|
| |
The Class Struggles
in Algeria
One might almost think that the new Algerian regime’s sole aim has been to confirm
the brief analysis the SI made of it in the Address to
Revolutionaries that we issued in Algiers soon after its inaugural putsch. Liquidating
self-management is the total content of Boumédienne’s regime, its only real
activity; and that project began the very moment the state, through the deployment of the
military force that was the only crystallization it achieved under Ben Bella, its only
solid structure, declared its independence vis-ŕ-vis Algerian society. The
state’s other projects — the technocratic reorganization of the economy, the
social and juridical extension of its power base — are beyond the capacities of the
present ruling class in the real conditions of the country. The mass of undecided, who had
not been enemies of Ben Bella but who were disappointed by him and who waited to judge the
new regime by its actions, can now see that it is ultimately doing nothing but
establishing an autonomous state dictatorship and thereby declaring war on
self-management. Even to formulate specific accusations against Ben Bella or to destroy
him publicly seems to be beyond its power for a long time to come. The only
remnant of “socialism” professed in Algeria is precisely that core of inverted
socialism, that product of the general reaction within the workers movement itself
which the defeat of the Russian revolution bequeathed as a positive model to the rest of
the world, including Ben Bella’s Algeria: the big lie of the police state.
Under such a regime the political enemy is not condemned for his real positions, but for
the opposite of what he was; or else he suddenly fades into an organized silence — he
never existed, either for the tribunal or for the historian. And Boumédienne, from the
beginning one of those most responsible for the fact that Algerian self-management is only
a caricature of what it needs to be, officially calls it “a caricature” in order
to reorganize it authoritarianly. In the name of an essence of self-management
ideologically backed by the state, Boumédienne rejects self-management’s actual
fledgling manifestations.
The same inversion of reality determines the Boumediennist critique of the past. What
Ben Bella is reproached for having done, or for having gone too far in, is precisely what
he did not do and what he scarcely pretended to strive for — the liberation of the
women or real support for the liberation struggles in Africa, for example. The present
regime lies about the past because of its own profound unity with that past. The Algerian
ruling class has not changed, it is reinforcing itself. It reproaches Ben Bella for having
done poorly what he had in fact only pretended to do; for a revolutionariness
that it itself has now ceased even simulating. The Algerian ruling class, before June 19
as well as after, is a bureaucracy in formation. It is pursuing its consolidation by
partially changing the way its political power is shared out. Certain strata of this
bureaucracy (military and technocratic) are predominating over others (political and
unionist). The basic conditions remain the weakness of the national bourgeoisie and the
pressure from the poverty-stricken peasant and worker masses, a part of which took over
the self-managed sector when the former (European) ruling class fled the country. The
merging of the Algerian bourgeoisie with the state bureaucracy is easier with the new
ruling strata that Boumédienne represents; moreover, this evolution harmonizes better
with the region of the global capitalist market to which Algeria is linked. In addition,
the bureaucratic strata that ruled with Ben Bella were less capable of an open struggle
against the demands of the masses. Ben Bella and the unstable social balance of power,
which was the temporary result of the struggle against France and the colonists, were
overthrown at the same time. When they saw themselves supplanted, the previously
predominant bureaucratic strata (the leaders of the FLN Federation of Greater Algiers and
the General Union of Algerian Workers) hesitated, then rallied to the new regime because
their solidarity with the state bureaucracy as a whole was naturally stronger than their
ties to the mass of workers. The agricultural workers union, whose congress six months
before had adopted the most radical positions on self-management, was the first to come
over.
Among the bureaucratic forces in the lobbies of power around Ben Bella, two mutually
antagonistic but related groupings had a special status: the Algerian Communist Party and
the foreign leftists — nicknamed “pieds-rouges” — who had put
themselves at the service of the Algerian state. They were not so much in power as
pretenders to power. Poor relative of power, waiting to inherit it, this extreme left wing
of the bureaucracy acquired its credentials as representative of the masses through
its connection with Ben Bella: it drew its mandate not from the masses but from him.
It dreamed of one day getting a monopoly on this power over the masses, this power that
Ben Bella still shared on all sides. Since Ben Bella was personally its only access to
present power and its main promise for the future, its only guarantee of being tolerated
(its Sukarno), the bureaucratic left demonstrated in his defense, but in an uncertain
manner. Just as it respectfully flocked around the state, it placed itself on the terrain
of the state to oppose the unfavorable shift of the relation of forces within the state.
Here again the Boumediennist critique of these elements, lumped together as
“foreigners,” in the name of a specifically Algerian Socialism, is entirely
false. Far from “making theory for theory’s sake” (El Moudjahid,
22 September 1965), the pieds-rouges represented an exhausted mixture of complete
theoretical nullity and of unconscious or consciously hidden counterrevolutionary
tendencies. Far from wanting to make adventurous utopian “experiments” in
Algeria, they possessed nothing but mistakes or lies that had been revealed as such a
thousand times. The best revolutionary ideas of the pieds-rouges were
unsuitable not because they came from too far away, but because they were
repeated much too late. It was a matter of history, not geography.
More radical and more isolated, at the extreme left of the Ben Bella regime, Mohammed
Harbi was the thinker of self-management, but only by grace of the prince, in the bureaus
of power. Harbi rose to the highest point reached by Algerian revolutionary thought: up to
the idea of self-management, but not at all up to its consistent, effective
practice. He understood its notion, but not its being. He occupied the self-contradictory
position of governmental theorist of self-management. More accurately, he might
be considered its court poet: soaring above practice, he eulogized self-management more
than he theorized it. The self-management state, that logical monstrosity, had in
Harbi its celebrator and its guilty conscience. Boumédienne’s tanks in the streets
meant a rationalization of the state, a state that wanted henceforth to free itself from
the ridiculous self-contradictions of the Ben-Bellaist balance of power and from any
guilty conscience and to simply be a state. It then became clear that Harbi, the
unarmed prophet of self-management, had not envisaged self-management’s
self-defense, its defense on its own terrain, but only its defense through the
mediation of Ben Bella. But if Harbi counted on Ben Bella alone to defend self-management,
who did he count on to defend Ben Bella? The thinker of self-management was protected by
Ben Bella, but who was going to protect his protector? He believed that Ben Bella, the
incarnation of the state, would remain universally accepted in Algeria, although Harbi
himself only accepted his “good side” (his token recognition of
self-management). But the real process advanced by way of his bad side: the forces that
followed the opposite line of argument on Ben Bella were more capable of intervention. Ben
Bella was not the resolution of the Algerian contradictions, he was only their temporary
cover. History has shown that Harbi and those who thought like him were mistaken. They
will now have to radicalize their ideas if they want to effectively fight the
Boumediennist dictatorship and realize self-management.
The fall of Ben Bella is a landmark in the collapse of global illusions regarding the
“underdeveloped” version of pseudosocialism. Castro remains its last star, but
he, who could previously argue with some plausibility that elections were unnecessary
because the people were armed, is now demanding that all arms be turned in, and his police
are rounding them up (Reuters, 14 August 1965). His second in command, Guevara, has
already disappeared without any explanation being given to the masses from whom these
leaders had demanded a blind personal confidence. Meanwhile the Algerians who are
experiencing the fragility of Ben-Bellaist socialism are also discovering the value of all
the so-called socialist camp’s concern for their cause: the Chinese, Russian and
Cuban states, along with Nasser, are naturally rushing to outdo each other in
fraternal greetings to Boumédienne’s regime. Revolutions in the underdeveloped
countries will continue to fail miserably as long as they recognize and emulate any
existing model of socialist power, since they are all manifestly false ones. The
disintegrated official Sino-Soviet version of this socialism and the
“underdeveloped” version of it mutually admire and reinforce each other and both
lead to the same outcome. The first underdevelopment we have to get beyond is the
worldwide underdevelopment of revolutionary theory.
The internal struggles of the Algerian bureaucracy, both during the war of independence
and in the postwar 1962-1965 period, took the form of clan struggles, personal rivalries,
inexplicable disputes among the leaders, obscure shifts of alliances. This was a direct
continuation of the conditions prevailing around Messali Hadj since before the Algerian
revolt. Not only was all theory absent, even ideology was only summarily improvised and
confused; everything remained centered around superficial, abstract political questions.
Since June 19 another period has begun: that of the confrontation between the ruling class
and the workers, and this is the real movement that creates the conditions and need for a
theory. As early as July 9, at a meeting of delegates from 2500 self-managed enterprises
held at Algiers and chaired by Minister of Industry Boumaza, the delegates expressed to
the latter their insistence on self-management as an inviolable principle and made a
series of critiques concerning the state’s role in limiting this principle. The
delegates “questioned the multiplicity of overseers (prefectures, ministries, party)
and denounced the heavy taxation and the state’s nonpayment of debts; some delegates
also brought up the problem of layoffs, the ‘draconian’ demands of the foreign
suppliers and the paralyzing role of the customs department” (Le Monde, 10
July 1965).
Those delegates knew what they were talking about. Since [Boumédienne’s] June
19th Declaration — in which the term “self-management” is not even
mentioned once — the regime has been preparing the “stabilization” of the
economic situation through the strengthening of state control and the accelerated training
of “cadres.” It aimed to start collecting installment payments as soon as
possible for the more than 100,000 squatted lodgings; to recover money “stolen from
the state” in the self-managed enterprises; to reduce the wearing out of poorly
maintained equipment; and to regularize all the illegal seizures carried out by the masses
upon the departure of the French. Since then, in spite of the fact that self-management is
the very form through which the paralyzing respect for property (private or state), which
has been such an obstacle in the workers movement, can be overcome, the workers in the
self-managed sector, awaiting their several-months-overdue wages, are continually
reproached for having stolen a large part of what they have produced. The most urgent goal
of the Algerian state, which already has enough soldiers and police, is to train 20,000
accountants a year.
The central struggle, veiled and open, immediately broke out between the ruling class
representatives and the workers precisely over the issue of self-management. The
“reassuring” declarations of Boumaza and Boumédienne didn’t fool anyone.
The “labor unrest” alluded to by Le Monde on October 3 is a euphemism
for the resistance of the sole bastion of socialist revolution in Algeria — the
self-managed sector — against the most recent maneuvers of the ruling
bureaucratic-bourgeois coalition. The union leaders themselves could not remain silent:
their official status as representatives of the workers vis-ŕ-vis the state and their
social status as left wing of the ruling class were at stake. The September articles in Révolution
et Travail — in which genuine workers’ demands (“when workers are
reduced to poverty, self-management is violated”) are mixed with expressions of the
union leaders’ increasing alarm (“agreement with the June 19th
Declaration’s analyses,” but denunciation of the technocrats and economists)
— exactly reflect this situation of overlapping vertical and horizontal struggles.
The increasing reference to “economic anarchy” (which always really means
self-management), the judicial measures against the self-managed sector (e.g. forcing the
self-managed enterprises to pay back-taxes), which the newspapers talk about less, and the
restitution of the Norcolor factory to its former owner — all this shows these
“labor” leaders that soon they will no longer have a place in the ruling
apparatus. The new pretenders are already there: the “scramble for power of dubious
elements” that outrages Révolution et Travail expresses the ruling
class’s swing to the right. The techno-bureaucrats and the military have no possible
allies but the representatives of the traditional bourgeoisie. At the same time that the
officers, in the style of South American armies, are attaining bourgeois status (everyone
knows about their BMWs, duty-free and 30% discounted), a multitude of Algerian bourgeois,
following in the footsteps of the Norcolor owner, are returning to the country in the
expectation of recovering their property, seized “in completely illegal conditions by
unscrupulous persons” (Boumaza). Added to these challenges is the rapid increase in
food prices. The workers, thoroughly aware of this process, are resisting on the spot:
the repeated strikes in the Renault factories, the strikes of the press and parcel
distributors and of the telephone and insurance workers, the demonstrations of the unpaid
workers of Mitidja — these are the first steps of a movement of rage which, if it
asserts itself effectively, is capable of sweeping aside the whole present regime.
Incapable of mastering a single one of their problems, the rulers react with constant
delirious conferences, constant torture in their prisons, and denunciations of the
“slackening of moral standards.” El Moudjahid (7 December 1965) attacks
“the erotic sentimentalism of a young generation without political commitment”
and the (accurate) views of those who “are tempted to reject religion as being a
restraint on their taste for pleasure and on their liberation, which they take simply to
mean their possibilities for pleasure, and who consider the contributions of Arab
civilization as a step backward.” The tone is no different from that used by the
rulers in Washington or Moscow when they regretfully announce their lack of confidence in
the young generation. And after a few months the new regime is emulating Ben Bella in its
most ludicrous Islamic manifestation: the prohibition of alcohol.
The present opposition to the Boumediennist dictatorship is twofold: On one side, the
workers are defending themselves in the enterprises (self-managed or not); they are the
real contestation implied in the facts. On another side, the leftists of the FLN apparatus
are trying to re-form a revolutionary apparatus. The first effort of the Organisation de
la Résistance Populaire, led by Zahouane and supported by the French Stalinists, was a
hollow declaration that only appeared six weeks after the coup, a declaration that
analyzed neither the present regime nor the means to oppose it. Its second appeal was
addressed to the Algerian police, from whom it anticipated revolutionary support. This
strategy proved to be somewhat of a miscalculation since by the end of September those
police had arrested Zahouane and broken up his first clandestine network (Harbi himself
had already been arrested in August). The ORP is continuing its activity, beginning to
collect contributions “for Ben Bella” from Algerian workers in France and
winning over the majority of the student leaders. This apparatus (underground or in exile)
is counting on an economic-political crisis in Algeria in the near future to reestablish
its influence with the struggling Algerian workers. In this Leninist perspective it will
present itself, with or without the banner of Ben Bella, as the solution for a replacement
of the Boumediennist regime.
What is nevertheless going to prevent the establishment of a Bolshevik-type apparatus,
striven for by so many militants? The time passed since Lenin and his failure, and the
continued and evident degradation of Leninism, which is directly expressed by these
leftists’ allying with and fighting each other in every sort of variant —
Khrushchevo-Brezhnevists, Maoists, sub-Togliattists, pure and semi-Stalinists, all the
shades of Trotskyism, etc. All of them refuse, and are forced to refuse, to clearly face
the essential problem of the nature of the “socialism” (i.e. of the class power)
in Russia and China, and consequently also in Algeria. Their main weakness during the
struggle for power is also the main guarantee of their counterrevolutionary role if they
were to accede to power. These leftists will present themselves as a natural continuation
of the personalized political confusion of the preceding period; but the real class
struggle in Algeria has now brought that period to a close. Their doubts about Ben Bella
overlapped with their doubts on the world (and on socialism) and will continue after Ben
Bella. They don’t say all they know and they don’t know all they say. Their
social base and their social perspective is that bureaucratic sector which came
out worst in the power reshuffle and which wants to regain its old position. Seeing that
they can no longer hope to dominate the regime, they turn toward the people in order to
dominate the opposition. Nostalgic bureaucrats or would-be bureaucrats, they want to
counterpose “the people” to Boumédienne, whereas Boumédienne has already
revealed to the masses the real focus of opposition: state bureaucrat versus worker. But
the most despicable aspect of their bolshevism is this glaring difference: the Bolshevik
Party did not know the sort of bureaucratic power it was going to end up establishing,
whereas these leftists have already been able to see, in the world and among themselves,
that bureaucratic power which they wish to restore in a more or less purified
form. The masses, if they have the chance to choose, will not choose this corrected
version of a bureaucracy whose essential elements they have already had the opportunity of
experiencing. The Algerian intellectuals who don’t rally to the regime still have the
choice between participating in this apparatus or seeking a direct linkup with the
autonomous movement of the masses. As for the Algerian petty bourgeoisie (storekeepers,
lower functionaries, etc.), it will naturally tend to support the new
technocratic-military bureaucracy rather than the bureaucratic leftists.
The only road to socialism, in Algeria as everywhere else, passes through “an
offensive and defensive pact with the truth,” as a Hungarian intellectual put it in
1956. People in Algeria who got the SI’s Address understood it. Wherever
practical revolutionary conditions exist, no theory is too difficult. Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam, a witness to the Paris Commune, noted, “For the first time one can
hear the workers exchanging their opinions about problems that until now have been
considered only by philosophers.” The realization of philosophy, the critique and
reconstruction of all the values and behavior imposed by alienated life — this is the
maximum program of generalized self-management. The leftist militants of the
bureaucratic groups tell us that these theses are correct but that the time has not yet
come when one can tell the masses everything. Those who argue in such a perspective never
see this time as having come, and in fact they contribute toward making sure that it never
does come. It is necessary to tell the masses what they are already doing. The
specialized thinkers of revolution are the specialists of its false consciousness, who
afterwards come to realize that they have done something entirely different from what they
thought they were doing. This problem is aggravated here by the particular difficulties of
underdeveloped countries and by the persistent theoretical weakness in the Algerian
movement. Although the strictly bureaucratic fringe within the present opposition is
extremely small, its very existence as a “professional leadership” is a form
that weighs on and determines the content of that opposition. Political alienation is
always related to the state. Self-management can expect nothing from revived
Bolsheviks.
Self-management must be both the means and the end of the present struggle. It is not
only what is at stake in the struggle, but also its adequate form. It is its own tool. It
is itself the material it works on, and its own presupposition. It must totally recognize
its own truth. The state power proposes the contradictory and absurd project of
“reorganizing self-management”; it is in fact self-management that must organize
itself as a power or disappear.
Self-management is the most modern and most important tendency to appear in the
struggle of the Algerian movement, and it is also the one that is the least narrowly
Algerian. Its meaning is universal. In contrast to the Yugoslavian caricature
that Boumédienne wants to emulate, which is only a semi-decentralized instrument of state
control (“We have to decentralize in order better to control the self-managed
enterprises,” Boumédienne openly admits in Le Monde, 10 November 1965), a
subordinate level of central administration; and in contrast to the Proudhonian mutualism
of 1848, which aimed at organizing on the margins of private property, real
self-management — revolutionary self-management — can be won only through the
armed abolition of the titles of existing property. Its failure in Turin in 1920 was the
prelude to the armed domination of Fascism. The bases for a self-managed production in
Algeria were spontaneously formed — as in Spain in 1936, as in Paris in 1871 in the
workshops abandoned by the Versaillese — wherever the owners had to flee following
their political defeat: on vacant property. These takeovers are a vacation from
property and oppression, a temporary break from alienated life.
Such self-management, by the simple fact that it exists, threatens the society’s
entire hierarchical organization. It must destroy all external control because all the
external forces of control will never make peace with it as a living reality, but at most
only with its label, with its embalmed corpse. Self-management cannot coexist with any
army or police or state.
Generalized self-management, “extended to all production and all aspects of social
life,” would mean the end of the unemployment that affects two million Algerians, but
it would also mean the end of all aspects of the old society, the abolition of all its
spiritual and material enslavements and the abolition of its masters. The present
fledgling effort toward self-management can be controlled from above only because it
consents to exclude below it that majority of the workers who don’t participate in it
or who are unemployed; and because even within its own enterprises it tolerates the
formation of dominating strata of “directors” or management professionals who
have worked their way up from the base or been appointed by the state. These managers are
the state virus within that which tends to negate the state; they are a compromise. But
the time for compromise is past, both for the state power and for the real power of the
Algerian workers.
Radical self-management, the only kind that can endure and conquer, refuses any
hierarchy within or outside itself. It must also reject in practice any hierarchical
separation of women (an oppressive separation openly accepted by Proudhon’s
theory as well as by the backward reality of Islamic Algeria). The self-management
committees, as well as all the delegates in the federations of self-managed enterprises,
should be revocable at any moment by their base, this base obviously including all the
workers, without any distinctions between permanent and seasonal ones.
The only program for the Algerian socialist elements consists in the defense of the
self-managed sector, not only as it is but as it must become. This defense must therefore
counter the purge carried out by the state with another purge within self-management: a
purge carried out by its rank and file against everything that negates it from within. A
revolutionary assault against the existing regime is only possible with a continued and
radicalized self-management as its point of departure. By putting forward the program of
quantitatively and qualitatively increased workers’ self-management, one is calling
on all the workers to directly take on the cause of self-management as their own cause. By
demanding not only the defense of self-management but its extension to the point of dissolving
all specialized activity not answerable to self-management, Algerian revolutionaries
can show that this defense is the concern not only of the workers of the temporarily
self-managed sector, but of all the workers, as the only way toward a definitive
liberation. In this way they will demonstrate that they are struggling for the liberation
of everyone and not for their own future domination as specialists of revolution; that the
victory of “their party” must at the same time be its end as a separate party.
As a first step, it is necessary to envisage linking up self-management
delegates with each other and with the enterprise committees that are striving for
self-management in the private and state sectors; to disseminate and publish all
information on the workers’ struggles and the autonomous forms of organization that
emerge out of them, and to extend and generalize these forms as the sole path for a
profound contestation. At the same time, through the same clandestine relations and
publications, it is necessary to develop the theory of self-management and its
requirements, within the self-managed sector itself and before the masses of Algeria and
the world. Self-management must become the sole solution to the mysteries of power in
Algeria, and it must know that it is that solution.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
Algiers, December 1965
(circulated clandestinely)
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
[Postscript to this article]
| |
|