Excerpts from the speech delivered by Comrade Enver Hoxha at the mass rally at the Gradishta sector of the Rrogozhina-Fier railway under construction on June 28, 1968
…Quite a different picture is presented by the situation in the capitalist and revisionist countries. We see before us two opposing worlds and two entirely different fates for the youth. A living testimony to this are the powerful student demonstrations that have taken place in these recent days in Europe and on other continents, in both the capitalist countries as well as in some revisionist countries.
The character of these demonstrations has not been identical everywhere. Those of the students of Prague and Warsaw played right into the hands of modern revisionism, were organized by the internal and external reaction, by the imperialist espionage agencies and were aimed at further liberalizing the revisionist regimes in power, at completing the detachment of their states from dependency on the Soviet revisionist hegemony and, at last, if they could manage it, at overthrowing the cliques in power and replacing them with new openly capitalist cliques, connected with and in the service of the capitalist states. Their strikes and demonstrations had, therefore, nothing progressive; everything in them was counter-revolutionary.
In Czechoslovakia, these demonstrations gave an aid to the advent to power of the group of ultra-revisionists, whereas in Poland, Gomulka managed to smash them by force for the time being. In these countries, such students have become the vanguard of reaction. The revisionist guard in the Soviet Union, in Bulgaria, in the German Democratic Republic, etc. are also afraid of such a vanguard.
In these countries, the revolutionary students, out of fear of repression and not wishing to compromise themselves with the hooligan students, did not come out in demonstrations. They did not however avail themselves of the opportunity to come out into the street, to clash with the hooligan students and to attack at the same time the revisionist cliques in power, to become a spark to set the whole field afire, to incite the working class in those countries to earnestly enter the game on the correct side. This did not happen. And that is why a sham impression was produced, as if, in Czechoslovakia, “the youth side with the revisionists,” in Poland, as if Gomulka “defends socialism” against the reactionary students and, in other countries where no disturbances occurred, as if the revisionists “are in tranquillity.” But this tranquillity is a false one. In the land of Soviets, where the Khrushchev revisionists have come to power, machine-guns have long since been brought into operation against revolutionary workers and youth. In the Soviet Union, in Poland, in Bulgaria, the very press of these countries is compelled to admit that hundreds and thousands of revolutionaries have been arrested, whole Party committees imprisoned because they are opposed to the treachery which the revisionist cliques in power are committing against their Homeland and their peoples.
In Titoite Yugoslavia, as you know, the Tito-Rankovich clique have cracked down furiously on the revolutionaries. Hair-raising are the murders, tortures, the ill-famed concentration camps of the UDB which for twenty years in succession blooded the heads of the peoples of Yugoslavia and of the Kosovar people, our brothers, to lay the foundations of and erect their rotten capitalist regime.
But what came out of this, was the insurrectional spirit of the Yugoslav peoples quelled down? No. Tito and his men sold out Yugoslavia to the U.S., British and international capital, they fattened the new exploiting capitalist class of the town and the countryside, they have set on foot a fascist dictatorship to preserve for them the riches they have robbed from the people and to oppress the latter and suck their blood. In vain does the Tito clique speak of a certain “self-management.” What should the people “self-manage,” the factories which belong to foreign capital and to the new capitalists, or should they “self-manage” the plains which are dominated by the kulaks?
It is difficult to deceive the people as a whole and for a long time, the saying goes. The Yugoslav peoples and youth cannot be deceived when Tito speaks of a certain socialism, of a certain self-management, while, on the other hand, they have no freedom, when they see that the swindlers are selling their country at auction out to foreign capitalists, when they see that the new ruling class is shamelessly speculating and the workers and youth are roving jobless through the streets, or hundreds of thousands annually going to foreign countries around the world because their own allegedly socialist country is unable to feed them.
Chaos is reigning in Titoite Yugoslavia. The courageous students of Belgrade rose in revolt against this out and out baseness and treachery. The Tito regime was shaken to its foundations. The tear gas bombs and cudgels of the Udbashes were put into operation. The heroic students opposed fascist violence with revolutionary violence. Victory went to the students. Tito yielded. But he lied, deceived, he made demagogy, as he usually does. But did Tito convince anyone? Nobody. All the honest Yugoslavs know that he is the author of this situation, that to make good this situation the iron broom of revolution must pass over it and this task is incumbent upon the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists at the head of the working class and of the peoples of Yugoslavia, and not upon the renegades, the sold out, the agents and dirty servitors of international capital.
Therefore, revolution in the revisionist countries is rising, ever rising, while revisionism is in a great crisis.
The demonstrations of the students in capitalist countries are of another character. They are more revolutionary. The students rose to furious demonstrations against the capitalist power of their country. They were attacked, they clashed with police, they set up barricades, they attacked, they were wounded and killed. They wounded and killed the policemen, too.
In France, they encouraged the greatest strike of the workers, they were in solidarity with them and caused the Government of that country, advertised as so strong, to shake to its foundations, to set in motion the army around Paris, to replace some Cabinet Ministers, to dissolve National Assembly, and to decide on holding new elections, etc.
Irrespective of the causes that prompted the students to rise in demonstrations, and these are of different categories — educational, economic, political, ideological, structural — they confirmed the opinion that the youth, if inspired, is a courageous militant force. The various political trends that influenced it at the beginning were not clearly seen, for it is a fact, if judged in general by the news items, the political parties, especially in France, were caught unaware by these events, and the French revisionists jointly with the French reaction openly attacked and disparaged the students who were throwing themselves into demonstrations against the regime.
It is important that similar demonstrations were held or are being held in the Federal Republic of Germany, in Spain, Italy, Britain, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Latin America and in other countries. Irrespective of the diversity of opinions, of political viewpoints that reign in their ranks, one thing is visible: they all attack the established capitalist state powers. These demonstrations are the first tests, they are beginning a period of testing and resorting to revolutionary violence against the bourgeois-fascist violence. Herein, at these moments and into these courageous crowds of young people, the new Marxist-Leninist parties, our revolutionary comrades must enter to work and fight jointly with them, to clarify and lead them.
This is a fire that has been kindled and that cannot easily be put out. It can be temporarily quelled, but it will burst out. This fire will burst out because the wind blowing it up is a political wind, it is the opposition of the youth and, in particular, of the students against the capitalist power that oppresses them, exploits them, that has closed to them all prospects of life. These are the main causes of the revolt, the other reasons and causes draw their source herein. The horizon of the youth is closed by capitalism.
The life of the youth is not certain under the capitalist regime, and when they reach an age of maturity in thoughts and work they see more clearly the insurmountable obstacles raised against them by capitalism, by private ownership, the organization of trusts and technocracy. The youth that wants to become educated, to have schooling, has no financial possibilities for this purpose because heavy taxes and dozens of other economic, administrative, educational, class and racial obstacles prevent him from meeting a vital need, so indispensable in a capitalist world where a diploma has become the minimum possible means of earning the daily bread, otherwise the youth is, a priori, destined to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Thus, such restrictions at studies are raised constantly and in an endless number against youth in capitalist countries. Thus, a first colossal selection is carried out. Then begins the second selection in examinations and the third selection in finding jobs for those who remain unplaced. Thus, misery, suffering, unemployment, humiliation lie ahead for youth.
In all these phases it is the people’s youth that suffers, therefore, it is this youth that moves prompted by all these open dissatisfactions and flagrant injustices which are formulated in claims of various character, many times also with not clearly shaped political tendencies, which have underlying them political questions, and only political questions.
The cause of revolution, of the overthrow by violence of the power of the bourgeoisie which is the source of all misfortunes, underlies the problem of the students and of the youth in general in the capitalist countries.
It is a fact that so far the organization of the communists in the fold of youth and students in the capitalist countries is still weak, due to the treachery of the revisionists, but the idea of revolution in them is great and inspiring. They feel more and more with every passing day the material and spiritual oppression, they are understanding the methods of degeneration used against them by capital, they see the destructive results of these methods at their expense. It is precisely this grip they seek to escape from and for this reason they look for a way out.
The road of socialism has been temporarily obscured to them by the modern revisionists. While monopoly capitalism, jointly with the revisionists, is striving to create among them a new chaos without a way out or to forge new chains for them.
As the press has announced, the students of Paris, in demonstrations and barricades, distinguished themselves by a revolutionary vigour against the forces of the Government and against the chieftains of the political parties and trades unions. Thus, the students had no faith in them. The students’ tendency, visible and carried out in practice, was the union of their cause with that of the workers, irrespective of the fact that among the students there were all sorts of political trends. Therefore, the students, the future unemployed, clearly saw what they should rely on and which ideology must guide them.
Both the capitalist governments and the French revisionists with Tito were aware of this danger and manoeuvred with all their means that this solid alliance should not take place, that the student movement should be discredited, isolated. The French revisionists gave a tremendous aid to French capitalism. The chief of French capitalism was not mistaken when he declared that communism was his enemy. He meant by this the working class and Marxism-Leninism and not the French revisionists who proved to be real lackeys of French capital.
But the student revolt in the capitalist countries will not be quelled down. It will continue rising and will channel itself in to the great tide of proletarian revolution, it will crystallize ideologically and politically. The all-conquering ideas of Marxism-Leninism will grip the minds and hearts of the students of the whole world and they will fully unite with the class of the proletarians in the world revolution, to overthrow with arms the power of capital and build up socialism as we did.
Clear prospects of the proletarian revolution must be opened to the youth of the capitalist world, to the students of this world and to the youth and students in the revisionist countries. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie by violence, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of socialism on the scientific basis of Marxism-Leninism will settle the whole great problem which includes also the settlement of the most crucial problem of the life of a people — the problem of youth, of their rearing, upbringing and active participation in work and in every other human activity so as the youth may feel themselves completely free, completely happy in their homeland which they build up by themselves, which they direct by themselves, which they beautify by themselves, where they prepare by themselves an ever more harmonious life for the coming generations.
On this problem, the value of the construction of socialism in our country assumes a great importance. In particular, through our materials which present the Albanian reality, the world youth is in position to understand the importance and correctness of our proletarian revolution. Led by our Marxist-Leninist party they are in a position to understand the deep importance of our reforms, of our progress in all fields. Our material backwardness in some sectors, which will also be overcome. is not due to our socialist system and our Marxist-Leninist ideology. It is due to the former feudal-bourgeois oppression. Let the world youth see how far ahead we are of the capitalist world in many directions, and precisely on the question they are struggling and will have still to struggle for…
The ideas of revolution and of the liberation struggle are winning over more and more peoples and revolutionaries of various countries. The tempest of the revolutionary war against imperialism and revisionism is rising.
The capitalist world and modern revisionism are undergoing a great political and economic crisis. This is no doubt the result of the revolutionary vigour of the peoples, of their struggles in all parts of the world, against capitalist oppression and exploitation, against old colonialism and neo-colonialism, against the fraudulent ideological trends used in great diversity by imperialism, the bourgeoisie and revisionism to puzzle the minds and the imagination of men and women, to give alleged theoretical explanation to their policy of predatory imperialist wars, of brutal exploitation of the peoples, to explain atomic blackmail, the dream of a “world without arms and without wars,” the division of the world into spheres of influence, the domination of the peoples by two “atomic superpowers” under the guise of “peaceful coexistence,” etc.
This great crisis of the capitalist and revisionist world, which has been caused by the rise of revolution and which will end through an inevitable chain reaction in the great world proletarian revolution, can be understood, explained and deepened only through our immortal and the eternally new theory — Marxism-Leninism.
Imperialism, the bourgeoisie, modern revisionism know that the rise of revolution is lethal to them, therefore they resort to all means, beginning with demagogy and ending with arms, to suppress it, under whatever form it may appear and at every stage of its development.
Revolution, in any initial form and in any stage, led by Marxism-Leninism, is the one which emerges victorious over all obstacles. Therefore, the theoreticians of imperialism, of the bourgeoisie and modern revisionism made every effort to liquidate Marxism-Leninism, if possible, or in the impossibility of achieving this, to do everything in their power to distort it, to make it inoffensive to them, to revise it from top to bottom.
The theory of Marx and Lenin about the rottenness and the advance towards the final collapse of capitalism and imperialism, through armed revolution and revolutionary violence, not only has not become obsolete, not only has not been overcome, as our enemies pretend, but it is as vigorous as in its days of youth, and life confirms this. No new invention whatsoever, be it temporarily in the hands of a handful of capitalists, can either alter the forward advance of revolution or darken the vanguard theory, Marxism-Leninism. It is not the capitalists who have created the technical progress, and even less so the economic well-being. The creative work belongs to somebody else while the system had made it a property of somebody else, of a group of exploiters. Development in capitalist countries is attained by the blood and sweat of the working class and of the working people who are exploited.
Nothing can save the capitalist class from destruction. The Soviet and Titoite modern revisionists and the other revisionists are new capitalists and imperialists who have swollen the ranks of the old ones and who now, we may say with certainty, are fully identified with the capitalists and imperialists of other countries. They have caused great damage to their socialist countries, which they have changed into capitalist countries, they have caused damage to world revolution, they put brakes on it or are striving to do so. They cause damage to the liberation struggles of the peoples, struggles which they hamper, quell down, deceive, but they can do nothing to harm the law of revolution, they cannot halt revolution either in their own countries or in the world. It forges ahead. This is confirmed by facts.
The Soviet modern revisionists and the other revisionists that have seized power in former socialist countries are striving at home and abroad to spread the belief that capitalism. which they have restored, is allegedly always “socialism,” indeed more advanced, purer, in the Soviet Union it is altogether “communism.”
The theory guiding this kind of socialism and communism is, according to them, the purest Marxism-Leninism, the genuine one. It is understandable, therefore, what role they have assumed and are playing, these traitors to Marxism-Leninism. They are the vanguard of the diversionists, the capitalist 5th column in the world communist movement.
Being such, they are politically, ideologically, organizationally and economically obliged to view the world and its development from the same angle as the capitalists of other countries and continents, to coordinate their affairs and actions, to conclude new agreements and alliances with one another, to create new conjunctures.
Great contradictions exist between them and others will come into being. These are inevitable contradictions in the pack of the capitalist wolves. The contradictions of the Soviet revisionists with the other imperialists are of the same nature and draw their origin from those same sources as, for example, the contradictions between the United States of America and France. But the revisionists are bluffing in order to conceal the real nature of these contradictions. They say they have contradictions because “we are communists” and they are capitalists. This is a sheer lie, both parties are capitalist.
The Soviet revisionists who lead this pack of traitors, by their anti-Marxist, anti-social theories and analyses are striving to explain the events that are taking place according to the prescriptions being distributed through the world by the chief of world imperialism, prescriptions which take shape in agreements, in ill-famed alliances of many sorts and in construction of bridges between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, between the various capitalists and the revisionist cliques. This treachery has been baptized “Khrushchevite peaceful coexistence.”
But in spite of all these and other such things, what is happening in the world?
Wherever there is a foot of an American, as in Vietnam and elsewhere, there is people’s war with arms, there are revolts, there is resistance. The peoples, the communists, the patriots on all the continents are fighting against them. At home, the United States of America itself is in a great crisis, the Afro-Americans are attacking, the students are attacking. King, the two Kennedys have been shot dead by snipers. The dollar is in a great crisis, so that Johnson tightens the belt of the American people and of his European and Asian satellites. Everywhere it intervenes, U.S. imperialism supplies arms for aggression, such as to Israel against the Arab people, to the Indonesian fascists to kill over half a million communists and patriots, etc. In Latin America people are fighting everywhere against the Yankee boot. In a word, it cannot be clearer — a worthy ally for the Soviet revisionists.
Britain is undergoing a very grave economic, and naturally also a political, crisis; she has become a softy, living in the shade of Uncle Sam. In the same condition are also the other capitalist countries of Europe and of other continents. The water is simmering in the pot and in all those countries the lid is ready to fly off.
The revisionist countries meanwhile, headed by the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are in a great crisis, in internal and external chaos.
The economic crisis which is deepening in the capitalist world has caught in its grip and is strangling the revisionist countries, and the Soviet Union in the first place. This deep crisis in these countries is the consequence of the capitalist transformation in ideology, in politics, economy, organization, in the way of life, it is the ties and alliances of many sorts, which they have established with various capitalists, it is the enslaving credits they have received from them, it is, therefore, their progressive introduction to the economic and political domination of world capital. Thus, the world crisis has swept the capitalist and revisionist countries alike. The Soviet revisionist traitors are undergoing one of their gravest crises, for their whole policy has been exposed, it has gone bankrupt, both at home and abroad. The clique of the Kremlin traitors is caught in the middle of many fires which will devour it. It is striving to impose itself by force, by lies, by temporary measures upon the revisionist satellite cliques in other countries, but they, too, are manoeuvring with the capitalists, with the Soviet revisionists, with the devil and his son, to lengthen their lifespan which is not long.
The Kremlin traitors are being attacked from within also, they are doing everything in their power to pose as being united. Some things are quite evident however. The Kremlin traitors are bleating that they are allegedly realizing their mistakes, that Stalin, according to some marshal acting under their orders, was a great man, that he was an able man, that allegedly Tito is a traitor and an agent of the Americans, that Stalin had considered these questions correctly, etc.
We have known the Khrushchev tactics for a long time. We well know what is hidden behind these demagogical sentences. However, this shows that the traitorous clique of the Kremlin is ill-situated, and it will be the more so with every passing day. Treachery will be subdued. Marxism-Leninism will triumph again in the Soviet Union and in the other countries where the modern revisionists are now ruling…
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