I
Six months after the coup d'etat that overthrew Ahmed Ben Bella, the Eighth World Congress of the Fourth International, meeting in December 1965, analyzed the situation in Algeria in a resolution, "Progress and Problems of the African Revolution." This analysis singled out the following aspects in the development of the Algerian revolution from 1954 to 1965:
1. Before independence, the Algerian revolution took the form of a deep-going mobilization of the masses. The political instrument of the revolution, the FLN [Front de Libération Nationale—National Liberation Front], took form as a politically ill-defined multiclass front.
2. Following independence, the FLN literally burst into fragments at the time of the crisis in the summer of 1962, which developed along very unclear lines.
3. A new stage, characterized by a dynamic of growing over into socialism, opened with the exodus of the French colons. The rising curve in the revolution reached its highest point with the March 1963 decrees and continued up to the expropriation measures in October of the same year. Observing this process, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International took note of the fact that a workers and peasants government had been established in Algeria. At that time the process had already slowed and a pause had set in.
4. Algerian society remained marked by the coexistence and conflict of different and antagonistic forces and sectors. A significant Algerian private capitalist sector continued to exist, including in the countryside, as well as a powerful foreign capitalist sector (oil and gas). Furthermore, imperialist aid continued to be important and Algeria remained dependent on the franc zone. An administrative, economic, and military state bureaucracy developed which enjoyed a privileged share of the national income.
5. The coup d'etat of June 19, 1965, was the outcome of the deterioration in the situation which Ben Bella could no longer forestall. The coup d'etat was supported by the most well-known representative of the state and army bureaucracy. Its result was to encourage those forces most hostile to a socialist conclusion to the Algerian revolution.
In adopting these conclusions, the world congress, however, left discussion open on the Algerian question.
II
Immediately after June 19, 1965, two factors favored a temporary misunderstanding of the nature of the coup d'etat and some hesitation among the revolutionary vanguard in designating the character of the Boumédienne regime.
(a) The fact that the coup eliminated only a relatively small number of figures, while a whole series of ministers in the Ben Bella government joined Boumédienne's "Council of the Revolution."
(b) The support which the Chinese leadership gave to the Boumédienne regime in the weeks following the coup and which was motivated by considerations of a factional nature linked to the way in which Ben Bella and his team had been preparing the Afro-Asian conference.
Today these factors are no longer operative. The nature of the Boumédienne government became clear to the revolutionary vanguard when Boumédienne adopted a completely different orientation from that of the Ben Bella government.
Other changes should be noted. Moscow, and not Peking, is making conciliatory moves toward the regime, accompanying this with an attempt on the ideological level to paint up the Boumédienne regime as "anti-imperialist." This line is being followed by the PAGS [Parti de l'Avant-garde Socialiste—Socialist Vanguard party, formerly ORP (Organisation de la Résistance Populaire—People's Resistance Organization) founded after June 19] in which former members of the Parti Communiste Algérien [PCA—Algerian Communist party] are active. In addition, after the Algerian leaders assumed verbal "leftist" positions in the Israeli-Arab conflict, Fidel Castro, who had very severely condemned the authors of the coup d'etat, went back on his condemnation, doing this in the form of self-criticism.
In view of possible confusion from these sources, it is necessary to reaffirm the position of the revolutionary Marxists on the present regime in Algeria without any ambiguities.
The June 19 coup d'etat marked the destruction of the workers and peasants government. The molecular changes for the worse, which had been accumulating both in the consciousness of the various classes and in the government personnel and organization, had ended in a qualitative change. Having seized power with relative ease, owing to the previous deterioration in the situation, Boumédienne and his army had little trouble in putting down the opposition. The new power represented a reactionary resolution of the contradiction that had existed between the capitalist state and the workers and peasants government with its socialist orientation.
In the following period extending from 1965 to the end of 1967, there was an increasing drift to the right although centers of resistance still remained. At the end of 1967, a second period opened, which continues to the present, with the rise of Kaid Achmed (former Commander Slimane) to the second highest political post in the country, the position of head of the "party."
In this shift, a dual phenomenon should be noted:
(a) The development of a state capitalist sector in the economy in close osmosis with imperialist interests.
(b) The steady loss of momentum by the UGTA [Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens—General Union of Algerian Workers] trade-union apparatus. This apparatus thought it could maintain its independence and serve as a center for a new mobilization of the masses by limiting itself in the interval to a defensive struggle to preserve self-management, if not to a purely economic struggle.
The attempted counter coup d'etat of El Affroun, led by Tahar Zbiri in December 1967 and supported by a section of the trade-union militants, was a desperate attempt to reverse the trend to the right. The masses did not intervene in any way.
III
The essential feature in the changes which have occurred in the Algerian economic structure has been the strengthening of the "mixed" (state capitalism and foreign capital) fuels sector of the Algerian economy. This is the main sector of the economy from the standpoint of export and has undergone constant expansion (39,700,000 tons produced in 1967 as against 26,100,000 in 1964) The fuels sector is dominated by Sonatrach [Société Nationale Algérienne pour la Recherche, la Production, la Transformation et la Commercialisation des Hydrocarbures—National Algerian Company for Research, Production, Conversion, and Sale of Hydrocarbons], a state company which was created originally to manage the third Hassi Messaoud-Arzew pipeline completed in 1966 but which has developed into one of the principal petroleum producers. The activities of Sonatrach, which is aided by American and Soviet experts and collaborates closely with foreign interests, have expanded to such a degree that this enterprise constitutes a veritable state within a state. The basis for the collaboration between imperialism and the state sector is still the 1965 oil agreement concluded shortly after the June 19 coup d'etat and ratified in the French parliament by a UNR-PCF [Union pour la Nouvelle République—Parti Communiste Français—Union for the New Republic (the Gaullist party)—French Communist party] majority. Algerian state capitalism has been collaborating with imperialism without any major conflicts. The "nationalization" of the American oil companies' distribution network in September 1967 was, in appearance, an anti-imperialist measure in response to the Israeli aggression. In reality it was a purchase agreed to by the companies involved. The same was true of the purchase of the other distribution centers in May 1968. While collaborating with imperialism, the state sector seeks to assure its control over the transfer of currency and to impose its conditions with regard to export prices. These are minor conflicts in which the primary objective is "getting into position" for the renewal of the 1965 agreement in 1969.
It must be added that the Algerian left forces have never advanced specific demands for this sector, limiting themselves to declaring that nationalization of mineral and energy resources was a "long-term goal" (1964 Algiers Charter).
As against the constant expansion of this sector, the modest self-managed industrial sector, composed in general of old plants, is steadily losing momentum. Its social weight is minimal. The workers in this sector are calculated at less than 15,000 (6 percent of the Algerian working class). Moreover, the new investment code freezes the limit of development of this sector. It guarantees that there will be no nationalization of the foreign capital invested in Algeria for ten years' time and that after that it can be nationalized only with payment of 100 percent compensation.
The nationalization of the French plants in June 1968, planned by American and Swiss "experts," was carried out according to this schema. These plants were turned over to state companies that were not self-managed. Some of them were previously self-managed plants returned to their former owners (Norcolor). In other cases, the "nationalization-purchase" was made long after these concerns had brought the enterprises in the self-managed industrial sector to their knees (oil works, soap factories).
Parallel to the industrial sector, peasant self-management has had to struggle constantly against sabotage by the authorities combined with difficulties on the French wine market (wine import quotas).
As for the "agrarian reform," adopted in 1966 but left unimplemented, it itself is nothing but a caricature of the reform drawn up under the Ben Bella government. Matching the appetites of the state bureaucracy, it is limited to an area producing a net annual income equal to the state payroll.
IV
In Algeria the bourgeoisie was exceptionally weak both socially and politically. It lacked the capacity to meet the revolution head-on at this stage. The immediate source, therefore, of the counterrevolutionary initiatives was the state bureaucracy.
In order to understand the reasons for the behavior of this new bureaucracy, we must examine the elements making it up, its international context, and the international social forces on which it bases itself.
We can define three layers in the Algerian state bureaucracy. These layers are based on the social interests they have represented in post-1962 Algeria, independently of the social origins of the bureaucrats themselves. According to this criterion, a bureaucrat may drift imperceptibly from one stratum to another.
1. A layer that made it possible to maintain a "well functioning" state apparatus between the cease-fire and the formation of the first Ben Bella government. It is composed of a certain number of functionaries, who were former or recent collaborators of the colonial regime, coming from the famous "Lacoste promotion." It is made up both of Algerians and reformed and cooperative pieds-noirs [French persons born in Algeria]. This stratum is the most faithful supporter of the leaders who want to maintain a state of the bourgeois type. By its inertia and its sabotage of revolutionary measures, this layer plays an important braking role. It hides behind the mask of "technical competence" in order to maintain itself. But it is being subjected to criticism by the most conscious cadres, who demand that it be purged. The continually promised removal of this stumbling block is always indefinitely postponed. This stratum takes advantage of the delay to consolidate its privileges and it exercises a pernicious influence on the opportunistic nationalist cadres who are slipping into reactionary positions.
2. The national bourgeoisie was extensively represented in the first Ben Bella government. These cadres based themselves in the state apparatus on a bureaucratic layer of high functionaries (cabinet members, prefects) whose actions then and since have been guided by the same class interests. Khider, the secretary of the FLN, worked in the party apparatus to consolidate the power of these strata, if not for a seizure of power by them. Representatives of this layer were to be found in the successive Ben Bella governments. A few were unmasked, but these bourgeois bureaucrats remained throughout the machinery of state. Certain bourgeois technocrats remain also in the Boumédienne government.
3. The third layer in the state bureaucracy, and the most numerous, formed as a bureaucratic layer in the FLN administrative apparatus during the war. It emerged from the agrarian and urban petty bourgeoisie which flocked to the FLN and the ALN [Armée de Libération Nationale—National Liberation Army]. This layer rallied first to Ben Bella and then to Boumédienne. It includes the majority of the army and men in the ministries whose opposition to the June 1968 "nationalizations" tends to show that some of them, too, have slipped into the first group. The vast majority of the intermediate-level functionaries in the ministries and the local administrations have come from different strata of the petty bourgeoisie—small and middle tradesmen, middle peasants, petty functionaries of the colonial era. The ANP [Armée Nationale Populaire—National People's Army] officers are almost entirely representatives of the petty bourgeoisie.
A part of this stratum came from the working class in the cities or in emigration. Former working-class cadres in the MTLD [Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques—Movement for the Achievement of Democratic Liberties] and former CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail—General Confederation of Labor] or UGTA unionists have risen to positions of responsibility in the state apparatus. Boumaza, Alia Yahia, and Zerdani represented this element. But in the context of the alliance that the petty bourgeoisie has concluded with the national bourgeoisie, this layer of the working-class bureaucracy, which is rather weak, has vacillated between the government and the masses to the extent that it experiences the political pressure of the masses. This layer will never be capable (with very rare exceptions) of conducting a proletarian policy. It is being totally rooted out of the state apparatus.
The most characteristic feature of this state bureaucracy is its heterogeneity. Representatives of the national bourgeoisie are found side by side with representatives of the working class, in the same ministerial and government commissions, in the Political Bureau.
The question which arises continually for each of these strata is, whom to serve. Such a heterogeneous bureaucracy becomes conscious of its social role only through constant confrontation with the social forces and classes which it claims to serve as a whole. This is why since 1962 all government bodies have been torn by clique infighting and struggles over immediate interests.
The pressures of imperialism on this bureaucracy must not be overlooked. French imperialism has brought pressure to bear through economic cooperation, continuation of the Evian accords, and the 1965 hydrocarbon agreements; British imperialism through mixed companies. American imperialism has exercised pressure through its not inconsiderable economic aid. And West German imperialism as well as others have been present. No less important is the considerable economic aid provided by the bureaucracies of the workers states—the USSR, China, and Yugoslavia heading the list. Far from being provided in accordance with the principles proclaimed by Che Guevara at the Algiers Afro-Asian Economic Seminar, this aid has been accompanied by declarations favorable to the regimes in power and in the last analysis has favored stabilization of the state structures and the status quo. The same effect was produced by the ideological default of the former PCA (especially in the newspaper Alger Républicain) and later, after Harbi's arrest, of the ORP-PAGS which assumed that a "socialist state" or a "noncapitalist road" had been achieved or was in the process of being achieved (and still speculating, even today, on conflicts in top government circles).
Enmeshed in this international context, the state bureaucratic structures have become allied with the retrograde social forces.
V
The general political resolution of the Second Congress of the UGTA in 1965 pointed to the "bureaucratic layer being formed" among the "forces of counterrevolution," alongside the feudalists and exploitive bourgeoisie.
But the Oumeziane leadership of the UGTA, elected at the Second Congress, timidly avoided drawing the necessary conclusions from this analysis. It tried to counter the dismantlement of self-management by a defensive struggle, seeking support in the government. Its paper has been repeatedly prevented from coming out (May 1966, December 1967, and up to the present).
In Algeria today, the workers' right to determine the rules under which their unions function, to elect their representatives freely, to formulate their program without interference from the authorities, and to decide their actions in complete independence—that is, the four necessary criteria of trade-union independence from the state apparatus—have been deprived of all semblance of reality.
VI
At the present time, despite Cherif Belkacem's and then Kaid Achmed's "reorganization," the "FLN party" is still nonexistent.
But on the side of the opposition organizations, the picture is not a reassuring one.
(a) The CNDR [Conseil National de la Révolution—National Council of the Revolution] or ex-PRS [Parti de la Révolution Socialiste—Party of the Socialist Revolution] was never able to develop after its initial "Menshevik-type" positions condemning the Ben Bella government's revolutionary measures as "premature."
(b) The PAGS or ex-ORP became nothing but a vehicle of the Kremlin's foreign policy, under Alleg's leadership after Mohammed Harbi and Sahouane were arrested. This was shown by its turn on January 26, 1966, toward the formation of a broad "people's democratic" front demanding even the release of Ait Ahmed, who was imprisoned at that time, and proposing a front with the FFS [Front des Forces Socialistes—Front of Socialist Forces]. It has no mass base.
(c) Ait Ahmed's FFS and Mohamed Labjaoui's OCRA [Organisation Clandestine de la Révolution Algérienne—Clandestine Organization of the Algerian Revolution] represent factions in the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois wing of the old apparatuses.
(d) The RUR [Rassemblement Unitaire des Révolutionnaires—Movement to Unite Revolutionists], which was born of splits from the ex-ORP and the OCRA, represents, from the standpoint of its program and its analyses, the tendency closest to revolutionary socialism. Its base in Algeria, however, is as limited as that of the other movements.
VII
1. In this context the fundamental strategic task remains the organization of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard and the subsequent formation of a party of the urban and rural workers which would struggle for the overthrow of the Boumédienne regime and the establishment of a government of the worker and peasant masses.
2. Inseparably bound up with this task is the necessity of struggling to revitalize the trade-union movement and gain its complete independence from the state.
3. This struggle can only be waged through and parallel to a revival of the mass movement. And the mass movement can be revived only through struggle for:
(a) Stimulation of the noncapitalist sector of the economy by putting the entire nationalized industrial sector under self-management and giving priority to this sector as regards fiscal advantages and the development of trade relations, etc.
(b) The establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade and the introduction of mandatory national planning to avert strangulation of the self-managed sector.
(c) Nationalization of the petroleum-producing enterprises belonging to all the imperialist countries involved in the June 1967 aggression against the Arab revolution, and the establishment of workers control exercised jointly by representatives of the oil workers and the socialist industrial sector over Sonatrach and the other oil companies.
(d) Abrogation of the pseudo-agrarian reform of 1966 and implementation of a radical agrarian reform by means of expropriation of the large landowners and severe limitations on the right to hold property in land. The starting consideration must be that it is of course incorrect to call only for the restriction of large and middle landownership independent of seeking the most productive use of the land. But it is not correct either to envisage agrarian reform as an attempt to put the most land possible under cultivation according to abstract criteria of economic efficiency, independent of social relationships.
(e) Amendment of the 1966 law on municipal government for a new definition of municipal boundaries guaranteeing that the municipalities will be economic units and eliminating interference by the FLN apparatus.
(f) Defense of the revolution by the creation of workers and peasants militias based on the big farms, the big factories, and the municipalities.
(g) Renovation and purging of the state apparatus, the creation of organs of people's power, and promotion of equalitarian tendencies in the struggle against bureaucratic privileges. Revival of the struggle for democratic demands—emancipation of women, the struggle to keep Islam out of public affairs, the struggle against illiteracy and for education, the struggle against regional particularism.
4. Particular importance must be accorded to work among the Algerian workers in Europe as well as work for the release of all the interned militants and leaders, especially Ben Bella, Ben Allah, Zahouane, Harbi, and Hadj Ali.
VIII
Today the Trotskyist movement is unanimous in its assessment of the current situation in Algeria. After the June 19 coup d'etat, however, the limited extent of the change in the government makeup led some militants to ask whether the character of this coup had not been exaggerated; since, after all, it did not exceed the dimensions of a palace revolution. Subsequently the majority agreed that the coup was the qualitative expression of a molecular deterioration which had occurred in the last period of President Ben Bella's regime. But in view of the rapidity with which the state bureaucracy accentuated its right turn, a second question arose: Did the Trotskyist movement exaggerate the advances of the Algerian revolution in February 1964 when it characterized the Ben Bella government as a workers and peasants government? This is the question that must be answered now.
There is no reason to minimize the real advances that marked the development of the Algerian revolution during the first years after independence. Real anti-imperialist and anticapitalist actions were taken by the Ben Bella government and, more precisely, the limited team around Ben Bella, which in important instances went beyond the institutional framework, legalizing the conquests of the masses by decrees. The Fourth International was correct in giving critical support to the Ben Bella team from the time it conquered power in July 1962.
It is, however, likewise necessary to take into account the fact that the masses in movement who won self-management were the permanent workers on the large estates that later became self-managed farms; that is, the agricultural proletariat in the true sense of the word. After the summer of 1962, this agricultural proletariat was the only sector of the masses in motion. This was the social base of the Ben Bella team. Its relative narrowness constituted a most serious weakness. The masses of poor peasants could have offered a broader social base, but they were atomized during the crises of the summer of 1962. They could have been mobilized through immediate implementation of a radical agrarian reform. But the Ben Bella team did not do this.
The Fourth International did not correctly estimate the narrowness of the social base on which the Ben Bella team rested and therefore failed to see the major difference between the situation in Algeria and the situation which led to the establishment of a workers state in Cuba less than two years after the Castroist team took power.
In this situation, a revolutionary leadership possessing an adequate instrument, a revolutionary party, could still have mobilized the peasant masses. But in Algeria, the FLN was never a "party" in the class sense. Moreover, it no longer existed after 1958, except as an organization in the federation of France and as a government in the GPRA [Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne—Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic]. For all other purposes it had abdicated in favor of the ALN.
In its early stages, the Algerian freedom struggle had served as an inspiring example throughout the colonial world. The Cubans, especially, were influenced by it. After the victory of the Cuban revolution and the establishment first of a workers and peasants government and then a workers state in Cuba, this reciprocal influence continued, with Cuba now becoming an example for the Algerians. It was legitimate in Algeria to hold up the example of Cuba and to struggle for a similar outcome.
However, the dynamics of the Algerian revolution was determined by important differences from the developments that led to the establishment of the Cuban workers state. French imperialism had drawn a lesson from the victory of the Cuban revolution; it followed a different course from the one taken by U.S. imperialism toward Castro. The mass mobilizations were much more limited in Algeria than in Cuba. The Ben Bella team was of much lower revolutionary political stature than the Castro-Guevara team in Cuba. It failed especially to smash all surviving elements of the bourgeois army—which in Cuba were smashed upon Castro's entering Havana. Instead, in accordance with one of the main provisions of the Evian agreement, Ben Bella allowed these elements to be integrated into the ALN. In view of these differences, which became evident in the course of the struggle, it was a mistake to expect an outcome analogous to the one in Cuba.
This error in estimate was made worse by a wrong assessment of the nature of the ALN, especially after the application of the Evian agreement, and by the conception, maintained primarily by the Pablo tendency, that in the concrete Algerian situation of 1962-63 the army could play the role of the party. The grave consequences of the delay in organizing an Algerian revolutionary vanguard were seriously underestimated.
The Pablo tendency, which was in charge of the work in Algeria and which also controlled the journal of the French section of the Fourth International for at least two years, tended to develop its own independent line. It advanced confused and incorrect formulas with regard to the Algerian state, calling it an "anticapitalist state" or "semiworkers state." It did not grasp the contradiction between the workers and peasants government and the bourgeois character of the state apparatus. It therefore assigned to mass mobilizations essentially the role of supporting the Ben Bella tendency and carrying out the program of the FLN, failing to appreciate that it was crucial for the urban and rural proletariat and poor peasantry to set up independent organs of power, and clinging to the utopian and non-Marxist concept of the possibility of a gradual change in the nature of the state.
From this, various consequences followed such as minimizing certain serious events; for example, the gangster-like attack committed by the Khider apparatus at the UGTA congress, which was explained away by calling the UGTA leaders "left Mensheviks."
The Pablo tendency eventually split from the Fourth International.
* * *
The Fourth International never used the category of workers and peasants government in the Algerian context as a synonym for a dictatorship of the proletariat. The state structure was always correctly analyzed as bourgeois.
But although the International correctly applied the designation of workers and peasants government to the Ben Bella regime, it did not sufficiently stress the imperious necessity of establishing independent organs of political power by the urban and rural proletariat. Such bodies, moreover, would have been the best instruments for a general mobilization of the masses and the sole means for making the process of permanent revolution irreversible.
A concomitant error was committed in May 1964 when the International Executive Committee set the task for the revolutionary Marxists of collaborating in the formation of a revolutionary socialist left "led by the FLN" (the IEC resolution, "The International Situation and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Marxists," Quatrième Internationale, July 1964) instead of stressing the need to work among the ranks first to create a revolutionary Marxist organization linked to the Algerian masses.
The lesson of the events in Algeria is of considerable importance. The victory of the socialist revolution in Algeria was possible. But a decisive factor was lacking: the revolutionary party.
Within the frame of this self-criticism it must be added frankly that if the participation of the Trotskyist movement in the Algerian revolution, including its material support to the struggle and its backing of the most progressive tendency after 1962, was considerable, too little was done in carrying out the specific function of the Trotskyist movement—to form the nucleus of a future Algerian revolutionary party. The work of training and recruiting Algerian militants was neglected for work at the top.
Doubtless, during an initial phase, in view of the smallness of our forces, it was correct to concentrate on a campaign of practical support for the revolution which was creating a climate favorable to the spread of our ideas. But after a given point, the formation of an organized nucleus should have been given priority and all work at the top subordinated to this goal. The International recognized this at its Sixth World Congress. It did not, however, make the necessary effort to carry out this line. Thus, it shares the blame for this error with the comrades of the Pablo tendency, who were the main ones responsible for this work and for the false orientation as regards building a revolutionary nucleus.