Assertion: Non-proletarian Class Character of the CP of China

In order to show how viciously E. Hoxha slanders Mao Tsetung and with what dishonest methods he operates we will quote from his report to the 5th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania on November 1, 1966:

"It is an undeniable historical fact and a great fortune for the people of the world and international Communism that the glorious CP of China under the leadership of the outstanding Marxist-Leninist Mao Tsetung is standing at the fore of today's struggle against imperialism led by the USA and against modern revisionism led by the Soviet leaders (continuous applause, ovations). The role and the contribution of the CP of China and the PR of China in the struggle for the revolutionary cause of the international proletariat and the peoples of the whole world are colossal.…
The enemies hope in vain that they can discredit the great People's China. It is victoriously marching forward under the leadership of the CP of China and Mao Tsetung Thought (continued applause, ovations)."(30)

Today, Hoxha acts as if he had never said this. But because he cannot deny it, he has to start slandering. Hoxha writes completely the opposite of the above in his book Imperialism and the Revolution:

"While renouncing the principled struggle in the ranks of the party, Mao Tsetung played the game of factions, sought compromise with some of them to counter some others and thus consolidate his own positions.
With such an organizational platform, the Communist Party of China has never been and never could be a Marxist-Leninist party. The Leninist principles and norms were not respected in it."(31)

Anyone who can write two such completely contradicting statements can't be taken seriously, he isn't credible. He is double-talking, dishonest and ruthless, and he seriously damages the international workers' movement. Hoxha asserts that Mao Tsetung exercised "unlimited power" and that he scorned the elected party bodies:

"Mao Tsetung did not have the slightest respect for either the Central Committee or the congress of the party, let alone the party as a whole and its committees at the base.… The party forums, its elected organs, had no authority whatsoever."(32)

In other words: The 30 million party members are a flock of stupid sheep blindly following their leader. It's bad enough that the members of the PLA have to take this from their chairman. But by publishing this book in foreign languages, he challenges the whole communist and labour movement of the world. Hoxha is also characterized by his methods. He quotes an instruction of Mao Tsetung from 1953:

"From now on, all documents and telegraphs sent out in the name of the Central Committee can be dispatched only after I have gone over them otherwise they are invalid."(33/34).

From this quotation Hoxha draws the conclusion:

"Under these conditions there can be no talk of collective leadership, democracy within the party or Leninist norms."(35)

This is knowingly misleading, for Hoxha does not say the reason for Mao Tsetung's instruction. It had become necessary in criticizing Liu Shao-chi and Shang-Kung, who had broken the party discipline and published documents without authorization in the name of the Party Central Committee. This shows that Hoxha uses deceptive methods. Hoxha denies the class character of the CP of China under the leadership of Mao Tsetung and asserts:

"Mao Tsetung, however, conceives the party as a union of classes with contradictory interests, as an organization in which two forces, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie ... confront and struggle against each other."(36)

This is a malicious insinuation. No Communist Party can prevent petty-bourgeois elements from intruding into its ranks and carrying in bourgeois ideas. Even the Bolshevist Party of Russia under Lenin's leadership was not safeguarded against that. In his speech "Combat Bourgeois Ideas in the Party" Mao Tsetung says:

"We must unfold a struggle in the Party against bourgeois ideas. Ideologically, the Party membership falls into three categories: some comrades are firm and unwavering and are Marxist-Leninist in their thinking; quite a number are essentially Marxist-Leninist but infected with non-Marxist-Leninist ideas; and a small number are no good, their thinking is non-Marxist-Leninist."(37)

Mao Tsetung said this in 1953, in the period between the national-democratic and socialist revolution. Furthermore he said:

"The bourgeoisie is sure to corrode people and aim its sugar-coated bullets at them. Its sugar-coated bullets are of two kinds, material and spiritual."(38)

Hoxha does not understand that this ideological struggle within the Party is a struggle of Marxist-Leninist ideas against bourgeois ideas that constantly penetrate into the Party, a struggle of the proletarian mode of thinking against the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking, or to be more precise, a struggle between two lines, the proletarian line and the petty-bourgeois line. This requires being constantly vigilant and applying criticism and self-criticism as the law of development of the party. In Revolutionarer Weg, No. 19, we have written:

"Under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat the class struggle shifts in the course of socialist development from the military side to the ideological and political, which is no less dangerous.
Bourgeois ideology seeps through numerous channels into the working class and seeks to corrode proletarian ideology. This is made easier by the existence of the petty-bourgeois strata, which vacillate between bourgeoisie and working class. The working class and the petty bourgeoisie are interlinked by thousands of strings. Petty-bourgeois thinking constantly exerts influence on the working class. The proletarian party, the vanguard of the proletariat, is also not immune to this." (W. Dickhut, State-Monopoly Capitalism in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Vol. II, pp. 535 f.)