The Forgotten Algerian Revolution

nineteen sixty two. So okay. The issue with this is that people kind of broadly know the outlines of the first Algerian Revolution, but the second Algerian Revolution, the one where the Algerian working class season is the control of the means of production, attempts to run them autonomous league, is just has completely faded into the mist of history. I talk about it, no one has any idea what

the fuck I'm talking about. And this is kind of startling, because you know, up until there's probably like there's like a four year span where the Algerian Revolution is the sort of like capital S capital R social revolution, like it's the big one, is the one people all over the world taking inspiration from, and then it kind of, you know, it flounders out for reasons that we're going to talk about, and also the culture revolution starts and

everyone lashes onto that. But it's sort of fascinating to me that this the second part of the revolution, and the part that everyone was really excited about, which is the core of the revolution being workers self management, and that being the sort of great theoretical innovation of Algeria and socialism, that has just completely faded for memory. It's

just gone. And so today we're talking about that revolution. Unfortunately, one of the most detailed studies on this I'm gonna be citing from a lot is in Clegg's Worker Self Management and AIA. Now this is a good book. However, Comma Clegg is uh, he's he's a very specific kind of Crimogeny Marxist guy.

pointless and goes nowhere. So you know, but it is a very very detailed and very useful account of what actually happened after the First Revolution, like after the French are forced to Pulo out of Algeria, and what happens effectively is well, if we need to go back a little tiny bit, so there are you know, there is a a staggering slaughter of people who attempt to resist

French colonialism. Like a lot of the sort of techniques that are going to be used in Vietnam, they are going to be used all over the world, and kind of insurgencies are developed in Algeria in this period. I'm going to read a quote from Clagg about what they were doing the use of air power in napalm to

clear cover made movement inside the country almost impossible. The construction of mind and electrified barriers along the border with Tunisia and Morocco kept the better trained and armed elements of the army Deliberation Nationale from coming to support the gorillas and moving in supplies. One of the most successful moves encounter in gerrilla activity was the policy of regroupment,

initiated by General Chalet. This strategy, learned from their British and Malaysia, involved moving the rural population out of areas favorable to the gorillas and resettling them in camps under military guard, and estimated two million peasants were treated this way, creating vast social and economic problems for the future. So, like they put two million people in concentration camps.

the becomes the new template for like thees. Yeah, and it's because it works really well, and you know, like the key thing of MAOIs like well, I mean there's a couple of things obviously, but like one of the key elements of it is this is this line from Mao. Is it like the gorilla moves to the people like

a fish moves through the sea. Right, So it's about like it's about building social basis such that you know, gorillas can move in and out of communities and not get turned in and stuff and use them as terrain.

is a very important thing, and like it. Yeah, it does make Garrida war esier if you can rely on the population.

the world of completely unrelated ideologies all sort of picked this stuff up. And the British response to this is the British are fighting a communist insurgency in Malaysia and they're like, okay, we're gonna do conscer ration camps for our purposes. So obviously this is a you know, this is an unfathomable atrocity, but it has enormous effects even after the war ends, because suddenly, you know, okay, like

the war ends, the French are gone. But you know, two million people have been taken from their homes and locked in and locked in camps. And this has enormous you know, I mean, this is this is enormous economic effects. And the second thing that has really sort of stunning economic effects are the Sore. There's been a class of people in Algeria called the Colognes who are basically there

the colonists. They're not actually all French, a lot of them are from other European countries, but they come to be this sort of hardcore French ultranationalist, sort of fascist turbo racists. I guess they're they're they're not quite the Rhodesians, but they're they're only not quite the Rhodesians because they didn't stay to fight it out. And when when the French lose the war and when the French pull out, these people just flee, like all of them were talking,

hundreds of thousands of people just are gone. I'm going to read another quote from Cleig, because you know, if these people had merely left, I think a lot of what's going to happen in this revolution goes a lot better. But they didn't just leave. Quote in June, a policy of scorched earth was declared, inaugurating an orgy of destruction. With his dream crumbling, the colonist's response was to destroy this world, which I think is a really sort of elegant.

can find. They're burning their lighting on fire. And the other thing about Okay, so Auxuria is a colonial economy, right, and the structure of the colonial economy is such that you know, if you are a anyone who has any kind of technical or manager gerial experience are all colonists, right.

Everyone else in the country is either doing subsistence farming or has been fed as like these this sort of like seasonal workers or really really badly paid sort of contract workers on the on these sort of like cash crap agricultural farms, a lot of orange production and stuff like that. And so when the colonists flee the country, suddenly like the entire technical managerial class, everyone with technical experience, and also all of the bosses and the entire bourgeoisie

are just gone. And this takes everyone by surprise. The Ethelen had assumed the Ethlens the the kind of like umbrella organization that carried out the revolution. They it kind of falls apart very quickly because it's it's not really a coherent ideological group. It's just the sort of banner that everyone who was fighting kind of attaches themselves to.

can even sort of speak. But it so it means self management, and it basically it has this context of of sort of like workers democratic self management. Right, if you're if you're doing atostone, you're like the workers of a factory have taken the factory and not running it themselves. The most prominent example and at this point of self

management is Yugoslavia. Now this it's very the Uslavian version is very, very weird, but as a way basically to tell the Soviets to fuck off, Yugoslavia adopts a very different kind of model of socialism than everyone else's. So they're models based on the quote unquote the withering away of the state. So they're you know, you have basically these like reasonably democratic, like workers co ops that are the sort of that are sort of their productive basis

of society. And these these co ops sort of compete against each other on the market. But other hand, there is a like a very large level of workers control that's different from you know, like the US, which is just a pure dictatorship of your boss in the workplace, tells you what to do, and if you don't do what, you get fired. Yeah, And so Algeria that's there, has their own version of of self management. But unlike Algeria, which is sort of effectively imposed by the top down

from the Comnist party. In Algeria, what happens is you have this this enormous mass of workers who used to work on these plantations, used to work in factories. There's these huge colonial agricultural estates. And what happens is with with the entire ruling class gone. And when I say the entire ruling class, we're we're talking from all the way up from you know, the highest level government officials, through all all of your sort of capitalist bosses, right

down to sort of the middle management guys are gone. Yeah, all those people just have disappeared. So what happens is workers start taking over all of their all of their workplaces, and they start forming workers councils. Right now, this is this is driven largely by I mean, there's there's there's there's a few different drivers. There's we'll get to the ideological aspect. A lot of it is that these people have no money and no one else is going to

run it. So there the workers who have now sees all of this stuff are like, Okay, well we're gonna we're gonna get the money we need to survive by running by running all the stuff ourselves.

up all this land. And there's a bunch of really funny stories of these guys buying these estates and showing up and the Workers Committee just kicking them out. Yeah, yes, eternities,

this is extremely funny. Yeah, there's also issues. So part of what's going on is this is this is the sort of this is the permanent workers taking over the stuff with their people, right, and so a lot of times like they'll they'll kick out seasonal workers because yeah, so it's not it's not perfect, and there's a lot of issues with it, right because this is this is all being formed effectively, spontaneously about a bunch of extremely desperate people.

some cases. And also, like this is the point actually gets missed a lot in online discourse about the Spanish Civil War, perhaps because people don't know as much as they think they do that like there were anarchists in all kinds of roles, Like when people talk about their rooty column or whatever, like, there were absolutely anarchists, non com missioned officers from the military who they relied on

heavily for advice. And the same is true with the collectivized workplaces, right that there were anarchists in many roles, you know, in shop stewards and things like that. Obviously not in like the higher management roles. I think, yeah, doing that is kind of incompatible with anarchism, and obviously

what we're dealing here with is anarchosyndicalism. For the most part of the fire was more of a purest anarchist group, but there you had people who'd been working towards us for a long time, who have been planning for it, and who did have people with a variety of experiences in I think oversight might be a better word than the management preps or like sort of organization. But they

were very successful. But that didn't just happen overnight. It often gets presented as if it did, as if on the eighteenth of July these people were just sort of going to work and by the twentieth they were fully formed anarchists running their own workplaces. But that's absolutely not the case.

French's fault and and you know, but but any such cases. Yeah, but this seizure really takes everyone by surprise, because all of the sort of leaders of fl and all leaders of the various factions that assumed that either they were going to sort of do I don't know, there's a ideological conflict, but they they they always assume that they're going to do some kind of like giant state light industrialization project, right, whether it's a socialist one, whether it's

more Islamist one. And then suddenly they are they are now all you know, it's like, okay, well your economy is now on the Yugoslavian uh self management model because all of these workers have just seized all their workplaces. Now that there are there are a few organizations that

are are politically very supportive of this. The the UGTA, which is Algeria's big sort of trade union, are very politically socialist and they they are really the only people in this entire country who are who are an organized political body who actually want to see this thing work. And so they do a lot of work helping me, helping workers set up their their committees and spreading the revolution.

Their plan is to use this against any attempt to set up basically a dictatorship by uh, you know, it's okay, and this is where it gets sort of interesting because very explicitly they are trying to stave off sort of Soviet style socialisticatorship, right they are, And their plan is we're going to use We're going to use the workers councils as the as the basis of of an actual sort of workers democracy against again against the sort of

orthodox like Marcus Leninist stuff. And this is another thing that's going on too, is the army is a lot more orthodox Marxist Leninists than either the workers committees or the unions, and so a lot in a lot of parts of the countries in the West, the army just sort of rolls through, knocks off the workers committees and

seizes the land for itself. And that's a fiasco. But now now pretty very quickly Ben Bella, who emerges as as the sort of as the leader of Algeria after a set of political maneuvering that we're not going to get into here, is basically forced to and in nineteen sixty three set a bunch of decrees saying that yeah, these guys are people who run the economy, et cetera, et cetera, but there's there are I want to talk I want to actually get into something that is really

not talked about in ninety nine percent of the accounts of this stuff, which is how do these councils actually work? Because spoiler alert, this whole thing is going to fail and all these people are going to be crushed, And a lot of that has to do with how this thing's set up, which is very badly because it is a system designed by Marxists, and they're very sympathetic Marxist

to a broad extent. But unfortunately the way that these that this is set up is that, Okay, so there's an assembly, right, that's like all the workers in the firm are in this assembly. The assembly elects this worker's council, which has like ten people, and then that council elects the management committee, which is the people who actually do the management. So it has a president and there's also a director supposed to represent the interest of the state

or whatever. And the issue with this is that it's designed specifically to keep power out of the hands of workers directly, right that that giant assembly it can't actually make policy. The only thing they can do is approve plans or disapproved plans set down by the management committee.

leads into the bigger issue, which is state control. And this is this is where I think, really this is something that Clegg doesn't get into much because Clegg is a Marxist, but this is where the Marxism of it all really comes into play. But first, do you know who's not a Marxist?

say not Marxists. All right, we are back. So the biggest issue here, and this is something that was kind of true in both Algeria and in the others kind of big Marxist self management experiments in Chile, which is that these the self managing firms don't have control over a lot of the things that they need right, So in Algeria, when when when the state essentially tries to absorb all of this stuff, when it when it gets sort of legitimized under under these decrees U there are

a lot of issues. One is that these self managing organizations don't have control over their own money. So they're yeah, you're paid, You're getting paid by the state, right and you so you give the state your money and then they they pay you. And this becomes a real issue because the state goes, oh will the people in these self managing things are act like privileged workers, so they have permanent pay freezers. And also you can't reinvest your profits back into the firm, which is a real issue.

think like an archao syndiclysm is right there. And it allows for the like unions and syndicate which over overlook a whole industry to coordinate between work it's committees and ensure that you know, things get done and people get treated with dignity, and and they also make enough money or have access to the resources that they need to survive.

And when we try and like cut the corners off this or kind of make a little college between this and and barkist Leninism or state socialism, like neither thing works and we just end up with this kind of terrible hodge podge in which it doesn't it doesn't function, right, But that that doesn't necessarily mean that work is self management itself is invalid as a concept.

Cleig calls it marketing is controlled by the state. But that's not quite what's going on. The other thing that's controlled by the state is the state isn't has the responsibility or and is the people who are in charge of selling the products. And they just fucked this up completely. They can't they can't figure out how to get like the fruit that's being produced sold, right. The problem here

isn't is an output. Is that the the state is doing things like I mean sometimes sometimes they they'll have all these oranges. So a lot of the the Algeria and agricultural economy is set up as a cash crop economy and you're supposed to fight you so okay, and it's it's never really worked very well. But the Algerian state just completely shits the bed. And there's I mean, this is like i mean, we're talking like tons of fruit is just sitting there rotting a lot of the time.

What they do is they just dump in onto the French market and for like basically zero cost and so and you know, and so you get these things, and you look at the sort of profit lost thing, and you know, the sort of like right wing parts of the state and this, Oh, I guess you like, I guess they are right one. But the the sort of anti self manager parts of theysteria going oh, well, look

at these these firms. They're hemorrhaging all this money. It's like, well, yeah, they're hemorrhaging money because instead of actually selling the goods, you guys are throwing all of their goods into a dumpster. Like yeah, of course it's not working, right, Yeah.

by the state. And so you know, there's an quote Clay again, as the president of a self managed farm said to me in nineteen sixty five, in this situation, how can we persuade the worker that he is no longer working for a capitalistic exploiter and like, well, yeah, he objectively is right, he is, like the state is stealing all of his money and then doing some stupid bullshit with it.

to you about. This was that if you look at the way that the that the Spanish system is set up, right, It's it's built off of coordination, like basically like sectoral coordination between everyone who's doing a thing. Right, It's built on resource sharing. If I'm remembering my stuff, I mean they have basically they have a banking union, and people put their profits into the into the banking union, and then people can get money from the banking union to reinvest in other places.

going to do things. But then if you look at the Algerian system, because it's because it's set up by Marxists, it's specifly designed such that basically like you're you're, you're instead of you actually managing yourself, you're you're just electing your boss and then your boss manages, right, Yeah, and

that's not actually good. This is and it's weird because looking at this, right, this is actually a worst system in terms of self management, I think in a lot of senses than the Chinese one, because the Chinese system is not designed for self management. But you can't fire people. So because because you can't fire people, you have to listen to what people think and what people sort of do.

Is this system, I don't know. It pisces me off because this is a revolution that very very easily could have worked, but it was you know, there's there's intentional sabotage by the state because most of the sectors of the state don't want this to work.

entire thing. And it, I don't know, it makes me really angry because the the the like the actual Algerian ruling class had the right idea and then they just got completely fucked by everyone who was supposed to be leading them or you know, the people who were supposed to be selling the stuff that they made, people who are supposed to be reinvesting, all the people who ended up with the financial control just completely screwed them. And yeah, I don't know, it's it's it's really it's it's it's

really depressing in a lot of ways. But on the other hand, right, like it does, it doesn't. It doesn't have to go like this, Right, you don't have to hand control of your workplace over to some fucking guy in the Department of Agricultural Waste Management or whatever so he can use your origines for fertilizer. Like you can simply not do this.

And then you have this sort of source of labor which is not inherently tied to the land in that like you know, when when there was a need, like for instance, I'm writing a book right now and then writing about the Druti column, and like they would because they had less rifles than they had fighters, they would rotate their fighters off the front line during the harvest time and have people help with the harvest, and then

they didn't like need those people the rest of the year. Right, So they were able to incorporate like temporary surgeries in labor without it being like destructive to their model, because it was the idea was like a collective community as opposed to a collective as opposed to like just the workplace being this island of a pseudo collectivization, like like

you're saying in Algeria. Also, shout out to the Iron column who I've been writing about recently, who solved their supply side issues by leaving the front line and raiding the cops because they didn't have enough guns either, so they simply took them from the cops. Yeah. Incredibly based, Yeah, very big.

each other. And those are, like you're those are your two models of socialism, and those both suck and both are set up to fail from the beginning because they're not actually you know, you're you're, you're, you're, you're not actually doing the thing, You're not actually having the entire the entire class as a class, you know, abolishing itself and then also managing managing production in such a way that people are cooperating to produce what people need instead

of everyone fighting over like either well, instead of either the state setting a steel quota and having that be the entire goal of the economy, or like seventeen co ops and the like both producing all producing the exact same kind of coffee. Try to figure out who can produce it more cheaply.