Correspondence

From: Queensland, Australia.

A comrade sent me the article by Neil Goold on the 20th Congress (Revolutionary Democracy, Vol. II, No.1, April 1996). It is mistaken to suggest that the Irish bourgeois leader De Valera wanted an alliance with Nazi Germany. I hold that the Second World War was initially an inter-imperialist conflict. At that stage it was correct not to intervene on one side or the other. While De Valera was 'officially' neutral he was in fact sympathetic to the Allies. For example downed British airmen who were supposed to be interned along with Nazi combatants in the South of Ireland were in fact secreted back over the border to return to combat.

Long Live Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

Fraternally,
M.

I wish to congratulate you for your efforts to publish an interesting journal which I always read with much interest. Herewith my analysis of Korea (Long Live Korean Reunification and Independence! Down With Korean Revisionism!). Let me know how many extra copies you need for circulation in India.

Fraternally,
Norberto Steinmayr.

This past year we did not receive Revolutionary Democracy. We ask you to send us the April and September issues. Please tell us how much and how we should pay. Your publication is a real support for all the forces that are fighting opportunism which is spreading false ideas about communism.

Communist Greetings,
Flor Dewit,
Communist Collective 'Aurora'.

Thank you for the set of Revolutionary Democracy which we received. We did not know of this magazine of quality before.

With great enthusiasm we read the transcripts of the five discussions on the political economy of socialism with Comrade Stalin published here for the first time. I found the introduction very informative as well as most accurate and indeed inspiring, from a scientific point of view. One of the negative consequences of the faulty maoist perceptions which dominated criticism of Soviet revisionist economics in the 1960s and 1970s was that exactly this basis and decisive field of the restoration of capitalism by the revisionists till this day remains very little elucidated from a Marxist-Leninist point of view. The Albanian critique to my knowledge (though I never read their textbook on socialist economics which was not translated from Albanian though we did publish in Danish the section on capitalism) never detailed or elucidated the point you make — that the turn towards revisionist 'socialist market economics' took place immediately following the death of Stalin. In general socialist Albania under Enver Hoxha held high the banner of genuine socialism — but due to objective political and material conditions only to a very limited degree was able to develop socialist economics much further.

The publication of the article 'Stalin and the Making of the Political Economy of Socialism' and excerpts from the Stalin Conversation with Political Economists in our journal Kommunistisk Politik has aroused considerable interest in Denmark. This is clear from the responses of our readers which include, of course, the Danish Marxist-Leninist Communists but also the revisionists and false Marxist-Leninist organisations and some of their members.

Most important is the question of the role played by the changes in the economics, in the basis of socialism, taking place immediately following the death of J.V. Stalin and the point that rejection of Stalinist (that is Marxist-Leninist) economics is and was from the beginnings of modern revisionism part-and-parcel of this counterrevolutionary trend. I have read the full set of your magazine and want to express my estimation of it as excellent and very useful to the present-day Marxist-Leninist Communist Movement. In my estimation it is rendering our movement internationally a great service by focusing on the birth of modern revisionism, by its defence of J.V. Stalin and its valuable illumination of the question of the commodity-money relations in socialism.

It seems to us that a new trend of modern revisionism is developing internationally after the exposure of the former brands like titoism, khrushchevism/brezhnevism/gorbachevism/eurocommunism, maoism etc. that of false Stalinism, false Marxism-Leninism, a trend that condemns the 20th Congress of the CPSU, but attributes everything to this Congress, thus underestimating the full breadth and scope of the hostile counterrevolutionary trend of modern revisionism, like the Andreyeva-ites. They are indeed defending modern revisionism, negating the capitalist character of the revisionism in power, the true development of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union and the social imperialist character of the brezhnevite Soviet Union. They deny the fact that the proletarian dictatorship and the beginnings of socialism were thwarted after 1953 (1953-60) in the countries of People's Democracy in Europe with Enver Hoxha's Albania as the sole exception. And they deny another important fact: that in the China of Mao Zedong, in the Korea of Kim Il Sung and the Cuba of Fidel the dictatorship of the proletariat was never established, that socialism was never built there, and that the communist parties of these countries were not upholding genuine Marxist-Leninist positions which are the precondition for the establishment of proletarian dictatorship and the triumph of socialism.

Indeed these parties and organisations are looking for inspiration in, so to say, the wrong side of the great struggle between Marxism-Leninism and modern revisionism that was initiated after the Second World War by Stalin, including the struggle against browderism, titoism and euro-communism in its earliest stages, revisionism in French and Italian colours, and the development of modern revisionism within the ranks of the CPSU.

In Northern Europe, like in Britain and the Nordic countries, the communist parties started to slip into revisionist positions. The party programmes like the British Road to Socialism (and the Danish, Norwegian etc. Roads to Socialism, adopted around 1952) all contain revisionist theses, that Khrushchevism was to elaborate into a complete revisionist ideology, strategy and tactics, covering up the reformist practice of revisionism.

As it is stressed in your magazine after the death of the great Stalin, Comrade Enver Hoxha, the leader of the Party of Labour of Albania, continued and developed the struggle against modern revisionism of all brands that spread in the international communist movement. This unrelenting struggle, that was continued and deepened right up to his death in 1985, cannot and must not be underestimated by the present day Marxist-Leninists, though he was the leader of a small party and a small socialist country. His great work (and his works) must be studied as a point of reference for us all. I was present at the last Congress of the Party of Labour that he presided over (the 8th) as well as the 9th Congress,that was chaired by the renegade Ramiz Alia, in my capacity as First Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Denmark(Marxist-Leninist). At that time Comrade Enver had unmasked the true opportunist nature of Mao Zedong-thought and the danger of maoism in the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement.

I do think, dear Comrade, that you are mistaken, when you state, that the struggle against Soviet revisionism on the part of Comrade Enver and the Party of Labour did not start until 1960. It is true that it did not reach its full scope before that time, that it was indirect, and often hidden by criticism of titoism and the revisionist rapprochement with titoite Yugoslavia. The PLA later stated that in this period not everything was clear to them, and that they had hopes that the Soviet leadership would mend its ways. I think, though, that Comrade Enver's report On the International Situation and the Tasks of the Party, published in the Zeri i Popullit of February 17th 1957, must be considered a major document in the struggle against the revisionist line of the 20th Congress. In retrospect I do not think that the stand of the PLA at the Moscow meeting, including signing the joint document of 81 parties, that indeed praise the 20th Congress, is to be reproached in any way. Later on, maoism was unmasked. From Comrade Enver's Political Diary, his Reflections on China, you can see the protracted process of solving the Chinese enigma, as he called it. The struggle against maoism was in my opinion raised and carried out at the proper time by the PLA. My former Party, DKP/ML, and the communist organisation Oktober that carries on the struggle of this Party since it turned revisionist, consider Enver Hoxha to be the greatest Marxist-Leninist of our time. We would not rate him as one of the classics of Marxism-Leninism, on a par with Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but after the death of Stalin no other Marxist-Leninist leader — unfortunately! — compares with him or even comes up close. Maoists like Comrade Ludo Martens whom I have met and with whom I discussed these matters, cannot hold back their negative feelings towards Comrade Enver. My former Party that was split in 1997 when a third of the membership left it following the expulsion of myself and two other leading Marxist-Leninist comrades, has begun publicly to attack Comrade Enver (and the international Marxist-Leninist Communist movement of the 70s and 80s) as dogmatic and sectarian, sliding into the position of mainly Cuban revisionism.

Dear Comrade, do you know the Albanian scientific magazine called Socio-Political Studies? An English compilation of some of the most important articles was published annually from 1984-1988 (5 volumes). Besides a number of writings of Enver Hoxha, which were published for the first time, a number of articles concerning the political economy of socialism and revisionism are still today of interest. Among other the following two : 'Criticism of some bourgeois-revisionist theories on the place and role of the commodity-money relations in socialism (Vol.3, 1986) by Priamo Bollano, and an article by the renegade and later social democratic prime minister Fatos Nano 'On the mechanism of the extraction and appropriation of surplus value in the Soviet society' (Vol. 1, 1984). If you do not know them, and want them, we shall send you copies. I find your evaluation of the present state of the Indian revolution to be very significant. I have to admit my unfortunate lack of knowledge of the problems of the revolution in your country, that is one of the major centres of world revolution, where the outcome of the coming new round of anti-imperialist and democratic revolutions as well as proletarian and socialist revolutions may be greatly influenced.

Comradely yours,
Klaus Riis,
Editor,
Kommunistik Politik.

We received Revolutionary Democracy and thank you for it. We liked it and the way you treat theoretical questions. We do not know here, in France, about the Indian situation, so we do not speak about it.

For the moment we have two questions. How do we procure Stalin's Works, volume 14 the Russian edition of which is mentioned in your 'Books Received' column? Please also send us information on the cost of an international subscription.

Revolutionary greetings,
G. Alemany,
Centre D'Etudes Politiques et Sociales.

Just to say thank you for your magazine Revolutionary Democracy with its many well-founded articles and historical facts. We may wish to translate some of them into Norwegian when our capacity allows.

Red regards,
Jan R. Steinholt
M-L Gruppe 'Revolusjon'.

I enjoyed the recent issue of Revolutionary Democracy with the poems of Nazim Hikmet. I was pleased with the article on nuclear weapons (after the enthusiastic response from Lalkar) and the fascinating quotations from Stalin on this question which I had not come across before.

Best Wishes,
John Puntis.

We are sending to Revolutionary Democracy copies of A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement (June 14, 1963) which we have reprinted. We hope you find these useful. Keep up the good work.

In Solidarity,
Ray O. Light.

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