A short film made in Socialist Albania

[Robespierres Neck]

_WEGF-B5n5U

[Red Banana]

I didn't know there was ever a socialist Albania.

[Ismail]

I didn't know there was ever a socialist Albania.Most people don't. But yes, in opposition to the Soviets, Chinese, Yugoslavs, and of course the Americans, Socialist Albania served as the center of the international communist movement after 1976.

In culture as in everything else the Albanians took a correct stand. They stood against Soviet and Co. efforts to copy bourgeois art, music, etc., and against Chinese xenophobia. They upheld socialist realism.

[l'Enfermé]

Yes. Socialism is not the emancipation of the human race and the development of the proletariat unfettered by capitalist relations. No. Socialism is the all-powerful state run by "party" bureaucrats(I say "party" because neither the Soviet Communist "Party" not the Albanian "Party" were genuine political parties, both were grotesque state-administration apparatuses) whose duty it is to enforce socialist art, socialist music and upholding "socialist realism".

Indeed, comrades.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I didn't know there was ever a socialist Albania.

Whatever it was, it was better than Feudalism.

[Philosophos]

it's just sad to see how these people used to believe. Just imagine how many lives died because the uneducated people were trusting the witches and shamans or whatever instead of the real doctors.... it is just sad...

[Ismail]

Socialism is the all-powerful state run by "party" bureaucrats"All-powerful state" sounds like the liberal concept of "totalitarianism." The state is an instrument of class rule and expresses the fundamental interests of that class which controls it.


(I say "party" because neither the Soviet Communist "Party" not the Albanian "Party" were genuine political parties, both were grotesque state-administration apparatuses)Of course they weren't political parties, and both were explicit about this; they were the revolutionary vanguards of the working-class, not electoral vehicles.


whose duty it is to enforce socialist art, socialist music and upholding "socialist realism".Indeed, something Lenin and Stalin noted quite clearly. The state in the hands of the working-class does away with all backward mentalities and culture, whether feudal or capitalist. It does not take a "neutral" stand.