Just below the Politburo and the Central Committee were the vast Party and government bureaucracy, professional people and intellectuals, and managers of state industrial and agricultural enterprises. There were some basic social differences between the top Party elite and the lower Party functionaries and state officials in terms of privileges, influence, authority, and responsibility. This group of lower Party and state officials was bound together by the economic privileges and prestige that went with their positions and membership in, or sympathy for, the Party; they all benefited from the regime and enjoyed educational and economic advantages denied the rest of the population. Below this group were the rank-and-file Party members, whose leadership role was constitutionally guaranteed. Aside from the prestige enjoyed as Party members, however, their privileges and economic benefits did not differ much from the next class in Communist structure of Albanian society, namely the workers.
Constituting about 15 percent of the total population, the working class, styled by the regime as the leading class, was created mostly after the Communist seizure of power and was composed almost wholly of peasant stock. This group, probably more so than the peasant masses, has been under constant pressure to work harder, to produce more, and to work longer, often even after their normal schedules were completed. Although the regular work schedule was eight hours, workers were called upon to perform volunteer labor and to overfulfill norms. There was very little chance for rest and recreation.
Before 1967 the workers could take advantage of religious holidays, which provided some time for recreation, but since then all religious holidays have been banned. The only legal holidays were New Year's Day; Republic Day, on January 11; May Day; Army Day, on July 10; and Independence and Liberation Days, on November 28 and 29, respectively. There were, however, a few local socialist holidays connected with the liberation of the areas by the partisan formations in 1944. The workers also received two-week paid vacations annually.
The largest class, that of the peasants, represented about two-thirds of the total population and, according to Communist dogma, was allied with the working class and led by it. The regime's policy of complete agricultural collectivization has been distressing for the peasant class. A lover of his land, irrespective of its size, and of his independence, the peasant was deprived of his farmland, except for a tiny plot, and herded into a collective. His income in the collective was only on the subsistence level. Collective peasants were called upon to perform 300 to 350 workdays a year.
A constant complaint of the regime has been that the peasants have not been "freed from the psychology of the small owner, the concept of private property." As of 1970 there were actually no social differences between the workers and peasants because nearly all the workers were of peasant stock and still had close ties with relatives in their native villages, and indeed some workers continued to keep their families in the villages.
Soon after the adoption of the Constitution in 1946, a number of laws were adopted regulating marriage and divorce. The law on marriage, adopted in 1948, provided that marriages had to be contracted before an official of the local People's Council, and strong penalties were prescribed for any clergyman performing a religious ceremony before a civil ceremony had taken place. The legal age for contracting marriage was set at eighteen for both sexes, but persons as young as sixteen years of age could enter into marriage with the permission of the people's court. In such cases the minors did not need parental consent, and the law considered them "emancipated."
Marriage was based on the full equality of rights of both spouses. Thus the concept of the head of the family, recognized by pre-Communist civil law and so important for Albanian family life, was eliminated. Each of the spouses, according to the 1948 law, had the right to choose his or her own occupation, profession, and residence. Marriage with foreigners was prohibited unless entered into by permission of the government.
The laws on divorce were designed to facilitate and speed up divorce proceedings. The separation of spouses was made a ground for divorce under the law, and in such cases a court could grant a divorce without considering related facts or the causes of the separation. The basic divorce law, which was originally passed in 1948 and, after some modifications, was still in effect in 1970, provided that each spouse may ask for divorce on grounds on incompatibility of character, continued misunderstandings, irreconcilable hostility, or for any other reason that disrupted marital relations to the point where a common marital life had become impossible. Certain crimes committed by the spouse, especially political crimes, the so-called crimes against the state, and crimes involving moral turpitude, were also made causes for divorce.
In the 1950-64 period the total number of marriages averaged about 12,000 annually, except in 1961, when 18,725 marriages were registered; for the whole fourteen-year period marriages averaged about 7.8 per 1,000 population annually. During the same period there were about 1,000 divorces a year in the whole country; this represented about 0.2 percent of the total married population.
The problems still facing the Communist regime in its efforts to change the traditional character of society, especially in the countryside, were highlighted in a strong editorial in the February 8, 1970, issue of Zeri i Popullit (The Voice of the People), the Party's official daily. According to the article, the most dangerous antisocial phenomenon in the social life of the country was patriarchalism. This phenomenon was particularly strong in the mountainous north where it was firmly entrenched and involved people from rank-and-file villagers to Party members.