Algeria at Independence: Crisis and Conflict

As the French government and the nationalist leaders of the FLN were negotiating Algeria’s independence at Evian in the spring of 1962, an exodus was beginning. Thousands of colons of French and other European origins—many of whose families had been in Algeria for generations—were leaving the country. Even though the accords guaranteed the status and property of these settlers, most preferred to depart for France as the colonial order was overturned. A trickle of tens of thousands became a flood as independence was established. In all some nine hundred thousand settlers—almost the entire colon population—fled the country, leaving a devastating hole in the Algerian economy (Ruedy 2005, 185; Stora 2001, 124). As settlers left they scrambled to sell their assets, often to Algerian speculators at rock-bottom prices. Elsewhere properties were left in the care of Algerian managers or closed “temporarily.” In many cases properties were simply abandoned. Ultimately one million hectares of land and seven hundred industrial enterprises were deserted (Lazreg 1976, 49).

Since the colonial economy had privileged the pied-noir population, their exodus presented the nascent Algerian state with an enormous problem. Not only did the colons’ departure deprive the country of the vast majority of its managerial class, it was accompanied by the mass flight of capital, which—coming at the end of almost eight years of war—had a severe impact on the economy.¹⁰² In addition, as the war reached its denouement, settlers and especially those grouped in the terrorist Organisation Armée Secrète smashed much of the country’s social capital, destroying government buildings, factories, hospitals, and other infrastructure. After the stampede for France, not more than thirty thousand colons remained (Ruedy 2005, 185–186).

The destruction inflicted on the country’s infrastructure was matched by the destitution of its population. Apart from the dead, numbering at least in the hundreds of thousands, more than two million Algerians were released from “imitation concentration camps” where villagers had been interned as part of the French regroupement policy (Amin 1970, 127). Several hundred thousand refugees began to return from Tunisia and Morocco; in total, three million rural Algerians had been displaced during the war (Ruedy 2005, 190). Finally the various “clans” of the heterogeneous FLN were engaged in a fratricidal battle as the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), based outside the country, raced to Algiers to defeat its opponents in the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA) and their guerrilla fighters of the interior. This conflict was an expression of long-standing strategic and ideological differences within the FLN (Stora 2001, 180–185).

It is worth considering the structure of Algerian society at the moment of independence, since the experience of 132 years of French colonial rule had substantially altered indigenous social formations.¹⁰³ In rural areas, expropriation by colonists led to the pauperization of the Algerian peasantry, which was forced from the most fertile lands. Peasants were compelled to choose among struggling to continue their previous way of life, selling their labor to the French landowners, or migrating to the cities, including Paris (Bourdieu 1961, 134–192). The vast majority of peasants remained on what land they could, but significant numbers opted for the latter options.

The colonial economy has frequently been characterized as a “dual economy,” with a “modern” technical European sector set alongside a “traditional” Algerian economy. While this formulation is unhelpful in some respects, there was certainly a duality in the case of agriculture, where large colonial estates were worked by an Algerian rural working class that, by independence, numbered 130,000 permanent and 450,000 seasonal agricultural workers. As rural–urban migration and urban populations increased dramatically during the war, there developed a small urban working class in colon factories and other enterprises. However, this class remained small—about 110,000 workers, owing largely to the character of the economy.

Oriented toward the colonial métropole, the colonial economy was geared to the export of primary products and used as a dumping ground for consumer products manufactured in France. Thus Algeria had a small manufacturing sector and negligible large-scale industry. The Algerian working class based in France, composed of four hundred thousand émigrés, was of lesser significance than a native, two million–strong urban “sub-proletariat,” a result of the expropriation of the peasantry and the high rate of rural population growth (Bennoune 1988).

While colonialism had assisted in the creation of these classes, it had hindered the development of other social strata. Since Algerians were systematically excluded from political and economic power and the economy’s structure hindered the development of a native industrial sector, an indigenous bourgeoisie did not properly develop. There existed the remnants of a large landowning class in the countryside and the embryo of an entrepreneurial bourgeois class in the cities, but both were stifled by colonialism. However, there was a limited degree of social mobility for Algerians, and a petit bourgeois class had emerged. Often French-educated, francophone, and occupying positions in the liberal professions, this class took advantage at various points of the small concessions offered by the French for Algerian political representation. It had benefited from French reforms that brought more Algerians into low-level positions in the colonial administration but at the same time provided the cadres for the early nationalist movement, which demanded assimilation with France (Bennoune 1988, 93–94).¹⁰⁴

It was the rural working class that, in the chaos before and immediately after Algeria’s formal independence on July 5, 1962, seized control of many colonial estates. Upon the farms that were taken over, workers established management committees to continue production. There are numerous cases of such takeovers, although—owing to the situation at the time—the documentary accounts are not substantial. One example cited by Blair comes from a large agricultural estate composed of vineyards and wheat fields on the Atlas Plateau near Médéa. When the French patron and his family went “on vacation” in June 1962 and did not return for the wine harvest, “[t]he Algerian foreman and 150 workers continued to operate the farm as they had in the past.” After a provisional government decree in August, “the farm was declared vacant and taken over by an elected committee. On the door of the mansion next to the inscription ‘Domaine Malevalle 1914,’ there appeared another one scrawled in black crayon, ‘Ferme Collective Malevalle Bien Vacant 1962’” (1970, 47).

A similar phenomenon took place in urban areas, where factories and small businesses were commandeered. The Union Générale du Travailleurs Algérien (UGTA), established in 1956 and autonomous of the FLN, played a role in these occupations, especially in Grand Alger and Oran, where its leadership “had decided on the forced occupation of factories and commercial enterprises.” The union had called as early as February 1962 for socialization rather than just nationalization of property, stating: “Independence is inseparable from the Revolution, but the Revolution is more important than independence” (Clegg 1971, 49). Once colons started leaving the country, the union appealed for workers to restart production, demanding they “direct and control the economy of our country.” UGTA militants also attempted to spread autogestion by setting up workers’ committees in the larger towns and on farms in the Mitidja and Cheliff valleys (Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 50–53). The autogestion movement was strongest in the rich coastal belts where agriculture was organized in large estates with concentrated, proletarianized workforces (Ruedy 2005, 198–199). Around 1.2 million hectares of land and one thousand industrial and commercial enterprises were seized by workers and placed under self-management in the summer of 1962 (Tlemcani 1986, 97).

The extent to which these “spontaneous” takeovers represented the expression of the workers’ “class consciousness” is a question that has been extensively debated in studies of the period (Clegg 1971, 48–56; Lazreg 1976, 89). Without entering the debate here, it may be useful to recognize that material interests played a part in their actions, but that the formation of workers’ councils—a recurrent revolutionary form—overturned the preexisting relations of production and posed fundamental questions over the wider organization of society.

An important consideration is that workers were not the only ones to stake a claim to the former colonial economy. Individual Algerian speculators, guerrilla fighters, army officers, and bureaucrats all enriched themselves by acquiring colons’ interests, sometimes expelling “illegal workers’ councils” (Tlemcani 1986, 97). The colons’ departure “paved the way for the quick enrichment as well as for the upward social mobility of the privileged social strata” (Bennoune 1988, 96). Furthermore, it was conceivable that the colons would return; many had left claiming they were merely taking a “vacation.” There was nothing in the Evian Accord to suggest colons’ property would be forcibly expropriated and, in fact, the provisional executive reassured settlers that their property would be guaranteed in an independent Algeria. In the August decree the executive demanded that departmental prefects protect abandoned properties, known as biens-vacants. There was no threat of nationalization, but if French owners did not return within thirty days the prefects were empowered to appoint managers. This set off a “wild stampede” by property-owning classes to register and claim biens-vacants (Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 51 ; Clegg 1971, 47; Blair 1970, 46).

Even once autogestion was legalized by Ben Bella’s government in the fall, it was explicitly stated that the colons’ rights would be respected and settlers could return and be integrated into the new management structures. Yet the pace of workers’ occupations accelerated after both the August government decree and Ben Bella’s endorsement. Amid the rush to claim deserted properties and set against the legal context, the working class’s seizure of the means of production can been interpreted as an attempt to guard against either the expropriation by the Algerian propertied classes or the establishment of neocolonialism. Indeed, there were many instances of confrontation between workers and prefects or Algerian bourgeois over abandoned property. Clegg provides two examples: in Céligny, crops and buildings bought by Algerians were burned by “irate peasants who felt they had not benefited from this transaction,” while at Meloug the sub-prefect supported by local army units had put a private Algerian owner in charge of the estate, but he was driven off by agricultural workers who had already occupied it (1971, 48). Whereas the nationalist movement had attained political independence by overturning the colonial order, Algeria’s working class demonstrated the effects in the economic arena. The nascent conflicts over self-management at this stage foreshadowed a coming battle over the country’s economic future.

Formalizing and Neutralizing Workers’ Control

As mentioned, none within the FLN’s senior ranks had envisaged workers’ self-management as an appropriate model by which to structure the economy of an independent Algeria; in fact, the nationalist movement had been unable to outline a coherent vision of its plans for the country. The closest it came was with the Tripoli Program, written in May 1962 for the party’s congress in the Libyan capital. The document—reflecting the political fault lines within the movement—denounced the FLN leaders’ “petit bourgeois” and “paternalistic” instincts and called for a popular democratic revolution led by the rural masses. Its prescriptions revolved around three main areas: agrarian reform with land redistribution and the formation of state farms, state planning with workers’ participation, and nationalization and stateled industrialization. Despite its analysis of Algerian society, the Tripoli Program did not “transcend the various statements made by the FLN throughout the war,” and clearly favored étatism over workers’ control (Lazreg 1976, 125).

By September 1962 Ben Bella was in power, supported by the army, and he faced a very different political landscape from that outlined in the Tripoli Program. Economic activity had plummeted, the government hemorrhaged tax revenues, its deficit swelled, and it faced the burden of stabilizing both the economy and a society in turmoil due to the effects of war and manifold socioeconomic crises. To make matters worse, the administration itself was in shambles. The bulk of the state’s employees had departed—including three hundred thousand workers responsible for the administrative and economic management of the country—meaning the government was rendered unable even to achieve many of its basic functions (Stora 2001, 124).

In this context, the government had little choice but to endorse auto-gestion, especially since self-management was keeping in motion vital sectors of the economy. Self-management also fit with the populist rhetoric of the FLN in which all factions talked of building an “Algerian socialism.” Moreover, autogestion was the most popular grassroots movement in the country and had “captivated the national imagination”; thus Ben Bella unhesitatingly put himself at its head (Ruedy 2005, 199). Within a month of taking power, he had set up the Bureau National Pour la Protection et Gestion des Biens-Vacants (BNBV ) to oversee the running of abandoned properties and to examine ways of regularizing autogestion. In a series of decrees issued in fall 1962, Ben Bella provided for the creation of management committees on vacant agricultural estates, industrial enterprises, mines, and artisans shops. Decrees also forbade transactions in abandoned French property and established a national marketing and trade agency for self-managed agriculture (Blair 1970, 49–50).

This official endorsement of autogestion had an immediate effect upon rural workers, who wasted no time in installing self-management on thousands more estates. For example, workers on the Bluchette domaine in Saïda, near Oran, met at their 690,000-hectare estate’s headquarters and elected a management committee: “In the next week, twenty thousand people went to work.” Local FLN militants also played a substantial role in establishing workers’ control on abandoned farms, for example in Saint Eugène, where seventy-four farms were reactivated with each enterprise managed by a committee of nine members, including five workers’ delegates. Blair quotes a local FLN member explaining the party’s role: “For three months we were in charge of everything; we went out and mobilized the people and explained our tasks to them and helped them start comités de gestion” (Blair 1970, 50). It should be stressed that far from representing an innovation based on Ben Bella’s government’s legislation, these takeovers were an amplification of an ad hoc process that had been under way since independence.

In the fluid political situation that emerged around the time of Ben Bella’s endorsement of autogestion, there materialized some remarkable examples of ingenuity that hinted at the possibilities of the creative forces that could be mobilized through workers’ control. An outstanding case comes from estates around the town of Cherchell, a coastal town west of Algiers. There, before the fall, some 2,400 workers assisted in reactivating 90 farms and vineyards and set up committees for maintaining agricultural machinery, as well as for health and social welfare. Most interestingly, from an economic point of view, the workers stressed the interdependence of industry and agriculture and reopened a local olive oil factory that had been abandoned during the war:

A hundred factory workers organized a committee, cleaned up the débris, repaired the machines, and began production with tons of raw materials diverted from settler companies. At one all-night meeting they decided that the first annual profits would be shared equally for four purposes: taxes, repairs and purchase of machinery, loans to local agricultural comités de gestion, and the remainder as bonuses for themselves. They declared their solidarity with their “brother workers on the farms” and planned to provide new jobs for seasonally unemployed farm workers by processing other crops during the off-season (Blair 1970, 51–52).

Such independent initiatives, which had sustained the autogestion movement from its inception, were gradually to be stifled by government moves, beginning with the takeover of the UGTA at its January 1963 congress. The leadership of the three hundred thousand–member union had expressed its wish to remain autonomous and had signed an agreement to this effect with the government in December. However, it was already apparent that Ben Bella was unwilling to tolerate the existence of rival centers of political power within a system over which he had gained a precarious ascendancy. Furthermore, the union had significant ideological differences with the government. At its congress the UGTA’s demands for autonomy and the right to strike were criticized by FLN leaders, and the UGTA was brought under government control (Clegg 1971, 117–118).

That the suppression of the UGTA was followed by the promulgation in March of decrees formalizing the structure and organization of the self-managed sector demonstrated no contradiction on the part of the government. Rather, it showed the Ben Bella regime’s desire to delimit any alternative form of power. The March decrees were drawn up by a small coterie of advisers to Ben Bella within the BNBV and set out the basic structure and functions of the whole self-managed sector, attempting to formalize and regularize the ad hoc and heterogeneous creations of workers. The group that drew up the decrees included the former leader of the Fourth International, Michalis Raptis (aka Michel Pablo), who had assisted the FLN during the war, Mohamed Harbi, and other Trotskyists. The decrees also brought into existence a number of national agencies including the Office National de la Réforme Agraire (ONRA), which was given responsibility for supervising the self-managed sector. In all about 22,000 colonial farms covering 1 million hectares of Algeria’s finest agricultural land, 450 factories, and thousands of shops and artisanal enterprises were put under autogestion. The decrees did not extend to the whole economy, only to the biens-vacants and properties of “national importance.” Especially for the industrial sector, the retention of a mixed economy and competition from private firms would assist in the gradual degradation of the sector (Clegg 1971, 59; Ottaway and Ottaway, 39).

It is worth taking a moment to outline the structure of self-management set out in the March decrees, although in reality the sector rarely functioned along these lines. In theory, the sovereign entity of self-management was an assembly composed entirely of full-time workers, and was supposed to meet at least once every three months. The assembly elected a workers’ council from among its membership, with a minimum of ten members plus one for every fifteen workers above a basic level of thirty, up to a maximum of one hundred. The council members were elected for terms of one to three years, and were supposed to meet at least once a month. At the next level, the council or in its absence the assembly elected a management committee of between three and eleven people, which met at least once a month and elected a president from among its ranks. Both the council and the committee were supposed to be composed of at least two-thirds production workers. The committee members were elected for three years while the president’s term was one year. At the apex of this pyramidal structure was a director who represented the interests of the state. According to the decrees, the council was to make long-term decisions over the purchase of machinery, the procurement of loans, and the like. The committee was to be the body, that is, much more active in day-to-day management, including drawing up development plans, organizing short-term loans, buying raw materials and plants, and keeping accounts. The president was charged with watching over all the organs of self-management, signing all financial documents, and representing the enterprise in law. The powers of the director were more extensive. He was responsible for checking the legality of all the enterprise’s transactions, holding its accounts, signing all documents, and maintaining minutes for all the management bodies. The final of four decrees promulgated in March allowed for profit-sharing among workers, the enterprise, and the state, each of which was due to receive a one-third share (Ministry of Information 1963, 54–66).

We can see a number of contradictions built into the structure of autogestion. For one, the decrees established a divide between full-time and seasonal workers by preventing the latter from participating in self-management based on their “lack of long-term interest,” thus de facto excluding this larger set of workers—some 450,000 as compared to 130,000 full-time rural workers—from having any stake in autogestion. Furthermore, the structure lent itself to the creation of a duality of personnel within individual enterprises (Bennoune 1976, 94; Hermassi 1972, 198). The roles of the council, which was intended as an intermediary between the workers’ assembly and the committee, were not clearly demarcated from those of the committee, while the functions of the assembly itself—theoretically the sovereign body—amounted merely to that of a rubber stamp. Then there was the director, whose responsibilities overlapped greatly with those of the president, thus containing “the seeds of an almost inevitable jurisdictional conflict” (Clegg 1971, 65). The state-appointed director, with his considerable responsibilities, was frequently the only literate member of an agricultural enterprise, allowing plentiful opportunity for abuse of the role. The decrees failed to spell out the relationship between the enterprises and ONRA and, furthermore, no allowance was made for workers’ representation either within this agency or at the national level. Ruedy describes the decrees as “a compromise package of overlapping jurisdictions and confusing institutional directions,” which were almost incapable of being implemented “by the largely illiterate rural workers” (2005, 199).

All these structural deficiencies would eventually find their expression in various ways as the potential of autogestion was strangled almost at birth. The inbuilt weaknesses in this bureaucratic apparatus would be a source of dysfunction and a means for the administration and its agencies to smother the self-managed sector. They not only hindered its efficiency at an economic level, but stifled the democratic and participatory promise of auto-gestion as it had emerged in practice.

Yet autogestion retained a central place in the official ideology of Ben Bella’s government and it had significantly increased his popularity. The question of Ben Bella’s own orientation toward self-management is a difficult one and riddled with contradictions. So in a speech announcing the March decrees he could produce a statement such as “The abandoned property will from today be administered by the State” while also maintaining its opposite, pronouncing, “Algeria belongs to you and it is for you alone to prove to the world that the Algerian revolution can and will be at the vanguard of Socialist experiences in this generation” (Hollingworth 1963). Similarly, in terms of his allies, he was able to embrace the Trotskyists Pablo and Harbi alongside those such as minister of agriculture Ali Mahsas and finance minister Bachir Boumaza, who were unequivocally opposed to the autonomy of the autogestion sector. Such inconsistency reflects not only the unstable political equilibrium of post-independence Algeria, but also the contradictions of the nationalist movement: anticolonialist and regarding itself as revolutionary, reifying the imagined role of the peasant masses in the independence struggle, while simultaneously prioritizing national development over radical social change. These contradictions would eventually work themselves out in the straightforward state capitalism of the Boumedienne years, with the notion of workers’ control definitively shelved. In the meantime, however, Ben Bella was to extend autogestion to wider sections of the economy while workers voiced complaints about growing bureaucratization, state control, and the removal of vital managerial responsibilities from workers’ control.

The Neutralization of Self-Management

Once the March decrees were passed it became apparent that self-management was not operating in accordance with the government’s prescriptions. In many cases elections for councils and committees were not taking place or directors and presidents were behaving akin to new owners. Elsewhere former guerrilla fighters were running farms as personal fiefs, and within the autogestion sector there was a chronic shortage of qualified technicians and accountants, which led in 1963 to farms being consolidated into larger units, mainly for the purpose of sharing qualified staff. There was also the problem of growing bureaucratization by ONRA, the agency of the agriculture ministry set up to supervise the self-management sector, which assumed increasing responsibility for farm-level management functions. Within a month of the March decrees it had taken control of both farms’ credit and marketing, thus controlling enterprises’ most crucial inputs and outputs; in effect the self-managed estates became “state farms in all but name” (Ruedy 2005, 200).

Just two months after issuing the decrees, on May 15, Ben Bella launched a nationwide “democratic reorganization” to secure their proper implementation, although its results were not impressive.¹⁰⁵ Rather than tackling the formalized structure’s obvious deficiencies, Ben Bella pressed ahead with extending self-management throughout 1963. The first major nationalizations of European property took place around this time, totalling around six hundred thousand hectares and including the estates of the wealthiest and most prominent settlers, seizures that were extremely popular among Algerians (Griffin 1973, 398; Coryell 1964, 7–8; Joesten 1964). In July the national assembly passed a law nationalizing illegally acquired property, and a month later approved a new constitution that “proclaimed autogestion as a major arm of the fight against poverty and economic dependency” (Ruedy 2005, 200). There was a further expansion of autogestion in October when Ben Bella dramatically announced the nationalization of all remaining settler land, meaning self-management now covered 2.3 million hectares—or onequarter of the country’s farmland—and, by late 1964, was organized in 2,284 units employing 200,000 workers.

Ben Bella’s decision to nationalize all French-owned land was certainly politically expedient: while dominating the power structure as head of state, head of government, and secretary-general of the FLN, and with the backing of the army, he was increasingly isolated in terms of any popular base. Thus he relied more heavily on the “politics of gestures” to garner support from the beneficiaries of his policies (Ruedy 2005, 199–202). Nevertheless, the nationalizations were certainly popular: some two hundred thousand Algerians gath-ered in the capital to hear the announcement, which was “decisive and wildly applauded” by banner-carrying crowds that welcomed what seemed to be the fulfillment of the promise of decolonization (Blair 1970, 65).

To tackle his political problems and to deflect anger from the malfunctioning self-managed sector, Ben Bella called two congresses of workers within autogestion; the first, for agricultural workers, was in October 1963 and the second, for the industrial sector, was held in March the following year. These congresses proved that the autogestion sector was deeply dysfunctional ; workers gave voice to all the complaints that had emerged since the decrees of the previous March. Moreover, although the congresses succeeded to some extent in bolstering support for the regime and Ben Bella hailed their example of “real democracy,” the agreed-to resolutions were tightly controlled by his government, demonstrating once again the regime’s reluctance to allow genuine democratic participation by workers (Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 106–115).

The 2,500 delegates at the farm workers’ congress laid out a long list of grievances over the operations of the sector, including insufficient funds to run farms, bottlenecks in the state marketing agencies, a lack of farm machinery, and a shortage of trained personnel. They also complained that the March decrees were still not being implemented correctly, saying ONRA did not respect the autonomy of farms under autogestion, but equally did not provide technical assistance. In numerous instances, power had concentrated in the hands of a few members of the management committee and on “many farms the president or the director took over the vacant house and with it the way of life of the French colon.” Workers also complained about problems of embezzlement, corruption, and salary payment, which was overseen by ONRA and frequently delayed for months. The conference agreed on resolutions that proposed remedies to some of the workers’ complaints, such as creating marketing cooperatives for farms, establishing a state-run bank for the agricultural self-management sector, and distributing farm profits to workers, as promised in the March decrees. Drafted by FLN-controlled commissions and approved by conference delegates, the proposals were applied only haphazardly. Some minor demands, such as wage increases, were implemented but profits were never distributed, and, while a marketing cooperative was set up, it was controlled by ONRA. The state bank wasn’t operative until mid-1967 (Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 65–66, 109–110).

The industrial workers’ congress again saw the government under fire for its handling of the self-managed sector. The appointment of qualified technicians was also a problem in this sector; by the end of 1963 only 25 directors had been appointed in 450 firms. These firms were further hindered because the administration did not favor self-managed enterprises in awarding contracts and often did not pay its bills on time. The government also, incredibly, held these enterprises liable for taxes and debts incurred by their former French owners, shackling them from the start. Besides these problems, the self-managed industrial enterprises were forced to turn to private banks for funding because of difficulty in obtaining loans from the government and its central bank. It is worth remembering that autogestion was situated within a mixed economy and faced competition from a private sector that outnumbered it fivefold; this competition was heaviest for industrial enterprises, since autogestion was even less extensive in that area. Once again, the impact of resolutions agreed to at the congress was slight and their implementation was uneven (Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 64–66, 110–114).

Despite these problems self-management continued to be emphasized by Ben Bella and his government. According to the Algiers Charter, adopted in April 1964 at the first FLN congress since independence, auto-gestion was identified as the route to socioeconomic development and socialism ; it was declared that self-management would gradually be extended to the entire economy and local government institutions. In the meantime it was to be enhanced through agrarian reform and the establishment of cooperatives in the private farm sector, along with nationalization and central economic planning (Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 119–122). The FLN was portrayed in the charter as an avant-garde revolutionary party that expressed the will of the masses and could temper the threat from a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie.” Yet this presentation was wholly inaccurate, as Ruedy notes: “by 1964, the FLN had itself become a major vehicle of upward mobility for Algerians anxious to improve their material and community standing” (Ruedy 2005, 205).

If self-management was crippled during the Ben Bella era, it was finally killed off after his regime’s overthrow in June 1965. Shortly before the coup d’état led by Ben Bella’s former ally Houari Boumedienne, the head of the military, a change in the regime’s direction had seemed possible. This was especially the case because the leadership of the state-controlled UGTA was being challenged by an emergent layer of militants. There had been a wave of strikes after the takeover of the union in January 1963 and throughout 1964, many of which were directly political: workers were either challenging the false promise of the autogestion sector or attempting to compel the government to nationalize private firms by forcing French owners to abandon their enterprises. These strikes demonstrated that despite the growing bureaucratization of self-management, UGTA members were still engaged in a battle over the direction of the economy and were still enthusiastic about the idea of autogestion. The UGTA’s weekly periodical, Revolution et Travail, replicated the demands of a half dozen striking unions in June 1964 by calling for “the institution of worker control over the management of enterprises in the private sector by the application of laws conforming to our [socialist] option.” An earlier, ten-day strike at the French oil company Compagnie Générale de Geophysique had ended in an agreement to share its management with workers (Braestrup 1964). Yet despite the vocal support for the extension and reinforcement of self-management—a cause with which Ben Bella closely identified himself—there was scarcely any protest when he was overthrown, so poorly mobilized behind him was any popular constituency.

Boumedienne aimed to take the country in a completely different direction : he was surrounded by a layer of technocrats who had been increasingly alarmed at Ben Bella’s embrace of self-management. Although he utilized the populist rhetoric of autogestion, Boumedienne subjected the sector to an economistic logic by arguing that individual enterprises must be profitable, and most were not (Singh 1966, 455). He also held workers responsible for the failings in their firms, as opposed to the bureaucrats who wielded the most power over them. In any case, the new regime quickly set about a wave of denationalizations, dismantling self-managed enterprises in the retail and tourism sectors. Boumedienne’s larger economic policy consisted of the formation of national corporations to take control of strategic sectors of the economy. His advisers viewed the establishment of heavy “industrializing” industries and the nationalization of foreign firms as the basis for development and economic independence. However, the autogestion model was essentially abandoned in the expanding “socialist sector,” and “consultation” with workers was the new paradigm within the ever-increasing number of sociétés nationales, which had a management body appointed directly by a government ministry.¹⁰⁶ When ONRA was abolished by Boumedienne in 1967, control of self-managed farms was merely transferred to the agriculture ministry, further centralizing control of the sector.

Boumedienne’s takeover brought to an end the stalled three-year experiment in autogestion, but his leadership constituted as much continuity as change. The direction he set for Algeria’s future—toward an increasingly consolidated state capitalism, bureaucratic control, and the logic of profit within the self-managed sector; away from the notion of workers’ control as a model to be extended throughout the economy—was already being charted during Ben Bella’s administration (Helie 1973, 473). Both leaders utilized the language of populism and the national myth of autogestion to their benefit even as the sector itself was critically weakened.

Thus far we have observed some of the structural and operational problems of self-management and examined briefly some of their immediate causes. To gain a deeper understanding of the reasons for the failure of workers’ self-management in the Algerian context, we must proceed to an analysis of the more fundamental dynamics at play during this period and how they impacted the development of autogestion.

Self-Management and Class Struggle

While the issue of “class consciousness” was earlier set aside, one has to consider the attitudes and level of political education among the working class and how these affected the role it played in defending autogestion. In a 1960 study, Bourdieu found that a large number of workers appeared to lack what he termed “trade union consciousness,” favoring individual solutions to achieving higher wage levels (Clegg 1971, 106). Furthermore, in many instances old workplace hierarchies were maintained after independence: autogestion merely represented a change of personnel from patron to director (Lazreg 1976, 94). Those who devised the structure of autogestion viewed profit-sharing as a crucial mechanism that would permit workers to view enterprises as their own—although, of course, ownership remained with the state. While it is doubtful such a system would have achieved its objectives, it was never put into practice; profits were never shared with workers.

Political organization among the working class was also minimal at the time autogestion was established. The UGTA possessed only a small membership among rural laborers—the majority of workers—and the union was neutralized early in 1963. Although Ben Bella’s government frequently called on the union to mobilize workers behind autogestion, it was of course unable to play this role. Furthermore, the FLN never fulfilled any kind of organizational role among the Algerian masses; despite debates in 1962 over whether it should be structured along the lines of a mass party or should play a more “avant-garde” role, it had essentially been hollowed out during the war for independence due to France’s effective counterinsurgency effort and the shift of the struggle’s center of gravity to the “exterior”—away from the rank and file of the FLN inside Algeria and toward the political leadership and the upper echelons of the ALN, based in neighboring Tunisia and Morocco. Once Ben Bella’s hastily created political bureau had seized control of the party in the summer of 1962, it was merely filled with his acolytes.

Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting that even without such political organization, Algerian workers had, in the summer of 1962, created almost spontaneously a new form of economic organization that succeeded in keeping the economy going. The autogestion movement was ad hoc and its structures variable: sometimes enterprises were managed by an elected workers’ council, at other times they were run along hierarchical lines similar to those pertaining under the colonial system. In adopting autogestion as a core part of its official ideology, Ben Bella’s government gave encouragement to this movement, and the March decrees replicated schematically many facets of the workers’ own democratic inventions while also incorporating aspects of Yugoslav self-management. Yet inherent weaknesses were built into this system that permitted its bureaucratization. The decrees created the cleft by which autogestion could be broken apart; the social forces at play provided the leverage.

What were these social forces? One can analyze the battle over self-management as a struggle between competing classes in the new Algerian state that began in the summer of 1962 and persisted as a partially disguised ideological battle. It is clear that there were divisions within the FLN over how the organization of the economy should proceed, with some favoring a statist approach to development while others were more committed to a semblance of workers’ control. Even in the latter case, however, what predominated was a pedagogical approach, with workers not trusted to take their own initiative without the assistance of an “avant-garde” (Bennoune 1988, 104; Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 68; Singh 1966, 449; Hermassi 1972, 198–199).

It is crucial to note that even after the extension of self-management through nationalization, the sector still formed a minority of the Algerian economy and existed alongside private as well as wholly state-operated sectors. In addition, the state inherited and then reactivated the capitalistic legal system of the French colonial state; even the regressive labor code was maintained. Thus self-management existed in an economic, legalistic, and political environment that was profoundly hostile. Throughout the experience of autogestion, workers raised concerns about the rise of a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” operating through ONRA, its local directors, and the Ministry of Agriculture. Such concerns, as we have noted, were also expressed in the Tripoli Program and the FLN’s Algiers Charter. They were borne out in the actions of the postindependence administration, which was responsible for overseeing the self-management sector and enacting the legislation that was supposed to consolidate and extend it (Helie 1973, 468; Tlemcani 1986, 88, 90–91).¹⁰⁷

The greater part of this administration consisted of Algerians of petit bourgeois origins who had occupied lower-level positions in the colonial bureaucracy (Stora 2001, 129). There was a startling degree of mobility for such administrators, who swiftly filled the vacuum at the top of the hierarchy, as former guerrillas and political appointees began to take up the lower-level positions. There were also many thousands of French administrative assistants who played a guiding role in the new state bureaucracy. This administration grew in size enormously after independence (Ottaway and Ottaway 1970, 83–84; Tlemcani 1986, 91). Therefore, it should come as little surprise that the growing bureaucracy did not implement autogestion with enthusiasm and in many instances scuppered self-management; drawn from the same class as those individual speculators attempting to buy and seize colon land, most were intractably opposed to the extension of workers’ control.

Some have explained the struggle for power in the new Algeria in terms of ideology, personal power, and competing “clans” (Quandt 1969; Zartman 1975; Entelis 1986). Yet while these notions all inform our understanding of the context, the dynamics of the struggle over autogestion are best illuminated through an account of class conflict. It is crucial to note that the nationalist movement was engaged not in a social revolution but a war of independence in which class distinctions were elided for the sake of the national struggle. As noted by Bourdieu during the independence struggle: “While the conflicts between classes are not consciously felt or explicitly expressed, and while they remain hidden or attenuated because the general feeling of the dominated society was one of opposition to the dominant European society, these conflicts nevertheless potentially exist” (1961, 191). If anything can be described as a revolution, it was the working class’s takeover of the means of production via autogestion. That such a takeover was vigorously opposed by other classes is amply demonstrated by the documented struggle with elements of the petite bourgeoisie and rural bourgeoisie for control of abandoned properties. What ensued, following the establishment by the workers of a sort of “dual power” in the summer of 1962, was a protracted conflict over autogestion that lasted throughout Ben Bella’s rule and into Boumedienne’s regime. This conflict found expression in political and economic policy, in legal decrees and, most of all, in bureaucratic maneuvers that rendered self-management defective even on the terms set out by the Ben Bella regime. This bureaucratization created the conditions in which autogestion could be attacked for being uneconomic.

The role of this bureaucracy has been a focus of debate in general theoretical terms and also regarding Algeria specifically. In the case at hand, Tlemcani argues that the state bureaucracy constituted a “new class,” suggesting it was sharply differentiated from other classes and identifying its existence as a “real social structure” controlling the process of labor, organizing the distribution of surplus value, and mediating between other class interests (1986, 6–10).¹⁰⁸ Accordingly, this “oligarchy,” formed of the military, colonial administration, and the petit bourgeois leadership of the nationalist movement, utilized its political power (in the form of the state) to conquer economic power through nationalization, the centralization of autogestion, and the creation of national corporations. Lazreg’s account (1976) is more nuanced in that she considers the state bureaucracy as an arena of struggle in which different classes and class fractions meet.¹⁰⁹ Identifying the state as both a producer and reproducer of classes, she describes technocratic and military factions of the petite bourgeoisie as having assumed political power after independence in opposition to the bourgeoisie. The goals of this petite bourgeoisie, the leadership of which was drawn from the radical nationalist wing of the FLN, happily coincided with those of the state: national development, economic independence, and the construction of state capitalism. Paradoxically, although this path necessitated the neutralization of workers’ control of industry, it also assisted in generating a capitalist industrial class in Algeria.

However we analyze the state bureaucracy, it is clear that this was the crucial instrument in undermining and destroying autogestion as created by the working class. Once self-management was formalized and the ad hoc inventions of workers disbanded, the relations of production remained the same as far as an individual worker was concerned: the state owned the enterprise, workers received a wage, democratic participation was at a low level, and vital areas of decision-making were beyond the workers’ grasp. Crucially, while the working class had seized control of the means of production in some of the most important sectors of the economy, it had neither set about extending workers’ control on its own nor consolidated individual units into greater organizational bodies. Thus by the fall of 1962, the process had effectively stalled and the government was in a position to assume responsibility for the movement.

Weaknesses in organization and political education permitted this takeover, with the UGTA unable to play a significant role after January 1963 and the FLN neither the mass party nor the avant-garde its various factions claimed. These weaknesses were also a product of the nationalist movement per se: while eventually successful in overthrowing the colonial order, the practical absence of any class analysis of Algerian society by the FLN left the mass of that society unprepared for the incipient class conflict that was visible in the summer of 1962 (Pfeifer 1985, 4). The extant social conditions must also be identified: the Algerian working class was a tiny minority in a predominantly rural, peasant-based society convulsed by social dislocation in the aftermath of independence. Finally, autogestion could be paired conceptually with a radical nationalist discourse of economic independence that, through a “process of both reification and interpretation,” eventually allowed self-management to be subjected to an economic logic that undermined its very foundation. Such a discourse, heavily deployed by Boumedienne, demonstrates the way in which ideology becomes a field of struggle in itself (Lazreg 1976, 131), for autogestion retained an enduring power as a founding myth of the Algerian state long after it had been emptied of its content.