Mysterium

 

Noterade denna på en blogg som heter "Mysterium 24".  

Den rödhårige kommunisten / brevbäraren som försvann

Effective fascism

 

This is supposedly a "fascist" government. They literally can´t deport 16 people! Hope their trains go on time, though. 

Italy faces big setback over migrant camps in Albania

Världens sista natt?

 

För kännedom. Och så vidare! 

Asylrättens dagar ser ut att vara räknade

"En demografisk kris utan dess like"

Bektashi Vatican

 

A *very* strange move by the Albanian government. Nobody seems to know what it means, and everyone was surprised when the announcement was made. Essentially, the Prime Minister Edi Rama wants to create a micro-state for the Bektashi Order, a peculiar Islamic group with a semi-secret syncretist religion often described as a blend of Shia Islam, Christianity and shamanism, while nominally being Sunni. 

The article hints at Albania hosting a number of controversial political/religious Islamic movements: the Iranian MEK, which fights the current Iranian regime, and the Turkish Gülen movement, which opposes Erdogan´s government. Perhaps there is a connection here? Do the Albanians have a policy of supporting "dissident" Muslims? Historically, the Bektashi have been associated with Albanian nationalism and are the only religious group mentioned with some respect in the writings of Communist leader Enver Hoxha! 

There are two religious micro-states in Europe: the Vatican and the Orthodox "monastic republic" at Mount Athos. There are also the Knights of Malta, who have extra-territorial status. Make Europe strange again!

Albania to set up Sufi Muslim Bektashi microstate

The One Ring, pardon, Spoon

 

Archbishop Elpidophoros is apparently the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in the United States. This super-Orthodox clip of uncertain provenance argues that the archbishop is too liberal! He seems to support Joe Biden, wants a dialogue with the LGBTQ community, defends Ukraine against Russia, and so on. 

More original (?) is the attack on Elpidophoros´ stance during the COVID pandemic, when he called on the Greek Orthodox to stop partaking of the communion wine with one collective spoon, instead recommending that each communicant uses an individual spoon - obviously to protect people from the virus. But this is anathema to whoever made this video, since he believes that both the wine and the collective spoon are supernaturally protected from pathogenes! After all, the wine is the blood of Christ, which blesses even the one spoon...

Dude.

Note also the paranoia against Freemasons. 

Demons in the sky

 

This one is hard to believe, tbh.  

Demons bonded by common diseases

Kommunism och islam

 

Hanif Bali om vem som *verkligen* kunde sekularisera muslimer:

>>>Albanien var det enda landet i världen med statsateism under den kommunistiska diktatorn Enver Hoxha, all form av religionsutövning var förbjuden från 1967 till 1990.

>>>Kommunister är de enda som kunnat sekularisera muslimska demografier, då med oerhörd mängd våld.

>>>Sovjet hade ”Hujum” (arabiska för ”attack”) i Centralasien från 1927, där månggifte, barnbröllop och slöja förbjöds - Mullorna reagerade kraftigt och uppmanade till mord på kvinnor som tog av sig slöjan. 2500 kvinnor som tog av sig slöjan mördades av muslimer. >>>Sovjet började klassa alla som attackerade kvinnor pga de ej hade slöja som terrorister. >>>Kollektiviseringen på 50-talet tvingade män och kvinnor att arbeta ihop och därmed omöjliggjorde mullornas krav på könsseparering. >>>Det tog till 1960-talet innan slöjan var utrotad. Därför är de muslimska ex-sovjetiska centralasiatiska länderna mycket mer sekulära än sina grannar i Mellanöstern.

>>>Så de enda moderna exempel på sekularisering av muslimer i någon omfattande grad verkar vara en outsinlig förmåga till fascistiskt våld. >>>Är det rimligt att kräva att Sverige behöva demontera sin demokrati och rättsstat för renodlad fascism för att sekulära vänsterliberaler vill ha en stor muslimsk befolkning som accessoar?

Originaltråden på X

The Code of Lëke Dukagjini

 

A short clip from one of the more bizarre Star Trek episodes, "Captive Pursuit" from the first season of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine". It´s also one of the more well known and popular. What a shame that the green alien is called Tosk, I mean, DS9 will never be shown in southern Albania!

When I saw it the first time, I was somewhat surprised that the Star Trek franchise had turned "based" or even "fascist", but it seems the shock value of the episode was quite intentional...

Of course, it subsided somewhat once it was established that the Tosk are genetically engineered beings, and maybe the Hunters are too?!    

The Canadian colony

 

“The CPC(ML): A Revisionist Organization of Agent Provocateurs” is a pamphlet published in 1978 by IN STRUGGLE! (yes, you´re supposed to spell it that way). It was later known as the Marxist-Leninist Organization of Canada IN STRUGGLE! (still with the exclamation mark at the end). Despite the peculiar name, the organization seems to have been a fairly main-line Marxist-Leninist group, if there is such a thing. In Struggle were independent-minded enough not to slavishly follow the “line” of any particular Communist regime. They supported Enver Hoxha´s Albania against post-Mao China, but never accepted Hoxha´s retrospective attacks on Mao Zedong. In Struggle even tried to unite various Marxist-Leninist groups in Canada, to no avail.

In the pamphlet, In Struggle take on a very different political animal: the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), a notorious and notoriously kooky outfit led by one Hardial Bains. The CPC(ML) were originally Maoists, then switched to supporting Albania. Despite their bad reputation on the Canadian left, the CPC(ML) managed to get the Albanian franchise and became officially recognized by the Party of Labor of Albania. The CPC(ML) still exist, but these days, they support Cuba and North Korea instead. I originally assumed that the CPC(ML) were mostly notorious for their tiresome rhetoric and personality cult of Bains, but if In Struggle´s pamphlet is something to go after, the real history is darker (but also very typical).

At least during the 1970´s, the CPC(ML) were an adventurist and extremely sectarian group of a kind that frequently pops up on the far left. They often physically attacked other leftists with baseball bats or bricks, attempted to take over leftist rallies and protest marches, invaded leftist or workers´ cafés to read bombastic declarations, and so on. Entryism was another tactic, for instance when Bains´ group pretended to form local branches of a competing Marxist-Leninist group. When the Bains group officially proclaimed itself a party, the CPC(ML) claimed that a highly respected Marxist-Leninist activist in Canada, Jack Scott, was their party chairman, when in reality Scott had denounced them as provocateurs! 

Bains was of Indian (Punjabi) descent, and successfully managed to infiltrate the East Indian community in Canada through various front groups. Or maybe not so successfully, since the CPC(ML)´s attempts to take over Sikh “temples” (really a kind of community organizations) sometimes ended in huge physical fights outside the meeting halls. Naturally, the Bainsites condemned all competing leftist groups (including In Struggle) as “police agents” and what not. In this pamphlet, In Struggle repays the favor by accusing the CPC(ML) of being literal fascists…

Like many other volatile groups of this kind, the CPC(ML) combined adventurism and bombastic sloganeering with positions far to the “right” of most leftists. A case in point is their Canadian nationalism. Bains claimed that Canada is a colony of the United States, and the Canadian revolution must therefore be “democratic” rather than socialist, uniting “all the people”, including anti-American capitalists. Indeed, one of Bains´ main objections to the Maoist “three worlds theory” was that it claimed that Canada was imperialist! He thus criticized the Communist Party of China *from the right*. 

This Canadian nationalist line created problems for Bains in Quebec, where he instead tried to promote Quebecois nationalism. In Struggle, which supported the right of Quebec to self-determination while arguing against actual independence, charges Bains with the crassest opportunism, since his weird party didn´t really fight for French language rights in the here and now (thereby adapting to Anglo-chauvinism), while calling for a bloc with Quebecois nationalists in the abstract. 

Not sure who might be interested in this material today, but there you go.

Odyssey through revisionism

 

The first revisionists?

I admit that I never heard about the Communist Workers Group (Marxist-Leninist) before a frequent commentator on this blog pointed out their erstwhile existence. The CWG was a small Marxist-Leninist group in the United States, apparently led by a man named Tom Clark, which published a magazine named “Forward”. The group existed between 1975 and 1978. A similar group existed in Canada, the Organization of Communist Workers (Marxist-Leninist). I assume they dissolved at approximately the same time. A previously unpublished work by Clark, “The State and Counter-Revolution” (written during the 1980´s), can be accessed on the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA). Clark himself passed away in 2010.

While not Maoist in the strict sense, the CWG originally supported China and Albania, while regarding the post-Stalin Soviet Union as “revisionist”. Later, the CWG would condemn the Communist Parties of China and Albania as “revisionist”, too. At some point, the CWG realized that the roots of this revisionism goes all the way back to Stalin himself. After all, it was the Stalinists who launched the Popular Front strategy at the 1935 congress of the Communist International. Had the CWG stopped here, they would have developed in a direction similar to, say, the Marxist-Leninist Party (MLP), which tried to develop a kind of de-Stalinized version of Marxism-Leninism. Perhaps uniquely among anti-revisionist Communist groups, however, the CWG went further. 

Clark and his co-thinkers eventually reached the conclusion that Marx, Engels and Lenin had been “revisionists”! Except, of course, that no “revision” was involved at all, since Marxism had been petty-bourgeois and middle class from the start. Clark seems to have ended up as a kind of anarchist or Council Communist, although he never uses those terms. What makes the evolution of CWG intriguing is that they reached their conclusion by consistently applying the same logic which made them break with China and Albania. Discovering striking similarities between the ideas of Marx/Engels/Lenin and later Communists, they naturally drew the conclusion that the entire Marxist movement had been “revisionist” from its inception.

One clue to the mystery of the CWG could be that they strongly emphasized the class basis of revisionism, while also making a direct connection between the old revisionism (Bernstein and reformist Social Democracy) and the new (which was ostensibly Communist). The social basis for both seems to have been privileged middle class sectors. But Marx, Engels and Lenin also believed that “the socialist intelligentsia” could play a positive role in the revolutionary struggle, indeed Lenin gave them a central role by claiming that revolutionary socialist consciousness could only come to the working class *from without*, from middle class intellectuals. Since Lenin believed in a vanguard party, what does this tell us about the class basis of said party and its leadership? Indeed, what does it tell us about the class character of the Soviet state, including the early Soviet state? 

In contrast to other Marxist-Leninists, the CWG also stressed that the revolutionary workers´ state must consist of directly elected soviets, an armed workers´ militia, and so on. This clearly wasn´t the case with the “revisionist” regimes, but nor was it the case with early Soviet Russia. If Marx, Engels and Lenin (or pre-1935 Stalin, for that matter) are analyzed bearing these principles in mind, they all fall short. Marx, Engels and Lenin often took positions that could be seen as “popular frontism”, “democratism”, peaceful road to socialism, united fronts with the petty bourgeoisie or with parties dominated by the middle class, and so on. Even pure or classical Marxism is a bottomless pit of revisionist deviations. 

Clark believed that Marx, Engels and Lenin supported the Paris Commune and the soviets for purely tactical reasons, and that their real perspective was either taking over the existing state through parliament, or a revolution for the benefit of the middle class. Lenin´s approach to the soviets struck Clark as parliamentarian, as if the soviets were a kind of workers´ parliaments in which the Bolsheviks peacefully competed for majority influence. Clark even questioned whether the Commune and the soviets were properly proletarian. Certain sections of the middle class might actually prefer a Commune-style state with radical democracy, cheap government, lower taxes, no standing army, and so on. The Paris Commune in Clark´s opinion had a leadership dominated by middle class elements, and so did the soviets in 1917 until shortly before the October revolution. Thus, not even a call for soviets is working class revolutionary in and of itself.

What non-Marxists would call “really existing socialism” is a third system discovered by the petty bourgeoisie or middle class, neither capitalist nor properly socialist. This third system places the middle class in command and hence enables it to survive. Marxism is simply the ideology of this particular middle class striving. Clark apparently predicted that the third system would eventually devolve into capitalism, and regarded the events of 1989-91 as confirmation of his view. Still, China seems to be a better confirmation of his theory, since the Chinese combine “capitalism” with a strong middle class-dominated state regulating it.

But what was the CWG´s or Clark´s alternative to Marxism-Revisionism, to coin a phrase? They “should” have become anarchists or Council Communists, but never actually adopted an alternative ideology to Marxism. However, I think it´s safe to say that Clark´s perspective has a family likeness to certain forms of anarchism and ultraleftism. The working class should struggle in the workplace and on the streets for its own material interests, independent of any middle class intellectuals, who will simply try and capture the movement and derail it. This is true even of proletarianized middle class elements, whose real goal is to create a system that will enable them to regain their privileges. The labor union apparatus is a case in point, but so is any revolution led by declassed strata of this type. 

However, it seems Clark coupled this crypto-anarchist perspective with a strong pessimism. The working class, due precisely to its material position in production, is a *weak* class. It´s easy pray to middle class demagogues. The CWG was a very “theory-heavy” group, and I get the impression that Clark never broke with this perspective. He wasn´t a pure spontaneist, rather he seems to believe that no true revolution is possible without the correct theory being adopted by the proletariat. But very few workers are capable of doing the research necessary to develop such a theory. Even the advanced workers therefore become dependent on theory already developed by others. And who are these others? Why, the Marxist middle class intellectuals, of course!

It´s almost as if the proletariat is doomed to be dominated by the “petty bourgeois” intelligentsia. But if so, Lenin was in a sense right: revolutionary consciousness can only come to the workers “from without”. And that means the working class is *materially incapable* of making a revolution in its own interest. The workers are doomed to forever be the fifth wheel under the middle class popular frontist bandwagon. They are not a revolutionary class. Clark never draws these conclusions, but they seem to be the logical next step. (Insert comment on George Orwell´s “1984” here.) 

What political conclusions follow from this? Ironically, the most obvious possible conclusion is that advanced workers should *support* the middle class reformers (or in extreme cases the middle class revolutionaries) as the lesser evil to unbridled capitalism. The radical rejection of revisionism leads straight to embracing it through a different route. The other conclusion is the one drawn by French Marxist Jacque Camatte when he lost faith in working class revolution (and modern civilization itself): take to the hills (the Cevennes in Camatte´s case) and form a survivalist commune. I admit that I´m vacillating between these two alternative options myself! 

Which helps to explain my interest in this rather obscure topic. The CWG´s political odyssey has a kind of family likeness to my own meandering perturbations…

Core or meltdown?

 

“The Party of Labor of Albania Came to Canada Under a Stolen Flag” is a publication of the Bolshevik Union, a long-forgotten small group of Stalinists in Canada. Published in 1979, the pamphlet is strictly speaking no 13 of the BU´s journal “Lines of Demarcation”. The BU formed an international current together with the Bolshevik League of the United States (a fusion of Leninist Core and Demarcation) and some West African groups based in France. I assume all these organizations disappeared at some point during the 1980´s.

Originally, the BU and its co-thinkers had supported Enver Hoxha´s Communist regime in Albania, but by 1979 they had decided that Hoxha was just another revisionist, not much different from the Chinese and post-Stalin Soviet versions. Interestingly, the Albanian Communists (known as “Party of Labor of Albania” or PLA) had tried to recruit the BU to their international network. When the PLA subsequently recognized the bizarre and cultish Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) as their fraternal organization, the Bolshevik Union first attempted to convince the Albanians of their mistake and then broke off all contacts. Presumably, this triggered their political reevaluation of Hoxha and the PLA.

What attracted many Marxist-Leninists to Hoxha was his attacks on the Maoist “three worlds theory” used by China to justify both a strategic alliance with bourgeois or semi-feudal regimes in the Third World, and its tilt towards the United States in the Cold War. However, the BU believes that the Albanian leader really has a similar perspective (minus the outrightly pro-American geopolitical positioning). Hoxha´s positive view of “non-aligned” nations is said to be similar to the Chinese, Soviet or Yugoslav takes. Hoxha´s regime had relatively good relations with Greece, Turkey and Romania (all broadly “pro-Western” at the time) and hoped to trade with Western Europe and Canada. Hoxha also expressed strong support for Egyptian leader Sadat´s break with the Soviet Union, since this removed a potential military threat to Albania at its southern flank. 

The BU believes that the PLA stopped referring to Canada as imperialist shortly after recognizing the CPC (M-L), a group which denied Canada´s imperialist character. While being cozy with Western nations, Albania had also established friendly relations with Vietnam, a pro-Soviet country, no doubt because of shared hostility towards China. Albanian support for Khomeini is also up for criticism. The deeper point is that the PLA calls for unity with the “national” bourgeoisie in the Third World and the imperialist nations of the “second world” (here Western Europe and Canada) just as the Maoist “three worlds theory”. The break between Albania and China has nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism but is simply a conflict between competing national interests. 

Even the seemingly radical sloganeering against “both superpowers” (the US and the Soviet Union), rather than the Chinese line of de facto uniting with one against the other one, is really a form of “three worlds theory” and revisionism, since opposition to “superpowers” can come from lesser imperialist powers or nationalist bourgeois regimes.  

The decision of the Albanian Communists to give the CPC (M-L) their Canadian franchise looms large in the pamphlet. To most people, CPC (M-L) is the small and crazy cult led by one Hardial Bains. Originally Maoist, they eventually sided with Albania instead. The Bolshevik Union couldn´t stand them. In the pamphlet, the CPC (M-L) are accused of being middle class, lumpen and agent provocateurs. Above all, they are revisionists and outright reformists. The CPC (M-L) denies that Canada is imperialist and instead tries to recast it as a nation oppressed by the United States. From this follows that the Canadian working class must unite with all the people, including “the middle bourgeoisie”, in a fight against the “rich”. The BU is opposed to this broad popular front, pointing out that what the CPC (M-L) calls “the middle bourgeoisie” really encompasses a sizable fraction of the capitalist class! The BU also complains about Albania not really giving a damn about who gets their franchise, since the PLA didn´t see it as necessary to have a single Marxist-Leninist party in each country in the first place. The important thing is that various Marxist-Leninist groups collaborate to aid Albania…

By most standards, the BU and the Bolshevik League would count as Stalinists. Yet, they seem to repudiate the popular front, a strategy associated with the very same Stalin. It´s not clear to me after reading some other material from this current whether the BU/BL rejects popular frontism en toto, or see it as a purely temporary tactic best avoided in 1979. Nor is it clear whether these groups are Third Period. In some curious way, these groups sound extremely sectarian and dogmatic, yet not really Third Period. 

The BU/BL current believed that a third world war was imminent, a war between the US and Soviet blocs, both being equally imperialist. In this war, all other nations would become proxies for one side or the other, indeed many already were so. This explains why no national bourgeoisie is progressive, the global situation being similar to the European theatre during World War I. Given this background, Albania´s diplomatic maneuvers could be seen as Enver Hoxha probing both sides in the future war to see which one he should join! 

BU and their co-thinkers thus had a very bleak view of the general world situation: the Soviet Union became “capitalist” after the death of Stalin, China had always been “capitalist”, and no national liberation struggles are possible except under Communist leadership, but of course, no such leaderships exist anywhere in the world. Apparently, this current disappeared during the mid-1980´s, no doubt because their entire political perspective turned out to be dead wrong. 

Bizarrely, the CPC (M-L) still exists, now led by the widow of Hardial Bains, but that´s another story!  

Anti-Maoist struggle session

 

Liu Shaoqi 

During the Cultural Revolution in China, two factions in the Chinese Communist Party were in conflict. On the one hand, the Marxist-Leninists based on the working class. On the other hand, the capitalist roaders, fascists and revisionists. And the leader of the latter faction was…Mao Zedong?!

Such is the “line” of the 1967 pamphlet “On the situation in the People´s Republic of China”, published by a small ex-Maoist group, the Marxist-Leninist Organisation of Britain (MLOB). Probably completely forgotten today, MLOB´s publication was apparently somewhat notorious at the time. Maoism was at the height of its popularity around the world. In the Western world, left-wing radical students struck up an interest in Mao Zedong Thought, often under the influence of the so-called Cultural Revolution. MLOB had previously thought of themselves as Maoists, indeed some of their members might have been among the first Maoists in the UK. But after observing the chaos during Mao´s “bombardment of the headquarters”, they reassessed their position and came out in support of Liu Shaoqi, who had been branded the number one “capitalist roader” within the Chinese party by the Red Guards. Presumably, you couldn´t win a popularity contest among the radical campus leftists in 1967 by launching a struggle session *against* Chairman Mao and his allies!

What makes MLOB´s pamphlet interesting is that they don´t attack Mao Zedong for “ultraleftist deviations”, which is probably the “logical” take for a strict Marxist-Leninist group which opposes the Cultural Revolution. Rather, they take the position that Mao was a “revisionist” from the start and hence was a “rightist” deviator of the same type as Bukharin. Mao´s writings from the 1950´s are used to prove (or “prove”) that Mao supported Khrushchev´s criticism of Stalin, wanted reconciliation with Tito, called for a prolonged period of peaceful co-existence between the workers and the national bourgeoisie in China, opposed “uninterrupted revolution”, and attempted to purge Marxist-Leninists from the party and the military. MLOB supports Marshal Peng Dehuai, a Chinese military leader who was often accused of being pro-Soviet and hence a “revisionist”. MLOB argues that Khrushchev´s support for Peng Dehuai was a conspiracy. The Soviet leader pretended to support Peng so Mao would get an excuse to purge him?! Not sure if I buy that one, tbh. As already mentioned, MLOB also expresses strong support for Liu Shaoqi, China´s president and a prominent rival of Mao in the Communist Party leadership. Both Peng and Liu were purged during the Cultural Revolution, both eventually dying in prison.

MLOB actually charges Mao with plotting the restoration of capitalism and bourgeois state power in China. The Red Guards are really fascist storm-troopers. To MLOB, the evidence for this position is pretty obvious: the Red Guards and their allies attacked Communist Party officials, dissolved Communist local organizations, and likewise attempted to dissolve the Communist youth organization and the trade unions. The “revolutionary committees” ordered wage freezes and called on workers to tighten their belts. Serious training in Marxism-Leninism was rejected in favor of mindless parroting of “Mao Zedong Thought” in the form of short soundbites from the Little Red Book. The most interesting part of the pamphlet (which unfortunately doesn´t cite any sources) details the civil war-like situation in various Chinese provinces, as supporters and opponents of the Cultural Revolution violently battled each other. MLOB believes that thousands of workers resisted the Red Guards, often arms in hand! The army seems to have been split, which is interesting (if true) since the PLA was supposedly allied with Mao.

There are obvious weaknesses in the report. Liu´s support for Mao´s erstwhile “revisionism” is simply brushed aside by declaring that he simply followed party discipline. MLOB also have problems explaining away China´s foreign policy, which was pretty radical at the time.

As already mentioned, “On the situation in the People´s Republic of China” was MLOB´s main claim to fame. The group must have been quite small (although they did have international co-thinkers) and underwent a split in 1974. One of the leaders, MB, was accused of Third Period-style politics and expelled. He subsequently became a Council Communist. The other leader, BB, changed the name of the MLOB to the Communist League and expressed support for Enver Hoxha´s Stalinist regime in Albania. There is a “family likeness” between Hoxha´s criticisms of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and that offered by MLOB ten years earlier. However, the Communist League also had unspecified differences with Hoxha. The group might still exist, and on the web I found a bizarre condemnation of BB by a German ultra-Stalinist group which accuses him of the original political deviations “Anti-Stalinism-Hoxhaism”, “Beria-ism” and “Neo-Menshevism”. Apparently, the ultras believe that Beria murdered “our beloved comrade Stalin” so BB´s “Beria-ism” rubbed them the wrong way…

But that´s just another Tuesday in ML-Land. No, the really interesting contribution these comrades did probably was the publication under review here.  

The fringe of the surrey

 

"What the Spartacist League Really Stands For. A Self-Exposure by James Robertson (The Speech the SL Wouldn´t Print)" is a classic pamphlet by the otherwise mostly unknown Communist (T) Cadre (CTC). The pamphlet was probably published in 1977. 

Yes, we are in the murky demimonde of intra-mural Trotskyist polemics. While the CTC must have been an extremely small group, the other groups mentioned in the pamphlet weren´t particularly large or influential either, although the Spartacist League was notorious on the American far left (and occasionally outside it). In January 1977, the leader of the Spartacists, James Robertson, gave a public presentation in New York City titled "Towards the Rebirth of the Fourth International". While most of the speech was frankly boring and very "political" (judging by the excerpts published in this pamphlet), Robertson did say things which raised the eyebrows of two other Trotskyist groups present at the show, the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) and the already mentioned CTC. When the Spartacist League refused to publish a transcript of Robertson´s speech, CTC decided to do so themselves (they had tape recorded the presentation and the debate following it). Or rather extended excerpts from it. The LRP had already published their own account of the fracas. For years afterwards, Robertson´s scandalous speech was notorious among small Trotskyist groups all over the world. I´ve heard from an ex-Spartacist in Sweden that Robertson was drunk as a skunk during his presentation, and that he hardly showed himself in public after the 1977 debacle! 

What went wrong? Many things, but what most upset the non-Spartacist auditorium was Robertson´s blatant racism and chauvinism. This from a guy who claimed to be some kind of revolutionary internationalist Marxist. Most blatantly, Robertson referred to Albanians as "goat-fuckers" (strictly speaking, he claimed that Marx had done so) in order to poke fun at the Maoists who believed that Enver Hoxha´s Stalinist regime in Albania had something important to say. 

However, other ethnicities didn´t fare much better. The Greeks survive by "exporting their sons and selling expensive wrist-watches to each other". (However, Robertson believes that Athens is nevertheless "a big step up" compared to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem!) North European workers aren´t revolutionary since "North Europe is dripping with fat". Immigrant guestworkers aren´t revolutionary either. "When they are deported, they scream for the popular front". The US defeat in Vietnam isn´t important, since "not many people live in Indochina" (!). Blacks in the United States (in 1977, the Spartacist leader still calls them "Negroes") are reverse racists and want to kill Jewish shopkeepers, and this attitude is common even among the Black supporters of the Spartacist League. Blacks are also stupid, since they burned down their own ghettoes and now wait for the Jews to come back and rebuild them! 

But then, many White leftists also fall short of Robertson´s high standards. The official Fourth International mostly picks up hippies, and at one point, Robertson even implies that the membership of his own organization is "a big pile of shit". So they must have been, since the Spartacists in the audience laughed and clapped every time Robertson made a disparaging remark about non-Anglo ethnics, most of the roaring laughter coming during his remarks about Albanian bestiality. 

As Communist Cadre points out, Robertson´s remarks weren´t some kind of personal idiosyncrasy, but connected to Spartacist League politics on a deep level. Perhaps uniquely on the left, Spartacist defended the right of national self-determination of *all* peoples, including groups usually considered colonial settlers, such as the Boer in South Africa. They also defended the national self-determination of Israelis and Northern Ireland Protestants (not entirely uniquely, but almost). The Spartacist feared the "genocidal" nationalism of the oppressed, in effect painting the Third World as a gigantic whirlpool of reactionary tribalism, with one ethnicity constantly replacing the other as "the oppressor". Thus, Greeks and Turks were fighting it out on Cyprus, Turks and Armenians in Anatolia, Bengalis and Biharis in East Pakistan, pretty much everyone in Lebanon, and so on. And perhaps Blacks and Jews in the New York City ghetto? 

Rather than drawing the conclusion that *all* nationalism is therefore reactionary (the anarchist and ultraleft take), the Spartacist League de facto took the "right-wing" position that certain currently dominant groups have the right of self-determination already under capitalism, these dominant groups always being the most "Westernized" and "modern" ones. (Nominally, the Spartacist tendency does say that if two peoples are "interpenetrated", none of them can lay claim to national self-determination under capitalism, but their *actual* position is that some of them really can - the ones the Sparts deem rational enough not to go on a killing spree in the ghetto.) 

This went hand in hand with a generally Anglo-centric view of the world and the revolutionary struggle, clearly visible in Robertson´s speech, where all the important action takes place either in the United States or in the United Kingdom (which apparently isn´t "dripping with fat" in the same way as Scandinavia and Germany). The sole exception to the rule is Japan, which Robertson analyzed extensively (in contrast to irrelevant little Indochina), obviously because it´s the most modern Asian nation. Perhaps there is another exception, too, but in the opposite direction: Anglophone Canada, which the Spartacist leader simply writes off as "the fringe of the surrey" (the irony is palpable). Bizarrely, Robertson even asserts that the United States is the only nation in the world with a continuous revolutionary Trotskyist tradition *thanks to stable US bourgeois democracy*! Funny Lenin made it under conditions of Czarist illegality...

On another point, the CTC analysis was soon proven wrong. The CTC identified with the Marcy-Copeland Tendency, something as peculiar as a pro-Stalinist Trotskyist current (you heard me). It´s main organizational expression in the United States was and is the Workers World Party (WWP), founded by Sam Marcy, a defector from the more properly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Outside the WWP were a couple of small and ultra-obscure groups which tried to be "more Marcyite than Marcy", among them the CTC. Naturally, the CTC attack Robertson for not being pro-Stalinist, even calling him a "neo-Shachtmanite". Max Shachtman was another defector from the SWP, but in the exact opposite direction compared to Marcy, charging the Trotskyist movement for not being anti-Stalinist enough. 

The litmus test for all these groups came in 1956 when the Hungarians rose in rebellion against the local Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union. Marcy supported the Soviets, arguing that the Hungarian uprising was counter-revolutionary. The SWP, Robertson and (unsurprisingly) Shachtman supported the Hungarian rebels. To the CTC, which upheld Marcy´s position, this was Robertson´s original political sin. The CTC thus predicted that Robertson would soon evolve in an even more anti-Stalinist direction. They weren´t *entirely* out of their league, since Robertson´s peculiar speech only mentioned two Communist regimes, Albania and Vietnam, and then only to disparage them. However, Robertson´s actual trajectory turned out to be the exact opposite: around 1980, the Spartacist League became almost as pro-Stalinist as the Marcyites. Still, it´s interesting to note that the object of their Stalinophile appetites was the modern White European-dominated Soviet Union, rather than China, Vietnam, North Korea or Albania (or even Cuba). The LRP, the other small group present at the meeting, believed that the Spartacists were really yearning for a Sovietized America, hence in some sense still being Anglo-chauvinists. 

The Spartacist League and the LRP still exist, but their websites are seldom updated anymore. There is, however, a kind of neo-Spartacist League in the form of the Internationalist Group, led by Robertson´s lieutenant Jan Norden (who had a fall out with the líder maximo circa 1996). The SWP and WWP are still around, too. The CTC has long disappeared. I´ve heard from a reputable source that the "T" in their abbreviation stands for "Trotsky", but usually the group´s name is spelled out "Communist Cadre", although "Communist T Cadre" is actually used at the front page of this pamphlet. I found it intriguing that the CTC, despite their highly sectarian nature, don´t sound completely insane. In fact, they come across as more politically serious than Robertson, whose speech is frequently rambling or just plain weird. 

With that observation, I close this admittedly somewhat esoteric discussion. 

You can´t beat the enemy while raising his flag - Dimitrov tries it

70% bad?

"Revolution" was the theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. This is a review of the issue dated June 1981, which may be of some interest to left-watchers. The RCP was originally a fairly regular Maoist organization, but veered sharply "to the left" (as in ultra-left) after the death of Mao, when the RCP leader Bob Avakian decided to support the so-called Gang of Four in China. That´s the crazy faction around Mao´s widow Jiang Qing which wanted to continue the Cultural Revolution! What the RCP believes in today, is anybody´s guess.

Judging by this issue of "Revolution", the RCP´s ultra-leftist turn was surprisingly consistent. Several articles explicitly repudiate the Popular Frontist line associated with the Seventh Congress of the Communist International and Georgi Dimitrov. One article argues against the politics of the Communist Party of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The RCP believe that the Communists should have formed a Red Army instead of joining the Popular Front government! While this Communist army would be in tactical alliance with the forces of the Republic against Franco, it would nevertheless be an independent force. (This is simply Mao´s line in China projected onto the Spanish situation.) The articles on World War II, while not arguing against the Soviet Union or Mao joining the Allies, nevertheless take the position that the war was at all times an inter-imperialist conflict. That a socialist state was forced to join one side, doesn´t change this basic fact. Once again, popular frontism is condemned, as is Stalin´s "On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union", a collection of speeches from the war years. While the RCP still uphold Stalin (the Soviet Union didn´t become "state capitalist" until after his death), they do admit that "revisionism" started to spread like wildfire already while the great leader was alive, and that his errors contributed to this situation. 

The problem with the RCP is that they can´t really give a materialist analysis of why "revisionism" developed at all. The Trotskyist analysis is that Stalinism had definitive material roots in the bureaucracy and its material privileges, which led it to see "the defense of the Soviet Union" (really the defense of its privileged position as a ruling stratum) as central, while working class struggles and revolutions elsewhere could be betrayed if they didn´t fit the momentary needs of Soviet foreign policy. Both the "theory" of "socialism in one country" and popular frontism were logical outgrowths of such a situation. RCP, by contrast, defends the theory of socialism in one country, while seeing the "line" of Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party as a series of political and ideological mistakes and shortcomings. The whole take feels strangely idealist. Or not so strangely, since the RCP (in good Maoist fashion) presumably believe that the "line" is paramount. 

The most well known article in this issue of "Revolution" is titled "You Can´t Beat The Enemy While Raising His Flag" and is illustrated by a bizarre faux American flag, in which the stars are replaced by spiders, while the stripes have turned into snakes! The article argues against any political adaptation, no matter how symbolical, to nationalism in the imperialist nations. Once again, various Communist policies from the Popular Front period are attacked. Avakian says that the American proletariat must learn to "hate the American flag" and that the American bourgeoisie can keep it. Communism, it seems, is no longer 20th century Americanism. In an accompanying article, the RCP polemicizes against the Marxist-Leninist Party (MLP), which during this period had evidently still not broken with Hoxhaism and *its* pop-frontist aspects. The MLP argued that the smaller imperialist nations are oppressed by the United States. In an intriguing twist, the RCP believes that both Hoxhaites and Eurocommunists really want the Western European nations to join the Soviet imperialist camp!

The magazine ends with a "joint communiqué" directed "to the Marxist-Leninists, Workers and Oppressed of All Countries", signed by 13 Maoist groups, including the RCP. (Interestingly, Sendero Luminoso in not one of the signatories.) It´s obvious from the declaration that the RCP still accepts Mao´s version of popular frontism ("New Democracy"). The communiqué even defends Pol Pot´s Cambodia against Vietnam - the standard Maoist position - while condemning both sides would be more logical. The Khmer Rouge, after all, had ties to Hua Guofeng´s "revisionist" regime in China, which overthrew the Gang of Four! The 13 left-Maoist groups decided to launch an international journal, "A World To Win", which later became the publication of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM).                                                                                                                                                 

With that, I end my review of "Revolution, June 1981". 

Titta vem som hyllar Enver Hoxha

Titta vem som hyllar Enver Hoxha. Ja, det är Motpol, en sajt som står politiskt långt till höger om SD och AFS. 

Enver Hoxha och den nationella frågan

Chairman Hua has a problem

“Kinas brytning med Albanien” is a book in Swedish published in 1978 by the local Maoist faithful, the so-called Communist Party of Sweden (SKP). It deals with an event which rocked the Maoist “world movement” a couple of years earlier: the split between post-Mao China and Enver Hoxha´s Albania. The Albanian Communist leadership, probably due to China´s pro-American foreign policy course and the vagaries of Balkan power politics (with the Chinese cozying up to Tito´s Yugoslavia), had broken with Beijing and embarked on a more “leftist” course, verbally attacking both the United States, the Soviet Union and China as “imperialist”. While this gung-ho isolationism attracted hard line Marxist-Leninists fed up with both Soviet and Chinese “revisionism” (and Realpolitik), it repelled pretty much everyone else, soon forcing the Hoxha regime to make some tactical adjustments, usually in the direction of pro-Soviet regimes in the Third World, but also Khomeini´s Iran – regimes Hoxha should logically have opposed if adhering strictly to the anti-Soviet (and anti-everyone) line. But this was still in the future when “Kinas brytning med Albanien” was published.

The book is divided into three sections. The most voluminous one is a collection of angry diplomatic (or not-so diplomatic) notes from the Albanian and Chinese Communist governments regarding the Chinese decision to break off its economic aid to Albania. I only skimmed this section. Please note: Albania was so backward that *Mao´s China* (hardly a power house of advanced technological development) could give it economic aid! This section ends with a sarcastic comment (funny when coming from Maoists) about how Albania sent a delegation to India to request economic aid from them instead… But sure, maybe India was more backward than China back in 1978? The second section contain the famous editorial “The Theory and Practice of Revolution”, published in the Albanian Communist organ “Zeri i Popullit”on June 6, 1977. This, then, gives the official Albanian position on the ideological rift with the Chinese. The final section is a response from the SKP to the Albanian polemic. The SKP doesn´t really argue its pro-Chinese line (really pro-Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping), essentially just repeating all the usual “Three Worlds Theory” talking points. What struck me when reading the article was how brazen it was – the SKP freely admits that in the event of a Third World War, they would support the United States and NATO against the Soviet Union! And the SKP regarded a third world war as inevitable…

Of course, SKP´s weird blend of Stalinistic Maoism and Swedish anti-Soviet nationalism didn´t pay off (as far as I know). The proper Swedish authorities still regarded them as unreliable reds. Today, the ex-SKPers have change their line again, now supporting *Russia* against the Western alliance, presumably confirming the deepest fears of the Secret Service. I suppose the left behind Maoists might still be taking their marching orders from oblique editorials in “People´s Daily”, although I suspect the Chinese no longer give a damn. And I frankly wonder if they gave a damn even back in 1978!  

Elsie versus Hutchings

I've seen an earlier version of this book ("Historical Dictionary of Albania"), published in 1996 and written by an entirely different author, Raymond Hutchings. In 2004, series editor Jon Woronoff decided to replace Hutchings with Robert Elsie for the new edition. It's not clear why.

I haven't seen the Elsie editions (there are several now), but judging by the preview, there are some important differences between Hutchings and Elsie. The former was strongly pro-Albanian and anti-Serb, and sounded opinionated in general (not necessarily a bad thing). Elsie sounds more “objective”. I noticed that Hutchings emphasizes the pro-Communist factions of the Bektashi, a heterodox Muslim order in Albania, while Elsie emphasizes the anti-Communist ones. In general, Elsie's entries are longer. Also, his editions mention the 1997 unrest in Albania, triggered by the collapse of pyramid schemes. Hutchings wrote before this central event in post-Communist Albanian history had taken place.

Woronoff points out in a preface to the 2004 edition that very few Westerners have specialist knowledge of Albania, and that it was difficult to find somebody suitable to write a historical dictionary like this! Hutchings' old edition doesn't seem to be available from Amazon at the present time, but if you can, procuring both may not be such a bad idea…

Pan-Africanism in practice?

This is a detailed, perhaps too detailed, study of Kwame Nkrumah's foreign policy. Nkrumah was the leader of Ghana from 1957 to 1966. Still today, Nkrumah is considered important in some circles, as the founder and first leader of Pan-Africanism. Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) was the first European colony in Black Africa to become independent. Nkrumah therefore wielded an enormous moral influence on African independence struggles. Soon, he attempted to turn this prestige into real political and military clout. Ghanaian troops (under UN command) were present in the Congo during the Congo crisis. Nkrumah called on the newly independent African states to swiftly form a union, complete with an actual federal government. He did manage to form a bloc of radical states as a counterweight to a more moderate alliance headed by the Ivory Coast and Liberia. However, the “organic union” remained elusive.

The author of this book accuses Nkrumah of unrealistic expectations and adventurism. Despite Ghana's poverty and small size, Nkrumah saw himself as an important international statesman, bickering with Nasser, Nehru or Tito (the real heavy weights) over the future course of the Non-Aligned Movement. Nkrumah's official visits to other nations seem to have been many, prolonged and always done in the company of a large entourage. He vacationed at Crimea at the invitation of Soviet leader Khrushchev. At times, Nkrumah's antics were downright comical. During a visit to tiny Albania, the Ghanaian president and Albanian Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha signed an agreement to establish an air traffic link between Tirana and Accra, trafficked by Albanian planes. There was just one problem: Albania didn't have any civilian air planes... (To be fair, Ghana's economy was actually stronger than Albania's and Romania's ditto, the reason probably being that the British colonial power had developed the Gold Coast prior to independence. Albania subsequently exported substandard beer and cigarettes to Ghana, while Romanian diplomats in Accra used their nation's trade deal with Nkrumah as a means of obtaining foreign currency, suggesting that the Ghanaian pound was stronger than the Romanian leu!)

Nkrumah's politics also had darker sides. The Ghanaian leader attempted to destabilize many other African nations, became increasingly more autocratic at home, and turned sharply “to the left” in the hope of receiving substantial subsidies from the Soviet Union and China. (Of course, Ghana was frequently the target of destabilization by others, including several attempts to assassinate Nkrumah himself.) Despite his radical reputation as a Pan-Africanist and socialist, Nkrumah's international forays were frequently opportunistic. In the Congo, Ghana's troops refused to give Lumumba (Nkrumah's supposed ally) access to the national radio station at a critical point in the power struggle with Kasavubu (who was more pro-Western). Later, however, Ghana agreed to smuggle Soviet arms to Lumumba's supporters in Stanleyville. In Togo, Nkrumah's operatives attempted to topple the nationalist government of Sylvanus Olympio (since he had various conflicts with Ghana), in effect siding with pro-Western coup plotter Nicolas Grunitsky. Nkrumah made attempts to obtain massive amounts of financial assistance and food from the Western powers (including the United States), while "building socialism" and strengthening Ghana's ties with the Soviet bloc.

It's not clear whether Nkrumah was a genuine megalomaniac or simply a poseur. The author regards his politics as seriously intended, if extremely unrealistic and misguided, including the attempts to form a vast African super-state (or super-federation) ASAP. He also believes that Ghana might have become a dangerous Soviet satellite, had Nkrumah not been overthrown by the military in 1966.

Due to its attention to details, “Ghana's Foreign Policy 1957-66” is a tedious read. The book is *not* detailed when dealing with other issues than its stated subject. Somewhat ironically, it therefore requires a good deal of background knowledge (especially concerning Ghana's domestic policy) to be fully understood. My background knowledge comes from Jon Woronoff's “West African Wager”, reviewed by me elsewhere.

That being said, this study is probably a must if West African political history is your thing…

Worth waiting for

OK, I admit it. I'm a geek. About a year ago, I tried to set some kind of world record here at Amazon, posting 84 cranky reviews in a row. I also expressed my great sorrow and disappointment that our favourite vendor wasn't selling the 15-volume mastodon work "Noctuidae Europaeae". I mean, imagine what I could have done with *them*? However, it seems the gods have been smiling at me this week, because guess what showed up at the Amazon horizon?

Yes, you guessed it: "Noctuidae Europaeae. Vol 4. Hadeninae I." by Hermann Hacker, László Ronkay and Márton Hreblay, published by Entomological Press at Soroe, Denmark in 2002. A unique Hungarian-Danish co-production, I'm sure. And in the English language, to boot! I mean, my Hungarian *is* a bit rusty...

The in-house character of the book becomes readily apparent already at the dust jacket, which shows a painted self-portrait of a 20 year old Hermann Hacker back in 1971, and a photo of an 18 year old László Ronkay from 1973. The self-styled "Editor-in-chief", Michael Fibiger, starts off the preface with the words: "Hadeninae I - Finally! The editorial board and authors are pleased to present this long-awaited volume in the series Noctuidae Europaeae, scarcely a year after the publication of the previous volume, Hadeninae II. Although in preparation for many years, part of the delay has been waiting for the completion of revisions of large genera and tribes in the old sense Hadeninae, which of course include large numbers of extra-limital, non-European species".

Of course.

I also note that the encyclopaedia is funded by...wait for it...the Carlsberg Foundation. Carlsberg really is the best beer in the world.

So what's all the fuzz and buzz about, then? What are the Noctuidae? Well, they are...you know, moths. Owlet-moths, to be exact. Yes, we are talking about a 15-volume encyclopaedia covering all species of owlet-moths found in Europe. And this is all bankrolled by the same guys who gave us Danish ale! :D

Of course, this makes the potential readership of "Noctuidae Europaeae" rather narrow, and I don't think the present volume is an exception to the rule. "Hadeninae I" covers the tribes Hadenini and Mythimnini. Causal readers better get to learn fancy-sounding words such as subgenus, paneremic, nominotypical, turanoeremic, saccular, fascia, crenate and synonymy. All this just from the first entry, about the truly exquisite owlet-moth Hadula (Hadula) sabolurum pulverata (Bang-Haas 1907). It's only been found once in Europe, at the Maltese Islands, but is included anyway. Incidentally, in this book, Europe really means Europe, all the way to the Urals and the Caspian Sea.

Each species presentation contains sections on Taxonomy, Notes, Diagnosis, Bionomics and Distribution. Range maps are included. The photographic colour plates show the poor moths in pinned, stiffed, unnatural position. Yepp, it's a science books! Let me guess. The moths were "sugared" with Carlsberg beer? There are also plates showing genitalia figures, for identification purposes only.

Obviously, a tour de force of this kind is bound to be based on some really obscure source materials. Thus, there is Beshkov's 1995 article "A contribution to the knowledge of the Lepidoptera fauna of Albania. Some findings of a collection trip in September 1993", published in "Atalanta", issue 26. Or how about the 970 pages long work by E. Berio, "Noctuidae I. Generalità Hadeninae Cuculiinae. Fauna d'Italia. Lepidoptera", published in Bologna by Edizione Calderini. Can I review it, please? But the real scorcher is surely a Swedish book from 1840 by one J W Zetterstedt, "Insecta Lapponica" at 1,140 pages sharp. I didn't even knew there were that many bugs in Lapland!

For the general reader, this is a no-no, especially at the price of 235 dollars just for this single volume, but if you are an owlet-mothing geek, an associate professor of entomology in Albania, or an insane Amazon reviewer, "Noctuidae Europaeae" probably is a must-have.

Just don't tell me I didn't warn you!

Wretched coward or mad dog?

"Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyites and other Double-Dealers" is the bizarre title of two speeches by Joseph Stalin to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. The speeches were given in 1937, during the Great Purges. The show trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Radek had already been staged, while the show trial of Bukharin was still in the future. Thus, the enemies of the Party attacked by Stalin are referred to as "Trotskyites" and "Zinovievites", but there are still no references to "the bloc of Trotskyites and Rightists".

If taken at face value, Stalin's speeches are the paranoid ravings of a conspiracy theorist, who blame all problems in the Soviet Union - not least the economic waste and inefficiency - on foreign agents who have managed to worm themselves into Party organizations, including at the highest levels. They are in cahoots with German and Japanese intelligence agencies, want to partition the Soviet Union between hostile foreign powers, stage terrorist attacks, plan to blow up dams, etc. Naturally, Stalin blames the murder of Kirov on the Zinovievite-Trotskyites. One sure wonders why so many traitors have managed to worm themselves into the monolithic, ever-vigilant, ever-ready Communist Party of the Soviet Union? But, of course, Stalin didn't believe a word of it, which makes the whole thing even more tasteless.

But sure, the great leader of the world proletariat does attempt some kind of "explanation" for the large amount of foreign agents in the midst of the Soviet Union. Apparently, many Party comrades have forgotten that the Soviet Union is still encircled by hostile imperialist powers. They are too preoccupied with economic matters, and too dizzy with the stunning successes of the first five-year plans. The comrades imagine that the opposition to the Soviet system slackens with every success of socialist construction. In reality, the more successful socialism becomes, the *harder* the resistance becomes. Not understanding this, the Party has let itself be caught off guard by the Zinovievite and Trotskyite wreckers, spies, terrorists, and so forth.

Wise words indeed. The second speech even contains some kind of involuntary (?) self-irony from Stalin's side, as he explains that it would be silly to shoot people just because they happened to walk down the same street as a Trotskyite. Silly indeed. In real life, the Great Purges came pretty close to doing just that...

Unfortunately, I haven't seen this particular edition of "Defects in Party Work". I have in my possession a Swedish edition from 1979, published by three small pro-Albanian Communist groups. Their edition is longer than the one found on Marxist Internet Archive (MIA), which only contains parts of the first speech and completely leaves out the second one. It's possible that the editors of the MIA couldn't find an English-language translation of the entire oeuvre, since the American Communists tried to avoid printing it! Apparently, "Defects in Party Work" has also been excluded from some English-language Soviet editions of Stalin's Selected Works.

I'm not entirely surprised. Usually, Stalin was an extremely boring, pedantic speaker. His works are virtual chloroform in print. Even "Defects in Party Work" is surprisingly pedantic in style, with Stalin's typical and constant repetitions - as if he was addressing a bunch of fools. However, the work is also marked by blood-lust and fanaticism. "Comrade" Stalin truly sounds like a mad dog. It seems this work was too hot to handle for some of the man's own supporters. Personally, I don't think they had much right to complain about it...

The Swedish edition of "Defects in Party Work" is topped off by a quotation from Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha: "Everyone must fight to uphold Stalin's correct and immortal work. Whoever fails to defend it, is an opportunist and a wretched coward." Or words to that effect.

Whatever.