Translation and Introduction by Stepan Afanasyev.

Introduction

Robert Linhart is a French Marxist, born in 1944 in the city of Nice. He was one of the Althusserian philosophy students, already united in the Union of Communist Students, who created the famous ‘Cahiers Marxiste-Leniniste’ (CML) in December 1964. This was an Althusserian Marxist theoretical journal, dedicated to theoretical analysis of key Marxist concepts, the theory and history of various sciences, particularly mathematics, current sites of class struggle, and the critique of bourgeois ideology. Later on, Linhart would lead the faction which emerged from this journal and created the Maoist organization UJC(ML). The second volume, released in March 1965, was dedicated to Algeria and India. Linhart’s essay on Algeria, which is translated below, was drawn from his experiences in Algeria in the summer of 1964. Linhart later recounted that this visit was what converted him to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and the CML would itself become more and more preoccupied with the topics of third-world class struggles and Maoist ideology. 

The Algerian revolution was a highly complex process that has been largely forgotten about, but which ought to be further studied today. Revolutionary Algeria was a remarkable experiment in third-world socialist development and international solidarity. Nevertheless, what began as a national liberation struggle against the genocidal French occupation, which had lasted over a century and had murdered over 5 million Algerians, was ultimately unable to construct a viable path for mass economic participation and development after independence, facing as it did the massive economic contradictions created by imperialism. The pressure of mass unemployment led to violent oppositional activity and repression in response, which finally led to the terrible years of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. Nevertheless, the memory of Ben Bella and the early years of the Algerian revolution is remembered by some young Algerians even today as an inspiring attempt to create a better future for the country, and more broadly, for the oppressed majority of our earth. 

This essay on Algeria touches on many of the themes that reappear throughout Linhart’s works. In 2010, he wrote that his “different books complement one another and constitute an ensemble: [they] deal with the Taylor system, the peasant movement, resistance to exploitation”. Although his 1976 book ‘Lenin, the Peasants, Taylor’ presented a more lengthy analysis of the negative effects of the Taylorist organization of labor on attempts to construct a socialist society, this concern with the depoliticizing tendencies of ‘technocracy’ is also evident in his analysis of such elements in the post-revolutionary Algerian state, whose ‘modernizing’ aims, he writes, are the ‘goal towards which the most conscious and effective elements of imperialist policy tends, sometimes not without some success’. Instead of the ordinary bourgeois path, Linhart advocates the deepening of existing attempts in Algeria to construct a new society by allying together different segments of the peasantry, educated and organized by a principled political party. Linhart thus advocated a mode of development that would respond to the real needs of the masses, including their most exploited layers, and involve their participation at the very frontlines of its construction. He contrasts such a path of mass politicization and education to abstract sloganeering and bureaucratic show projects which require heavy present sacrifices on the part of the masses for unclear future goals. His attempt to identify ‘structural homologies’ between the contradictions of socialist development in post-revolutionary Algeria and the Soviet industrialization debates and experience is one of the most important parts of this work. The need to conceptualize – by grappling with its real contradictions – a progressive model of socio-economic development for poor nations is more urgent today than ever. 

ON THE CURRENT PHASE OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN ALGERIA

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

We do not propose here to describe the political and economic regime of the new Algeria. The reason is simple: this regime does not exist.

That self-management is still for the most part a pious wish is obvious and should not surprise us. You have to be completely foreign to Marxist-Leninist methods of analysis to imagine that one social formation can magically give way to another. We will refer several times to the Soviet Union, which for a long time retained elements of the Tsarist social structure. Algeria is no exception: its distorted economy is still a colonial economy. And the ideology of the popular masses is an ideology of the colonized – that is to say, among the most oppressed, a sort of passive resistance to the initiatives of the apparatuses, a desire for security and appeasement, a marked preference for immediate benefits. 

We must never lose sight of the fact that to speak of the Algerian Revolution is to mix analysis of the present situation with an evocation of the principal tendencies, the problems to be solved, and the problems which are being stirred up. The game is not over and most of the determining decisions remain to be made:

• The March decrees, the first official step towards socialism, date back two years; the Algiers charter, the first coherent revolutionary program, one year.
• The restructuring of the Party, the importance of which we shall have to stress, is barely being completed and the results are still difficult to distinguish.
• The second phase of the Agrarian Reform, that is to say the first act of an offensive against the strongest reactionary class in Algeria – the 18,000 large landowners – will only come into force this year. At this point, we can expect a new revolutionary outbreak as well as vigorous resistance from the big landowners targeted – and their allies in the state apparatus. The very nature of nationalization – with or without the means of production? with or without compensation – remains uncertain and will be of great importance.
• The small peasant production cooperatives, whose essential role to play we will try to indicate, still only exist in the draft stage. Their official status has not yet been adopted. The first attempts on the ground failed.
• The Plan does not yet exist. A pre-plan is being developed, the objectives of which are still being discussed.
• The accounting reorganization of the socialist agricultural sector is underway – we will underline its role in the progress of production relations in the countryside.
• As for the overhaul of the remuneration system and the creation of a wider range of agricultural wages, these measures only took effect a few months ago and it is impossible to know whether they had the expected effect – namely the return to the countryside of executives and essential specialists: accountants, mechanics, etc.
• Certain essential measures, which the Algerian government is committed to carrying out, have not yet been taken. Such as the nationalization of foreign trade.

In all fields, finally, the revolutionary struggle has only begun; everywhere the weight of previous structures is manifested, overturning projects and official attempts, hampering the rise of revolutionary layers; neo-colonialism remains, endowed with powerful means; the situation, all in all, is absolutely not stabilized.

We can only protest, therefore, against the petty-bourgeois flippancy of certain assessments made about Algeria. The play between the good and bad sides of history occupies center stage, and one already tries to classify the regime – often on the side of either bureaucratic national socialism or state capitalism. Nothing is more absurd than the question “Is Algeria socialist?” (The title of Challiand’s book). To ask this question and to answer it negatively – two years after Independence – is to demonstrate a total ignorance of the revolutionary process: there is no approved model of socialism that one applies after taking power; it is during years of class struggle – after the seizure of power – that the workers acquire the means to collectively control production and that a new state apparatus is forged which will be, in this struggle, their apparatus and not that of the exploiters. But the seizure of power by revolutionary militants is not enough to dispel the ignorance and illiteracy of the mass of workers, and to wrest control of the state from the commercial and bureaucratic bourgeoisie.       

If we must give up summary judgments, we are not powerless, however, to approach the current phase of Algerian history.

We will note, during this analysis, a certain number of analogies between the situation of Algeria after liberation and that of Soviet Russia in the first years after the Revolution; let us now identify the level at which we would like to situate these similarities. It is less a matter for us of discovering, besides very important differences, common elements (which nevertheless do exist – a vast, ignorant, miserable peasantry, still living in part in a self-subsistence economy; the persistent establishment (implantation) of private trade; the permanence of a bureaucratic state apparatus inherited from the previous period) – than of identifying the structural homologies likely to enlighten us on the laws of emergence and development of socialist-type social formations. In particular, we will focus on the problem, for us fundamental, of the contradictions that we see arise during the transition phase between effective production relations on the one hand, and, on the other hand, legal powers and different levels of political superstructures. We are led by this to sketch a theory of parallel economic worlds that we will formulate as follows. The “advance” (using this term for lack of a better term) of a part of the political and legal superstructures over the actual production relations necessarily constitutes, at the start of the transition phase, an essential progressive factor. However, out of a certain level of legal fiction, or of unrealism in the official representation of the relations of production, a second economic world is constituted, which obeys its own laws, often contradictory vis a vis their official representation. The unrealistic nature of certain slogans, the rigidity of premature or outdated legal statutes, or even a voluntarist conception of the Plan, have the consequence of drowning and obscuring the totality of production and distribution processes, which makes controlling them more and more difficult. The dissimulation function of official ideology worsens when unrecognized contradictions become more acute, and the room for maneuver of reactionary forces is reinforced. Ultimately, important fields of action, which in principle fall within the purview of the State, escape it completely; the government, gradually losing real control of the economic organism, finds itself pushed towards a partly magical control, the symptom of a veritable “state pathology” which consists, among other things, in attributing to “sabotage” distortions that it cannot rationally reduce through a strategy commensurate to its means.                  

Other manifestations of this state of affairs are excessive and unsubtle propaganda, the total obscuring of the class character of certain contradictions (between workers and peasants, between various layers of the peasantry, etc.). 

In fact, an excessive extension of the powers conferred either on the State or directly on the workers, while the effective means of ensuring these powers are still weak for the former as for the latter, turns into its opposite and even prohibits the exercise of powers which until then had been really exercised, or which could be exercised if there existed, at the level of the superstructure, a more realistic representation of the relations of production. The antagonism that develops between the requirements of official representation and the necessities of economic life makes essential illegal practices which, born in a field where legal fiction is particularly pronounced, spread to other fields and ultimately constitute a specific social function, an integral part of the structure.     

The “cult of personality” or, on the other hand, the persistence of capitalist-type realities under official socialist representations, may be the most striking consequence of the disproportion between powers claimed and assumed “in theory”, and the capacity to effectively exercise these powers. It is in this sense that outrageous nationalizations (in particular in the delicate sphere of commerce) or unrealistic slogans (“workers’ management”, when the workers are not in a position to assume it and that only a worker’s control can emerge in reality) are reversed into their opposites:         

• At one extreme, the monopolization by the State of exorbitant economic tasks which it does not have the means to dominate triggers the irruption into economic life, then the structuring, of clandestine functions (uncontrolled exchanges, etc.). This process was described by Bukharin in connection with “war communism“: we will offer an analysis of it in the passage of this article devoted to the problem of the marketing of agricultural products.    
• At the other extreme, the granting of fictitious powers to the workers favors the uncontrolled development of the bureaucracy – uncontrolled because this bureaucracy is not recognized, because it has no precise, legally delimited function and because it usurps a place which, in the official representation of the structure, is filled by the workers themselves. From a certain level of consolidation of fiction and “parallel” organizations, the gap between the legal representation of the relations of production and social practice can become, so to speak, irreducible, the new social structure resisting all superficial criticism (against “bureaucracy”, etc.).      

In this respect, the realism of the work of socialization, the meticulous precision brought to the means of control placed at the disposal of the workers, plays a decisive role. We will develop this point in the passage devoted to the conditions of effective control by workers over production in the self-managed sector. It seems to us that the need for great flexibility in the forms of agrarian cooperation is of the same order, a flexibility that manifests itself in particular in the multiplicity of types of property, such that it is possible to adapt a statute to each specific situation. We will designate this as a condition for the success of the Agrarian Reform, then of collectivization, when we deal with cooperation among the small peasantry.    

We would like to clarify what has just been said and situate it precisely in the outline of this article; these deformations of the transition phase are not the main characteristic of Algeria today, but could become so if certain paths are taken – excessively hasty industrialization, neglect of agriculture, violent policy towards the most disadvantaged members of the peasantry, exaggerated confidence in “self-management”.   

The current situation is confused and constantly shifting; the masking functions of ideology, the elements of underground bureaucratic management, the parallel economic worlds already appearing, but not yet structured into a coherent whole. It is enough to read the speeches of President Ben Bella to realize that the government refuses to cover up these distortions – or to attribute them to simple “saboteurs”. Trade union congresses and self-management congresses have allowed workers to freely express their criticisms and demands. But if the strategy that is implemented by the government does not rigorously correspond to the specific conditions of the class struggle in Algeria – conditions that we will try to describe -, the contradictions inherent in the transition phase could then take a sharp form.     

Some critics are cutting corners and are already making a point of reproaching the Algerian government for its demagoguery – even its reactionary character – on the pretext that its decrees and proclamations have not yet entered into reality.

This is to ignore the importance of the phase when the state power uses these means to address the masses over (par-dessus) its own apparatus: power thus assumes the role of agitation, making the masses aware of the objectives to be achieved even before the practical conditions are met:   

There was a time when the passing of decrees was a form of propaganda. People used to laugh at us and say that the Bolsheviks do not realise that their decrees are not being carried out; the entire whiteguard press was full of jeers on that score. But at that period this passing of decrees was quite justified. We Bolsheviks had just taken power, and we said to the peasant, to the worker: “Here is a decree; this is how we would like to have the state administered. Try it!” From the very outset we gave the ordinary workers and peasants an idea of our policy in the form of decrees. The result was the enormous confidence we enjoyed and now enjoy among the masses of the people. This was an essential period at the beginning of the revolution; without it we should not have risen on the crest of the revolutionary wave; we should have wallowed in its trough.

Lenin, Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P. (B.)¹  

It is impossible to give a fair assessment of the current phase if we neglect the need for this first stage and if we confuse the initially necessary mismatch between superstructures and relations of production – a positive mismatch which allows the former to play the role of training and liberation – with the pathological and frozen form that this inadequacy can take in a second phase (which then becomes a braking and obscuring factor). The whole difficulty, of course, lies in determining the threshold: was it already crossed when the N.EP was adopted?          

Still, the fundamental distinction between the two stages is explicitly made by Lenin , who continues, in the text cited (and which dates from 1922):  

But this period has passed, and we refuse to understand this. Now the peasants and workers will laugh at us if we order this or that government department to be formed or reorganized. The ordinary workers and peasants will display no interest in this now, and they will be right, because this is not the central task today[…] The key feature is that we have not got the right men in the right places; that responsible Communists who acquitted themselves magnificently during the revolution have been given commercial and industrial functions about which they know nothing; and they prevent us from seeing the truth, for rogues and rascals hide magnificently behind their backs. The trouble is that we have no such thing as practical control of how things have been done[…] the key feature now is not politics in the narrow sense of the word (what we read in the newspapers is just political fireworks; there is nothing socialist in it at all), the key feature is not resolutions, not departments and not reorganization.²

We have here, perfectly defined by Lenin, the displacement of the principal contradiction that founded the NEP: henceforth, in Russia, the shift of superstructures (“politics in the narrow sense of the term” ;” what we read in the newspapers”, “resolutions “, “departments”) plays a negative role of hindering and obscuring (“… they prevent us from seeing the truth”).              

If it is not based on such an analysis (a rigorous analysis of the stage which corresponds to the social formation where the revolutionary mutation takes place), political practice lapses into empiricism and subjectivism. It is this analysis that Challiand fails to make, which limits his enterprise to an inventory of facts that are often true but mixed with empty phrases and wishful thinking – facts which are ultimately meaningless, and which only serve as serious errors of interpretation.  

We have insisted at length on the points of insertion of the current phase of Algerian history in a general theoretical problematic of the phases of transition.

However, we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into the game of historical comparisons to neglect the specificity of the Algerian structure, which is overdetermined by a certain number of additional contradictions: 

1. The fact that the Algerian state apparatus is not only corrupted by petty-bourgeois or capitalist elements which retain their bases in market relations – like the Soviet apparatus of Lenin’s time – but also by imperialism, which does not rush to the borders but is rather implanted in the heart of this place. We will see the consequences for the problems of planning and accumulation.
2. The fact that Algeria is a small country inserted in the networks of a complex world market (in particular for its agricultural production: vines, citrus fruits, and other fruits and vegetables, which cannot therefore make any claims to autarchy. This fact modifies the terms of the problematic of Soviet planning and of the teleologist-geneticist alternative; the Algerian Plan will not be able to give itself the luxury of falling into voluntarism and will have to take a certain number of conditions as givens – in particular the structure of the external market.
3. The fact that the function of a conscious “proletariat” assumed in Russia by some 3 million workers in heavy industry seems to have to be fulfilled in Algeria initially by the modern fraction of the peasantry (the self-management workers, in very variable numbers, for reasons which we will indicate).

This shifts the Leninist problem of the alliance of the working class and the peasantry and transforms it into the problem of the alliance between different layers of the peasantry.

Within the limits of this article, a large number of important issues will not be discussed. We will not deal head-on with the prospects for industrialization; we will not analyze workers’ struggles – against the private industrial sector and foreign capital. While these phenomena may be called to play a decisive role later, they do not constitute the essential contradictions of the current phase. It is rather in the countryside that, in the midst of struggles and perils, the first features of new production relations emerge, and that the fate of the industry to come as much as that of agriculture is played out. 

We will try to show from several angles the strategic function of agriculture in the current phase. We can now say a few words in general about the transition phase.

What escaped certain theorists and practitioners of the transition phase (Trotsky, Preobrazhensky, Stalin) is the organic character of the transition phase, which is not a simple interlude, but determines from its specific characteristics the form that the properly socialist phase will take. We have often had a mechanistic conception of the different elements of the transitional structure: we have spoken of the ” advance ” and “retardation” of superstructures, or even of the relations of production (which does not mean much), as if part of the structure pivoted at will above the base and could then be returned to its place. But in a social formation, no place ever remains empty, and we have already spoken of the secondary and more or less parasitic organisms which develop there, and which it is no longer possible to liquidate. 

With regard to the relations between industry and agriculture – and consequently the relations between the working class and the peasantry – this mechanistic conception ended up imposing itself at the level of ” priorities “, of unequal relations and of multiple mediations: it was thought that the phase could be divided in two; at first, the working class would ” exploit ” the peasantry, confiscate a large part of the surplus from it, and tightly control its production. This process of ” primitive socialist accumulation ” would lay the industrial foundations for agricultural mechanization, and one could thus return to a normal situation.         

However, experience has shown that the distortions thus put in place cannot be purely and simply resolved: 

•  the excessively unequal relations between the working class and the peasantry (in particular at the level of prices) led to breaks in the alliance and required the establishment of a repressive and controlling apparatus which, thereafter, became difficult to eradicate.
• The little freedom left to the peasantry deteriorated its own capacities for productive consumption and determined a passivity that would weigh on the possibilities of planning even though there were significant material means of production.

This was the consequence of a narrow conception of the agricultural surplus (at its limit, the wheat taken by force for the workers of the city could be sufficient), which was to severely handicap a modern and differentiated industry that could consume many agricultural raw materials.

Now, if no one can dispute the need for a large socialist primitive accumulation, it is not obvious that this accumulation must always take such a centralized form. On the contrary, it can be valuable to allow an internal accumulation of agriculture to develop, at least for a certain time, so as to provide a solid and balanced basis for industrial development. Let us add that the accumulation of a centralized and unequal type that characterized Soviet Russia for a certain time was to a certain extent imposed on it by particular historical conditions (isolation, military encirclement), conditions which do not recur for each phase of transition.

We will come back to the way in which the problem is posed to the Algerians, in a way displaced to the relations between different sectors of agriculture and layers of the peasantry. We will now turn to the analysis of certain features of Algeria today.  

Our purpose is not to paint a situation but to sketch out a Marxist – that is to say scientific – analysis of social phenomena that many seem to be able to describe only in the form of the dithyramb or slander of the Pharisees. 

… The deepest cause, perhaps for our disagreement with the populists, lies in the difference in fundamental ideas about economic and social processes. In studying these processes, the populist usually draws such or such moralizing deductions. He does not regard the various groups of individuals participating in production as creators of such and such forms of existence; it does not propose to present the whole of the economic and social relations as the result of the relations between these groups whose interests differ, as well as the historical roles which they play.

Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia³

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF AGRICULTURAL SELF-MANAGEMENT 

The Algerian countryside 

The main contradiction of the Algerian agricultural economy lies in the perfect division between two sectors, which no objective unit brings together: 

• the fertile lands of the plains and the valleys
• the plain of Bône (the richest)
• the Mitidja
• the plain of Oran
• the valley of Chéliff

These lands were in their overwhelming majority in the hands of the French colonizers. They constitute what is called the ” modern sector”, now self-managed. About 30%, however, of this land used to and continues to belong to large Algerian landowners.  

This sector makes use of mechanical means of production and the totality of the irrigation network.

Its production is directly oriented towards the French market, on which it therefore continues to depend: 

• The vineyards (which cover more than 300,000 ha) export practically all of their production to France and constitute for the latter an excellent means of blackmail in economic negotiations,
•  The citrus fields (the main crop in the regions of Boufarik, Blida, Mohammedia, etc.) have suffered a severe crisis of overproduction in 1963 and 1964, due to the bad mood of French buyers, who turned to Morocco and Spain, Algeria’s main competitors in this market.
• The “ traditional ” sector, confined to stony slopes, foothills and eroded mountains.  

This is where the mass of small fellahs (more than six million) tries to survive, in a closed subsistence economy, outside all commercial exchanges. The operating conditions are disastrous, the means of production rudimentary: plowing with a wooden plow, often even – for the poorest – by hand, with a spade. No fertilizer, no crop rotation; the soils are exhausted.  

The March decrees and the functioning of the new institutions 

By the decrees of March 1963, the Algerian government legalized the taking over of ” vacant property ” – that is to say, industrial, commercial and agricultural enterprises abandoned by their European bosses – by workers.  

The management of the farms was handed over to the workers, who were to exercise it through institutions that borrowed from the agricultural workers’ self-management: the general assembly of the workers elects a council, which in turn appoints a management committee. The management committee appoints a chairman from among its members each year. The State is represented in the operation by a Director or temporarily (given the lack of cadres available in the current phase) by a “project manager”.    

The “management committee” assumes the management tasks of the company or the operation and in particular :   

•  Develops the plan for the development of the business or operation within the framework of the national plan, as well as the annual equipment, production and marketing programs,
•  Establishes regulations on the organization of labor, and on the definition and distribution of tasks and responsibilities,
•  Establishes end-of-year accounts
• Decides on the method of purchasing the necessary materials; inputs such as raw materials or seeds, etc.
• Decides how to market products and services
• Addresses production issues, including the hiring of seasonal workers”. 

How does agricultural self-management actually work? It covers over 3 000 000 hectares spread over a little more than 2 000 committees. The extent of the estates varies according to the type of production – from 600 ha under intensive cultivation to 6,000 on wheat plateaus – a self-managed estate sometimes includes 15 or 20 former ” farms ” (which remain separate and serve as the basis for the distribution of work).      

The means of production  

• So that the 1962 plowing campaign’s success could be guaranteed in both agricultural sectors, a large section of the tractors were withdrawn from the committees and made available to the SAPs (see below).
• With regards to the remaining material, it is used wisely from an cultivational point of view (plowing depths, etc.) but less well from a mechanical point of view. The training of mechanics attached to committees is a necessity of chief importance. There were a few upon Liberation ; they received the same wages as other workers and preferred to look for better paying jobs. 

A new decree has just raised their daily salary to more than 20 F, a realistic measure that will help resolve the issue. Perhaps an effort should be made in this direction for those returning from France after having worked at Renault, etc.

It is necessary to underline the importance of the solidarity which was manifested between workers of the cities and the countryside: during “ socialist Saturdays ”, voluntary mechanics came, in large numbers, to repair tractors and various installations on the farms (electrical installations, wine cellars, etc.); Considerable work has been done by this voluntary service, a concrete manifestation of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry in the tasks of socialist construction.    

The problem of equipment does not arise in an acute way in terms of the quantity of the means of production, but rather with regard to the maintenance of the existing means of production. With some 13,000 tractors, Algeria is relatively lucky. The two main concerns of the government are therefore:  

• The training of mechanics (contracts have been signed with specialized companies for this purpose).
• The homogenization of the equipment, which would make it possible to absorb the serious shortage of spare parts. 

But the sabotage of the imperialists and their accomplices in the bureaucratic bourgeoisie slows down and jeopardizes the reorganization: some large American company in the construction of agricultural equipment succeeds in concluding a contract with the administration for the supply of tractors; it constructs an annex in Algiers to guarantee the supply of spare parts. As soon as the material has been delivered and paid for, the annex disappears. The peasants will have to wait a long time for their spare parts.  

We hope that the forthcoming construction in the Algiers region of a tractor factory will give the Algerian comrades the means to shatter such maneuvers.

The Functioning of institutions 

The very low level of literacy in the countryside left by colonialism (it is common to find committees where only the project manager can write, the chairman himself being illiterate) limits workers’ participation in discussions, decisions, and organizational work.

Due to the limited resources of the General Assembly, the two essential functions are those of the chairman and the project manager.

The competence of the chairman above all technical: he is an old worker who has been employed for a long time in this field, and who knows it well.   

The project manager is delegated by the central administration (ONRA). Most often it’s a former agricultural instructor who has been given an internship for a few weeks on the march decrees and rudimentary accounting. In principle, he should deal with accounting, but often he has trouble controlling all the papers entrusted to him (inventory, cash book, stock accounts). Often, on his own initiative, he sets up a simple and usable system of accounts (large crop sheets or a work schedule). But the real accounts are in fact kept by the SAP, a dual body, both banking and technical (dealing with the supply of fertilizers, seeds, and chemicals).  

The SAP, formerly SIP (Société Indigène de Prévoyance) is a cooperative organization, set up by colonization to assist the small fellahs. Confusion between the banking and technical functions impacts on the flexibility of supplies of equipment and means of production – subject to the possibilities and timing of credit. The creation of an Agricultural Bank envisaged by the government will make it possible to separate these functions. As for the problem of accounting, we will tackle it later.

Hostility to the SAP has often manifested in the countryside: they have been accused of appropriating the means of production and even the profits. Most of these accusations are ill-founded but refer to a problem of structures that have not yet been resolved: the determination of the relationship between accumulation and democratic management, the distribution of posts in the technical and social division of labor. The history of class struggles in the countryside, which we will now discuss, revolves around this contradiction.  

[missing pages, 17]

is immediately broken down into wages, at the expense of supplies, of productive consumption. It has been calculated that generally, between 75% and 80% of production costs consist of wages.

In the current phase, the Algerian comrades are working to restore the situation and to clean up the management conditions in the committees. But it is obvious that insofar as the problems posed are not pragmatic ones and on the contrary, reflect the facts of the class struggle, the solution can only be found at the level of the revolutionary strategy of the totality.

How, for example, to free the management committees from their parasites if new centers of attraction are not created, specifically intended for the mass of poor small farmers and the unemployed? We thus end up with the management of the Peasant Unions, and the alliance of the two agricultural sectors. But there are many other problems that are faced head-on, inextricably linked, and which we will now address. 

PROBLEMS AND MEANS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY

We are going to examine some of the determining elements of the Algerian revolutionary strategy, insisting on the fact that the related options have not yet been taken definitively and that consequently our analysis will focus on the description of the present situation by the evocation of its possible evolution and will be attached to the conditions of possibility of Algerian socialism, not to an Algerian socialism already given.

Political superstructures and their function in the current phase: state apparatus – the FLN Party 

The experience of all socialist revolutions proves that workers’ new state power is obliged to use for a long period the state apparatus forged by the previous ruling class. The confusion –  often pointed out by the bourgeois – between the repressive social function of the state apparatus and its technical assignments (national accounts, administrative information, management of organizations and public services) prohibits any brutal liquidation and obliges the new government to retain in their technical role – one inextricably linked with their political authority – bureaucrats which it is not in a position to replace. Five years after the October Revolution, Lenin made clear the lingering power of the Tsarist bureaucracy : 

“We took over the old machinery of state, and that was our misfortune. Very often this machinery operates against us. In 1917, after we seized power, the government officials sabotaged us. This frightened us very much and we pleaded: “Please come back.” They all came back, but that was our misfortune. We now have a vast army of government employees, but lack sufficiently educated forces to exercise real control over them.”

Fourth Congress of the Communist International⁴ 

Lenin repeated this critique of the Soviet-Tsarist state apparatus over and over, insisting that “these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome .” (“Better fewer, but better”)⁵     

In this regard, there is no miracle in Algeria. The current state apparatus, the one on which one it relies to serve the revolutionary government, is nothing other than the old colonial apparatus, with its rigid structures, its bureaucracy, its oppressive aims; it is often even the men who served colonialism that today have the task of making the apparatus work, with the help of French aid workers: aren’t they the only ones who know how this apparatus works, how to write a memo, how to use the switchboard, the only ones to find their way through the maze of administrative circuits, and to understand the organizational hierarchy of the ministries?   

Given the administrative debacle of ’62, it is easy to understand the tendency to cling to the men who knew the machine. From the outset, the alibi of “technicality ” assured executives trained by colonialism, the debris of the ” third force ” and barely veiled counter-revolutionaries a de facto stranglehold on important sectors of public management: a situation which gave rise to numerous manifestations of sabotage or corruption in areas such as the marketing of products from the socialist sector, the importation of animals, etc. This de facto permanence of men and processes representative of the previous social formation was rather quickly covered with a cloud of “socialist” proclamations, the demagogic perfection of the most reactionary elements of the state apparatus which still contributes to obscure the real situation. We must insist on the fact that, while there is an accumulated experience of socialist revolutions, bourgeois reaction and imperialism benefit equally from the lessons of history: it is no longer at the level of ideology that the [reactionary] layers try to justify discredited capitalist relations of production in the eyes of the masses; by indulging in one-upmanship of revolutionary phraseology, their representatives can much more effectively take measures which are anti-socialist in practice and implement methods of management and planning in accordance with the interests of imperialism and its new comprador bourgeoisie.         

The pressure of the reactionary elements within the state apparatus is powerful enough to win over a number of genuine militants to technicist mythology, maintained by various cooperating engineers and ” experts “, and to lead them to propagate ” scientist ” prejudices which are useful to finally break any revolutionary initiatives and to perpetuate the old methods.    

The state apparatus, through its organization as well as through a large part of its members, therefore represents an unwieldy and often counter-revolutionary force. This is an essential given, but it is easy and naive to immediately constitute oneself as a judge. Lenin’s texts written five or six years after the Revolution of 1917 are there to remind us that the Soviet government was obliged to carry out the Revolution with the Czarist bureaucratic apparatus! That the seizure of power does not automatically constitute a fundamental modification of the state as an autonomous organism is the basis of Leninist political theory. 

When Challiand, after showing the large proportion of executives promoted from schools of colonial administration – in particular for management positions – hastens to conclude that “ it was essential to tackle the problem of administrative structures adapted by independence“ he draws a lesson that is as futile as it is ill-timed. It is obvious that the problem of the upheaval of the state machine arises and it is equally obvious that it could not be solved in the short period following the seizure of power by the FLN.   

On the other hand, Challiand is better inspired when he emphasizes, by referring to the Evian accords, that “the non-destruction of the old apparatus was thus guaranteed”. Imperialist policy weighs heavily on the Algerian state apparatus. However, it would be wrong to believe that imperialism relies solely on the permanence of the old colonial apparatus. The most serious danger is on the contrary in a certain style of modernization of the State, a technocracy of the Tunisian type, and it is towards this goal that the most conscious and effective elements of imperialist policy tends, sometimes not without some success.

Indeed, the old colonial state apparatus – ministries with innumerable departments, prefectures, DSA, SAP, etc. – is in the long term more or less condemned, in the first place because it no longer corresponds to the new relations of production which are being structured, but also because it appears more and more as incapable of fulfilling its technical functions: administrative delays, incapacity, confusion are such that the authorities are obliged to create additional devices, in principle better controlled by them, to carry out certain urgent operations – ONRA, special delegations. The use of these new devices brings out what is hardly tolerable in the long run for the maintenance of a mass of officials who are far from usable and who absorb an extremely large operating budget, despite the government’s austerity efforts. The decline of the colonial administrative structures and the birth of new centers of power and management are already causing competition between revolutionary militants and pro-imperialist elements for the control of these new centers. Bull and IBM, one at ONACO’s and the other at ONRA’s service, present themselves first as simple tools to record and use accounts and then, when significant costs have already been incurred, they abandon their ” neutrality ” and begin to exert pressure on the type of documents they want to receive, therefore on the collection of information : and gradually, it is one of the basic elements of the national control of the economy, which begins to pass into the hands of experts from foreign companies. For the training of administrative staff, the FAO is in line, trying to monopolize the intermediate techno-administrative functions for fear of seeing them fulfilled by grassroots militants; it hastens to propose its “ investigators ” for the collection of basic statistical and accounting information on the management committees and opposes any attempt which would tend to give the workers themselves the means to record part of this data (” if you make them literate you will make them communists “, explains an ” expert ” …). The mobilization of the rural masses itself, this task par excellence of the Party, becomes the objective of foreign companies specializing in ” animation “, such as IRAM, which thus enters into competition with a government BNASS created for the same purpose but whose limited resources and activists limit its possibilities for action. The tasks of Planning are of course not neglected by these companies and we see the flourishing of studies and development projects of various types which have nothing to do with the aspirations of the masses but are based exclusively on calculations of optimization and of profitability intended to valorize the capital of foreign aid as quickly as possible. It is here that the danger hence appears: insofar as the specialized organizations and the research companies bring with them the money necessary for the realization of their projects – and even practice a kind of blackmail for aid by insisting on controlling or even deciding on the use of the credits which they grant, they wield extreme influence over the conception of the objectives and the means of accumulation.               

In fact, whenever a specialized international body or a consulting firm obtains control and responsibility for a certain sector of Planning, or of information gathering, or of local administration, it is just as much a power that has been taken away from control by the people and its national organizations – in the first place the Party -, it is a new sector of economic management where authoritarian organization and mistrust with regard to any attempt at educating workers and advancing popular control preponderates, where ” development ” becomes the business of specialized calculators reasoning in terms of capitalist profitability. At the same time, this new apparatus which escapes the forms of sclerosis of the colonial administration thanks to the dynamism of businessmen and large financial means – generously spent by lenders eager to obtain large contracts for equipment projects, machinery supplies, etc. – secretes its own forms of waste: in particular “study” credits (which are often assimilated to productive investments, which allows them to be spent by a budget which the authorities are trying to make one of austerity) are inflated, each study being designed to require another – it is rare to come across an economic report that does not suggest specialized soil studies, sociological analyzes, etc. A host of “experts”, “engineers” and various “specialists” thus share an important part of the capital lent to Algeria and which it will one day be required to return without having been able to draw all the results that she could legitimately expect.              

It is these companies and organizations – SEDIA, FAO, IRAM, SEDES, SEDAGRI, etc. – veritable sellers of spare state apparatus, which constitute the vanguard detachment of imperialism in underdeveloped countries. A dangerous apparatus because it cloaks itself with the appearance of dynamism and efficiency and pretends to confine itself to the role of an instrument, usable even by a revolutionary government, while it undermines the means of action of the revolutionary layers of society, while it limits more and more people’s control over the organization of the population and ends up being the arbiter of the objectives of accumulation.

Such are the main forces within the state apparatus: a potential comprador bourgeoisie, linked to national merchant capital, which monopolizes the main management positions of the old colonial administrative apparatus and, influencing policy decisions, tries to take power once more by deforming some of the revolutionary objectives (economic control, rural activity) – the avant-garde elements of neo-colonialism. 

Faced with these reactionary forces, what are the means of action left to revolutionary militants? Speaking into the void of a reform of the state apparatus, of the fight against corruption – conceived as a simple affair of personal dishonesty – and against the bureaucracy, where one wants to see only excess of paperwork, is a simple voluntarism and often a hypocritical logomachy. 

The crux of the matter is not the immediate conquest of the state apparatus by the still disorganized revolutionary forces, but the structuring of these revolutionary forces on a class basis, that is to say the establishment of the party. As long as the revolutionary militants have not succeeded in raising the level of consciousness of a large part of the workers, in giving them the effective means of controlling production (we will come back to this point), the determining cadres – that is to say, the middle administrative and managerial staff – will continue to be made up of a petty bourgeoisie with a bureaucratic-colonial tradition, ensuring its grip on the tasks of economic control.

The essential problem is therefore to extract from the administrative jumble the few already-trained revolutionaries and to use them for this work of agitation and education in contact with the masses. It is to the extent that the militants are able to identify and defend the objective interests of the workers that the Party will secure a class base, and acquire the power necessary to extend its hold over the state apparatus.

This precondition was clearly laid down by the FLN which, at its last Congress, recognized the bureaucratic and colonial character of the state apparatus, and gave a priority role to the building of the Party, and stressed the need to preserve its autonomy: 

“ … In order not to be absorbed by the state, the Party must physically distinguish itself from it. In this regard, the majority of party cadres at the level of the various directorates should be outside these state bodies and devote themselves exclusively to party activities. This will avoid the danger of a suffocation of the party and its transformation into an auxiliary of the administration and an instrument of coercion.” (Algiers Charter)

Of course, the ultimate guarantee against ” suffocation does not lie in institutional arrangements but in a line which is that of the workers:   

“In the sea of people we are after all but a drop in the ocean, and we can administer only when we express correctly what the people are conscious of. Unless we do this the Communist Party will not lead the proletariat, the proletariat will not lead the masses, and the whole machine will collapse. ”

Lenin, XIth Congress of the PC⁶

Moreover, if we temporarily give up on making the state the main – or at least the only – link of revolutionary power, we must seek new forces on which to rely and develop a strategy that can counterbalance state deviations without falling into anarchy: the whole conception of primitive socialist accumulation must ultimately be affected. This is why we are going to examine here the main elements of a socialist strategy, both from the point of view of the extern defense of the self-managed sector, of its internal consolidation, as well as of the alliance with the other layers of the peasantry, and from the point of view of methods of accumulation. 

But before moving on to this analysis, it remains for us to complete our investigation of the “tools” of the government by examining the present state of the FLN party.  

The Party has not yet achieved its homogeneity. Numerous contradictions exist within it, inherited from the national struggle and from the social and political differentiation between participants of the liberation war. Of these contradictions, the main one is that which exists between the base of the Party and its leading cadres.

The party base is spontaneously social, absolutely not socialist. It demands salaries, jobs, the distribution of land to veterans, pensions for war widows, etc. In short, it expects benefits from the government, an attitude obviously inherited from the paternalism of certain colonial administrations (SAP, SAS, etc.). It has no idea of how an economy works, the meaning of wages, accumulation, etc.  

This spontaneous ideology is somewhat systematized by certain elements of the ANP, by ulamas and supporters of the “socialism of the Prophet”, in the sense of an authoritarian and social regime, and, on the other hand, by bourgeois demagogues with populist allure who use these spontaneous demands to fight against the socialist sector.  

Ultimately, we can say that the party base, often closer to veterans’ clubs or pressure groups than to a political organization, often expresses and imposes the subjective desires of the mass of small private peasants and the unemployed against the direct objective interests of the socialist sector and indirectly against this very group.

On the other hand, the leading organizations of the Party have a number of militants who are more and more aware of the objective conditions of socialist construction, as regards the accumulative function of agriculture, the role of industry, etc. ; but their uncertainties in determining which revolutionary layers on which to rely as a priority (industrial workers? peasants in the socialist sector? small fellahs?), their distance from the base, a distance which limits the effectiveness of their campaigns at explanation and the choice of their themes, are all factors that slow down their progress.  

It should be noted that intellectuals – in particular students – have often inherited the French left’s propensity for revolutionary phrases and its scant interest in the practical problems of building socialism. It is striking to see the cafes of Algiers haunted by young intellectuals whose essential topics of discussion seem to be alienation, study allowance, student status, etc. while it is difficult to find volunteers for the tasks of conducting surveys in the countryside, rural supervision, accountancy, literacy …

Should this be seen as a foretaste of what our UEC would be like when faced with the tasks of a socialist revolution? 

In fact, we cannot say that the revolutionary cadres have regrouped and organized definitively yet; the decisive fact of the last FLN Congress lies much more in the adoption of texts in which an effort is made to elucidate the present phase and its class data. The second phase of the political reorganization has only just started this summer, with the ” restructuring of the Party “, which aimed to make it possible to achieve balance between the objectives of the Congress and the human means to achieve them, that is to say, to eliminate the bourgeois elements and increase the number of workers of the socialist sector within the Party. It is still too early to take stock of this reorganization and it is very likely that we will see the present imbroglios continue for a time–which constitute such old foxes as those of the Bachaga family, authoritarian and imbued with colonial traditions in defending the objective interests of self-management against grassroots activists obsessed with the sole concern of liquidating unemployment immediately.   

There is no reason to be surprised at these contradictions: the instrument that is the Party is not forged outside the class struggle but within its very dynamics, and this struggle on the home front has just started. All efforts will be carried out head-on: mobilization of popular layers against the exploiters and structuring of the revolutionary vanguard. One of the conditions for the possibility of this situation is the presence in power of a leading team which takes up the positions of socialism. Now the new power (which we absolutely must not confuse with the state apparatus, since it lacks in particular the latter’s technical and managerial functions) has its own means of coercion – the police, etc. – which it can use even against its state apparatus, and means of direct communication with the masses (presidential speeches, often of considerable effect). The conjunction between the direct action of the new power over the apparatuses and the rise of popular struggles creates in the political structure the function of a fighting party: the organ is being born which will fulfill this function. What is essential is that the authorities be able to define a revolutionary strategy which takes into account the deformations of the state apparatus and deliberately favors the rise of antagonistic social forces (local management bodies, means of people’s control over production; communes which have their role to play in accumulation, etc.) which constitute the true nursery of the Party.      

We will discuss in the following pages the objectives of such a strategy: external defense of the socialist sector, internal consolidation, the alliance between the different layers of workers, means of primitive socialist accumulation. 

Elements of the overall strategy: Marketing, an essential link 

The development of socialization can be viewed from two main angles : the role of the socialist sector as a whole in the structure of the global economy; workers’ control over the production process within nationalized production units. We have often wanted to schematize this double problem as an antagonism between planning and self-management. To do so is to jump a little too quickly over the structure’s articulations, and to neglect on the one hand the deep link that exists between the requirements of a real plan (material balances, control, etc.) and the conditions of social management at the level of the production unit (simplified accounting methods). In fact, spaces of people’s control and centers of socialization are distributed within multiple implicated processes, which we must avoid confusing:     

• accumulation in terms of the increase in value of total social capital and the capitals of economic units.  
• accumulation from the point of view of the creation of new productive forces (industrialization) through agricultural surplus and foreign aid.  
• accumulation from the point of view of the development of the productivity of the existing productive forces, by the creation of various forms of infrastructure – irrigation, DRS etc. – and new types of operations.

However, whatever powers and power relations are established in the implementation of these tasks, it is through market categories that accumulation in its various aspects must take place. In other words, the transformation into value of agricultural production in the socialist sector is the first condition to be achieved. However, the marketing of agricultural production has always posed complex problems, since it requires :     

1. Rigorous coordination of commercial tasks with the production calendar (often very complex, for example for citrus fruits which give rise to 13 different harvests depending on the species).
2. Significant means of conditioning and storage.
3. The proper functioning of auxiliary light industries (funds etc.) and means of transport.
4. Finally a precise knowledge of the outlets, the most favorable market prices, etc. Thus, the citrus-producing colonists of the Perrégaux region had telex links with the main European markets: when a high price was established for mandarins in Copenhagen, people did not hesitate to charter Breguets to bring the merchandise there. 

The operation of marketing was therefore ensured, within the framework of the colonial economy : 

• By the skill of the capitalists in exploiting market fluctuations ; 
• By a very important network of wholesalers and intermediaries who held in their hands the infrastructure necessary for domestic distribution.

The first task of the new power, after the socialization decrees, was to ensure the profitability of the self-managed sector by trying to divert the profits of traders and wholesalers to the benefit of national accumulation.  

We can say that it was through the crisis of commercialization that the hardest class battle was waged between the socialist sector on the one hand and hypertrophied commercial capital on the other (undoubtedly the most powerful part of Algerian capitalism: speculators, wholesalers, various “nepmen” clinging parasitically to the self-managed sector). This first confrontation ended in the defeat of the socialist sector. Largely because of the collusion between the managing bodies of the state apparatus and the commercial bourgeoisie.   

The phases of this struggle are reminiscent of the development of the problem of commercialization and trade during the first years of Soviet power. Two stages: an attempt to storm and monopolize trade which ends in disarray due to deficiencies in state infrastructure ; then, a more flexible policy of control rather than taking possession, playing on market mechanisms in an attempt to control them. It is the encirclement phase, after the frontal attack of war communism, to use Lenin’s metaphor.  

After having hoped to organize the entire population into “consumption communes”, where the necessary products would be directly distributed in exchange for labor vouchers, the Bolshevik authorities agreed to give private intermediaries the chance to sell what they could not fully cover. They would therefore “learn” the techniques of commerce, accountancy, etc. and would set out to conquer the market by competing with private capital through better organized consumer cooperatives, shops, etc.    

In Algeria, government strategy broadly followed the two phases of Soviet policy : 

1. An attack by force, that is to say an attempt by the State to monopolize the main part of marketable agricultural production.A state body was created which was to take care of everything: taking the harvest out of the ground, conditioning it, directing it to markets and export locations. This was called the ONACO (National Marketing Office). The clandestine agreements between wholesalers and state officials, the rigged auctions, the harvests liquidated at ridiculous prices, largely showed that the state apparatus was far from constituting an effective instrument of economic struggle against the wholesalers and the bourgeoisie.
2. It seems that currently the militants are taking up the problem at the base and that a more rigorous effort is being undertaken, in the form of the establishment of marketing cooperatives capable of effectively fighting against the wholesalers and of selling the production of the socialist sector, freedom of maneuver being left to committees for the production of that which exceeds the absorption capacities of the cooperatives. It is especially in the East, with the creation of Departmental Unions, that the marketing crisis is beginning to subside.

The chronological and event-driven determination of this analogy matters little: what seems essential to us is that we see emerging these laws for the constitution of parallel economic worlds, the possibility and danger of which we have pointed out. A certain type of over-hasty revolutionary offensive in the sphere of commerce ends up offering wholesalers and, more generally, commercial capital, much greater possibilities of control over the economic organism of the state apparatus itself than those left to commercial capital by a progressive and more rigorous conquest of the market. This is the meaning of the failure, in Algeria, of ONACO, a failure to which Bukharin’s analysis of war communism and its abandonment in favor of the NEP applies very exactly:

” … During war communism, almost everything was legally in the hands of the state. In fact , there was an underground market, starting with the illegal stock exchange and ending with the “ peddling of products ”. […] With the establishment of the new economic policy, the productive forces began to grow rapidly. Regular trade has become legal. Legally , the state had in its hands much less than in the days of war communism. In fact the state had more because the development of big industry was assured […]

After the NEP, the state found itself faced with a state of affairs in which the state apparatus for the flow of goods was absent, while a torrent of several million small private traders broke loose. […]We can say that in the field of commerce, the situation was very dangerous : there was at the base an infinite number of private traders, starting with the peasants, who gave birth to small and tiny ” capitalists ” who in turn gave birth to more important cadres. At the top of the ladder, agile and flexible businessmen of of the speculator and profiteer type penetrated all the pores and all the interstices of the organism of the State after being given the possibility to move. They crept in wherever there was the possibility of obtaining exaggerated gain and large profits by speculation.   […]But during this period a double process took place : on the one hand a process of a certain accumulation of private capital and, on the other hand, a process of feverish organization, of a choice of men, of accumulation of business experience in newly organized state and cooperative bodies. In this way, the role of private commercial capital during this short period was, to some extent, to reap the ” tuition fees ” of organizations that were gradually recovering in their struggle with private capital. It was only after this early period that the workers’ state was able to undertake a gradual, slow, and at first barely visible offensive on the trade front ”.

Bukharin, The International Bourgeoisie and its Apostle Karl Kautsky

An overly centralized and state-run conception of accumulation, a refusal to allow certain capitalist mechanisms to operate in order to control them little by little, destruction of the balance of exchange, thereby laying the objective foundations of ” bureaucracy ” – of the clandestine alliance of the nepman, the rich peasant and the bureaucrat.

It should be emphasized, however, that the problem of commercialization does not arise in the same way in Algeria as it did in the Russia of 1921. In fact, the consequences of war communism led the Bolsheviks to pose the problem of distribution at the acutest level of physical survival, supplying the city through the countryside. What was brutally signaled to the working class by the peasant masses was the refusal of this alliance on the conditions imposed.

In Algeria, the problem has never arisen like this. The existence of a vast segment of production which is not legally marketed, but partly recovered by barter, etc., allowed the peasant mass to feed themselves as best they could and the relatively small number of city dwellers was not threatened with famine (the pilot socialist stores have in this respect helped to fight against speculation).

Above all, insofar as the Algerians have never tried to rid trade of its commercial substance (which, moreover, was unthinkable in a country so dependent on the world market), the problem was not posed by the givens of self-subsistence, but rather by budgetary data: the non-profitability of the socialist sector compromised an accumulation which was largely based on the circuit of exporting agricultural products, the income of foreign exchange, the purchase of machinery and equipment. 

Industrialization cannot proceed from a simple worker-peasant alliance, from the direct exchange of manufactured products for agricultural products, before Algeria has succeeded in creating the sector of production of the means of production, the possibility of which will be opened up by an initial progression of agricultural productivity (the conditions of which we will see later) and judicious marketing of the surplus.

All of these mediations and the obscuring role of external financial aid, which seemed to have the function of accumulation (in an illusory way), meant that the situation was able to deteriorate at the level of the budget of the committees and of the reinvestment fund without being manifested immediately in an explosive manner.

The fact that there was no Kronstadt does not limit the structural importance of commercialization. The state power will have to systematically renounce a state organization that only suffocates the socialist sector and enriches saboteurs and “nepmen”, and return to the management committees the initiative they demanded at the Congress of Fellahs – that of commercialization. The essential thing is always, for a government whose strengths and effective means are limited, not to take charge in all fields and of all tasks, but to firmly control certain strategic points : the monopoly of foreign trade, by leaving local organizations to take care of the procurement and delivery of products ; the use of vacant assets for storage and the creation of cooperatives, when the frameworks exist (the ideal being to have a former wholesaler and an accountant).

We have tried to illustrate the question of the defense of collectivized production units, the problem of the marketing of agricultural products; It is obvious that a whole series of similar points should be studied: in industry in particular, the defense of the socialist sector against private industry, the consolidation of enterprises in the same branch by the creation of integrated unions (as has been done for the timber industries); in agriculture and industry, the problem of supplying companies and the breakdown of certain foreign monopolies (sulfur). In fact, a consistent defense of the socialist sector cannot remain static and must lead to the socialization of new areas of economic life. But the perils of these enlargements demand that, internally, the workers acquire the means to actually exercise the management and control tasks which are in principle entrusted to them.

Conditions for effective control by workers over production 

“Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count.”  

Lenin, “Left-Wing” Childishness⁷

The problem of self-management is often considered from a point of view that is too limited (distribution of profits) or too abstract (the workers’ collective demands powers that it is not in a position to exercise). As far as wages are concerned, it is evident that privileged groups of workers, isolated in the midst of the unemployed and miserable fellahs, cannot afford the profits obtained because of exceptional conditions – modern means of production, more fertile land. The objectives of participation in the development of the cultivation plan, of work standards, and of the organization of production can, on the contrary, constitute a realistic objective, provided that the concrete means of this participation are examined. For the moment, the conditions for the possibility of control have not been met.   

The first – and most serious – obstacle is the very low level of culture of the workers, the overwhelming majority of whom are illiterate.

The second obstacle is the current accounting system, which even prevents the project manager from acquainting himself with the essential elements to influence the economic policy of the operation. This system is characterized by the concentration at a high administrative level and in the hands of a single body (the SAP, now called CCRA, cooperative center of Agrarian Reform) of three different tasks, namely: the distribution of credits, the distribution of material resources, and the keeping of accounts.    

Despite the efforts made to establish the keeping of a cash book and stock accounting at the committee level, the only accounting actually in place is the SAP global accounting system. However, this accounting is absolutely insufficient to establish the data necessary for management and planning: 

• It does not refer to actual production units (the ex-farms) but to centers of financial movement (the committee, a unit of several hectares, and the SAP).
• It does not make it possible to establish production costs and differentiated standards by type of crop and land, but on the contrary tends to equalize the differences by adjusting the number of units covered (thus equalizations are established for transport and plowing charged to the committee, without taking into account the actual cost price of these operations).
• In any case, the expenses are not even broken down between crops and even less between plots. This accounting equalization does not make it possible to detect the farms that are really in deficit or the aberrant production costs; as for the management committee, it is not in a position to analyze the actual profitability of a particular crop. 
• Above all, this accounting involves complex financial movements (payroll, global sums intended for fertilizers, etc.).

This accounting constitutes an instrument for the social division of labor and the distribution of resources, not an instrument for controlling the use of these resources.

Only a system of simplified crop information sheets, directly linked to the organization of work, can initiate this control. These crop sheets must consist of a record of the movements of products (fertilizer, seeds) indicated in quantity, hours of work, and hours of mechanized work at a very decentralized level (the plot or group of plots that constitute the “farm”). Such simplified stock accounting would be completed by quickly trained workers, under the responsibility of the “crop manager ”, constituting the backbone of an often non-existent work organization.      

In fact, what has not yet been resolved is the contradiction between the need – underlined by the state apparatus – to preserve the accumulation of capital according to external markets, the need, therefore, to centralize to the maximum the economic unit of production, and, on the other hand, the demand of workers to keep technical and social units of production of sufficiently small size so that they can be aware of the production process in which they are engaged and gradually gain control. It is no coincidence that this contradiction could not be resolved. The hidden struggle that exists between the social layer of workers of self-management and other peasant social layers (small fellahs and the unemployed) gives the opportunity to the commercial and bureaucratic bourgeoisie to pose as the defender of these deprived layers in order to actually monopolize to its profit part of the work of the socialist sector and to lay the foundations of a centralizing organization of the economy beyond the control and the will of the workers. The political power will increasingly have the task of supporting the workers’ desire for economic responsibility by paying the greatest attention to ad hoc reorganizations (accounting, location of equipment, etc.) into which the new powers will be incorporated. But insofar as this task goes well beyond the framework of technical reforms, it is closely linked to this other top priority political objective: the alliance of the self-managed sector with the small peasantry.    

Before posing the problems of this alliance, let us dwell for a moment on this question of the effective socialization of production units, and in particular specify the risk inherent in the attribution to workers of legal powers which they cannot exercise. We will reason with regard to the case of industrial units, because the technical division and the social division of labor are organized there in a systematic way, which is not always the case in agriculture. Nonetheless, the large integrated farms in the self-managed sector have achieved a degree of division of labor akin to industrial division – which would allow us to extend the demonstration made for industry to them.

When a factory has been nationalized, we can set ourselves the task of establishing workers’ control over production – control of cost prices, of the marketing plan, of work objectives – by carrying out simultaneously the two complementary aspects of socialization: the constitution of the effective conditions of control and the progress of the legal level of socialization. In effect, this means that the state delegates a responsible manager (and one which it does not feign to consider a simple secretary) and, at the same time, develops a simplified accounting system that allows workers to familiarize themselves with the different elements of the production and marketing process; to avoid competition between production units, the interests of the branch are defended by a workers’ committee elected by several companies (note that this unification is underway in the self-managed industrial sector in Algeria: “Consolidated unions” of wood, metals, etc.); in the production units themselves, Party work councils (this is the specific task of the avant-garde) advance at the level of subjective conditions, knowledge and the means of control, so as to give more and more content to legal powers that are already important but limited to precise tasks.            

Let us suppose now that the government messes up a step and, abandoning the slogan of “workers‘ control“, it adopts from the outset – that is to say from the beginning of the transition period – that of ” workers’ management”. The situation is radically modified: in fact, what is established from this moment is a legal fiction, provoking on the other hand, like a vital necessity, the structuring of an underground reality. The workers not having the means to collectively ” manage ” the means of production under pain of anarchy, it will be specialized executives who will do it in their place – but in a clandestine way – under the guise of secondary administrative functions. And above all they will do it in the name of the workers: since in principle it is the workers themselves who are in charge of management. Consequently, the end result being supposed to be achieved, it would appear absurd and almost reactionary to endeavor to create precise means of workers’ control in specific fields. Consequently, the gap created between the factual situation and the legal situation can only widen disproportionately. That which, in a situation of realistically delimited powers would allow control over the cadres, disappears. Having by right only a derisory existence, the executives assume in fact a decisive importance in all the fields. This condition, coupled with the fact that their clandestine place in the structure forces them to systematically hide the reality of the relations of production and to make themselves the means of expression of an official ideology very far removed from this reality, transforms them from simple executives into ” Bureaucracy “.                        

It seems to us that such a process is developing in the relationship between SAP and self-managed operations. In particular, it is urgent to legalize, in order to recognize and control them, a certain number of practices to which AMPs are driven (illegal and unaccounted profits taken from the supplies of equipment and products, from the rental of tractors) due to the unrealism of the budget conceded to them. By granting the EWS normal and codified bases of operation, one would perhaps succeed in normalizing the often very tense relations that they maintain with the committees (which reproach them for their illegal practices); Finally, we could establish control over financial movements in the socialist sector and know more exactly certain production costs. 

The small peasantry and the problems of the alliance

The most difficult and perhaps the most important task of the Revolution is to initiate the development of the productive forces in the most disadvantaged sector of agriculture – called “traditional”.  

An important task : 

• First, because only the mass of poor peasants and the unemployed can give the revolutionary power its true foundation.
• Second, because the neglect of the private sector results in an overload of the socialist sector (multiplication of jobs and various cuts), risking in the long run to jeopardize its very development.
• Finally, because if we tended despite everything to consider that only the agricultural sector deserves attention, which provides almost all of the marketable production and that, in any case, industrialization will solve the rural crisis by reducing unemployment and by providing machinery, the Algerian economy would be doomed to remain disproportionate, doomed to unequal development and burdened with bureaucratic outgrowths essential to deal with distortions.

Here we find, displaced within agriculture, the mechanistic reasoning that we criticized about the relationship between agriculture and industry: we accept the distortions, even if it means setting up a repressive apparatus that we intend to remove thereafter. However, the apparatus remains, the unity of the social layers which should be allied is broken and the whole structure is marked by it. 

The three essential points on which the fate of small farmers is played out are: 

1. The creation of production cooperatives – or ” Peasant Unions ” – that is to say, the modification of production relations and peasant ideology.  
2. Rural Renovation, that is to say, the qualitative transformation of the main means of production: the land. 
3. The alliance with the “modern” “socialized ” peasant layer, which must materialize at the level of the municipality, the place of a synthetic solution to the problems of production and distribution.    

These three problems are a prerequisite for the solution of all the others – mechanization, etc.

We will address them successively.

Cooperatives of small producers 

It is impossible for a small farmer who cultivates less than 10ha to use the land according to his potential. Whether the soil lends itself to it or not, he is forced to cultivate the grains he needs for food. What is more, in the inability to dispose of a surplus stored from one year to the next, he cannot even practice a simple rotation and depletes the soil. The weakness of his production acts in return since it does not allow the minimum exchange which would bring about the essential improvements – selected seeds, fertilizers.

Grouping small producers together would increase the surface area cultivated and make it possible to establish coherent cultivation plans, which take into account the use of the soil. Loans to the community would make it possible to jointly purchase selected seeds and possibly hire a tractor. But the determining element will always be the work of agitation conducted by the Party, to which fall the tasks of popularization, of propaganda for cooperation, of struggle against individualist ideology.

In this regard, the attempts to create Peasant Unions in the Chéliff valley have been significant. Deprived of political and technical support, they practically all failed. Most often the Peasant Union has been held at arm’s length by the SAP and has formed a parasitic collective. Here is how it comes to be this way. SAP provides selected seeds on a loan basis. The co-operators start by eating half of them to survive – they undertake the plowing together but, left to themselves, are quick to argue – each being convinced that his donkey works more than his neighbor’s. The quarrels having blocked the plowing, they end up begging the SAP to carry it out: weary of the struggle, it gives in and sends its tractors to plow in impossible conditions (on stony slopes) which has the double effect of damaging the equipment – to the discontent of the farmers of the plain – and irremediably indebting the nascent cooperative. Naturally, without agricultural extension, without technicians, cultivation practices remain the same and the results are always just as catastrophic: for three quintals sown, it is not uncommon for five to be harvested!   

Finally, impoverished, in debt, the cooperative caricature dissolves on its own and its participants fall back into isolation and misery.

These failed attempts are not without gravity insofar as they help to discredit the peasant unions, which the wealthier peasants of the plains consider to be groups of lazy people. In this area more than in any other, all the conditions for success must be met before any attempt: in particular, ideological effort, technical popularization, demonstration through facts of the advantages of cooperation (control plots, etc. .) is the sine qua non. The upheaval of ideological superstructures and of the objective relations of production must be led head on. The function of the party is precisely to create this momentary excess at the level of subjective factors which appears as a condition for material modifications – the growth of the productive forces – before the adequacy is again achieved at the level of a new structure, both collectivized and modernized.  

For the moment, the statutes and organization of peasant cooperation are the subject of careful study. An important point seems to be not to create large cooperatives which would arouse a mentality of users, therefore of profiteers (the normal attitude towards the colonial SAP), but of small units jointly owning or using a tractor. – which would exclude tacit sharing and would make collaboration necessary for a cultivation plan.

Rural Renovation 

The most glaring drama of the small peasantry is the accelerated destruction of the soil in the cultivated areas where they are trying to survive – foothills, mountainous areas. Geographical factors naturally play an important role, through erosion, but it is social factors that appear to be decisive (no crop rotation, no development, etc.). It is to the great merit of a specialist in agriculture in “ underdeveloped ” countries, Monjauze, for having given a global explanation of these phenomena, situating them as an interaction of physical, plant, biological, economic and social factors, and to have established, for Algeria, the broad lines of an agricultural policy, integrating the until then isolated problems of the “ agrarian reform ” and of the “Defense and Restoration of Soils” (DRS). This is the “Rural Renovation” theory.        

There can be no question of giving an account here in its full scope of this theory which would constitute an essential link in the analysis of the “Agrarian Revolution ”.  

The main points of this Renovation are: 

• The accelerated reconstitution of the soil: a powerful machine, the “rooter “, breaks the bedrock to a depth of 1 meter.   
• The restoration of the water cycle and the fight against erosion:  
• Rooting already has the effect of restoring the water stock in mixed soil.
• Tree planting will have the dual role of increasing precipitation (Soviet scientists have shown that an extensive network of Windbreaks can increase precipitation by up to 10%) and reduce evaporation.
• Classic DRS works alongside reforestation– bench terraces on slopes and so on – limit the effects of erosion.
• The reconstitution of the land structure on the basis of this new landscape (which implies a new distribution of plots no longer in a checkerboard pattern on the hill, but following the contour lines); the introduction of more modern cultivation practices (rotations, fertilizers); the choice of crops likely to accelerate the process of reconstitution of the soil.   

We see that it is a real upheaval of the previous structures – from the landscape to the distribution of property – which constitutes the Rural Renovation. This means that only the massive support of the target population can allow success. The resistance of the peasants to a redistribution of land in particular cannot be broken by administrative decisions. Without a political framework that enjoys the support of the workers, it is not possible to implement new cultivation practices; as soon as the DRS works are finished, the peasant resumes plowing perpendicular to the benches, which he quickly destroys. We should therefore not be surprised by the failure of French attempts to create “indicator zones” of Rural Renovation in the colonial framework, through the strong reinforcement of “psychological action”.      

The arrival in power of the FLN opens up the possibility of effective achievements in this area. So far, however, the Renovation as a comprehensive project has made little progress.

Isolating the problem of “reforestation” and tapping into enthusiastic but poorly skilled urban volunteering has done little to advance the problem. Trees planted within the framework of “national days” are sometimes even condemned to wither because, for lack of prior “rooting”, the water supply is lacking.      

As for the unemployment sites organized by the American Embassy under the undeserved name of “rural renovation sites”, they are only an organized waste of time: we take a hill at random, we have some terrace benches made and we go away. The only result is to increase the dissatisfaction of the unemployed who are called on to do bogus jobs for a moment and then abandoned again.   

In fact, planning and infrastructure work should be seen not as a task that can be entrusted to anyone, but as an integral part of the general progress of productive conditions, both objectively and subjectively. It is especially important that the volunteers for this kind of work are the future users, that the producers themselves take responsibility for improving production capacities. It is only on this condition that human investment creates this dynamic process in which unproductive developments and directly productive work are linked together in a continuous growth.  

The role of the Party, the importance of which we have already stressed in the launching of future cooperatives, will therefore be just as decisive in the task of Rural Renovation. In particular, propaganda for volunteering can only have an effect if it takes as its themes precise calculations, arguments by which it will be proved that voluntary work, far from increasing unemployment, creates productive employment; it will be necessary to give up on abstract propaganda, like that which is currently carried out, and to replace it by a work of rigorous explanations about each project (hill dam, terraces, etc.). This supposes the tireless presence of Party militants within the masses, in the villages, at the workplace – a mobilization which is still far from being achieved and which must become one of the priority objectives of political power.   

The alliance of the small peasantry with the self-managed agricultural sector. 

Assuming that certain technical and social obstacles are removed in the private sector, the problems facing it will not be resolved. The economics of agricultural production include in particular the problem of regional complementarities, and very often all the factors are inextricably intertwined in the plain-foothills ensemble (which can broadly be identified with the self-managed farm – small fellahs of the neighborhood ensemble). Primarily, the “ fodder revolution ”, preached so much by René Dumont, that is to say the establishment of a new balance based on the combination of the ensemble of livestock-forage crops introduced to the animal manure crop rotation, cannot intervene only in the modern sector: livestock accounts for 50% of the production of the small peasantry while it comprises only 10% of the self-managed sector, which is on the other hand infinitely better placed to produce fodder. We can see how the two economies should be complementary.   

The Orléansvillois region offers a significant example of this situation. On the foothills, the fellahs cultivate a poor wheat crop and miserable herding – low-value undernourished sheep. In the plain, wheat and vegetable crops for the most part. Little fodder. Between the two sectors, no communication. However, the introduction of fodder plants in the rotation of farms in the plain would constitute a notable improvement in production. The outlet seems obvious: the foothill breeders. But they absolutely refuse to buy fodder when they can have meager natural pastures. How can we be surprised that they do not care much about feeding their animals when they can barely feed themselves? In fact, it is not on a particular point that we can break the balance of misery and self-subsistence, but by a general policy of exchanges between the two sectors of agriculture, and of simultaneous development. In the case of Orléansvillois, such a policy would combine the creation of peasant unions to which credits and supplies would be advanced, the introduction of fodder in the rotations; breeding on the foothills could be supplemented by fattening and hiring in the farms of the plain; the manure would be distributed between the two sectors, etc.      

Here too, the growth of the productive forces depends in the last analysis on the dynamism of political organizations at the most decentralized level, and on their capacity to envisage a synthetic line. It is at the level of the commune that all the contradictions between the various peasant layers crystallize; It is at the level of the commune that the conditions for the possibility of accumulation must be realized, and in the first place the leap forward in agricultural productivity. It is at the level of the municipality that the socialist sector can demonstrate in a tangible way to the mass of poor peasants that it is a driving factor rather than an island of relative opulence.   

In this sense, the efforts made to develop cooperation between the two sectors are an important first step towards this alliance of the two sectors, the basis of a rational division of labor between the plains and the mountains. A trend is emerging in particular to link the emerging production cooperatives to the infrastructure already in place for self-managed farms: at the SAP would be located a CUMA, which would lend the tractors to the cooperative sectors. Supply and seed cooperatives would be common to both sectors, as would sales cooperatives. But the true alliance is still only sketched out and the weight of the contradictions between the layers of the peasantry continues to weigh heavily.   

“Technical assistance and socialist accumulation”

It goes without saying that one cannot speak of the economic basis of socialism without industrialization. However, certain conditions must be met for this industrialization to take place on a satisfactory basis. The problem is particularly acute for a country that remains in the economic sphere of imperialism: the Cubans were able without too much damage to make some mistakes by hasty industrialization, but these errors were repairable insofar as they were attached to the socialist economic space (and where the economic pressure of imperialism was not exerted on them from within). Conversely, Morocco has had the sad experience of neo-colonialist industrialization – that is to say of rampant looting. A remarkable analysis of this “negative industrialization” was given by A. Serfaty in the collection “ Industrialisation au Maghreb ” (Paris, 1963). This is not the place to resume the description of all the processes which allow imperialist capital to drain the resources of an exploited country, under the pretext of ” development aid ” (processes which are the internal accumulation of capital by exorbitant depreciation rates, dividend transfers, ” ghost freight “, etc.). A Serfaty rightly fights against the substantialist illusion which consists in seeing in any importation of means of production a positive phenomenon:               

The illusion that an industry that we create is, in any circumstance, a positive factor and a definite factor in the development of the country. We will see… that this industry can be a means of draining resources towards the outside instead of stimulating development.  

And Serfaty gives, it seems to us, a fair picture of the situation when he writes : 

 … Our countries are starting from an economic system that bathes in the capitalist system. I say “ which bathes” in the sense that we are not, we, so much in a closed capitalist system; in reality, we are only the dependencies of the developed capitalist system…      

If this situation is not fully taken into account and if we embark on industrialization before having secured the bases – by a leap forward in agriculture and measures to limit the economic influence of imperialism, the irruption of private capital or foreign aid capital can have catastrophic consequences.  

It seems to us that one can sketch, for a country like Algeria, an economic strategy in two stages (being of course not a question of a rigorous chronological division): 

• As long as the country is closely integrated into the imperialist system, do not encourage the creation of ” pockets ” (these ” development poles ” of neo-colonialism) easily controlled by a few experts and aid workers.      
• Promote the development of agriculture on a larger and less centralized basis – small water projects, rural renovation, etc. – to achieve in practice the alliance of workers –  privileged peasants – unprivileged peasants, and to advance the relations of production and their subjective representation in the countryside. 
• It is only from there that the economic (agricultural surplus) and social (anti-imperialist pressure from the masses) foundations of socialist industrialization can be laid.

This question is now being asked in Algeria : 

Can primitive socialist accumulation be the direct heir to the technocratic methods of ” development ” established by neo-colonialism? Can a revolutionary power carry out development tasks through the infrastructure left by specialists by “cooperation” and “technical assistance”?        

Or must it resolutely renounce, during the first stage of the transition, gigantic unproductive investments, major equipment works directed by an army of foreign engineers and set up, through political action at the base, more modest but truly popular centers of accumulation – micro-achievements, small water projects, human investment, etc. – where the hitherto exploited, humiliated masses would realize for the first time that their fate is in their hands and no longer depends on the hostile or paternalistic good faith of distant foreign technicians?   

The policy of modern, dynamic imperialism in “underdeveloped” countries is clear :   

• In the first place to divert for the benefit of the technicians provided by them the tasks which would fall to revolutionary militants, or even to grassroots workers.
• To monopolize the development of equipment programs, in order to multiply the outlets offered to the industries of the advanced capitalist countries.
• To drain assistance credits in sectors that are both costly and unproductive (roads, major works, prestigious installations) so as to divert them from investments in industry and to maintain the country in its role of supplier of raw materials and outlet for the products of imperialist countries. The “assembly lines”, integrated into the economy of the exporting country – where the multiplicative and accelerating effects are manifested – only constitute a sham of industrialization and cannot mask the real situation.  

The administrative structure put in place by colonialism lends itself admirably, as we shall see, to this kind of operation.

Imperialist policy is, moreover, perfectly deliberate. It would be necessary here to give an analysis of the principles of the IBRD, or of the main features of the Plan of Constantine. Let us content ourselves with quoting, according to Michel Hincker ( Économie et politique , July-August 59, p.69) this report of the Board of Directors of SOFFO (Société Financière pour la France et les Pays d’Outre-Mer) : 

In all these territories, we have committed the recklessness of granting full political sovereignty without having previously defined and put in place new economic structures. All these laboriously prepared conventions have practically become obsolete. What matters is… to put in place a truly liberal economic regime.  

We will end by illustrating the type of waste organized by colonialism, then by neo-colonialism within the framework of “development ”, on the policy of major works, which is designed to ensure :    

• The profits of large supplying companies (concrete, steel tubes, etc.).
• Various advantages to administrations that award contracts.

The most striking scandal was, within the framework of the Constantine plan, the multiplication of dams without additional investments. Out of a capacity of more than 100,000 hectares of irrigation by dams, only 40,000 hectares are actually irrigated. How is such an aberration possible?   

1. The administration which is in charge of the irrigation works (Hydraulics and Rural Engineering) receives ” fees “, that is to say a percentage of premium per cubage of concrete used. This percentage only comes into play for the bulk of the work; there is nothing for additional investments (the irrigation system itself); however, these require much more work, an effort of synthesis (choice of rotations according to the degree of salinity, determination of the type of irrigation, by sprinkling or not, etc.) and the collaboration of users, that is that is to say of the peasants.    
2. The companies called upon to work find all their interest in immense and expensive works of art and worry very little about the additional details: billions are thus swallowed up in vain. 
3. A large part of the works which must protect and enhance the dam does not depend on hydraulics and rural engineering. In particular, the reforestation of the slopes of the watershed, essential to avoid siltation, is the responsibility of Eaux et Forêts (Water and Forests).  

However, an old antagonism is maintained, from the scholastic level, between the two administrations (which brings us back to the French training system, since the positions are held by aid workers or by engineers trained in France). Finally, the Eaux et Forêts do nothing and the dam silts up.

Thus, the Oued Fodda dam lost almost half of its capacity before being enhanced by ancillary installations.

We see how the administrative compartmentalization disintegrates a complex problem such as irrigation into centrally regulated stages, without a summary of the different aspects. 

In such a situation, the productivity of investments is often almost zero, making Algeria an endless pit of loans, and therefore an inexhaustible source of interest for foreign capital.

An equipment policy cannot be catapulted from the outside but must involve the effective participation of the workers that one equips: even if the achievements must be infinitely more modest (hill dams, etc.), it is better to carry out useful work – because it responds to the desire and the productive demand of the peasants – than large unusable works. 

The equipment policy is only one aspect of the problem of the modalities of primitive socialist accumulation, which the Algerian government has to face. The choice of the location of industries (strict “capitalist” profitability which leads to over-determining in industries the areas already favored in the perspective of “poles of attraction”; or the effort of developing deprived regions, at the cost of more expensive options?) the choice of moving factors, etc. are an integral part of it. The charter of the FLN Party rightly states :      

“We cannot confuse, without leading to serious crises, the optimum rate and the maximum rate of accumulation. An optimum rate (which must be the goal sought) cannot result from the constraint undergone by the workers. This would lead to depoliticization, a tendency to desert villages, towns, factories, a spirit of generalized social irresponsibility. “

The Transition Period, Thesis 7  

CONCLUSION

Algeria’s multiple contradictions today revolve around two main determinations :  

1. Algeria is entering the transition phase which, from the formation of colonial semi-capitalism, should lead it to socialism.
2. Algeria remains integrated into the imperialist economic space and is the object of a neo-colonialist offensive.

It is no exaggeration to say that the conjunction of these two determinations imposes on Algerian militants an exceptional effort of analysis, failing which they would risk making serious errors. But the Marxist-Leninist theory, combined with precise knowledge of the present conditions, can allow them to dominate the contradictions and to correctly find their practice. This practice must take into account a certain number of constraints which we have tried to show, and which it would be dangerous to deny: 

• The discrepancy of a good part of the political superstructures in relation to the relations of production, either that they already embody the ideology of the social formation to come (the power of the revolutionary state), or on the contrary that they perpetuate the methods of economic management and the social division of labor established within the framework of the previous mode of production (the state apparatus). 
• The inadequacy of the powers legally granted to workers and their effective capacity to exercise them (this point was clearly highlighted by Charles Bettelheim); that is to say, the difference that exists between the official representation of the relations of production and the actual relations.   
• The reciprocity of the links that exist between the material level of the productive forces, the production relations and the subjective representation of the production relations; which is to say that given certain essential conditions – in particular the proof administered by the existing political power that it does indeed represent the objective interests of the workers -, an autonomous action is possible at the level of ideology, which has the effect of precipitating the liberation of the productive forces before the final material bases of the new production relations have been created (hence the role of the Party in the progress of the small peasantry).         

All of these discrepancies, inadequacies, and interactions between the different levels of social reality constitute both the raison d’être and the field of political practice that we call revolutionary strategy after the seizure of power. 

Lenin was the first to have put to work, mainly in the course of the NEP, the concepts which relate to these inadequacies and these inverted relations. He considered the non-adequacy of the state apparatus to the objectives of the Soviet government to be a given fact which is historically necessary, and outlined a strategy by which the control of the accumulation and reproduction of the productive forces would not be exclusively located in the central state apparatus, but partly entrusted to the municipalities:   

Some workers can and should be transferred from work at the centre to local work. As leading men of uyezds, and of volosts, where they can organise economic work as a whole on exemplary lines, they will do far more good, and perform work of far greater national importance, than by performing some junction at the centre. The exemplary organisation of the work will help to train new workers and provide examples that other districts could follow with relative ease. We at the centre shall be able to do a great deal to encourage the other districts all over the country to “follow” the good examples, and even make it mandatory for them to do so.

Lenin, The Tax in Kind⁸

Lenin showed that there was an autonomous action to be taken at the level of the subjective representation of the relations of production and that alliances between social strata cannot be based only on indefinitely mediated “common objective interests ” – the working class “exploiting” the peasantry in order to be able to equip it later with machines, the thesis of Preobrazhensky, then of Stalin – but also requires a community of immediate interests:       

We must reveal this link so that we may see it clearly, so that all the people may see it, and so that the whole mass of the peasantry may see that there is a connection between their present severe, incredibly ruined, incredibly impoverished and painful existence and the work which is being done for the sake of remote socialist ideals. (…) Our aim is to restore the link, to prove to the peasant by deeds that we are beginning with what is intelligible, familiar and immediately accessible to him, in spite of his poverty, and not with some thing remote and fantastic from the peasant’s point of view.

Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.)

It was also Lenin who, from the first months of Soviet political power, demonstrated the fact that the means of effective control by workers over the social process of production did not arise ex nihilo from the legal modification of property, that we will have to fight against this discrepancy and set ourselves the concrete task of creating these means of control:   

If we decided to continue to expropriate capital at the same rate at which we have been doing it up to now, we should certainly suffer defeat, because our work of organising proletarian accounting and control has obviously— obviously to every thinking person—fallen behind the work of directly “expropriating the expropriators”.

Lenin, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government        

The strategic nature of the question of accounting, on which we have insisted, only reflects the autonomy of the specific task of creating the subjective – literacy – and objective – simplified material accounting – means of socialization, in its full sense of effective popular control.   

Robert LINHART
March 1965

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1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm
2. Ibid.
3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/devel/
4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/04b.htm
5. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm
6. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm
7. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm
8. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm