Algeria

[p008] ALGERIA 53 A discussion article by by David Francis INTRODUCTION IT IS NOT OUR PURPOSE in this article to re-examine, even briefly, all the political problems raised by the Algerian revolution and by the class struggle in Algeria today. Our purpose is to give a ‘clarifica- tion’ of the content, the meaning and the conse- quences of the activities of the ‘Pabloite’! revision- ists in this important sector of the world revolution, in which they played a certain role as a political tendency. The overthrow of the Ben Bella government reveals the bankruptcy of the common line of the ‘United Secretariat’? of Germain-Hansen and Frank and Pablo. But the most important factor is not the crumbling of illusions resulting from At the same time, this episode stresses the re- sponsibilities of the International Committee and of its Organisations: to ‘defend Trotskyism’ is to work to rebuild the Fourth International, to build its sections in every country, to develop Marxism in that struggle. In Algeria, this struggle must find its political expression, its application in practice. the divergence between the grandiose statements on ‘Algerian socialism’ and reality. It is the fact that this episode deepens and makes more precise the political role of revisionism, and shows, as did the open move by the LSSP in Ceylon to class collaboration, its role in the class struggle. l. i.e., the supporters of the so-called ‘International Secretariat of the Fourth International’, which was for most of its life, after the split in the Fourth Inter- national (1952-3), led by Michel Pablo. 2. United Secretariat: the body set up in 1963 after the International Secretariat reached formal agreement with the leaders of the SWP, though the latter are pre- vented from participating in its organisation by the United States government’s Voorhis Act.

[p009] ALGERIA 53 A discussion article by by David Francis INTRODUCTION sections in every country, to develop Marxism in IT IS NOT OUR PURPOSE in this article to re-examine, even briefly, all the political problems raised by the Algerian revolution and by the class struggle in Algeria today. Our purpose is to give a ‘clarifica- tion’ of the content, the meaning and the conse- quences of the activities of the ‘Pabloite’! revision- ists in this important sector of the world revolution, in which they played a certain role as a political tendency. The overthrow of the Ben Bella government reveals the bankruptcy of the common line of the ‘United Secretariat’? of Germain-Hansen and Frank and Pablo. But the most important factor is not the crumbling of illusions resulting from At the same time, this episode stresses the re- sponsibilities of the International Committee and of its organisations: to ‘defend Trotskyism’ is to work to rebuild the Fourth International, to build its that struggle. In Algeria, this struggle must find its political expression, its application in practice. the divergence between the grandiose statements on ‘Algerian socialism’ and reality. It is the fact that this episode deepens and makes more precise the political role of revisionism, and shows, as did the open move by the LSSP in Ceylon to class collaboration, its role in the class struggle. 1. i.e., the supporters of the so-called ‘International Secretariat of the Fourth International’, which was for most of its life, after the split in the Fourth Inter- national (1952-3), led by Michel Pablo. 2. United Secretariat: the body set up in 1963 after the International Secretariat reached formal agreement with the leaders of the SWP, though the latter are pre- vented from participating in its organisation by the United States government’s Voorhis Act.

[p010] 54 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 ‘PABLOITE’ REVISIONISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE COLONIES As the decomposition of the international re- visionist Centre accelerates, so there develops a tendency to throw responsibility for the most blatant failures on to one or other of the ‘world leaders’. But if there is one sphere where this kind of move would be difficult, it is precisely in the intervention of the ‘international leadership’ of Pablo - Germain - Frank - Hansen - Maitan, on the question of the revolution in the colonies. Pablo and his team’s para-governmental activity’ was covered up for by the revisionist movement as a whole, and the unanimity of the revisionist spokes- men was expressed in the published documents of the Pabloites. Firstly, the resolution of the Sixth World Congress on the ‘Colonial Revolution’—the con- gress which was held in Pablo’s absence whilst he was interned in Holland—gives in advance the ‘theoretical’ grounds for Pablo’s practical activity in Algeria, . This resolution stressed the decisive role for Africa of ‘The Elite’, ‘Embryo of a State Bureau- cracy’, and ‘Fundamental Element of Future Evolution’. In In Defence of Trotskyism,* S. Just exposed the mechanics of this resolution and there is no point in returning to it. Let us simply recall its practical conclusion: - ‘Whence comes the specific role of the restricted native stratum which takes power and controls the state in a specific international and national context, unknown in the past? ‘This stratum holds a force in itself, the state, without coming under the precise influence or the control, of a ruling class of which it would be the mandatory. ‘It is through the administration of the state that this stratum develops and acquires a social import- ance, and not through the intrinsic needs of pro- duction or by its role in production. In the historic conditions which prevailed in the past, and up till the last war, this kind of stratum with this kind of function could only evolve towards being a comprador bourgeoisie in the service of imperialism. ‘But in the present particular conditions, in which it necessarily comes under the influence of the powerful movement of the masses, of the growing strength of the Workers’ States, and when it knows that it can take advantage of the East-West antagonism, this stratum acquires a bonapartist role which it imprints on the whole state, whose economic and social structures are not yet defini- tively directed towards a necessarily classical 3. ie., Pablo’s acceptance of a post in Ben Bella’s state administration. 4, Published in La Verite, No. 531. capitalist development.’ (Our emphasis.) Quatrieme Internationale, No. 12, pp. 61-62. We will leave the unravelling of this curious sociological or political analysis to the enthusiasts. We must stress that Pablo merely moved its field of application a few degrees north and that he was not advancing any new idea in underlining the importance of the centre of gravity of the evolution of Algeria (its governmental elite) for it to ‘imprint on the state’ a ‘non-classical capitalist develop- ment’. The basis for these statements on the existence of socially indeterminate states in the newly- independent backward countries, capable of evolv- ing towards socialism or capitalism according to the political orientation of those in control, is found in all the documents of this Sixth Congress on the ‘Colonial Revolution’, and in the resolutions of the Reunification Congress, which repeated many of the positions held by the Socialist Workers’ Party. It lies, first of all, in the way in which con- temporary social reality is cut into slices—which certainly are to come together again in the far-off paradise of the ‘world revolution’, but which remain perfectly separate for the time being: the capitalist advanced countries—sphere of structural reform —the Stalinist world— promised de- Stalinisation—and the underdeveloped countries— the prey of the ‘colonial revolution’. For Marxists, internationalism—as a strategy— is the consequence of the international unity of the class struggle, produced by the world market and the international division of labour. This inter- national struggle of the working class for socialism develops through specific forms, but in each case the struggle of the working class is only com- prehensible from the standpoint of its international dimension. From this point of view, there is no ‘colonial sector’ with its own ‘colonial revolution’ for particular objectives (national independence, industrial development). That is how the petty- bourgeois ideologists who speak of the “Third world’ see things. This is also quite certainly the axis of the revisionist conception. It is in this that is re- vealed, in the particular sphere of the revolutionary struggle in the colonies, the abandonment of Marxist method which characterises their overall positions: the abandonment of the international class struggle and of its conscious factor; the problem of revolutionary leadership as the starting point for any analysis and any definition of policy. As an autonomous zone, the ‘third world’ is en-

[p011] ALGERIA titled to its revolution ‘of a special type’, Pablo might say, since it has its own criteria and makes the best of bourgeois leaderships for the purpose of winning (however little ‘revolutionary’ they may be), and by the use of the famous ‘élite’ transforms bourgeois states into workers’ states. The method was illustrated in the case of Cuba as much by the different leaders of the Inter- national Secretariat as by the leadership of the SWP. Algeria was the other ‘proof’ of the correct- ness of the method. The SLL in its polemic with the SWP took up all the arguments put forward by the revisionists on this question. The conse- quences of their conceptions are clear: a refusal to start from the international reality of the class struggle to tackle the problems of the proletarian revolution in the under-developed sectors, and an abandonment of the Marxist theory of the state lead to adaptation to the conventions of the ‘revolution by stages’ and the ‘state of national democracy’. The idea according to which revolutionary leaderships would correspond to this particular revolution and would be adequate to the task without being selected on the basis of an inter- national programme leads to an adaptation in practice to present bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships. In his pamphlet The Colonial Revolution and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution Pablo gives a good summary of this conception starting from the Cuban and Algerian examples. After having noted that the historical novelty of what he terms the ‘Castroite phenomenon’ con- sists in the ‘possible substitution in the role which traditionally is played by the revolutionary marxist party, of a more restricted leadership of a different ideological origin’ (p. 7), that is: ‘restricted political Jacobin leaderships of a special type which show their degree of revolutionary 55 understanding precisely in that they take part in effective armed struggle’ (p. 6), Pablo concludes: ‘, . . the national revolutionary movements which rise to power following independence, whether it has been conceded or gained through struggle, occupy precisely as a result of the exercise of power and the state apparatus, a particular position in society of a bonapartist character of a special type (again!) ‘They are exposed to the combined pressures of their base—composed of the immense mass of the peasantry specific to these countries, of the urban proletariat, of the imperialist or capitalist firms, of the ‘educated’, of the nucleus of feudo-capitalist native compradors, of imperialism, of the workers’ states and of the world revolution in general. ‘In these conditions, the possibility exists that the state will turn towards an economic and social policy of structural reforms, of nationalisation, of radical agrarian reform, of monopoly of foreign trade, of industrialisation, of planning which imperceptibly (our emphasis) set the country on the preparatory path to a workers’ state’ ‘The more the national revolutionary movement reaching power is already structured, endowed with a precise anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist pro- gramme, undergoing the pressure and the control of its revolutionary base, the greater is the chance of an anti-capitalist orientation of the new state.’ (our emphasis) (pp. 13-14). It cannot be said that, from the standpoint of its own logic, the bankruptcy of ‘Pabloism’ rests in its inability to build revolutionary parties—it does not aim to build such parties. In this sense its present organisational setbacks, the blows that events bring to its proclamations, are not identifi- able with its defeat as a political tendency defined by its opposition to the programme of the Fourth International from which it came. This liquidationist and revisionist tendency will only meet its real defeat—in Algeria as elsewhere— in the rebuilding of the Fourth International and the building of its sections—in Algeria as else- where. REVISIONIST POLITICAL PRACTICE CONFRONTED WITH THE ALGERIAN REVOLUTION In this chapter we intend to recall, in chrono- logical order, the most important positions taken up by representative personalities of the revisionist and liquidationist tendency, and the practical activity of this tendency when confronted with the social and political events which have determined the evolution of Algeria since Evian. In doing this, we shall have to document our analysis very briefly, by referring mostly to already published studies. (a) The FLN and the Evian agreements Of course, the attitude of the International Secretariat and the subsequent United Secretariat —and the personal role of Pablo and his team— towards the Ben Bella regime, did not constitute a ‘turn’. They express the general policy that we have exposed above, they are the logical continua- tion of their attitude towards the leadership of the FLN during the revolutionary war against

[p012] 56 French imperialism, which was made particularly clear in their appreciation of the Evian agreements, which were the basis of the new Algerian state. Immediately after these agreements an editorial in Quatriéme Internationale (No. 16, July 1962) defined the agreements as being ‘the expression of a compromise based on the precise relationship of forces between imperialism and the revolution.’ But this definition is entirely wrong: it is im- possible to speak of ‘Revolution’ in general—even by using a capital letter—the dynamic of the revolutionary process in question must be analysed; and also the situation and aims of the different classes taking part in it, together with their organisations and their leaderships. The bourgeois nationalist leadership of the FLN, whatever the real and deep disagreements which could place the more radical elements in this leader- ship in opposition to a more ‘Bourguiba-ist’ element, did not represent the proletarian revolution. What was signed at Evian was an agreement between im- perialism and the weak national bourgeoisie, represented by the central apparatus of the FLN, and it was an agreement aiming at the building of a bourgeois state in Algeria. At Evian the FLN leadership attained its aims, which were not the proletarian revolution in Algeria, and confirmed its reality as a bourgeois nationalist organisation. But, at the same time, the FLN was dying as a mass organisation channelling the struggle of the Algerian proletariat and peasantry against im- perialism. It burst into rival cliques, which threw them- selves into the struggle for power, multiplying the promises of ‘socialism’ and ‘revolution’. For the bourgeois press this was the decisive aspect because it was spectacular. But, in fact, the clash between these personalities was no more than a symptom of a deep social crisis which was developing. The masses continued the struggle for their own objectives, and the substitution of the apparatus for the first Evian arrangements (the provisional executive) was not sufficient in the situation created by the almost complete exodus of the European minority. Abandoned factories and land were occupied, European flats requisi- tioned; the trade unions were reorganising, and at local level the elements were coming together of a power directly issuing from the armed struggle. Parallel to this, on the level of the middle cadres and militants of the FLN, there was not only fantastic confusion but also a great need for FLN FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 clarification and a rapid political development. Those who were looking for really socialist solu- tions should have been told the truth, the meaning of the Evian agreements, and a political perspective opened for them in terms of the mobilisation of the masses and of the necessary political inde- pendence of the proletariat. The revisionists followed the opposite road; they disarmed these militants and discredited Marxism in their eyes. Far from considering the question of a political organisation of the working class, instead of telling these militants that they could only carry out this task by starting with an examination of the struggle and the role of the leadership of the FLN, Pablo and his friends speculated on the evolution inside the heights of top leadership, classifying them more or less on the » left, without the activity of the masses or the real problems of the Algerian revolution impinging on their analysis. The editorial article that we have already quoted analysed the situation inside the FLN as follows: ‘Roughly, there can be found (in the FLN) at present, when the Algerian revolution is entering on its social phase and the decisive options, three distinct tendencies: the socialist and _ tending- towards-socialist left, the Bourguiba-ist right, and the undecided and opportunist centre. ‘The left includes a whole range of ideological tendencies which go from a frankly revolutionary Marxist wing, through a favourist wing, to a wing of ‘Arab socialism’ of the Nasser type. It reflects the interests and aspirations of the plebeian base of the Algerian revolution, which includes the peasants, the workers, the radicalised petty- bourgeois of the towns, in particular the “educated”’.’ It is up to this very diverse left to transform the FLN into a revolutionary party, and all will be for the best: ‘the FLN will transform itself into a political party which will have a programme with a clear socialist orientation... .’ (b) The birth of the Ben Bella regime As we have said, we are not retracing the political and social history of Algeria after Evian. The facts and a Marxist interpretation of these, as far as the rise to power of Ben Bella is concerned are sufficiently well known (see especially, La Vérité, No. 527 ‘Social classes and the State in Algeria’). The conclusion which has to be drawn is that the new regime was right from the start imposed against the masses. Placed in power by the ANP

[p013] ALGERIA (the frontier army) of which he was virtually the hostage, Ben Bella had the task of restoring ‘order’ —and that order embodied a respect for the essence of the Evian agreements, the control of the Algerian economy by imperialism. The new Ben Bella regime was established through the liquidation — including military liquidation — of the organs of power raised by the masses. The conflict between the GPRA (Ben Khedda, etc.) and Ben Bella was only a secondary factor with regard to these first steps towards the rebuilding of a bourgeois state in Algeria. The International Secretariat and its publications will say nothing of all this. For them the choice is between Ben Bella—defined as the ‘left’—and the old GPRA. Ben Khedda : The conflict between Ben Khedda and Ben Bella only a secondary factor... In fact, the revisionists chose the counter- revolution, based on the army, against the masses. In September 1962, the French organisation affiliated to the International Secretariat published a pamphlet including the Tripoli programme and a study by Pablo entitled Impressions and problems of the Algerian revolution. The preface already shows the level of ‘Pabloite’ political thought: ‘the Algerian revolution already has a programme, the one adopted unanimously at Tripoli, which, if it is carried out, will make Algeria a society belonging to the Algerian peasant and worker masses, and the Algerian state into a workers’ state building socialism.’ Let us not comment on the idea of ‘the state building socialism’. In any case, to carry out this programme a ‘socialist leadership’ is necessary. But, the anonymous author of the preface adds, ‘a socialist leadership cannot have the slightest chance of success if it does not very rapidly unite with the peasantry. For, in present-day Algeria it is 57 the only social stratum spontaneously putting forward a demand which cannot be circumvented, which will fundamentally transform the economic structures and create a powerful impetus for the masses: the agrarian reform. ‘The peasantry today, reduced to extreme poverty, follows the ANP and the political bureau. It is from these facts that any socialist perspective must be traced out in Algeria.’ The moral of this text, which begins by simply eliminating the proletariat, is very simple: Ben Bella and Boumedienne are the strongest, let us therefore build ‘socialism’ with them! As for Pablo’s text, written for the occasion to flatter those whose servant he was, it reads today rather spicily. In the chapter entitled ‘Interview with Brother Ben Bella’ we learn that the latter, ‘very simple, serious, thoughtful, probably over- worked’, made the best impressions on Pablo, who repaid him by revealing to him his future as a great leader: ‘For my part, I ended the discussion by stressing the key role played by leadership in a revolutionary period, and sometimes even by a single individual, as the real animator of the collective of a leadership, of a team.’ (p. 51) But Ben Bella was precisely not alone. A kindly word was also needed for Boumedienne, of whom Pablo had ‘the opportunity to measure the strength, as well as the very great degree of attachment and. veneration that the soldiers and officers have for him.’ (p. 43) Here, the style of the ex-secretary of the Inter- national becomes quite high-flown: ‘the magnetic personality of Colonel Boumedienne is at once charming and disturbing. The augurs are undecided: Savonarola, Cromwell, Bonaparte, Boulanger or Castro? For my part, I am inclined to believe that this man from whom emerges a deep and sincere faith in the people, I would even say in the basis, in the mystique of the revolution, and who is certainly not a “mere Nasserite Social- ist” will never accommodate to a state apparatus copying the administrative system inherited from colonialism. ‘He will struggle with his team of political com- missars and officers as the incarnation of the revolu- tionary will of the ALN spearhead of the “revolu- tion”, for a deep structural reconversion of the country. His defeat would be the defeat of the revolutionary ALN, the defeat of the most positive forces in the present stage of the revolution.’ (p. 43) But the kernel of Pablo’s openly counter- revolutionary position appears, even more clearly than in these psalms, in the following passage:

[p014] 58 ‘in any case, the omnipotence, at the present stage, of the army, even if it does present some incon- veniences for the necessary passage to the establish- ment of civil institutions (state, party), is the embryo of the revolutionary power which has emerged from the dislocation of the colonial state and, unfortunately, also of the political organisation of the FLN. ‘it is in starting from this embryo, and not by opposing it in any way, or by ignoring it, that it will be possible to build revolutionary civil institutions .. (p. 42) Boumedienne : augurs undecided? (c) The evolution of the Ben Bella regime and the positions of the revisionists In itself, the establishment of the Ben Bella regime did not bring any solution to the stabilisa- tion of a bourgeois regime in Algeria. The econo- mic and political ‘vacuum’ created by the flight of the Europeans was spontaneously overcome by the masses (control of the abandoned property by management committees, both in the countryside and in the towns). The movement which tended, in the countryside, to place the main part of the advanced sector of the rural economy in the hands of the agricultural workers, undoubtedly con- stituted a stage in the agrarian revolution, and modified favourably the relation of forces in the interest of the masses. The organisations set up by the peasants, by their very existence, posed problems that went much further than the ‘manage- ment’ of this or that property. The need for credit, for marketing the produce, for links between the different management committees, the rela- tionship of agriculture and industry, etc. flowed from them. In fact, these were political problems, concerning power. The trade unions, the UGTA, whatever the limitations of their leaders, were an_ essential element in the mobilisation of the masses, in the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 development of their consciousness, because face to face with the petty-bourgeois apparatus of the FLN, which called on the ‘nation’ to gather round it, they existed as the proletariat’s class organisa- tions, able in their development to bring about the indispensable revolutionary alliance with the poor peasantry. It is, in any case, in this direction that the UGTA outlined its perspective, albeit con- fusedly and timidly. This is why one of the first acts of the Ben Bella government, clearly confirming its nature, was the destruction of the independence of the trade unions, which were reduced to dependence on the FLN apparatus and thus on the state, after that congress in which the leadership that the most advanced sections of the Algerian working class had chosen was reduced to silence by the worst. bureaucratic methods, Ben Bella enjoying the support of the peasantry in order to isolate the working class (see La Vérité, No. 527 in particular). On this episode, essential for anyone claiming to be a Marxist, what has Quatriéme Internationale to say? Michel Pablo, who was then still its ‘official’ spokesman, only alludes to it ironically, laughing at the ‘left intellectuals’ who scrutinise the ‘Algerian reality’ whilst regretting its ‘contradictory aspects’. And Pablo adds: ‘They do not lack “arguments”. On the negative side, banning of the Algerian CP, bureaucratic con- gress of the UGTA, followed by a virtual coup d’etat carried out by the political bureau.’ But what does Pablo think of all this? We shall never know what interests him beyond the changes in the economic and social forms initiated, for Pablo is not one of those who ‘devote themselves above all . . . to the form of the political regime that they judge to be anti-democratic and personal, to the impetuous professions of Arabo-Islamic faith of some leaders, to the real dangers of the party monopolising certain sectors of political life, abolishing not only the old style ‘workerite’ militancy of the unions (our emphasis) but becoming purely and simply autonomous as the organisation of a distinct class. by its nature and its role in the Party and in the State, etc., and ... ‘are naturally ready to condemn the regime or to despair of its socialist evolution, which remains still open... .’ However, this lucid and objective ‘Marxist’ who stresses the vulgar character of politics based on the analysis of superstructures does not forget the role of personalities. Earlier in the same article he states that there is ‘a landmark in this unstable and _ explosive situation, the Ben Bella-Boumedienne tandem, with

[p015] ALGERIA the forces that each represents, was and remains the most advanced incarnation of the Algerian leader- ship, of the revolutionary line directed towards socialism.’ Under the leadership of this tandem the ‘embryos of a new social order’ are being established, that is the self-managed sector. The political justifications by the revisionists of their attitude towards the Ben Bella government will never rise above this level: one can speak to them of the close depend- 59 ence of the Algerian economy on the French economy, of the domination of the monopolies in industry, of the non-existence of agrarian reform for most of the peasantry, they always reply ‘self- Management’, and, of course, their enthusiasm knew no bounds when Ben Bella institutionalised self-management of abandoned property in March 1963. We must thus dwell on this point. SELF-MANAGEMENT, THE NATURE OF THE STATE AND THE CHARACTER OF THE GOVERNMENT In fact, one of the most blatant aspects of the abandonment of Marxist method by the revisionists is the complete absence in the nevertheless very great volume of writings on Algeria of an analysis of the social relations and thus of the nature of the state. In its place one can only find bombastic phrases about a ‘highly transitory’ revolutionary process, vague considerations of the supposed in- tentions of the leading group, incantations to an abstract ‘Algerian Revolution’ which, endowed with capital letters, pursues its march forward outside class relations, nationally as internationally. In this group, the only solid factor that comes to the surface is the (unique and revolutionary) phenomenon of ‘self-management’, from which the Ben Bella government is defined as a ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’. Two sets of confusions are carefully maintained on the subject of the management committees, their role and their development: 1) a confusion between the movement which gave rise to the ‘management committees’ and the form in which the gains of this movement have been institutionalised and codified by the state. 2) a confusion between the participation of the management committees in the administration of a firm or a farm and the property relations governing that firm. The facts on these two points have been estab- lished in the article by M. Aklouf in La Vérité, No. 527. All that has happened since has merely confirmed the conclusions of this article on the subordinate nature of the management committees. We will, therefore, not go into his proof in great deta‘! here. As far as the first point is concerned, we must start not from the decisions of the Ben Bella regime, or the orientation of the FLN, but from the spontaneous offensive of the workers in the towns and in the countryside in the summer of 1962, in the situation created by the flight of the European minority. A number of industrial and com- mercial firms, like the big agricultural estates, were ‘occupied’ by the workers who took control of them and began production on them once again. This was the expression of a deep and authentically revolutionary phenomenon, which by its own logic questioned the content of the Evian agreements and thus the capitalist regime in Algeria. The October 1962 decrees of the Ben Bella government sanctioned an accomplished fact. Mohamed Harbi, who was the ‘left’ theoretician of Ben Bella-ism, described this phenomenon more clearly than did his ‘Pabloite’ mentors, even if his conclusions are wrong: ‘It will be remembered that the accession of Algeria to sovereignty did not take place in normal Cetebrating the accession of Algeria to sovereignty.

[p016] 60 circumstances. It was marked by the simultaneous evaporation of the colonial state after the death throes of the OAS and the massive exodus of the European owners and the disintegration of the FLN. This double crisis and its consequences, which were the disorganisation of the admini- stration inherited from colonialism and the absence of an organisation coming out ‘of the resistance movement which was able to take over, left the way open for popular initiative. The aim of which had always been the dream of the masses: the seizure of the property from which they had been expro- priated and defrauded, was within reach. The limiting clauses of the Evian agreements did not bind them, and those that they did bind were no longer there to stop them. They had become the power. By taking over the abandoned property the working strata expressed their wish to come on to the economic and political scene, and to become the governing force’ (Chartre d’Alger). ‘Self-management is the conscious codification of this spontaneous revolutionary process, born in August 1962, during a period of social crisis in Mitidja and the plain of Orleansville.’ (‘Algeria and its reality’, a lecture given in Paris on March 22, 1965, by M. Harbi and published in the May issue of Economie et Politique). Of course, the masses had not ‘become the power’, but they had moved towards setting up the embryo of their own power, at the same time that they were beginning to organise along class lines (in the UGTA). It is as an element in this move- ment of the masses leading to the appearance of ‘dual power’ that the phenomenon of the ‘manage- ment committees’ can be understood. They were the first rough outline of workers’ control over one sector which, by force of circumstances, was to be nationalized, to become the property of the state. But of which state? Of that which was being rebuilt thanks to the bayonets of the ANP and which, to use M. Harbi’s phrase, was ‘bound’ by the Evian agreements, as it was being built pre- cisely to guarantee the main terms of these agree- ments. The armed struggle against ‘Willayism’, and the destruction of the UGTA as an independent working-class organisation, showed what the Ben Bella government was. It was to the benefit of this bourgeois state, by the actions of a government which had shown itself in fact to be opposed to the masses, that the ‘codification’ that Harbi speaks of took place. The famous decrees of March 1963, which institutional- ised the management committees, and define ‘un- occupied property’, etc., in no sense have the revolutionary scope that Ben Bella’s admirers attribute to them. Starting from an irreversible fact—the need for the Algerian state to take over FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 the ‘modern’ sector of Algerian agriculture as well as a certain number of industrial firms abandoned by their European owners—and from a political situation in which it was still necessary to make concessions to the masses, they canalised the movement and led it into the blind alley of managing a sector of the Algerian economy. Not only is it not possible to define these measures as ‘socialist’, but there is not even any question of any workers’ control over production: the instruments of this control by the class organi- sations having been dismantled before the decrees were passed. In capitalist society a ‘workers’ co-operative’ is not a ‘socialist island’ but a unit of the capitalist economy, determined by its laws. In the same way the existence of particular forms of admini- stration in a firm or a sector of the economy do not cut this firm or this sector off from the economy as a whole. Neither do they give this firm or this sector a particular social character. What characterises the ‘self-managed sector’ legally, above all, is not the methods by which it is administered, but the fact that it is the nationalized sector. (The authority of the state, in any case, is clearly shown in the fact that the ‘executive power’ in a firm remains in the hands of a director which it nominates.) Socially, it is characterised by the class nature of the state. But, on a Marxist analysis, as we have pointed out, the Algerian state can only be defined as a bourgeois state. It is progressively rebuilding the new machinery of repression which ‘defends capitalist property relations in the form in which they predominantly exist in Algeria: the domination of foreign capital. (La Vérité, No. 527, p. 61). It is possible to understand this merely by look- ing at Algerian society: the economy remains over- all under the domination of imperialism, within a framework devised by the Evian agreements and already outlined in the Constantine plan. Industrial development in Algeria is about 90 per cent the affair of private industry. In agriculture, whereas the modern sector has been nationalized, the traditional sector has not seen any modification in its plight, which is the heritage of colonialism, and the vast majority of the fellahs are still without ‘land and without work. It is the series of relations as a whole which the Algerian state expressed. The self-managed nation- alized sector, too, is dependent on the capitalist economy. — The confusions that we pointed out above were necessary to the revisionist system, in order that the existence of a nationalized and self-managed

[p017] ALGERIA sector might constitute ‘a proof of the development towards a workers’ state’ of the Algerian state and of the ‘worker and peasant’ character of the Ben Bella government. Thus, the essential facts concerning the pheno- menon of self-management, from the point of view of the class struggle, were knowingly con- jured away. In the first place, the way in which the movement was ‘codified’ was a barrier to any further extension of the movement. As well as being a sizeable concession to the peasantry (the non-reappropriation of the ‘vacant property’ by the Moslem bourgeoisie) the decrees of March 1963, by avoiding the question of property, put off agrarian reform to an unspecified future date and maintained most of the Algerian peasants in their present state, separating off from them a relatively privileged minority: the workers in the modern sector of agriculture. Again, the movement for the seizure of the ‘vacant property’ was undeniably the expression of social upheaval (the upsetting of the balance on which capitalist exploitation rested by the sudden disappearance of the European ruling class; the mobilisation of the peasantry and, to a lesser degree in the first stages, of the proletariat by their demands), and the institutionalisation of the 61 management committees represented a big concessiou to the masses on the basis of the new relationship of forces between them and the ruling class established by these upheavals. It was a concession full of contradictions: the proletariat, and in particular the rural proletariat, would learn through the experience of the manage- ment committees that the problems raised could only have a political solution, at the level of power. Consequently, it was not a question of neglecting the movement which, in a sense, the state had confiscated for its own political advantage, but of considering it as an arena for struggle and above all working for the workers to organise as a class, independently from the state. But that required precisely a correct definition of the state and an appreciation of the character and the political nature of the Ben Bella govern- ment as a function of the historic needs of the Algerian working class, the vanguard of the Algerian revolution. For the revisionists, on the contrary, it was a question of helping with advice and advisers the ‘leading elite’ so dear to the Sixth World Congress to accomplish a ‘revolution of a truly special , type’. THE OSCILLATIONS OF BEN BELLA’S BONAPARTIST REGIME. THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN ALGERIA AND THE POLICY OF CRITICAL SUPPORT In order to avoid any confusion let us repeat that we do not intend here to attempt to write the history of the class struggle in Algeria since 1962. This task remains to be accomplished, and this document only begins it by giving it a methodo- logical framework, starting from a critique of the political positions of revisionism. The characteristics of the Ben Bella regime, as it was established at the end of the summer 1962, were quite clear. In the framework of a bourgeois state, the machinery of which it undertook to rebuild in extremely difficult circumstances, the Ben Bella government, supported by the ANP and thus largely dependent on this force, used the unstable equilibrium between the classes in Algeria in order to lift itself above those classes and to play the part of a relatively autonomous factor. ‘Relatively’ means that the Ben Bella government acted within precise social limits—those of the defence of the capitalist property relations, and thus its subordination to imperialism could not be fundamentally challenged. But inside this framework, it had ample room to manoeuvre because for a time, in a given relationship of forces, it was irreplaceable as -an ‘element of order’. It could therefore, to a certain extent, blackmail imperialism into giving some ground. It could also, by this fact, make the Algerian bour- geoisie and petty-bourgeoisie accept (more easily) their elimination from political power and the concessions made to the masses. Towards the masses, it used these concessions and the ‘successes’ that the support of imperialism granted it (the ‘co-operation’ with the Gaullist government) to confuse them, and to isolate them from any political opposition group. Against the working class, deprived of its independent organi- sations, the Ben Bella regime leant on the peasan- try, which was itself divided by the division in- herited from the colonial period into a section enjoying certain advantages in the modern sector and the vast majority kept out of political circula- tion. This bonapartism which characterised the Ben Bella regime was accompanied, so to speak, by a second-degree bonapartism: the struggle inside the

[p018] 62 regime itself between the different factions for ‘power’. Here, too, Ben Bella stood between the different cliques and eliminated them one after the other, by posing as a heaven-sent man. His entire policy was based on the consolidation of his personal dictatorship, and on the attempt to make the ‘irreplaceable’ nature of his regime permanent. The weakness of the state machine was betrayed in the fact that each element in the machine (admini- stration, army, etc... .) played its own game and was a candidate for leadership of the state. The special machinery of the single-party, which Khider set out to build, was put out of the running, but the regime’s fate still depended on the support of the military caste which developed through the repression and in the conflict with Morocco. Even a superficial examination of Ben Bella’s government completely eliminates any idea of a ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ as characterising it. The Ben Bella government was in no way initiating a break with imperialism. It was preparing the ground for collaboration with it. This government in no way leant on the mobilisation of the masses, assembled in their own organisations, building in the course of their actions the embryo of their own power. On the contrary, it governed against them, even if it did have to manoeuvre with them from time to time, ensuring its own power by destroying any possi- bilities for their organisation. Bearing in mind that this is merely an analogy as far as its function in the class struggle is concerned, we can say that the Ben Bella govern- ment, whose aim was the rebuilding of the bour- geois state machine, was as far from being a ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ as was de Gaulle’s government in 1945, which also had to make important concessions due to the circum- stances of the ‘liberation’. A. Aklouf, in the conclusion of his article published in La Vérité, No. 527, gives a Marxist characterisation of the regime: ‘The national bourgeoisie has not the means to govern directly. It has to rely on a parasitic political bureaucracy to build a real state machine. This state, in the strict sense of the term, plays the part of a guardian for the bourgeoisie, ensuring the conditions for economic development by the creation of a nationalised sector. By this yery fact this state enjoys a relative independence: it is in this sense that the Ben Bella regime, raised above the different social classes and taking advantage of their contradictions, is a bonapartist regime. It is evident that it does not satisfy all the strata of the Algerian bourgeoisie, but they are forced to put up with it for the time being. This type of FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 regime, resting on a single party, can be found, with variations, of course, in a number of coun- tries which have reached formal independence. ‘What can be added now in the specific case of Algeria is that the authoritarian nature of the Ben Bella regime should not deceive anyone: it is unstable.’ This instability is dual, in any case. The new Algerian state, in flagrant contradiction with the enthusiastic declarations about the march towards socialism, is very directly dependent on imperial- ism. The very functioning of the economy depends on the goodwill of French imperialism (invest- ments, credits, external trade, fuel and power). Its industry remains essentially in private hands— mostly as subsidiaries of imperialist monopolies. Thus only on a far smaller scale than in other countries of the same type (Egypt, for example) does the state play the part of guardian. This weakness in relation to imperialism is accompanied by and can be partly explained by the regime’s weakness in relation to the masses. They may have been contained by the regime, deprived of organisation, politically confused, but the fact remains that they are not entirely con- trolled by it and that it could not immediately turn to repression. In this context the Ben Bella regime could only swing back and forth from left to right, with alternate concessions to the various classes and social strata according to the needs of the struggle inside the state machine and the more general necessities of the national and international equili- brium of that state machine. These concessions to the masses could have been used to organise the workers on class lines, to prepare a struggle against the regime, in the perspective of the socialist revolution. But, of course, for the revisionists the question did not even arise. The ‘left’ concessions of Ben Bella and his team proved the revolutionary essence of the government, and the ‘elite’ had to be helped to penetrate further on the march towards social- ism—as for the masses.... Here, moreover, is the extravagant way in which an editorial of Quatriéme Internationale posed the question : ‘Some people try to lessen the government’s role, arguing that it acted under the pressure of the masses. It is of no interest to enter into a dis- cussion of this nature about which came first, the chicken or the egg.’ All along, in the evolution of the Ben Bella regime leading to Boumedienne’s military dictatorship, re- visionism (that is, the abandonment of the pro-

[p019] ALGERIA gramme of the Fourth International, of the theory of the permanent revolution, of the Marxist theory of the state, of the class independence of the pro- letariat), is revealed in a policy of demoralisation and of confusion, by constant adaptation to the Algerian petty-bourgeoisie, or more precisely to the faction in power, expressed under the cover of revolutionary verbiage. We will examine only two examples: 1. In October-November 1963, Ben Bella took a new series of measures: nationalization of all land belonging to European settlers and the handing over of this land to ‘self-management’—congress of the self-managed sector. Thanksgivings then appear in the various publications of the Unified Secre- tariat: ‘The Algerian revolution has in reality entered into its decisive phase. Whilst revolutionary measures increase in the direction of a transforma- tion of the country into a state having the economic and social structure of a workers’ state, the threats against the internal and external revolutionaries are becoming clearer.’ (M. Pablo, L’ Internationale, October 1963). ‘. . . The former Ben Bella government attacked the privileged capitalists. The new government, which can be characterised as a workers’ and peasants’ government, attacks the state structures inherited from the colonialists. Moreover, a_ series of nationalisations (transport, tobacco), the gradual but irresistible installation of protection for collec- tive production, notably by the liquidation of the export of capital, bring nearer the moment of a quantitative turn in the Algerian revolution. A decisive, driving part of the Algerian economy having escaped capitalist production relations, the control of foreign trade being once established, capitalism being in continuous regression, controlled and directed like the rest of the economy in terms of popular interests, the government being in the hands of a socialist leadership, the Algerian Republic will be a workers’ state in the politico- economic sense that the Bolsheviks gave to the term.’ (M. Fiant, L’Internationale, November 1963). ‘The left regroups the vast majority of Algerian peasants and workers and has already spoken publicly and very clearly at the peasants’ congress both against the bourgeoisie and against the bureaucracy. ‘This left is notably personified by Ben Bella, many of whose declarations and decisions show clearly the will to build socialism in the service of the masses based on the principle of self-manage- ment. There is, in the thought of this leader, a development which cannot fail to remind us of the road covered by Fidel Castro.. ‘One of the latest declarations of Ben Bella on the Finnish radio needs no comment. (Our 63 emphasis). ‘“Mr. President, you often speak of ‘Algerian socialism’, what are the peculiarities of this social- ism that you call Algerian, and in what way does it differ from Marxist socialism?” ‘“Algerian socialism is exactly Marxist socialism in its economic analysis. But it is fundamentally different in its theoretical analysis concerning the theory of nationalism. Here, we are Arabs, we are Muslims. We are believers, and it is in this way that our socialism is different from other social- isms.” ’ (Unsigned article in L’Internationale of January 1964.) Finally, promotion of promotions, the United Secretariat, following the perspicacious M. Fiant quoted above, awarded the Algerian government, in a resolution of February 20, 1964, the title of ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’. We should note that the repressions against the various ‘oppositions’ are only mentioned in passing (and encompassed in the struggle against reaction). We will not dwell on the fact that neither the nationalization of part of the landed property, nor the holding of a congress of land workers, deprived of all power of political decisions, brought about in themselves a modification of the nature of the state or of the government. We shall simply note the mystificatory nature of the ‘Pabloite’ studies which judge these measures without relating them to an overall political analysis. In the autumn of 1963 an opposition to the regime developed amongst the masses. Corrup- tion and speculation continued in the towns, whilst the lot of the workers had not changed. The vast majority of the peasants were also in an unchanged situation. What happened in Kabylie, a disin- herited region, was not essentially a manifestation of ‘regionalism’ but a particular expression of the overall situation (the development of the partisans of the Front of Socialist Forces was not, in any case, confined to Kabylie). The crumbling away of power threatens the regime itself with disintegration, and it is the im- potence of Ben Bella to deal with this threat that will toll the knell of his ‘personal power’. The ANP has to undertake the military elimination of the ‘dissidents’. It is in this context that Ben Bella makes some considerable concessions to the peasantry. In particular, the ‘Congress of the agricultural self- managed sector’ opens the road to the organisation of the agricultural workers, shows the limits of ‘self-management’ and unmasks the bureaucracy and despotism which are rife on the level of the management committees. The questions of per-

[p020] 64 spective brought up by the peasants at the congress raise the problems of the extension of the agrarian reform to the ‘traditional sector’, of links with the working class—in short, of political power. The masses seize on the concession made by the government: they attempt to make it a means of organising. In this lies the possibility of inter- vention by a revolutionary vanguard working to bring together workers and poor peasants, on a class basis against imperialism, the national bour- geoisie and their state. The revisionists propose the very opposite. Showering praise on the government, seeing it as the decisive factor in an inexorable revolutionary process, they lead those Algerian militants that they do influence into a blind alley. They trap them in an ineffective reformism with relation to the regime. At the same time, through the support that they give to the repressions, by their direct participation in the state machine, they confuse the militants who seek a revolutionary road in the opposition. We must not attribute too much importance to the activities of Pablo and his movement in Algeria, any more than we should to the effective- ness of Ben Bella’s manoeuvres. The causes of the rapid defeat and of the disintegration of the ‘opposition’ lie elsewhere but it remains true that all this activity has as its aim the prevention of the forming of a vanguard based on Marxism, and that with regard to this objective it was effective. 2. The content of revisionist politics became even clearer in the months preceding the fall of Ben Bella, during which there was a renewal of working- class activity which, struggling for elementary demands, clashed with the regime. It is the attitude of the revisionist tendency at that time which we are going to study, defining its concept of ‘critical support’. Before we do this, we should note that the mystifying and idealist nature of the system in which the revisionists imprisoned themselves was shown perfectly at the time of the FLN congress in April 1964. For any serious observer, this congress _ was nothing but the congress of the apparatus (the FLN, on its own admission, no longer existing as a mass organisation). By claiming to bring together in an atmosphere of ‘national unity’ all ‘honest and revolutionary’ elements, the congress aimed to strengthen Ben Bella’s personal position, and to free the leadership from its military guardians. The congress can only be understood as a stage in the rebuilding of the state machine. Any analysis of the congress leads back to the overall problems of Algeria. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 For the revisionists, on the contrary, th statements of the programme adopted at the congress had an intrinsic value to be taken literally. ‘Socialist language’ is considered as in- dicating a socialist reality. ‘Revolutionary’ state- ments are taken for the genuine article. The method is circular and coherent. Under the leadership of the most progressive elements in the FLN, Algeria was on the road to socialism—the congress confirmed the leadership and the direction —it thus reaffirmed the FLN as a revolutionary party. The programme is discussed in detail, but with- out its relation to reality ever being examined. All is ‘as if? the FLN were a revolutionary workers’ party; some details of the plan are criticised but it is recognised that overall it proves the revolu- tionary and socialist nature of the FLN. Thus Livio Maitan managed to write an article nine pages long in Quatriéme Internationale entitled ‘Algeria at the time of the first congress of the FLN’, without mentioning at all the history of the FLN or analysing the Algerian state and society, the economy or external policy! There are ‘problems’ (industrialisation, unemployment, agrarian reform, bureaucracy, Islam, a single party or not, democracy, etc. ..) but they are enumerated without any reference to the social framework in which they exist. The important things are the statements, and Maitan is delighted with the ‘very remarkable speech of December 30, 1963’ by Boumaza, the economics minister, who declared: ‘Socialism will only triumph if it itself under- takes the tasks of the democratic and popular revolution, which in other countries was carried out by the bourgeois class.’ This does not prevent the said Boumaza from being Boumedienne’s Minister today, and from being denounced by the publications of the United Secretariat as being the ‘saboteur of self-manage- ment’. What is places important is that the programme ‘,.. the FLN, no longer as an advanced party among revolutionary nationalist parties, but as a revolu- tionary socialist party.’ (G .Marquis, L’Internationale, May 1964). We can appreciate how, in this framework of thought, the reality of the class struggle in Algeria could only surprise the revisionists at every stage, and at the same time bring out more clearly the counter-revolutionary characteristics of their policies,

[p021] ALGERIA Despite the grandiose proclamations, Algeria was staggering. The economy was still unsteady, there was still massive unemployment, and the pauperisation of the backward countryside was as bad a3 before. The contradictions in the regime become more and more apparent: contradictions between the concessions made to the masses and the need for the economy to run and the state machine to be built; contradictions between the speeches and the reality of the situation of the proletariat and the vast mass of the peasantry who can see, rising above their poverty, the arrogant and cynical upstarts of the regime; they discover in practice that the mainspring of the economy remains in imperialist hands. As units integrated into the capitalist economy, the ‘self-managed’ firms, whether industrial or agricultural, still contain exploited proletarians— producers of surplus value. Now, attempts are being made to integrate them into the same ‘trade union’ as the state officials whose job it is to manage the pro- duction of these firms. They are rebelling against this, and this struggle, from its beginning, is much more than a reaction to the kicks of an ‘authori- tarian’ state bureaucracy. It fundamentally ques- tions the social nature of the famous ‘self-managed’ sector. Parallel to this are the struggles which, in fact, raise the question, under the cover of ‘self-manage- ment’, of workers’ control in the capitalist firms which are the property of foreign monopolies. Finally, there are the wage struggles. The movement reaches its climax towards the end of 1964 and the beginning of 1965, on two levels: strikes in many sectors and the struggle for the ‘reconquest of the UGTA’. In fact, what was posed here was the question of trade union in- dependence from the state. The activity of the workers is such that the central organ of the UGTA, Revolution and Labour, after having con- demned the strikers as irresponsible, has to make a retreat. The affair is taken in hand only at the second congress of the UGTA, and then only with difficulty, by sacrificing the former leadership to the anger of the workers. But the final resolution adopted by the congress confirms state control over the unions. What did the revisionists have to say in this moment of class struggle in Algeria, of extreme importance in relation to the regrouping of the proletariat on a class basis? They were unable to ignore the brutality of the government’s reply, expressed by the official trade union leader- 65 ship: ‘The strikes in the nationalised sector are in- admissible.’ (Editorial in Revolution and Labour, January 20, 1965). ‘The Executive Committee of the UGTA cate- gorically condemns the unofficial strikes.’ (Executive Committee of the UGTA, January 15). They dissociated themselves from them, and clearly. This was the critical side of ‘critical support’. But let us examine things a little more closely: criticism is only an aspect of support. Pablo and his co-thinkers of the ‘United Secretariat’ could not abandon the twin pillars of their system: Algeria was ‘almost’ a workers’ state and the rising wing of the revolution was the Ben Bella leadership. Thus, all that they can say is that this situation compromises the ‘revolution’ and warn the leader- ship to take note of it. They prattle on about the relations between the trade unions and the state, the trade unions and the party, the conflict between the bureaucracy and democracy, outside space and time, as if the state were a workers’ state (or almost) and the FLN a revolutionary party. They are unable to raise the question in terms of the class struggle, to start from the historical interests and immediate needs of the organisations of the Algerian pro- letariat, for this would contradict their entire policy and method. Once again, revisionism shows its real essence; going over to the positions of the class enemy. They have to close their eyes to the blinding truth: the radical class opposition which opposes the proletariat to the regime and to its organisations. The wish to preserve the appearance of revolu- tionary qualities leads nowhere. In L’Internationale for March 1965, a long article by R. Jeromet entitled ‘Will the UGTA congress speed up the political cleavage?’, in which we find some interesting in- formation and even some interesting remarks on the development of the situation in Algeria, finishes thus: ‘We must thus hope that Ben Bella will speak clearly on the real causes and responsibilities for the recent strikes. Up to now, in fact, the presi- dent of the Republic has maintained a silence that does not favour resistance to the bureaucracy.’ The reality of ‘critical support’ is like the famous recipe for ‘horse and rabbit pie’: ‘one horse, one rabbit’. Support means adaptation de facto to the regime, criticism means respectful suggestions to the great leader. This is not the product of personal weaknesses but expresses the logical out- come of a policy of abandonment of Marxism.

[p022] 66 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 THE TASKS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE: THE REBUILDING OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AND THE BUILDING OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY OF THE ALGERIAN PROLETARIAT (a) The significance of the Algerian revolution For Marxists, the struggles of the Algerian workers and peasants, which culminated in a revolutionary war forcing French imperialism to abandon its direct rule, struggles which lasted for decades, are an integral part of the international struggle of the proletariat against imperialism. There is no isolated Algerian revolution, which can only be understood with reference to Algerian national reality. The proletarian revolution in Algeria develops through the struggle against im- perialism for the solution of the bourgeois demo- cratic tasks and can only be analysed with reference to the international class struggle of which it is a component part. We must, of course, retain this point of departure to analyse the final expression of the class struggle in Algeria: the problem of the revolu- tionary leadership, of the revolutionary party and its construction. The absence of such a party in Algeria today is not a ‘national’ phenomenon, but is closely bound up with international processes, in the realm of both objective factors (relative strengths of the classes, etc. . . .) and subjective factors (dislocation of the Fourth International). The extremely rich experience of the Algerian revolution must be fully analysed in order to define the strategy for building revolutionary parties in the under-developed countries. In the Algerian revolution the most diverse forms of struggle were combined, and in its course the limits which nationalist movements with petty-bourgeois leader- ships are unable to overcome were confirmed— however ‘radical’ they might be and however ‘plebeian’ their basis. They could not either wholly or partially change into revolutionary parties, that is to say that neither these move- ments, nor tendencies within these movements in the same ideological and political framework, could, as such, evolve to the point of changing into organisations consciously built on the basis of the programme of the world socialist revolu- tion. This does not in any way mean that these movements or tendencies did not form the frame- work in which the struggle for the emergence of such a party took place, or that the most advanced militants in these parties were not potentially the backbene of such a party. We shall return to this question. But we must first stress—what emerged very clearly between 1954 and 1962—the international character of the Algerian revolution. This character was first of all confirmed by the close relation between the armed struggle in Algeria and the class struggle in France. This link was the result of historical development, of the unique nature of colonisation in Algeria, of. the fact that there was there a European minority owning most of the landed property and means of production, and that the most important part of the Algerian industrial proletariat was concen- trated in France. Also, in the case of Algeria, the interdependence between the struggle in the industrially backward sectors and in the advanced capitalist countries was directly shown by the threat that the Algerian revolution constituted to bourgeois rule in France, and by the fact that the development of the Algerian revolution as a proletarian revolution was directly linked to the actions of the French pro- letariat. In this sense the Algerian revolution constituted a ‘high point’ of the revolution in the colonies, to the extent that, in it, the unity with the struggle of the proletariat of the advanced countries was posed not only as a perspective but as an immediate political task. From this, too, comes its explosive nature, from the fact that international imperialism under American leadership, just as much as the Soviet bureaucracy, aware of the danger, did all they could to ‘limit the damage’. In order to arrive at a provisional solution main- taining bourgeois rule in Algeria—Evian—it was necessary to initiate a profound crisis in the regime in France itself, a crisis which the bour- geoisie was only able to face by establishing a bonapartist regime, because it was able to defeat the French proletariat without a fight, the defeat being prepared by the Stalinist and reformist poli- tical machines, in the class struggles of the previous years, linked to the Algerian revolution. The destiny of the Algerian proletarian revolu- tion was not decided only in Algeria, but also in Nantes in September 1955, in the isolated struggle of the conscripts in 1956 and in the victory of Gaullism in 1958. This does not mean that the struggles in Algeria and France were an identical process, that at each stage the development of the revolution in Algeria was mechanically dependent on what was happen- ing in France. The continuation of the armed struggle after 1958, the demonstrations in Decem-

[p023] ALGERIA ber 1960 in the towns, the activity of the prole- tariat and the peasantry after Evian, are enough to prove the absurdity of such an idea. “What this means is that one of the decisive factors in the relationship of forces of the revolution and the counter-revolution in Algeria was the relationship of forces of the classes in France itself. This relationship appears even more forcibly at the level of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle in Algeria. The social vanguard of the Algerian revolution, the industrial proletariat, which was the basis for the selection of a revolu- tionary leadership able to challenge for control of the struggle for freedom (the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leadership) was, for the most part, concentrated in France. Its intervention in the struggle of the Algerian people was linked to its intervention in the class struggle in France, and hence to the development of that struggle. This, of course, is only the concrete expression, in the course of the revolutionary war, of the organic link joining the problems of the revolution- ary party in Algeria to those of the international workers’ movement. The specific forms of this link are the close relations established with the French labour movement, but through them, what emerges as the decisive factor in the non-formation of a revolutionary party in Algeria is the develop- ment of the international working-class movement, the degeneration of the Third International and its going over to social-patriotism. From this point of view, Algeria is not a special case: the character of the nationalist leadership, the limitations of its ideology, do not spring from an ‘Algerian’ mischance, but can only be understood as a specific manifestation of the international crisis in the working-class movement. The control of these liberation movements by petty-bourgeois leader- ships is inexplicable without reference to the bankruptcy of the Third International, to the successful political separation of the proletariat of the colonial countries from those of the advanced countries. The entire history of the Algerian nationalist movement underlines this in particular. A practical and political split with the radical petty-bourgeoisie and with its ideology, and thus the building of a revolutionary party of the Algerian proletariat, was inconceivable outside an international perspective. The absence of a proletarian leadership in Algeria was both an element in and the expression of the crisis of revolutionary leadership on a world scale, a crisis which could not find any solution but an international one, through the building of the Fourth International. 67 It is from these facts that a strategy could ve worked out. Solidarity in action with the Algerian revolution, by a communist proletarian organisation in France, was thus expressed by the mobilisation, however limited, of sections of the French proletariat, raising the question of power by their struggle. It was in relation to this role of the class struggle in France in the Algerian revolution that the different tendencies in the Algerian nationalist movement could be classed. The role of the Algerian proletariat in the struggle was defined in diametrically opposite ways, depending on whether or not one started from the relationship between the struggle in Algeria and the class struggle in France. In the first case it could play an all important role, by contributing, together with the French proletariat, to the preparation of an attack on the imperialist bourgeoisie in the metropolitan country itself. In the second, it was only a supporting force, secondary and isolated, to the struggle being carried out on the national territory, and seen (essentially) in military terms. The most proletarian wing of the movement, which emerged in the course of the successive struggles of the PPA and then of the MTLD, could only link the fate of the Algerian people to that of the Algerian proletariat, and to this extent throw its forces into this struggle. It is only by starting from this perspective that the tasks of solidarity with the Algerian revolution could be worked out, that the relationship between the struggle of the colonial masses and that of the proletariat of the industrially advanced countries could be expressed, and the permanent character of the Algerian revolution be translated into a strategy. It is only by starting from that that the building of a communist organisation of the Algerian proletariat could be undertaken. It is a fact that in this framework of thought and action errors of method were committed concerning the means of building a revolutionary leadership in Algeria. However serious these mistakes may have been they do not make up even a partial ‘explanation’ of the course taken by the Algerian revolution. The essential factor in the affair is the fact that in France, as in the other advanced countries, the vanguard organised on the Trotskyist programme was not able to extend its influence, its penetration of the working class, and increase its intervention to the extent of breaking the yoke of the bureaucratic apparatuses. It is in this sense that we can say, together with P. Lamotte (Informations Internationales, No fA

[p024] 68 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 French imperialist repression—as seen here in the last days of the Algerian war—has been replaced by the bonapartist dictatorship of Ben Bella and now, by the open military tyranny of Boumedienne. that ‘the crushing responsibility for the bourgeois course taken by the Algerian revolution lies first and foremost with the traitor apparatuses, which subjected the French working-class movement to French imperialism’. This does not diminish in any way the political responsibility of those nationalist Algerian leaders who gave their sanction to the Evian agreements, who would have liked to present them as a ‘victory for the revolution’, and who tried to integrate themselves into the state machine guaranteeing those agreements, rather than understand that they should have placed themselves in the opposition in the radical sense of the world and prepared the organisation of the proletarian and peasant masses against the regime. But it is absolutely necessary to stress that the Evian agreements were only possible because of the previous defeat of the French proletariat, organised by the bureaucratic apparatuses, and that there can be no question of blaming the most militant sections of the Algerian proletariat and peasantry, abandoned in the hardest of struggles, for the fact that in the crisis of Algerian nationalism in 1962 there did not appear to be any clear solution. The first sentence of the Transitional Programme should always be borne in mind, not merely as refer- ring to a ‘general’ context, but as the guide to any concrete analysis: ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a_ historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.’ This crisis continues. It can only be resolved in the building of its Fourth International—expressed in the building of its national sections. This is the whole meaning of the struggle carried out by the organisations of the International Committee. At each stage of the struggle, an examination of the gains and weaknesses is absolutely necessary, for Marxism can only be developed as the theory of the struggle of the proletariat through that struggle. This struggle of the organisations of the Inter- national Committee is carried out in determinate conditions, and these conditions are not only objective ones. The disintegration of the inter- national Trotskyist movement reorganised after the war, a stage of the road to the building of the Fourth International, the transformation of its leadership into a revisionist and liquidationist centre, are political factors of the utmost import-

[p025] 68 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 French imperialist repression—as seen here in the last days of the Algerian war—has been replaced by the bonapartist dictatorship of Ben Bella and now, by the open military tyranny of Boumedienne. that ‘the crushing responsibility for the bourgeois course taken by the Algerian revolution lies first and foremost with the traitor apparatuses, which subjected the French working-class movement to French imperialism’. This does not diminish in any way the political responsibility of those nationalist Algerian leaders who gave their sanction to the Evian agreements, who would have liked to present them as a ‘victory for the revolution’, and who tried to integrate themselves into the state machine guaranteeing those agreements, rather than understand that they should have placed themselves in the opposition in the radical sense of the world and prepared the organisation of the proletarian and peasant masses against the regime. But it is absolutely necessary to stress that the Evian agreements were only possible because of the previous defeat of the French proletariat, organised by the bureaucratic apparatuses, and that there can be no question of blaming the most militant sections of the Algerian proletariat and peasantry, abandoned in the hardest of struggles, for the fact that in the crisis of Algerian nationalism in 1962 there did not appear to be any clear solution. The first sentence of the Transitional Programme should always be borne in mind, not merely as refer- ring to a ‘general’ context, but as the guide to any concrete analysis: ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a_ historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.’ This crisis continues. It can only be resolved in the building of its Fourth International—expressed in the building of its national sections. This is the whole meaning of the struggle carried out by the organisations of the International Committee. At each stage of the struggle, an examination of the gains and weaknesses is absolutely necessary, for Marxism can only be developed as the theory of the struggle of the proletariat through that struggle. This struggle of the organisations of the Inter- national Committee is carried out in determinate conditions, and these conditions are not only objective ones. The disintegration of the inter- national Trotskyist movement reorganised after the war, a stage of the road to the building of the Fourth International, the transformation of its leadership into a revisionist and liquidationist centre, are political factors of the utmost import-

[p026] ALGERIA anve in the present period of the class struggle. They played an incalculable role in the case of the Algerian revolution. (b) On the building of a communist organisation in Algeria We do not discuss with the revisionists. The programme of the Fourth International and the overall positions and activity of the revisionists are incompatible. In the class struggle, we are not on the same side of the barricades. This means, among other things, that we feel no need to justify any one of our positions in debate with these > i A. Filali A. Bekhat A. Semmache Nothing in common with those who covered up for the murders of these Algerian trade unionists in 1957. people. We have nothing in common with those who sang the praises of Boumedienne after he had crushed the ‘willayas’, just as they covered up for the murders of the Algerian trade unionists in 1957. On the other hand we do discuss revisionism inside the Trotskyist movement. Not for pleasure, but in order to destroy it. And in this discussion, which has meaning only to the extent that it is linked to our intervention in the class struggle, to the struggle for the Fourth Inter- national, we are led, in an attempt to deepen its lessons, to study our own activity. We mentioned above the error in method com- mitted in the building of a communist organisation in Algeria. This question has already been summed up in the French Trotskyist movement (cf Informations Internationales, No. 6, the article by P. Lamotte mentioned above) and the conclusions now form part of our public propaganda. Thus in the issue of Informations Ouvriéres dealing with Boumedienne’s coup d’état the question was summed up as follows: “However radical the actions of these Algerian parties may have been from time to time, they did ’ tion of the International Committee. 69 not and could not break the bounds of petty- bourgeois radicalism. It might have seemed that the struggle for national independence, often carried out with ferocious determination, could lead to the perspectives of the proletarian revolution. It is a mistake that we made.’ (nformations Ouvrieres, No. 251, June 26, 1965). Thus it is not necessary to return to these questions except insofar as they are directly linked to the present discussion, to the struggle for the rebuilding of the Fourth International, which includes the struggle for the building of its Algerian section. The article by P. Lamotte, mentioned above, clearly points out the roots of the error: the false analysis of the Algerian people as a ‘people-class’ with the conclusion that the ‘party of the people’ could be the ‘party of the class’. It is not necessary to dwell here on his analysis of the limitations of the programme of the ‘North African Star’. We simply stress that the initial false analysis did not spring from a misappreciation of the social structure of Algeria, but from the fact that the role of the decisive classes in Algerian society (decisive because they are part of the classes that, in our epoch, are decisive on an international scale, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie) was not yet clear enough. That is, in that the theory of the permanent revolution was not applied at a high 2nough level of generalisation, that is not concretely enough, to Algeria. Now this error in method was not the innova- It was ‘in the air’ inside the Trotskyist movement, where the question of links with the revolutionary struggles of the under-developed countries was generally raised only in terms of ‘solidarity’ and where the political parties of the colonial countries were essentially judged by virtue of their effective anti- imperialism, in action. This is certainly the decisive criterion for their support, for the estab- lishment of a united anti-imperialist front, but does not in any way settle the question of a com- munist organisation. Starting from this point it is easy to take the step, as the Pabloites were later to do, towards the conception of ‘parties good enough for the colonial revolution’, as they. were able for the time being to carry on the anti-imperialist struggle, as a substitute for Marxist proletarian parties, for sections of the Fourth International. In other words, we can say that the error made was of a ‘Pabloite’ nature or, to be more precise, that its origins lie in the series of imprecisions and confusions on which the Trotskyist movement lived

[p027] 70 after the Second World War and which facilitated the development of the revisionist tendency and its first victories. In his article ‘In defence of Trotsky- ism’ S. Just has analysed the theoretical weakness of the Trotskyist movement, linked to the weak- ness of its intervention in and its penetration of the class struggle. This weakness, which showed itself in the inability to develop Marxist theory by applying it to the situation after the Second World War (the class struggle in Europe ,the Eastern European countries, etc. . . .), was also true of the revolution in the colonies and semi-colonies. This was first of all very much under-estimated, then discovered as an ‘autonomous’ sector only relating very formally to the building of the International, finally to be sanctified and opposed to the inter- national proletarian revolution in ‘finished’ Pabloite theory. This fundamental weakness which. enabled Pabloism to develop was evident just as much in the isolation of the French section at the Third World Congress as in the degeneration of the SWP, which although it had been the political initiator of the International Committee in 1953 yet re-established, in its practice, the overall con- ceptions and policies of the revisionists. It is not enough to ‘break with revisionism’ even if one understands that it is revisionism. Experi- ence teaches that revisionism can only be eradi- cated by conscious intervention in the class struggle on the basis of the Programme, and by theoretical development and generalisation in terms of that intervention. The experience of the Algerian revolution and the examination of the Trotskyists’ intervention enable us to have a more precise conception of the building of revolutionary parties in the indus- trially backward countries, and to oppose that conception to revisionism, which, on this particular issue, can always arise again, including inside our own ranks, as it is nurtured by the fact that the the working class of the advanced capitalist coun- tries remains under the control of the Stalinist and reformist bureaucracies, and that the revolution in the industrially backward areas seems to develop as a process that is to a large extent ‘autonomous’. In the most general terms, the problem can be summarised in two points: 1. Given the social structure of the industrially backward countries, the bourgeois democratic tasks on the basis of which the mobilisation of the masses is carried out, and given the fact that the working-class movement of the advanced capitalist ‘that is politically independent. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 countries remains controlled by the reformist anu Stalinist bureaucracies, the struggle of the pro- letariat and of the peasantry is controlled in these countries, in the first stage, by nationalist organisa- tions with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leaderships. It is only possible even to envisage the building of a communist organisation by intervening in this struggle, the stages of which are, in any case, not mechanically linked to the existence and activity of a revolutionary party. The national and international dynamic of the class struggle can, in fact, drive petty-bourgeois leaders a long way down the road towards a break with imperialism and an effective struggle against it (whether military or not)—witness Cuba, or Vietnam, where a leadership that is linked to the international counter-revolutionary apparatus of Stalinism and includes bourgeois nationalists is forced to carry out a revolutionary war against American imperial- ism. 2. But the revolutionary struggles in the under- developed sectors only have meaning as an integral part of the international proletarian struggle; the partial successes that can be gained, including those under petty-bourgeois leaderships, can only be defended and enlarged in the perspective of the international struggle for socialism. This perspective can only be concretely (‘politic- ally’) present at all moments of the struggle through the action (whatever the forms in which it appears, expresses itself, etc... .) of a communist organisation It is only through its activity that the unity of the international class struggle in the epoch of imperialism can be posi- tively expressed: through victory on a national level—by the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, alone capable of resolving the problems of national independence—and through the integration of victory into the international class struggle, of which it is a component part. An organisation of this kind will find its cadres and its militants in the mass movements—and thus in the nationalist movements—but it will not be born from a ‘leftwards’ development of a tendency with a petty-bourgeois leadership, however radical it may be. An organisation of this kind can only be the result of the open political struggle of Marxist militants organised for the class independ- ence of the proletariat, to confirm its leading role. This political struggle can only be the specific expression of the struggle for the building of an International.

[p028] KENYA-—COLONIALISM AND INDEPENDENCE KENYA 71