– Gjon Bruçi –
With the victory of the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War and the People’s Revolution on November 29, 1944, led by the Communist Party and the legendary Enver Hoxha, Albania embarked on the path of socialist construction. From that day until the end of 1990, political and economic power was in the hands of the two main classes of Albanian society, the workers and the working peasantry, in close alliance with each other. From this position, for about 45 years, the former overturned classes, which included beys, aghas, merchants, bajraktars, bourgeoisie and collaborators of the nazi-fascist occupiers, found themselves under the pressure and judgement of the people’s state power which, according to the “head,” placed the “hat” upon them. Yes, what were the “hats” placed upon them, or more plainly, the punishments with which the people’s state power penalized these representatives of the former Albanian aristocracy? Undoubtedly, they were harsh punishments but at the same time were deserved for their anti-people and anti-national deeds. Their crimes were not isolated phenomena nor the result of misunderstandings of the situations created in our country. The conglomerate class of the Albanian bourgeoisie had inherited their anti-people and anti-national stance over centuries as the only way to maintain power and exploit the “raja” (people). This perverse class had always served as a mercenary for all occupiers, who were not few, but in the case of World War II, they surpassed even ordinary mercenarism, turning into an organic appendage of nazism and their occupying forces.
After the victory of the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War and the People’s Revolution, a portion of these anti-national and anti-people contingents who escaped the partisan bullets, clung to the heels of the occupiers or took to the mountains, transforming into terrorist bands, which from 1945-53 killed around 626 innocent citizens, most of whom were defence soldiers, simple citizens and peasants, activists of the people’s state power, teachers and volunteers rebuilding the country, and even young girls and women who sought to break the darkness their terrorist fathers of the mountains had left as a legacy for centuries. Precisely with this contingent of nazi-fascist collaborators and terrorist bands and their descendants, today’s lists of the “persecuted” were drafted, which the “democratic” state has compensated and continues to compensate with financial values collected from the people’s taxes. This “discredited contingent” was later joined by “the dregs” that the socialist system produced along the way, such as thieves, vagabonds, ordinary murderers, degenerates, etc., who in the early days of “democracy,” with all sorts of dealings, added the paragraph of “agitation and propaganda” to their theft and crime files, which listed them among the compensable war criminals and mountain bands.
If in the early days of “democracy,” the state had publicly opened the files of this contingent, surely the overwhelming majority would be proven “killers” of citizens and “traitors” in the service of the enemies of Albania. No type of democracy, even latent, would compensate those whom even the U.S. State Department has called “terrorist bands.” The same goes for the thieves and saboteurs of the country’s construction. So then why were these compensations given and continue to be given to this anti-people and anti-national class and strata?
This happened because, unfortunately, those who seized power in the self-proclaimed “democratic” state in 1990 came from the contingent of degenerate individuals during socialism. These deniers of the socialist order, which they had served with “self-denial,” had and have as their only “ammunition” for seizing and maintaining power in the new system, imposed by the international bourgeoisie, the “fight against communism.” To prove that these former socialist leaders were now co-opted into the new bourgeois order, among other things, they drafted various decisions and reforms in the interest of the new and old bourgeoisie, domestic and international, which they served and continue to serve as experienced mercenaries. Among these reforms and decisions was the decision to compensate the former exploiting class, which was struck by the people’s state power after the victory of socialism. This effectively made the true persecuted the people, with whose taxes the former enemies who had brought centuries of suffering and torment to them and the Homeland were compensated.
In the new situation created in our country, the distinguishing boundary between the exploiting class, represented by the new bourgeoisie of bourgeois democracy on one side, and the workers, peasants, and poor urban and rural strata on the other, has become very clear. The social gap between them has deepened and is deepening every day. The new Albanian bourgeoisie, forcibly and deceitfully co-opted into the state leadership, are a living copy of the former exploiting classes. Just like their predecessors, the new bourgeoisie have not only seized the people’s wealth for themselves but are selling parts of the country’s surface and underground resources to foreigners daily, turning it into a neo-colony like those of past centuries.
But the situation cannot enter a closed cycle. The return to power of the bourgeoisie was not the end of the socialist road. Workers, peasants and the people’s intelligentsia, who had built socialism, lost a battle but not the war for socialism and communism. The class struggle, as taught by the classics of scientific communism, is the driving engine of society, leading it towards progress. The simple people, who increasingly feel the oppression and exploitation, will awaken and react. And their reaction will not be a simple protest like those of the various Albanian oppositions, which “play wars” not to change the oppressive system but simply to exchange the chairs of power where riches are produced for the corrupt rulers of the capitalist system.
The people are like the sea which, when it swells up to its distant shores, erupts furiously, overthrowing and tossing the bourgeois class, which is fattened and being fattened with the sweat and blood of the people, around like worthless rags. This history of eruptions and revolutions has been proven several times over the past centuries, from the French Revolution to the victorious proletarian revolution in the famous November 1917. This history of eruptions and revolutions has also been proven in our country, with the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War and the People’s Revolution, which were crowned with success on the historic day of November 29, 1944. The time of global proletarian revolutions is approaching, and the Albanians, who enjoyed the miracle of the socialist system for half a century, will not miss out on this grand action of reclaiming power, which had secured them a standard of living unparalleled in any period of their long history.
This revolutionary eruption will not delay and above all, it will be much more powerful than any other revolution on the face of the earth. The revolution in question will no longer leave room for “compensations for the persecuted,” nor the possibility of the former bourgeois classes returning to power. In the case of our country, the revenge will be twice as harsh as that of November 1944. Because no circumstances will mitigate the dark deeds of the current political class of these three decades of fascist “democracy,” whose deeds have been and are among the most monstrous.
(Translated from the Albanian original and first published in “Gazeta SOT” on June 5, 2024)
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