In Imperialism and the Revolution, Enver Hoxha opportunistically attempts to reverse the verdicts of the international communist movement on Mao Tsetung, the Chinese Communist Party, and socialism in the People’s Republic of China. These were verdicts that Hoxha and the Party of Labor of Albania themselves previously upheld and widely championed.
As a small part of this assault from the “left” on our Marxist-Leninist ideological legacy, Hoxha briefly castigates Mao Tsetung for promoting revisionist formulations on materialist dialectics. Hoxha’s crude and unsophisticated philosophical attack merits little attention in itself, but it must be taken seriously and rebutted mainly because of the prestige and influence enjoyed by the Party of Labor of Albania in the recent past among Marxist-Leninists around the world.
In many of its essentials, Hoxha’s philosophical attack represents a rough carbon copy of the works of Soviet revisionists, who have been assailing Mao on the same questions for decades. The coincidence in criticisms between the PLA and the Soviet revisionists is no accident, since, as we are becoming increasingly aware, they seem to share a number of the same ideological assumptions. The biggest difference is that the PLA tries to dress up its criticisms of Mao in more of a “left” dogmatic cover.
In our own study of materialist dialectics, we put particular emphasis on the so-called three basic laws of dialectics – the unity and struggle of opposites, the mutual transformation of quantity and quality, and the negation of negation. In addition, we supplemented our study on the unity and struggle of opposites by taking up the vital question of antagonism and non-antagonism.
As a group, we did not put any great emphasis on the topics of principal contradiction and the relation between principles and compromises because we did not believe that resolving these questions, although important, would directly deal with the main line of Hoxha’s arguments, the substance of which, we believe, is based on a particular understanding of the dialectical laws.
The fourth paper included here, “The Unity of Opposites of Affirmation and Negation,” is not being put forward as a collective position. It is basically the position of a number of comrades in our group, with which there was no serious disagreement from the rest of the membership. Because of the limited time we had to devote to this particular topic, which is complex and has been much confused, the group as a whole was not sufficiently consolidated to warrant endorsing the paper as a collective document. We are circulating it among the other MULC circles because we think that it represents a valuable contribution to sharpening up the struggle around these questions.
We are unable to produce a paper on the relation between matter and consciousness at this time. We consider the topic to be difficult and complex, and are taking up a new round of study relating to this question, but with the focus being to sum up the strengths and weaknesses of the Committee for a Proletarian Party. When we have consolidated a position on this question, we will circulate a paper as soon as possible.
We hope that the present six papers will help to contribute to the collective efforts of all Marxist-Leninists in this critical period to reaffirm the correct historical verdicts on Mao Tsetung as a great Marxist-Leninist and re-affirm the CPC as an outstanding Marxist-Leninist party and the People’s Republic of China as a vanguard socialist country during the time of Mao’s political and ideological leadership.