artful Hoxha
names as Hindess and Hirst whose major
'practice was to exert enormous influ-
ence over a scruffy little magazine deal-
ing with semiotics. The influence of those
who merely fellow travelled with the pure
'true socialists but often refused to go all
the way has actually been felt in important
sections of the labour movement.
Wood deliberately excludes
bawm from her survey since his political
approach is based upon the popular front
and there is 'no sign of any explicit
departure from Marxist theoretical ortho-
doxy as he has always understood it'. The
quasi-caveat of 'as he has always under-
stood it cannot save this section from a
profound ambivalence towards the
popular frontism which is re-echoed
when Wood appers to endorse this
strategy in relation to confronting fascism
and other forms of dictatorship. I think I
am not just indulging in knee jerk ortho.
doxy on this point.
Laclau, whom Wood flays for substitut-
ing 'radical democracy for socialism, started his argument exactly from the MICHELE LEE Jon Halliday (ed.), The Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha, Chatto, £5.95. ENVER HOXHA, the head of the Albanian party and state for more than forty years, died in 1985 a committed Stalinist. It was Stalin, of course, whose timely intervention in 1948 had saved Moxha trom demotion (or worse) under Yugoslav pressure. Yet it would be wrong to ascribe Hoxha's devotion to Stalin to purely
point of the popular front. He amalga-
mated third periodism and the united
front as being examples of 'class reduc-
tionism'. The popular front was
Con-
trasted favourably with both of these
options with the minor quibble that the
role of 'democratic interpellations' had
not been sufficiently grasped. The 'radicHobs- al democracy' of Stedman Jones and Laclau is not massively different in con-
tent to the 'advanced democracy' of
Stalinist orthodoxy.
There are distinctive features to the new
revisionism but Wood does not sufficient-
ly grasp the continuities with such older
ideas as the 'parliamentary road', 'pop-
lar tront, and 'advanced democracy'. Itis this older tradition that has allowed more
orthodox' members of the Communist
Party to at least coexist with the more
extreme new 'true' socialists and to be
able to utilise a number of their concepts
to justify an increasingly right wing poli-
tical strategy for the labour movement in
general and a future Labour government
in particular. self-serving motives. Hoxha was a follower of Stalin out of intellectual conviction and as a result of personal experience. Like Stalin, he too came to identify politics with factional struggle for personal power, personal power with the new state's well-being, and narrow state interest with socialist internationalism. This outlook then defined his domestic and foreign policies — as it did Stalin's.
Jon Halliday's The Artful Albanian is a compilation of extracts taken from eleven volumes of Hoxha's memoirs. It provides
a useful introduction to Hoxha's relations
to the outside world and in a sense also to
the 'Albanian road'. The reader is not told
what guided the editor's choice: there is
on the whole a preference for the irreve-
rent gossip, the neat anecdote and the
cynical comment rather than for themes
that would help one to understand the
domestic parameters of Albania's fore-
ign policy, stormy and consistent at the
same time.
For the central enigma is not the
character of Enver Hoxha, but how a
fully-fledged Stalinist system could
emerge out of a popular revolution and
maintain itself unchanged for four docades. Hoxha's rule was characterized by two central features: the ready recourse
not just to 'discovery and removal of
enemies' (as Halliday somewhat dising
envously suggests), but to frequent and thorough bloody purges of the entire party leadership, a process which, over a period of time, denuded the party of all the original wartime leaders (Shehu was the last to go, in 1982), leaving in the end only Hoxha himself to symbolize continuity with the original revolution; secondly, a degree of internal repression and lack of party democracy that seemed inconsistent with the regime's popular support (that this support remains very real has been proved on several occasions, as Halliday documents). The break with Yugoslavia in 1948 provided the first occasion for a really major purge, and they continued at intervals until the very end of Hoxha's life, draining all the vitality and spontaneity from the system.
Whereas in its isolation, after 1948, the Yugoslav party set about broadening its base (by suspending the brief and disastrous attempt at collectivization, introducing self-management into the factories and liberalizing the cultural sphere), Albania by contrast exhibited a further consolidation of the power of the apparatus and a remarkable tendency of its leadership to settle political differences by violent means.
Hoxha, like Stalin, feared democratisation not only within Albania but anywhere in the communist world. After his 'secret speech at the 20th congress of the CPSU, Khruscher joined Tito as Hoxha's most hated enemy: 'The opportunist " new spirit" which Khruscher was arousing and activating was apparent in the way in which the proceedings of the congress were organized and conducted. This liberal spirit pervaded the whole atmosphere, the Soviet press and propaganda of those days like an ominous cloud; it prevailed in the corridors and the congress halls, it was apparent in people's taces, gestures, and words. The former seriousness... was missing. Even non-party people spoke during the proceedings of the congress... Khruschev's de- 39
nounciation of Stalin was a villainy which had gone beyond all bounds, with catastrophic consequences for the Soviet Union and the movement...! Khruschev, disgusting, loud-mouthed individual', a 'charlatan, clown and blackmailer' and Tito were 'two revisionists, two agents of capitalism', revisionism being country from socialism back to capitalism, the turning of a communist party into a fascist party, it is the inspirer of ideological chaos, confusion, corruption, repression, arbitrarity, instability and putting the homeland up for auction.!
Gomulka was a "communist" 'after a number of ups and downs and writhings of a heterogeneous leadership, in which the agents of Zionism and the capitalist powers were not lacking' became 'Khruschev's friend' - perhaps ai the price of Bierut's life? The 1956 Hungarian 'counter-revolution' was master- Tito, Khruscher, Nagy. and Kadar, aided — naturally — by Western imperialism.
Similar hatred is reserved for Chinese 'revisionism': 'What rubbish will be introduced into China! How many of them — i.e. the bourgeois 'wasps' — will marry! Yellow Earth GILL LEE