http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.com/2009/07/20/an-appreciation-of-leszek-kolakowski-1927-2009/
http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1974_Kolakowski.pdf

I wonder if he realises how much of a chopper he makes himself every time he gets near a keyboard …

In what way can anyone who abolished such things be counted as an adherent of Karl Marx? It’s like describing Stalin as a good Christian.

I think there is little doubt that Hoxha, at least until 1980, had the intellectual equipment to understand Marxism-Leninism and how to use it for his own benefit

Do you see where this brings your notion of communism as inherently evil down? You contend that Hoxha was using communism for his own benefit. You are right. The communist terrors of the C20th represent, not the instiution of communism, but the perversion of communism by new elites for their own ends. The supposed vanguards of the revolution simply became the new ruling class, the new aristocrats/plutocrats/theocrats. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Minor mistake there, Hasan, my good fellow. I think you meant ‘pathetic, a-historic and clearly polemic’ rather than plausible

I chose not to include the Cold War in the list, but I fail to see how there´s a plausible case to claim the Russians were responsible, for instance, for overthrowing Arbenz, and supporting a government that wiped out about 250,000 people. There several other dictatorships that resulted from capitalist states post-war actions and produced similar or greater death tolls.

plenty of people believe in class struggle, as well as democracy. In case you hadn´t noticed, the vast majority of people are working class. The Bolsheviks crushed a popular, radical democracy between 1917 and 1921. But the people they crushed were communists who believed in class struggle. They founded democratically managed factories, armies and communities. And they fought the Bolsheviks when they tried to abolish them. But they were communists, and believed in class struggle. They just weren´t Stalinists.

I concede the point. Now I’ll wait for amazon to send me the Rise and Fall.

Nonsense. Slavery and famine (take the example of Egypt) are mentioned in the Bible, colonialism is ancient, and the devastation of the populations of the Americas and the Caribbean happened when the first mercantilist theorists were writing, centuries before Malthus or Smith. World War One of course would have nothing to do with Austrian/German-Russian rivalry in the Balkans, which went back to the eighteenth century. That’s without mentioning the rather more plausible case the fascism emerged from the views of Italian and German socialists. Otherwise, one can point out that socialism has brought us genocide, slavery, famine and colonialism and numerous wars in a mere fraction of the time you describe.

or including anything from the Cold War

Er, the Cold War involved more than one side. The enslavement of half of Europe, the siege of Berlin, the wars by proxy conducted by Cuba were all children of the socialist system.

Stalinism, doctrinally, had no interest in bourgeois democracy and its attendant civil liberties.

That’s because in socialism, all true struggle is class struggle. Each class has its representatives. In a socialist system, the ruling class is the working class and it’s the working class which rules. What’s the point of ‘bourgeois democracy and its attendant civil liberties’ if society is run by the working class? So of course socialist societies are one-party dictatorships. A democratic society requires the ability to own property and money.

Stalinism, doctrinally, had no interest in bourgeois democracy and its attendant civil liberties. Consequently the regimes that Stalinist Parties produced were one-party dictatorships. But I´m not a Stalinist, and I believe in democratic societies, actually I believe in radically more democratic societies than liberals believe in. There´s no more reason not to take that at face value, than for me to say “you all believe in the tyranny of private property, therefore would let Indian people starve rather than disrupt the export of grain, it is your nature, because you believe in private property”

I have. At least “The Anglo American Threat to Albania” and “The Titoites”. I was influenced by Arshi Pipa’s review of Jon Halliday’s compilation, in which he states “(Hoxha’s) minimal references to Marx in his ‘theoretical’ works are those of a freshman first exposed to an Introduction to Marxism course. It would seem that Hoxha is the kind of Marxist intellectual who has not read Marx”. I was simply making the point that intellectual sources are likely to be of strictly secondary importance to working politicians (or dictators) who grab what they need as justification without necessarily understanding the originals.

I remember too reading somewhere that Hoxha’s supposed contributions to L’Humanite have never been actually traced, and that maybe Hoxha invented his journalistic career.