Bill Bland

Bill Bland (born April 28, 1916 in Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire , † March 13, 2001 ) was a British Marxist-Leninist and optician , who was considered a worldwide leader of a communist current, which is in the clashes of different currents within the communist movement in the late 1960s appealed to the Albanian party leader Enver Hoxha . Before he became the leader of this little "anti-revisionist" current, Bland was a member of the Communist Parties of New Zealand and Britain . In 1965 he was a co-founder of the later Communist League of Great Britain .

Bland claimed that in the Soviet Union was after the death of Josef Stalin a form of capitalism has been restored (with pseudo-communist masking), what he in his extensive work The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union tried to describe in detail; He saw Mao Zedong as a “left deviator”, while he described Hoxha as a true Marxist-Leninist in the tradition of Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels , Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Stalin. Bland's position on the Soviet Union ( restoration of capitalism ) was predominant in the neo-Stalinist K groups in Europe; the one about Mao was problematic in the 60s, as Hoxha was still supporting Mao at the time. He was finally strengthened in his position on the People's Republic of China by the Sino- Albanian break in 1978.

He was one of the founders of the Albania Society and became its managing director three years after it was founded, a post he held there for almost thirty years until the fall of the communist regime in the early 1990s. He was editor of the journal of the Albania Society , "Albanian Life" . Bland was also one of the founding members of the Stalin Society in Great Britain.

Web links

• Page of a 'Comintern ML' with some of Bill Bland's works in German