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Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution
In 1962 when Algeria finally obtained its independence from France after an eight-year guerilla war, it immediately embarked upon a second revolution aimed at destroying the colonial economic and social order. While the nationalist leaders struggled for power in the first hours of independence, peasants seized French farms and workers the factories, thus setting Algeria on the road toward a new socialist order. This book is a study of the Algerian socialist revolution, of those who made it and those who gained by it. The primary focus is on political behavior, on those aspects of the struggle among Algerian leader which vitally affected the character of the new order. The authors find that even though Algeria acquired all the trappings of a socialist state and economy, politics remained almost exclusively a question of personal relations, alliances, and rivalries among a small group of leaders--what the authors call, borrowing a concept from the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, the politics of assabiya. Algeria's first President, Ahmed Ben Bella, tried to integrate the new and old political groups into a modern political system, but he failed. His overthrow by the army opened a second phase in the process of building stable political institutions and of overcoming the tradition of "palace conspiracies and rebellions of feudal lords." The authors trace in details this cyclical process during the first six years of Alergian independence. The work benefits from a wealth of first-hand information gathered during the authors' three-year stay in the country. The resulting picture is that of a new nation embarked upon a socialist "revolution" which owes little to Soviet or Chinese influences or, in some respects, even to the intentions of its leaders. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.
344 pages, Hardcover
Published March 25, 2022
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November 4, 2025
CLUELESS IN ALGIERS
David and Marina Ottaway spent three years in revolutionary Algeria, David Ottoway being a reporter for the New York Times there. While there is some useful information in the book, the authors really don’t know what a socialist revolution is, and whether Algeria had one. The little they know of Marxism is confused with Stalinism, which they appear not to be totally opposed to. So, what you get is bourgeois cynicism, mixed with a touch of Stalinism.
The book does give a picture of the dreadful state of things that France and its right-wing colons, after being defeated, leave the country in. The new government took power with the government offices having been robbed of phones, furniture, etc. They explain the different peoples and languages in Algeria, and the fact that it had never before existed as a single independent state.
But they have no idea what a socialist revolution looks like and spend more of their time reporting on action in the FLN and legislative assemblies than on what is happening among workers and farmers.
But when it comes to the revolutionaries, all they can see is unprincipled cliquism, which they sometimes describe as “clans,” or to show they’re familiar with the great 14th century Arab social scientist Ibn Khaldun, they use the Arab word “asabiya.” To them Ahmed Ben Bella, who becomes the central leader has no real differences with his opponents—they all just want to be the central leader. Even when he’s fighting a faction that includes former French collaborators, they assure us that there are no principles involved. They tell us that he’s popular with the masses, but they don’t say why.
They tell us that “No leader of the stature of a Lenin or a Mao Tse-Tung or even[!] a Castro had emerged from the war to dictate the theory and practice of the Algerian socialist revolution.” Lenin and Castro were great revolutionary leaders, as opposed to the Stalinist thug Mao, but there is no blueprint for a socialist revolution. This, of course, does not mean that one doesn’t have to absorb the lessons (both positive and negative) of what has gone before.
One of the things that seems to bother the authors most about Ben Bella is his “Trotskyite” [sic] advisors.
While they admit that “The Trotskyites had a long history of involvement in the Algerian Revolution, having been one of the first groups in Europe to support the cause of the FLN,” they give no idea why this was. In Lenin’s day, support to national liberation movements in colonies was automatic! Why did the FLN not receive support from the Soviet Union and China until they were in power and calling themselves socialist? In particular, the authors don’t even mention that the PCF (French Communist Party) refused to call for independence of Algeria, and during the struggle advanced the abstract slogan of “peace”! The French Trotskyists--together with dissident members of the PCF, and people who had left or been expelled from the PCF because of their revolutionary sympathies—were involved in producing and smuggling arms to the FLN. I have no interest in defending the political record of Michel Raptis, better known as Michel Pablo. But neither will I tolerate the Ottaways’ red baiting attempt to slander him.
They write that “The adoption of the self-management system in Algeria was largely the outcome of the chaos that reigned in the country at independence. In the confusion a small group of intellectuals [the French Trotskyists included workers] dominated by foreign Trotskyites was able to impose its ideas. Unfortunately, these intellectuals were only interested in promoting the takeover of power by the workers in order to prevent bureaucracy from chocking the revolution, as they believed had happened in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. They were oblivious to economic problems”[!].
Did Lenin think that the question of bureaucracy had nothing to do with economic problems? Of course not! (See in particular 'Lenin's Final Fight. Did Fidel Castro? Don’t be absurd! (See in particular 'Building Socialism in Cuba. Our Power Is That of the Working People.
Revolutionaries, including the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S., hailed the victory of the Algerian people. In 1964, Joseph Hansen, a leader of the SWP, wrote a resolution on the character of the Algerian government, which was adopted by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, at the time an international organization of revolutionaries.
"For some time, the course of the new regime in Algeria has shown that it is a `Workers and Farmers Government,'" Hansen wrote, "a possible forerunner of a workers state." (See The Workers and Farmers Government.
The resolution noted that at the outset the new FLN-led government included both bourgeois figures and popular revolutionary forces. The deepening mass mobilizations, backed by Ben Bella, led to the ouster of a number of the bourgeois figures and the establishment of a workers and peasants government, with many similarities to the course that led to the socialist revolution in Cuba a few years earlier.
The document pointed to the revolution's biggest challenge--the lack of a working-class political party and a communist leadership like that grouped around Fidel Castro in Cuba.
The Ottoways don’t make much of the overthrow and jailing of Ahmed Ben Bella by Col. Houari Boumédienne in 1965, although they note a decline in internationalism. But this marked the end of the opening stage of a socialist revolution in Algeria.
Fidel Castro was not neutral, and bitterly assailed the coup. "We are not going to talk in diplomatic language," Castro said in a June 27, 1965, speech: "In the first place, the military insurrection that overthrew Ben Bella's revolutionary government is not--nor can anyone classify it as--a revolutionary insurrection," Castro said.
"Those who disregard the force of the masses and who may try to replace them with the force of the barracks, behind the people's back," can never be revolutionary, Castro emphasized.
For a wonderful book of interviews with Ben Bella, see Ahmed Ben Bella by Robert Merle. For Ben Bella’s tribute to Che Guevara, see Celebrating the Homecoming of Ernesto Che Guevara's Reinforcement Brigade to Cuba. For the impact of the Algerian Revolution on Malcolm X, as well as revolutionary minded youth in the US see Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and Cuba and the Coming American Revolution.
Note: To date I have only read the first 100 pages of the book and skimmed a bit further. I might read more, but I don’t think I’d have anything more to add.
David and Marina Ottaway spent three years in revolutionary Algeria, David Ottoway being a reporter for the New York Times there. While there is some useful information in the book, the authors really don’t know what a socialist revolution is, and whether Algeria had one. The little they know of Marxism is confused with Stalinism, which they appear not to be totally opposed to. So, what you get is bourgeois cynicism, mixed with a touch of Stalinism.
The book does give a picture of the dreadful state of things that France and its right-wing colons, after being defeated, leave the country in. The new government took power with the government offices having been robbed of phones, furniture, etc. They explain the different peoples and languages in Algeria, and the fact that it had never before existed as a single independent state.
But they have no idea what a socialist revolution looks like and spend more of their time reporting on action in the FLN and legislative assemblies than on what is happening among workers and farmers.
But when it comes to the revolutionaries, all they can see is unprincipled cliquism, which they sometimes describe as “clans,” or to show they’re familiar with the great 14th century Arab social scientist Ibn Khaldun, they use the Arab word “asabiya.” To them Ahmed Ben Bella, who becomes the central leader has no real differences with his opponents—they all just want to be the central leader. Even when he’s fighting a faction that includes former French collaborators, they assure us that there are no principles involved. They tell us that he’s popular with the masses, but they don’t say why.
They tell us that “No leader of the stature of a Lenin or a Mao Tse-Tung or even[!] a Castro had emerged from the war to dictate the theory and practice of the Algerian socialist revolution.” Lenin and Castro were great revolutionary leaders, as opposed to the Stalinist thug Mao, but there is no blueprint for a socialist revolution. This, of course, does not mean that one doesn’t have to absorb the lessons (both positive and negative) of what has gone before.
One of the things that seems to bother the authors most about Ben Bella is his “Trotskyite” [sic] advisors.
While they admit that “The Trotskyites had a long history of involvement in the Algerian Revolution, having been one of the first groups in Europe to support the cause of the FLN,” they give no idea why this was. In Lenin’s day, support to national liberation movements in colonies was automatic! Why did the FLN not receive support from the Soviet Union and China until they were in power and calling themselves socialist? In particular, the authors don’t even mention that the PCF (French Communist Party) refused to call for independence of Algeria, and during the struggle advanced the abstract slogan of “peace”! The French Trotskyists--together with dissident members of the PCF, and people who had left or been expelled from the PCF because of their revolutionary sympathies—were involved in producing and smuggling arms to the FLN. I have no interest in defending the political record of Michel Raptis, better known as Michel Pablo. But neither will I tolerate the Ottaways’ red baiting attempt to slander him.
They write that “The adoption of the self-management system in Algeria was largely the outcome of the chaos that reigned in the country at independence. In the confusion a small group of intellectuals [the French Trotskyists included workers] dominated by foreign Trotskyites was able to impose its ideas. Unfortunately, these intellectuals were only interested in promoting the takeover of power by the workers in order to prevent bureaucracy from chocking the revolution, as they believed had happened in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. They were oblivious to economic problems”[!].
Did Lenin think that the question of bureaucracy had nothing to do with economic problems? Of course not! (See in particular 'Lenin's Final Fight. Did Fidel Castro? Don’t be absurd! (See in particular 'Building Socialism in Cuba. Our Power Is That of the Working People.
Revolutionaries, including the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S., hailed the victory of the Algerian people. In 1964, Joseph Hansen, a leader of the SWP, wrote a resolution on the character of the Algerian government, which was adopted by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, at the time an international organization of revolutionaries.
"For some time, the course of the new regime in Algeria has shown that it is a `Workers and Farmers Government,'" Hansen wrote, "a possible forerunner of a workers state." (See The Workers and Farmers Government.
The resolution noted that at the outset the new FLN-led government included both bourgeois figures and popular revolutionary forces. The deepening mass mobilizations, backed by Ben Bella, led to the ouster of a number of the bourgeois figures and the establishment of a workers and peasants government, with many similarities to the course that led to the socialist revolution in Cuba a few years earlier.
The document pointed to the revolution's biggest challenge--the lack of a working-class political party and a communist leadership like that grouped around Fidel Castro in Cuba.
The Ottoways don’t make much of the overthrow and jailing of Ahmed Ben Bella by Col. Houari Boumédienne in 1965, although they note a decline in internationalism. But this marked the end of the opening stage of a socialist revolution in Algeria.
Fidel Castro was not neutral, and bitterly assailed the coup. "We are not going to talk in diplomatic language," Castro said in a June 27, 1965, speech: "In the first place, the military insurrection that overthrew Ben Bella's revolutionary government is not--nor can anyone classify it as--a revolutionary insurrection," Castro said.
"Those who disregard the force of the masses and who may try to replace them with the force of the barracks, behind the people's back," can never be revolutionary, Castro emphasized.
For a wonderful book of interviews with Ben Bella, see Ahmed Ben Bella by Robert Merle. For Ben Bella’s tribute to Che Guevara, see Celebrating the Homecoming of Ernesto Che Guevara's Reinforcement Brigade to Cuba. For the impact of the Algerian Revolution on Malcolm X, as well as revolutionary minded youth in the US see Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and Cuba and the Coming American Revolution.
Note: To date I have only read the first 100 pages of the book and skimmed a bit further. I might read more, but I don’t think I’d have anything more to add.
Displaying 1 of 1 review