e state,
which determined by law the conditions of marriage and the family.
Marriages could be considered legal only when contracted before
competent state organs, and only state courts had jurisdiction on all
matters connected with marriage. Included in the 1946 Constitution also
was the Marxist tenet "from each according to his ability and to each
according to his work." Subsequent revisions to the Constitution gave
legal sanction to the existing situation that the Party and its members
were the leading, or vanguard, group in the country.

_E Drejta Kushtetuese e Republikes Popullore te Shqiperise_ (The
Constitutional Right in the People's Republic of Albania), published in
1963 by the Faculty of Jurisprudence of the State University of Tirana,
stated that the War of National Liberation was actually class warfare, a
civil war whose purpose was as much national as it was social
liberation--that is, the establishment of the "people's power" and the
"dictatorship of the proletariat."

Communist spokesmen listed three principal classes prevailing in the
early years of the regime: the working class, the laboring peasants,
and, in their terms, the exploiting class, that is, the landowners in
the agricultural economy and the bourgeoisie in trade. The exploiting
class was liquidated through a rapid revolutionary process in the early
stages of the regime. The middle and high bourgeoisie was destroyed as a
result of the nationalization of industry, transport, mines, and banks
and the establishment of a state monopoly on foreign commerce and state
control over internal trade. The feudal landlords disappeared with the
application of the agrarian reforms in the 1945-47 period. These steps
were followed by a program of rapid industrialization, with the
consequent creation of a strong working class, and the collectivization
of agriculture, supposedly resulting in the formation of a homogeneous
peasant class.

After the destruction of the old class structure, the Communist regime
claimed that only two classes existed in the country, the workers and
the working peasants. A somewhat different social composition of the
population, however, has been given by the government's statistical
yearbooks, based on the last official census, taken in 1960. Under the
title "Social Composition of the Population," for instance, the 1965
statistical yearbook listed, in order, the following groups; workers,
employees (civil servants), collective and