Chapter 1
Windows95
Banned
Algeria was in the state of a post-independence flux. There is a process of nearly a million, former colonialists, the Pieds-Noire, leaving Algeria. They take with them, civil servants, technocrats, businessmen, and merchants. They left behind their restaurants, shops, small businesses, workshops, artisanal shops, small factories and the vast amounts of agricultural estates.
The indigenous and newly decolonized Algerian people, were suddenly left with a vacant vast amount of property left over. Unsure what to do, they did the unexpected, they took over the vacant property. Spontaneously, with observation and practice, they somehow self-managed the enterprises, elected a leader where it is small sized, or in cases where the agricultural estates were vast, elected committee of workers to help manage and run the farms along participatory democratic lines.
This was the quite unprecedented event, certainly surprising event. The Algerians, who were brutalized by colonialism, unable to read, oppressed by the French, were guided by the autonomous FLN trade union, the UGTA to takeover the workplaces.
It is not that the Algerians themselves were revolutionary, they did not know what it is since they are illiterate, farmers long been blocked moving upwards in social mobility by the colonizers. They are mostly rural workers and small minority of urban workers who worked within the agricultural estates and the departed property left behind by the colonials. They reactivated the enterprises because they wanted to continue their livelihoods, and by extension, indirectly or unintended, the economy of Algeria that was ruined close to scorched earth levels. The country itself was threatened with famine since there were no experts or any of the advisors of the kind to manage the farms.
So in a kind of revenge and a must-do-action, they set out to collectively self-manage the property that was stolen, a kind of vindictive justice to outsiders and interested people watching the events play out. Quite miraculously, Algeria was saved by famines. It was quite the irony that self-managed enterprises saved Algeria from starvation.
The agenda was also to take over the means of production based on the "free association of producers" as thought by Marx, but it was influenced by the experience of worker's self-management in Yugoslavia and experiments and another faction that wanted to replicate the experiment of democratic councils managing the economy. They want to build a socialist economy based on the complete self-management of the workplace. But there were problems: The conservative character of the Muslim workers, an elitist/privileged position of the full-time workers compared to the seasonal or part-time worker. There's also a confusing mix of socialist consciousness and survival for income. There's also other plans of the other factions, which are the FLN general leadership, the local guerrilla warfare elites, landlords, peasants and their families who want the land back as to regain what was lost, speculators and so are the army faction composed of Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne who want to practice socialism along Maoist and Castroist lines: nationalized enterprises, state-enterprises with some agricultural cooperatives for good measure. And not but least, the population of small entrepreneurs that was catching up fast to the self-managed sector of the economy. It would be an understatement to say that there was a lot rest on their heads to construct a society that's both socialist and democratic.
They thought that they want to produce a society as described as Frantz Fanon, a society of honest labour and self-direction and control of what should belong to them, and not from the colonists nor the capitalists, but for the Algerian. It is also thought that this economy that they want to make could be a third-way, but better than Yugoslavia and other decolonized African countries.
Flag of the General Union of Algerian Workers (French:
Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens)
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You guessed it correctly guys, I've started a new timeline. And I am also desperately looking for a beta-reader/really good editor for what I am about to do. And yes, this is a what if the Ben Bella regime delayed/did not enact the disruptive decrees of September 1962 and subsequently the March decrees of 1963 that fully stopped the nearly-independent self-managed sector cold, thanks to the state intervention.
The indigenous and newly decolonized Algerian people, were suddenly left with a vacant vast amount of property left over. Unsure what to do, they did the unexpected, they took over the vacant property. Spontaneously, with observation and practice, they somehow self-managed the enterprises, elected a leader where it is small sized, or in cases where the agricultural estates were vast, elected committee of workers to help manage and run the farms along participatory democratic lines.
This was the quite unprecedented event, certainly surprising event. The Algerians, who were brutalized by colonialism, unable to read, oppressed by the French, were guided by the autonomous FLN trade union, the UGTA to takeover the workplaces.
It is not that the Algerians themselves were revolutionary, they did not know what it is since they are illiterate, farmers long been blocked moving upwards in social mobility by the colonizers. They are mostly rural workers and small minority of urban workers who worked within the agricultural estates and the departed property left behind by the colonials. They reactivated the enterprises because they wanted to continue their livelihoods, and by extension, indirectly or unintended, the economy of Algeria that was ruined close to scorched earth levels. The country itself was threatened with famine since there were no experts or any of the advisors of the kind to manage the farms.
So in a kind of revenge and a must-do-action, they set out to collectively self-manage the property that was stolen, a kind of vindictive justice to outsiders and interested people watching the events play out. Quite miraculously, Algeria was saved by famines. It was quite the irony that self-managed enterprises saved Algeria from starvation.
The agenda was also to take over the means of production based on the "free association of producers" as thought by Marx, but it was influenced by the experience of worker's self-management in Yugoslavia and experiments and another faction that wanted to replicate the experiment of democratic councils managing the economy. They want to build a socialist economy based on the complete self-management of the workplace. But there were problems: The conservative character of the Muslim workers, an elitist/privileged position of the full-time workers compared to the seasonal or part-time worker. There's also a confusing mix of socialist consciousness and survival for income. There's also other plans of the other factions, which are the FLN general leadership, the local guerrilla warfare elites, landlords, peasants and their families who want the land back as to regain what was lost, speculators and so are the army faction composed of Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne who want to practice socialism along Maoist and Castroist lines: nationalized enterprises, state-enterprises with some agricultural cooperatives for good measure. And not but least, the population of small entrepreneurs that was catching up fast to the self-managed sector of the economy. It would be an understatement to say that there was a lot rest on their heads to construct a society that's both socialist and democratic.
They thought that they want to produce a society as described as Frantz Fanon, a society of honest labour and self-direction and control of what should belong to them, and not from the colonists nor the capitalists, but for the Algerian. It is also thought that this economy that they want to make could be a third-way, but better than Yugoslavia and other decolonized African countries.
Flag of the General Union of Algerian Workers (French:
Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens)
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Sources:
Clegg, Ian. 1971. Workers’ self-management in Algeria. London: Allen Lane.
Sources:
Clegg, Ian. 1971. Workers’ self-management in Algeria. London: Allen Lane.
Southgate, Samuel J. “From Workers’ Self-Management to State Bureaucratic Control: Autogestion in Algeria.” In Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present, 228–47. Haymarket Books, 2011.
Porter, David. “The Ben Bella Regime (1962-1965): Ideal and Reality of Workers' Self-Management.” In Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria, 92–104. AK Press, 2011.
Swearingin, Will D., and Philip C. Naylor. “Agricultural Policies and the Growing Food Security Crisis.” In State and Society in Algeria, edited by John P. Entelis. Westview Press, republished by Taylor and Francis Co., 1992.
Porter, David. “The Ben Bella Regime (1962-1965): Ideal and Reality of Workers' Self-Management.” In Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria, 92–104. AK Press, 2011.
Swearingin, Will D., and Philip C. Naylor. “Agricultural Policies and the Growing Food Security Crisis.” In State and Society in Algeria, edited by John P. Entelis. Westview Press, republished by Taylor and Francis Co., 1992.
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