First Published: Modern Times, Vol. II, No. 4, April 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Our last issue of Modern Times stated that we would carry an article dealing with the weaknesses and strengths of Albania’s criticism of the “three worlds” analysis put forward by the Chinese Communist Party and others. We find that we lack the space to adequately do so. So we ask, if you are interested in this debate, contact us and we’ll get a copy of the whole Theoretical Review article on the subject (Jan.-Feb., 1978 issue)–or write T.R., c/o Zapata Books, P.O. Box 3524, Tucson, Arizona 85722. (You may also want to subscribe to their bimonthly publication–$4 a year.) A few brief excerpts from the article might interest you:
... the Albanians are inconsistent in their position. If the term ’first world’ is classless and non-Marxist, is not the term ’superpower’ equally so? Can the Albanians reject the one while continuing to rely on the other? ... The Albanians, like the Chinese, have never produced the rigorous theoretical proof to substantiate their insistence that capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or their allegations that the USSR is an imperialist state in the Leninist sense. The scattered and confused pieces of empirical data which they have instead presented from time to time have only served to retard the theoretical treatment of this important question ... For Lenin, ’social-imperialism’ had an ideological value in the struggle against the social democratic betrayal of the working class before and during the first world war. The Albanians, like the Chinese before them, have mechanically transferred this term into a different context, that of the debate on the character of the Soviet social system... (and used it) as if its scientific value for this purpose was self-evident ...