution will be global, because there is no other way to defeat global capitalism. “It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.” as Engels put it. But it will have to be the work of the working class themselves, which precludes a state, local or foreign/imperialist, doing it for them.

As the manifesto puts it: “In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

For more information on Marx’s material conception of history, just read Marx and Engels. This is basically all based on Marx’s works specifically. It’s why I don’t use terms like “dialectical materialism” or “historical materialism” or even “marxism”, because he didn’t use those terms, those descriptions came from later interpreters of his work, but that’s outside the scope of this text.

The works I quoted above are a good starting point. The preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has a great introduction to his views, Marx himself summarizes them in a single paragraph and the whole book is worth reading. Regarding religion, another preface that states Marx’s view very clearly is the often-quoted introduction to A Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, the source of the “religion is the opium of the people” quote. The Communist Manifesto is of course worth reading and quoted at length above. Engels wrote a FAQ-style draft of the manifesto called The Principles of Communism in 1847 that quite literally answers common questions about communism, particularly relevant to this post are the answers to questions 19-23.

[definitely-not-the-kgb]

I had to log in to my computer for this. Let's go.

I. Hate. Nationalists.

I. Hate. Conservatives.

I hate self-proclaimed "Marxists" who are both Conservative and Nationalistic.

Marxism, Socialism, Communism, and all Leftist ideologies are incompatible with Conservatism and Nationalism. There is no compatibility between them, and the adoption of Conservatism and Nationalism by economically Socialist people and parties is not only revisionist, it is a total and complete betrayal of Marxism in all its forms, including Leninism and Stalinism, ideologies behind which many of these bastards hide behind.

The LGBT community benefitted thoroughly from Socialism in Eastern Europe, that is undeniable. Countries like the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People's Republic, the Republic of Cuba, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic have brought freedom, in large part, to LGBT people, within the frameset of their times. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the People's Republic of Bulgaria made enormous scientific steps to understand LGBT people. Lenin had liberated LGBT people in the early Soviet Union before Stalin undid that in one of the worst mistakes of his premiership.

For self-proclaimed "Socialists" and "Marxists" to deny this is to deny historical fact and give into the lies of Liberal propaganda, based mainly on a purposeful misunderstanding of history and on survivorship bias. Am I saying that LGBT people were entirely free? Of course not. Persecution was still common in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, Romania, Albania, and -of course- the Post-Stalinist USSR, and even in countries where it was wholly legalised, often the governments didn't go further to ensure protection, but this happened at a time where in the Capitalist Bloc tens of thousands of LGBT people were executed and imprisoned compared to a few thousand in all of the Eastern Bloc in the same time.

The liberation of LGBT people is inherent to Marxism, and anybody who claims that not to be the case is not only a revisionist and a reactionary but a traitor to the revolution and the cause: Do not let their pitiful attempts at Identity Politics get to you. No war other than the class war means no war based on gender, no war based on ethnicity, race, nation, or anything. The only fight that Socialism must embark upon is that of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie war whose intrinsic goal is overthrowing the established order and liberating the proletariat, be they a woman, a man, neither, both, in between, or someone else entirely. Regardless of who they do or do not love.

Nationalism is against all the values of Marx and Engels, Lenin and even Stalin. Do not let them hide behind their excuses from Kim Il Sung and Stalin. Stalin never supported Nationalism. He explained in Marxism and the National Question that each nation has different material conditions, and thus they each have varying procedures to be taken to achieve the revolution. This is one of the few beliefs he shared with the Left Opposition of Trotsky.

The belief that the primary division of humanity is the nation is revisionist, not just revisionist but one of the main rhetorics of fascists and nazis, according to which the superiority of one nation over every other separates "Good" from "Bad". There is no "National Communism"; there is a "National Way to Communism", no Socialist Nationalism, no Left-Wing Nationalism. Any ideology that puts the nation before the people and culture before the workers, that ideology is not leftist, socialist, or Marxist, but rather some type of Falangism more or less moderate.

Be warned of these reactionaries and fascists pretending to be Socialists: do not fall for their rhetoric and stand your ground. The liberation of the proletariat includes everyone, all people of all nations, everywhere on Earth. No tolerance for the intolerants, no war but the class war, no enemy but the bourgeoisie. Remember, comrades, the revolution is red, rainbow, black, pink, blue, and every colour because the only struggle that unites us is against the oppression of Capitalism. The only things we have to lose from this liberation are our chains.

[socialismforall]

Palestine Belongs to Palestinians (1970-1983) Part 2/2 by Enver Hoxha. #Marxist/#Communist Audiobook.

[justforbooks]

Ismail Kadare

One of Albania’s greatest writers who explored the ugliness and dignity of this ancient and long-oppressed nation

Ismail Kadare, who has died aged 88, was the best known Albanian writer of his own generation and all others, and one of the most remarkable European novelists of our age. He leaves a body of work as immense as Balzac’s Human Comedy, as unrelenting in its critique of dictatorship as Orwell’s, and as disturbing as that of Kafka.

Kadare’s 80-plus novels, stories, poetry collections and essays constitute a national monument, an invention as well as a reflection of what it means to be Albanian, an exploration of both the ugliness and the dignity of an ancient and oppressed nation. With him disappears Europe’s last indisputable national writer.

The son of Halit Kadare, a minor official, and Hatixhe (nee Dobi), Ismail was born and grew up in the walled city of Gjirokastër, which was also the home town of Enver Hoxha, dictator of Albania from 1944 to 1985. The city, its modern history and its strange atmosphere are recreated in Chronicle in Stone (1970) and elaborated in The Fall of the Stone City (2008).

Kadare was a brilliant student at Tirana University and already a celebrated poet when he was still in his teens. Albania was a Soviet satellite state at that time; Kadare was therefore sent to Moscow to pursue his literary education at the Gorky Institute for World Literature, which he attended between 1958 and 1960. What he learned there, he often said, was how not to write. The miserable weather of most of his novels, set in a country with a Mediterranean climate, was understood by Albanian readers as silent mockery of the sun-kissed wheatfields of socialist realist novels.

Hoxha broke off relations with the Soviet Union in 1960. Kadare was therefore able to write a fictionalised account of his Moscow years without risk. Twilight of the Eastern Gods (1978) nonetheless implies that something was rotten in the state of Albania too.

Kadare’s first published novel deals with the bizarre duties of an Italian general sent to Albania to gather the remains of soldiers who had fallen during the Italian occupation and the war against Greece (1938-43). The General of the Dead Army (1963) established Kadare’s reputation as a novelist. It also attracted the attention of Jusuf Vrioni, a former aristocrat educated in Italy and France, who offered to translate it into French. Vrioni went on to translate all of Kadare’s work until his own death in 2001, and his name cannot be separated from the story of Kadare’s career.

In the 1960s, communist Albania, which refused to be “de-Stalinised”, entered into an alliance with Mao Zedong’s China, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. Kadare and thousands of other intellectuals spent months in the provinces among workers and peasants. However, his official position was that of journalist, and he was allowed to return to Tirana before the end of the decade.

In these early years, Kadare wrote a large amount of poetry, and most of his fiction consisted of short stories and novellas. Often, a poem would be rewritten as a prose story; sometimes, stories would be expanded or combined. Names, motifs and places recur from one story to another, linking them as fragments of an imaginary world.

Cross-references between different works are part of the arsenal of subtly hidden tools Kadare used to express opposition to the authoritarian regime of Hoxha. However, despite his fame and international recognition, he was not exempt from political discipline. In 1975, a poem denouncing bureaucracy (but indirectly suggesting that the party had blood on its hands) led to a self-criticism session and “relegation” to the countryside.

In 1981, The Palace of Dreams, a chilling analysis of state-led paranoia, was withdrawn from sale and Kadare was not allowed to publish book-length novels thereafter. Yet throughout these tribulations – and occasional thoughts of emigration – Kadare’s output never flagged.

Kadare was one of the very few Albanians allowed to travel abroad. A visit to Turkey in the 70s brought him into brief contact with an American scholar of Balkan oral epics, Albert Lord: the result was a novel about the struggle for national identity through poetry, The File on H (1981). Kadare also visited China and he used some material from that trip for his Shakespearean fantasy of Maoist intrigue, The Concert (1988).  

Foreign travel barely impinges on Kadare’s writing, which is almost always set in Albania, sometimes in disguise (as Egypt, in The Pyramid, for example, or Ottoman Turkey in The Palace of Dreams). But time travel is of the essence: Kadare’s novels range over the history of Albania from the invasion of the Turks in the 15th century (The Siege, 1970) to the monarchy of the 30s, the victory of the partisans, the communist reign (1944-92) and the post-communist period, while weaving into these stories myths from Greece and from the rich store of Balkan legends, together with echoes of Shakespeare and Dante.

Broken April (1978), perhaps the most read of Kadare’s novels in English, is a harrowing narrative of the blood feud as laid down in Albania’s ancient code of law, the kanun. Indirectly, though, it is an oblique assertion of the permanence of Albanian civilisation in the face of Hoxha’s attempt to replace it with the “new man” of Stalinist ideology.

Kadare’s recourse to national myths and legends – in The Ghost Rider (1979), for instance – resuscitates a national identity, and rejects attempts to suppress folk traditions, including religion. Kadare had little interest in contemporary literature; he was more at home with Aeschylus and Byron.

The fact that Kadare survived in an environment as hostile as that of Hoxha’s Albania led some in the west to accuse him of compromise. His appointment as a member of parliament, which he never attended, misled some into thinking him sympathetic to the regime. It is now accepted that these suspicions were unfounded. Kadare’s story is one of courage, persistence, wiliness and luck. The emergence of his work in a place as cruel as 20th-century Albania shows the resilience of the human soul.

Hoxha died in 1985 and was succeeded by Ramiz Alia, who maintained an isolationist and Stalinist regime. Kadare could not imagine that communism would collapse in his own lifetime, but he could see the weakening of the state and he feared the chaos it would bring. He fled to Paris in 1990 for personal safety, and also to give a signal to the Albanian regime. He was granted political asylum almost immediately and later awarded French nationality.

After the collapse of the Alia regime in 1991, Kadare divided his life between Paris, Tirana and a villa on the Albanian coast near Durrës.

In Paris, he used his influence to promote other Albanian poets and novelists, and wrote criticism and essays on his own approach to literature. Several volumes of interviews also appeared. Far from slowing down, Kadare’s rate of production remained intense throughout the 90s and the first two decades of the 21st century.

Even while he revised his entire opus in two languages for a bilingual complete works series for Fayard, published in parallel hard-bound volumes, he brought out new work in profusion.

Suppressed novels unpublished in their own time (Agamemnon’s Daughter, written in 1986 and revised in 2003), new novels portraying post-communist Albania through the same lenses of myth and dream (Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, 2000), and retrospective exploration of the mental torture of life under tyranny (The Successor, 2003), sequels to earlier novels (Fall of the City of Stone) and entirely new works such as The Doll (2020) continued to flow from Kadare’s pen through his 60s, 70s and 80s.

With each new work, the Kadarean universe acquired ever greater consistency and self-sufficiency. It adds up to a portrait not of the real Albania, but of an imaginary land – Kadaria, some have called it – with a single, central topic: how to remain human in a world ruled by fear and suspicion.

Kadare won a great number of literary prizes, among them the Man Booker international award in 2005, the Princess of Asturias award in 2009, the Jerusalem prize in 2015 and the Neustadt international prize for literature in 2020. Only the Nobel escaped him.

On a state visit to Albania last year, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, awarded Kadare the rank of Grand Officier in the Légion d’honneur.

Most of Kadare’s work is available in more than 40 languages, but several major novels and a swathe of short stories have yet to be published in English.

Kadare is survived by his wife, Elena (nee Gushi), herself a writer of distinction, whom he married in 1963, and two daughters.

🔔 Ismail Kadare, writer, born 28 January 1936; died 1 July 2024

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