Twenty years ago this month Algeria became an independent state after a colonial war which had lasted nearly eight years. From a purely military point of view this war had been won by the French army which, by a ruthless policy of repression (tortures, kidnappings, murders, the concentration of the rural population into strategic villages, the mining of the frontiers with Morocco and Tunisia), had succeeded in “pacifying” Algeria. When peace talks started in 1961 there were only a few thousand poorly-armed FLN guerrillas actually inside Algeria, mainly in the more remote mountainous parts of the country.
Politically it was a different story. The support of the Algerian Muslim population had not been won over. International opinion was against France as an increasing number of states recognised the provisional government in exile (GPRA) which the FLN had set up. The Algerian war was draining French resources and destablising its political institutions. Indeed, it was the Algerian question which finally brought about the downfall of the Fourth Republic when a settlers’ and generals’ revolt in Algeria brought De Gaulle back to power in 1958.
De Gaulle had a shrewd sense of political realities and soon came to realise that the only solution was an independent Algeria, if possible closely tied to France ' like the other French colonies which had been given independence in 1960. Negotiations between the French government and the FLN opened in 1961 and eventually led to an agreement which was signed in Evian in March 1962.
The Evian agreement provided for the establishment of an independent Algerian state, if that was what the population showed they wanted in a referendum. The position of the non-Muslim minority in Algeria — some 10 per cent of the population made up of the descendants of European immigrants since Algeria became a French colony in 1832 and of those of the original Arab-speaking Jewish communities which had existed in pre-colonial Algeria — was to be protected by a number of safeguard clauses similar to those negotiated more recently for the whites in Zimbabwe. The referendum gave an overwhelming vote for independence, the safeguard clauses turned out to be quite academic. The non-Muslim population, joined by many pro-French Muslims, simply voted with their feet. By the time of independence in July 1962 some million people, including nine-tenths of the non-Muslim population, had left Algeria never to return.
This exodus decisively affected the future course of events in Algeria as it represented the flight not only of the bulk of the qualified workforce (white collar and supervisory workers, civil servants, even skilled manual workers) but also of the capitalist class large and small, and of the landowners (on the eve of independence 22,000 Europeans owned about 25 per cent of all cultivable land, 40 per cent of land actually cultivated). It also meant the depopulation of the towns, especially those along the coastal strip which had all had substantial European minorities; Algiers and Oran in fact had even had European majorities.
The places, the jobs, the positions, the homes of the exiles were taken by Muslim Algerians; 1962 was a year of rapid upward mobility for those Algerians who had some money and some education. They were able to acquire very cheaply good houses, even whole apartment blocks and small businesses, and rapid promotion to top and middle ranking jobs in the civil service. For this new petty bourgeoisie independence and the flight of the Europeans had been a bit of very good luck.
At the political level too there was a vacuum to be filled and the same struggle for power, place and privilege also occurred here. On independence the members of the GERA rushed back to Algiers to stake their claim to being the new government, but they had acted too hastily forgetting that in the end political power depends on controlling some armed force. When a dispute broke out between them and Ben Bella and the other political leaders of the FLN itself, the armed force — in this case the army of the frontiers, in Morocco and Tunisia, under the command of Colonel Boumédiène whom the GPRA had upset by trying to replace — backed Ben Bella. Boumédiène marched his troops across Algeria from Morocco and installed Ben Bella in power in Algiers. The National Liberation Army (ALN, later the National People’s Army or ANP) was in fact the only organised force in Algeria in the chaotic conditions of 1962 and it was thus logical that whoever won its support should end up in control of political power, another factor which decisively shaped the future course of events in Algeria.
A further feature of this period was the occupation of the farms, and to a lesser extent of the factories, left vacant by the flight of their European owners. The Algerian farm workers organised to take over and run the abandoned farms themselves. This was a normal, even natural reaction in the circumstances — they could hardly have been expected to sit back and do nothing, leaving uncultivated the land which also produced their own food — but it caught the imagination of Leftists outside Algeria. This was the Revolution as they had always imagined it: workers spontaneously taking over the means of production and running them themselves through workers’ councils! The most prominent of those who came to Algeria to help the new regime was the Trotskyist leader Michel Raptis (Pablo) who became an official adviser to Ben Bella.
The government later rubber-stamped the workers’ actions here by officially nationalising all properties left vacant. In time however “workers self-management” became more and more of a delusion as real decision-making power passed to the full-time managers who were in effect appointed by, and in any event responsible to, the central state.
Under Ben Bella Algeria became officially a one-party State, the single party being the “Party of the FLN” The first peace-time congress of this party was held in Algiers in April 1964 and adopted a programme known as the Charte d’Alger. This committed the FLN unequivocally to building “socialism” in Algeria —to developing the country on the basis of state ownership of the main means of production and of central state planning. This was not quite the Soviet model since a large space was to be given at least on paper, to workers’ self-management (autogestion). The FLN Party, however, was still not really a political force in its own right. The only organised force remained the Army under Boumédiène. In the end the Army grew tired of the posturings and eclecticism of Ben Bella who was projecting himself on the international scene as a sort of African Castro. On 19 June 1965, the even of an international conference in Algiers which was to consecrate Ben Bella as a leader of the Third World, the Army seized power and Boumédiène became President, a post he was to occupy for 13 years till his death at the end of 1978. Ben Bella remained a prisoner in Algeria till 1980. He emerged from prison a Muslim fundamentalist.
The first nationalisation measures, as we saw, concerned those properties and businesses left vacant by the flight of the European minority. This was followed in 1966 by the nationalisation of foreign mining interests, the first step in a sustained policy to eliminate foreign-owned businesses from Algeria which had led by 1974 to the creation of a substantial state capitalist sector embracing banks, insurance, foreign trade, heavy industry, mining, oil, gas, pipelines, railways and shipping as well as some sections of light industry and commerce. By 1977, 80 per cent of industrial employment was provided by the state sector. Since this figure does not include civil servants, it is clear that the state is by far the biggest employer in Algeria.
Private capitalist enterprise, however, has not been suppressed, though it only plays a subordinate, supporting role to the state sector. The nationalisation measures of the period 1966-1974 only concerned foreign-owned businesses, “national capitalists” were allowed to survive and were for a period actively encouraged. Private enterprise plays a significant role in the building trade, in the consumer goods sector and in the retail trade (where it predominates), but everywhere has to face the competition of state firms.
Unemployment has remained a chronic problem in Algeria. It has been estimated that in 1975 nearly 40 per cent of the adult male population of working age were unemployed, some 1,500.000 people, a figure greater than those in industrial and civil service employment. With the continuation of the world crisis this won’t have changed much today, especially as since 1974 emigration to France the traditional safety valve for unemployment in Algeria has been stopped.
In addition to this chronic unemployment, workers in Algeria suffer from poor housing (shortage of accommodation, overcrowding, shanty towns), shortage of consumer goods, poor transport, health and other services. Frustration over this, and over low wages and bad working conditions, expresses itself from time to time in strikes and riots as in 1977 and again more recently. The language policy of the government — trying to impose the use of Classical Arabic as the official language (as opposed to the other languages spoken in Algeria, namely, popular Arabic, Berber and French) — has also aggravated the existing social discontent among the minority of Berber-speakers. It sparked off the serious riots in Tizi-Ouzo in April 1980, which had a marked social content over and above their linguistic aspect.
From 1965 to 1976 Algeria existed virtually without a Constitution, with effective power in the hands of a Council of the Revolution composed mainly of army officers and headed by Boumédiène. By 1976 this ruling group had come to the conclusion that the political situation was stable enough to be institutionalised. A Constitution was drawn up and adopted. Constitutions rarely tell where real power lies and the Algerian Constitution of 1976 is no exception despite its frank proclamation of the leading role of a single Party. In actual fact however real power is not in the hands of the Party leadership as such but only to the extent that the leadership of the Party and that of the Army overlap. In other words, real power lies in the hands of the leaders of the Army for whom the Party is a means of political control rather than vice versa as the Constitution might suggest.
When Boumédiène died in December 1978, the Political Bureau of the FLN Party (the old Council of the Revolution) chose as his successor another military man, Chadli Bendjedid, who is the current President of Algeria. The Prime Minister, Mohamed Abdelgani, also comes from the Army, thus clearly indicating where real power still lies in Algeria.
Algeria is one of a number of countries outside the Russian and Chinese blocs which claim to be “socialist”. In Algeria’s case the claim is not yet to be a “socialist country”, but only to be “building socialism”, defined as a system based on the state ownership of the means of production in which the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their labour” will apply. In other words, Lenin’s mistaken definition later enshrined by Stalin in the Russian Constitution of 1936.
This claim has not gone unchallenged. In fact most critics of the Algerian regime both outside and inside Algeria, regard the country as being, economically, state capitalism and, politically, a “bourgeois state”. One of the earliest and most persistent of these critics has been Mohamed Boudiaf. Boudiaf was one of the founding members of the FLN in Cairo in 1954, but ended up on the losing side in the struggle for power which broke out after Algeria became independent in 1962. For him, the Algerian regime represents the rule of a new class, a new bourgeoisie which has emerged out of the “bureaucratic petty-bourgeoisie” (officials of all kinds, governmental. Party, military, economic) which came to the front as a result of the flight of the Europeans.
A similar criticism was expressed in the period 1963-4 but this time from within the FLN by a group associated with the weekly Revolution Africaine. This was (and still is) an official organ of the FLN Party but during this period adopted an independent line as the voice of left-wing elements within the Party. Among its journalists were a number of French Leftists who had come to help the “Algerian Revolution”, such as Gerard Chaliand, later author of a number of books on Third Word struggles. As early as 1964, in his L’Algerie, est-elle socialiste? (“Is Algeria socialist?”) Chaliand wrote:
Today there exists a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, essentially turned towards strengthening itself within the framework of a State capitalism which it is working to set up.This concept of a “bureaucratic” or “administrative” or “state” bourgeoisie ruling on the basis of state capitalism is also put forward in a number of other books such as Le Capitalisme d’Etat en Algerie by Marc Raffinot and Pierre Jacquemot (1977) and the excellent collective work, by “Dersa”, L’Algerie en debat, published last year. Even the Trotskyists regard Algeria as state capitalist, somewhat inconsistently in view of their attitude on the very similar regimes in Russia, East Europe, China, Vietnam and Cuba. It is true however that they regard state capitalism in Algeria only as a transitional stage to the sort of fully-fledged private capitalism we know in the West which, in their view, must sooner or later emerge in Algeria.
Even though this affirmation is based on the Trotskyist dogma that a state capitalism without a proper private capitalist class cannot by definition be a stable, lasting system, it is not to be excluded. At some time in the future Algeria could go the way of Egypt under Sadat. On the other hand, the system in Algeria has now lasted some twenty years (which in Russia takes us to 1937, by which time a definite ruling class had evolved there) and shows no immediate signs of changing. Thus the question must be seriously faced of whether or not a more or less permanent bureaucratic class system, or state capitalism, has emerged in Algeria as it did in Russia.
This conclusion presents no problem to those who, unlike the Trotskyists (and, indeed, the ideology of the Algerian regime) do not identify capitalism with the existence of a private capitalist class. It is a conclusion that is well-developed in the collective work L’Algeri en debat:
The first point that must be noted in this respect can be resumed in this truism: “State capitalism is a species of the capitalist system”. The most obvious particularity of this species is clearly the legal form of property. The private appropriation of the means of production and exchange does not entirely disappear, but the most important means of production are owned by the State itself and it is the economic institutions of the State which effectively control and manage production. This particular form of ownership of the means of production does not in itself involve any fundamental change in the social relations of production. Labour remains paid for by a wage and generates a surplus value (the capitalist expression of surplus labour) over which the producers have no command and whose use they do not control. The criteria for the choice of investments and for deciding the aim of production are determined by the objectives of maximising profits whatever the term used to designate this — and domination of the exploited strata.So a picture has now emerged of the origin, rise and nature of the Algerian ruling class. On independence in 1962 the group of self-styled “revolutionary patriots.” recruited from various social backgrounds who had led the war against French colonialism found themselves not only in control of political power but also obliged, due to the flight of the European capitalists and to the weakness of the Algerian ones, to assume economic control too. Eventually, on the basis of a predominating state sector, some of them evolved into a replacement capitalist class.
This privileged group is made up of the leaders of the Army and of the Party (often the same), top government and civil service officials, and the senior management of the state industries. Their domination of the most important means of production is not private and individual, nor is there any reason to believe that it will necessarily have to become so, but is collective and as a class. They monopolise — own, in a sociological, non-legal sense — the means of production collectively, as a sort or corporation, through their control of the state in a situation where the main means of production are state-owned.
In other words, for the ordinary workers and peasants of Algeria “independence” has only represented a change of masters.
Adam Buick
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