Statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International on Algeria 21/6/1965

[p007] STATEMENT BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL ON ALGERIA AHMED BEN BELLA, President of Algeria, was removed from power in the middle of the night of June 19-20. His arrest, and the reorganisation of the government, were the work of his Defence Minister and leader of the Army, Colonel Boume- dienne. Characteristically, Ben Bella was deposed with- out any prior open political preparation either by the masses or even by organised trends within the National Liberation Front (FLN) party, which has the monopoly of political life in Algeria. It was a matter of a highly organised plot by Boumedienne and top military leaders to impose a change on the masses of Algeria. In this fundamental sense, therefore, there is no change whatsoever in the character of the state in Algeria. The country remains capitalist. As well as the considerable properties retained by Algerian bourgeois, 80 per cent of the country’s economy remains in French hands. Boumedienne’s first public statement was to guarantee these holdings and to promise adherence to all existing agreements. The fundamental land reforms to begin the liberation of the Algerian poor masses have not yet begun. The powerful state and military bureaucracy will be consolidated rather than ‘democratised’ by the recent events. Not even a single word of appeal to the masses came from Boumedienne. When students and workers demonstrated against Ben Bella’s arrest on June 21, they were dispersed by troops and police. This persistence of capitalist property relations in Algeria, with the economy still rigidly controlled by the relation to the world market, particularly through agreements with France, is the source of dire poverty and economic chaos in Algeria, where over one million are registered unemployed. Boumedienne and other bourgeois-nationalist leaders are likely to denounce the ‘corruption’ and ‘economic experimenting’ of Ben Bella, hoping to divert thé attention of the masses from their real problems. The only solution is a break from imperialism. For this to happen, there would have to be built an independent revolutionary Marxist party to lead the workers to power. No section of the national bourgeoisie can accomplish this task. In Algeria, as in all the ‘newly independent’ bourgeois states, the crisis of world imperialism ‘is exposing the real class nature of the regimes. These have hitherto claimed to be ‘revolutionary’ or ‘socialist’, but are now faced with the impossi- bility of an independent or national path of capi- talist development. In Algeria, the problem of the national bourgeoisie, a very weak class depending on French capitalism and needing a strong state apparatus to organise the economy and discipline the working class, is facing all the major questions in the immediate future, and the quarrel between Ben Bella and Boumedienne reflects the struggle between differing bourgeois groups on how to handle the situation. The national-liberation movements have to solve in the first place the problems of the bourgeois- democratic revolution, national liberation ard unification, land reform (liberation of the peasants from the landlords) and the establishment of bourgeois forms of political sovereignty in the state in some kind of bourgeois-democratic regime. In the epoch of imperialism, the bourgeoisie, neither in Algeria nor in Cuba, nor in India, nor anywhere else, can achieve these tasks. The bourgeoisie is too weak; it is tied closely both to the foreign exploiters and to the landlords, it fears the peasantry, and especially the working class, too much to accomplish land reform or the establishment of political democracy. , Instead, as in Algeria, they have compromised with French imperialism, halting the land reform at an elementary stage, imposing a one-party state and abolishing independent workers’ and students’ unions. ; ; It is in this context that one ruler replaces’

[p008] 4 another under circumstances like the present. The next few weeks will bring all these problems to a-head. The foreign policy of the government and the consolidation of Ben Bella’s personal reputation and power were at stake in the Afro- Asian conference in Algiers in June, which never took place. Negotiations for changes in the oil and gas agreements with the French imperialists are due to begin this week. No doubt there are differences within the FLN about how to drive a bargain which will strengthen the Algerian bourgeoisie and its state against the masses. Ben Bella himself was due-to enter France on a state visit. Last, but by no means least, Ben Bella had been forced by peasants’ and workers’ struggles to promise that the basic land reform would begin this summer immediately after the harvest. None of these problems can be permanently settled by the national bourgeoisie and their state. They will proceed to bureaucratic and dictatorial solutions, and the removal of Ben Bella is intended to smooth the way for new repressions of the workers and peasants. This does not mean, of course, that the new regime will not make demagogic promises in the next few weeks. In late 1964 and early 1965 the workers in the towns conducted a number of strikes for higher wages and for workers’ management of the factories. The government of Ben Bella, having in the previous year intervened to abolish the inde- pendence of the trade unions, was forced to make certain gestures to this mass protest while in fact tightening the grip of the government party in the unions. The new regime will be especially con- cerned to repress the workers’ movement, fearing above all the possibility of an alliance of these town workers with the poor peasantry, who grow more bitter and impatient against the delay in the land reform. In such a situation, with the bourgeoisie divided, finding it necessary to depose a figurehead whom they had needed to mislead the masses with talk of national unity, the opportunities for the working class are evident. A _ revolutionary workers’ party would gain an enormous following for a programme of workers’ control, leading to workers’ state power, expropriation of the land- lords, confiscation of the vineyards and the formation of peasant soviets, and the expropriation of foreign holdings. The Fourth International and the international workers’ movement must pay particular attention to the absence of such a party and the urgency of beginning its construction immediately. The neglect of this task, flowing from the revisionist capitulation to the national bourgeoisie contained FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, SUMMER 1965 in Pabloism and the policies of the ‘United Secre- tariat’, has played a vital role in creating the present situation, where the immediate questions of the fate of the Algerian masses is settled by military coup and counter-coup. These Algerian workers and peasants have not said their last word; it is their strength and pressure which bring to a head the crisis of the bourgeois state, unable to adjust its rélation to world imperialism without changing the delicate balance of class forces within Algerian politics. A revolutionary party can and will be built in Algeria, but only if the lessons of the struggle against revisionism are learned. The International Committee condemned the Evian Agreement with de Gaulle as a sell-out. We insisted against the revisionists that Algeria re- mained a bourgeois state. The revisionists apolo- gised for Evian; they insisted that Ben Bella represented a powerful trend towards the left, and even towards a workers’ state in Algeria. All criticism of the Algerian state, all insistence on starting from its class basis, was condemned as ‘sectarian’ and the revisionists staked everything on pushing ‘left’ bourgeois elements further to the left. When Boudiaf and other socialist leaders were imprisoned, the sections of the International Com- mittee protested. Once again these repressions were supported by the revisionists. Their role has been to disarm the working class, leaving the national bourgeoisie free to dominate the state and repress the working class whenever that became necessary. All this was done in the name of ‘Trotskyism’ and the ‘Permanent Revolution’. The results are now there for all to see, just as they were in Ceylon. ‘The emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself’ was a principle abandoned by Pabloism through their rejection of the need to build independent re- volutionary parties. In a whole number of colonial and semi- colonial countries, the national bourgeois govern- ments are undergoing political changes in their form of rule and political domination over the masses, in response to the squeeze which is put on them by the currently developing economic crisis. Where the state takes a bonapartist form on behalf of a weak bourgeoisie, as in Algeria, or Cuba, then the type of ‘revolt’ occurring on June 19-20 in Algiers is on the agenda. The role of the Fourth International is not to take sides and campaign for mass support for one or another wing of the bourgeoisie, but to build independent parties of the working class which can utilise such crises for the overthrow of the capitalist state. 21/6/1965

[p009] INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Since January 1961, a process of theoretical clarification has been going