Hoxhaism

Name

Hoxhaism takes its name from Enver Hoxha, but the organisations associated with it rarely use the word. They regard Hoxha's theoretical contributions as an augmentation of anti-revisionism rather than a separate ideology, and call themselves Marxist–Leninists or Stalinists. In Albanian too it is an informal term, a label attached to the tendency only from time to time. It is also called Enverism (Enverizmi), after Hoxha's first name.

From the Soviet break to the Chinese break

Hoxhaism grew out of anti-revisionism, which arose in the mid-1950s in opposition to Khrushchev's reforms. The Albanian leadership saw Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin as an opportunistic act meant to legitimise revisionism in the international communist movement, and the Albanian–Soviet split of 1956–1961 ended with the severing of diplomatic ties in December 1961. During the Sino-Soviet split the Chinese Communist Party and the Party of Labour of Albania jointly denounced the Khrushchev line as revisionist. Albania condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and formally left the Warsaw Pact on 5 September. From 1971, however, Nixon's visit to China and the Chinese "Three Worlds Theory" alarmed the Albanian leadership. Deng Xiaoping proclaimed the theory at the UN General Assembly in April 1974, and when Albania refused to endorse it, Beijing sharply cut its aid by 1976. At the Seventh Congress of the Party of Labour in November 1976 Hoxha did not mention Hua Guofeng and openly denounced Deng. On 7 July 1977 an editorial written by Hoxha in Zëri i Popullit, "The Theory and Practice of the Revolution", attacked the Three Worlds Theory by name. A year later to the day, on 7 July 1978, China informed Albania that it was ending all economic and military agreements; Albania called this a reactionary act from great-power positions, repeating the methods of Tito, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Hoxha's Imperialism and the Revolution, published in December 1978, devoted its second half to the Three Worlds Theory, Chinese foreign policy and Maoism.

Main positions

Hoxhaism demarcates itself by a strict defence of the legacy of Stalin and the Soviet Union under Stalin and by fierce criticism of virtually all other communist groupings as revisionist. Hoxha condemned the United States and Yugoslavia, calling the latter social-imperialist, and after Stalin's death and the break with China extended the charge to the Soviet Union and China. In Imperialism and the Revolution he described China as a social-imperialist country seeking superpower status by allying tactically with the US against the USSR, and judged Mao "not a Marxist–Leninist, but a progressive revolutionary democrat", an eclectic who mixed elements of Marxist dialectics with idealism and ancient Chinese philosophy. In December 1977 he wrote that China had carried out a bourgeois-democratic revolution of a new type through national liberation war, which could not become a socialist revolution. He dismissed the Cultural Revolution as neither proletarian nor a revolution but a palace coup on an all-China scale. Eurocommunism was treated as an anti-communist movement. Hoxhaism affirms the right of nations to pursue socialism by different paths according to their conditions, yet Hoxha held Titoism to be "anti-Marxist" in practice. At home, Albania was declared the world's first atheist state in 1967, and after the split with China it proclaimed reliance entirely on its own forces, without foreign aid or credits.

Distinguished from Maoism and anti-revisionism

Anti-revisionism was the broader position that branded the post-Khrushchev Soviet Union revisionist and social-imperialist; in the 1960s its two state centres were the Chinese Communist Party and the Party of Labour of Albania. Where Maoism treated Mao Zedong Thought, the Three Worlds Theory and the Cultural Revolution as the culmination of anti-revisionism, Hoxhaism broke away inside the anti-revisionist camp by condemning Mao Zedong Thought itself as a form of revisionism. It is thus not an extension of Maoism but a line against it, defining itself by hostility to China, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia alike. Where Titoism made a virtue of departing from the Soviet model through self-management and non-alignment, Hoxhaism treated such departures as revisionism. "Revisionism" served Hoxhaism as the charge of deviation from orthodoxy, and Hoxhaist theorists saw Earl Browder's dissolution of the Communist Party USA in 1944 as the forerunner of modern revisionism.

Spread and aftermath

After the Sino-Albanian split Albania won over a large part of the Maoists, mainly in Latin America. The Communist Party of Brazil was Hoxhaist, as was the Tigray People's Liberation Front until 1991; in West Germany the largest Hoxhaist party was the Communist Party of Germany (Marxist–Leninist). Hoxha died on 11 April 1985 and was succeeded by Ramiz Alia. After the fall of communism in Albania in 1991, Hoxhaist parties formed the International Conference of Marxist–Leninist Parties and Organizations (Unity & Struggle) in 1994, with its publication Unity and Struggle. Critics point to the personality cult that made Hoxha an "Albanian Stalin", the ban on religion and the harsh persecution of dissenters, and many see Hoxhaism as little more than Hoxha's attempt to put his stamp on Stalinism.