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	Workers Vanguard No. 1161	20 September 2019

For a Workers and Peasants Government!

Algeria in Turmoil

For a Leninist-Trotskyist Party!

We print below a translation of an article by the Ligue trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League, that appeared in Le Bolchévik No. 228 (June 2019). Since the publication of this article datelined May 12, many hundreds of thousands of Algerians have continued to demonstrate against the government.

Since mid February, Algeria has been rocked by an unprecedented wave of mass demonstrations and strikes triggered by [then President] Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s attempt to run for a fifth presidential term. The first demonstrations took place in Vgayet (Bejaïa) in Kabylia [region in northern Algeria, home of the Berber-speaking Kabyle national minority]. Hundreds of thousands of people then took to the streets of Algiers, where rallies had been banned since the 2001 Kabyle “black spring,” in which some 130 Kabyles were killed. According to some estimates, some ten million people, nearly one-quarter of the country’s population, have been involved in protests. Bouteflika was finally ushered out by the army, which has held the real power in Algeria since independence. His ouster did not appease the protesters, who have continued to demand the removal of the whole Bouteflika “system,” including Army Chief of Staff Gaïd Salah. But even the departure of all the notables of the “system” would not solve anything if the struggle remains within the narrow framework of the capitalist system and if it does not have an internationalist perspective.

Algeria is a neocolonial country subjugated by imperialism, primarily by French imperialism. The Algerian bourgeoisie is tied to the imperialists by a thousand threads; it is too weak to break with its own subordination because it fears above all its “own” working class and the threat the latter poses to capitalist property.

Down With French Imperialism!

Imperialism is a global system of exploitation and oppression, dominated by a few rival powers. In the era of the dominance of finance capital, monopolies are supported by their nation-state with its armed forces. Behind the “aid” and “advice” of the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union are the imperialists, who seek to intensify the plundering of the natural resources of the dependent countries and bleed their economies dry in order to increase profits.

Our perspective is permanent revolution. Trotsky explained that, under capitalism, the bourgeoisie of those countries of belated capitalist development, restrained by imperialist oppression, cannot break the imperialist yoke. To do so, it is necessary to overthrow the capitalist system itself through socialist revolution. The proletariat, once in power, will have to call on its class brothers in the neighboring Arab countries and in the imperialist centers to extend the revolution to the rest of North Africa, especially to the powerful Egyptian proletariat, and to France itself, where hundreds of thousands of workers of Algerian origin are an integral part of the working class.

Algeria’s independence was heroically wrenched from the French colonialists in 1962, but the country, which remained capitalist, could not free itself from imperialist subjugation. The turnkey factories purchased at an exorbitant cost in the 1970s under [President Houari] Boumediène, with the aim of consolidating the development of a powerful Algerian national bourgeoisie, have only enriched imperialist engineering companies, without allowing balanced economic development.

Independent Algeria has never ceased to be a capitalist state. The army that has held power since 1962 defends the same forms of property as before, only now without any resort to “socialist” rhetoric. The core of the bourgeois state consists of bodies of armed men (the police, army, courts and prisons) whose very purpose is to defend the capitalist system of exploitation. Socialist revolution would shatter the institutions of the capitalist state by replacing them with new organs of power based on workers councils.

Our model is not Boumediène’s so-called “socialism,” but rather the Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky. The capitalists were driven out and the entire economy was nationalized, land was given to the peasants, and the young Soviet state fought with all its might for the victory of workers revolution in the capitalist countries of Europe, especially in Germany.

Despite the subsequent degeneration of that revolution due to the defeat of the German Revolution in late 1923, the internationally isolated Soviet Union remained a workers state, making possible vast economic and social progress, including in the realm of women’s rights. The very existence of the Soviet degenerated workers state allowed the Algerian bourgeois-nationalist government to maneuver in the face of imperialist demands. Thus, Algeria was a preeminent player in the “non-aligned” movement; its oil industry was nationalized in 1971.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, with the capitalist counterrevolution led by [Boris] Yeltsin in collusion with the imperialists, was a catastrophe for workers in the Soviet Union and far beyond. The “non-aligned” balancing act became impossible, and Algeria found itself more than ever dependent on international oil prices set in London and New York. The country sank into a bloody civil war, with the army pulling the strings to preserve its power.

Capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR had a profound impact on the level of consciousness of many workers around the world, including in Algeria and the diaspora of those of Algerian origin. Many Algerians, invoking the fate of the USSR and/or the failed industrialization of Algeria, think that socialism “did not work.” But it is ultimately because the Soviet Union was isolated that it perished. The Stalinist bureaucratic caste usurped political power from the working class beginning in 1923-24. The Stalinist bureaucracy, which pursued the pipe dream of conciliating the imperialists, was an enemy of international revolution—and an obstacle to achieving it. That history does not at all show that a socialist revolution in Algeria is impossible. Rather, it underlines that revolutionaries would have to immediately seek to extend the revolution internationally, including to France, where workers of Arab and Amazigh (Berber) origin would provide a huge base of support.

Constituent Assembly: A Trap for the Proletariat

Some demonstrators in Algiers praised the police and the army, viewing them as allies. This is a cruel illusion. It is true that demonstrating this spring in Algiers against the military regime has so far been considerably less dangerous than demonstrating in France against the “progressive” [President Emmanuel] Macron and his supposedly democratic cops. Nonetheless, while a section of the Algerian security apparatus was well aware that, sooner or later, the dying Bouteflika regime (which was a national embarrassment) would have to be buried, that apparatus is ready to defend capitalist domination by any and all means, including a bloodbath. Moreover, the May 9 arrest of Louisa Hanoune, leader of the (Lambertist) Workers’ Party (PT), is an ominous threat to the entire labor movement, regardless of the extent of her involvement with the Bouteflika regime. We demand Hanoune’s immediate release!

The army recently announced a presidential election for July 4. [The election was postponed and has been rescheduled for December 12.] Clearly, this election will in no way solve the problems of Algerian workers; nor will their problems be solved by the convening of a constituent assembly, which most of our political opponents are clamoring for. The Algerian Workers Socialist Party (PST), which has links to the NPA [Nouveau parti anticapitaliste] in France, declared that “only the election of a sovereign constituent assembly, representing the democratic and social aspirations of workers, youth, women and all the oppressed in our country, can represent a truly democratic solution to the current crisis” (National Secretariat of the PST, 3 April).

The central committee of the Algerian PT, which is linked in France to the Lambertists of the POI [Parti ouvrier indépendant], likewise decided on April 6 to focus its interventions “around demands for a sovereign Constituent Assembly, defense of the Algerian nation and renationalization of national wealth. For this the regime must clear out” (Informations ouvrières, 11-17 April). As for the dissident Lambertists of the POID [POI démocratique], who have been conspicuous in the Paris demonstrations, their newspaper headlines demand “a sovereign Constituent Assembly.” (The POID would have us forget that for more than 20 years its leaders led the international organization to which Louisa Hanoune and the PT still belong. The latter are rightly seen by many Algerians as flunkies of the regime.)

But to call for a constituent assembly is to call for a capitalist government. Consider the case of Tunisia after the fall of [President Zine al-Abidine] Ben Ali in 2011. A constituent assembly was duly elected in a relatively transparent manner. But the reality of bourgeois democracy was seen in the rise of anti-woman Islamist reactionaries and, moreover, a return of Ben Ali supporters. Today, in Tunisia it is more difficult to get an abortion than it was ten years ago. Historically, calling for a constituent assembly has simply been a trap for the working class and the oppressed. As we wrote in our article “Why We Reject the ‘Constituent Assembly’ Demand”:

“From the 19th century to today, all attempts to channel the struggles of the discontented masses into constituent assemblies or other new bourgeois parliamentary bodies have proven to be deadly traps. History has shown conclusively that the constituent assembly can achieve neither democracy nor national and social liberation, but only continued subordination to the bourgeoisie. It cannot be a bridge to proletarian state power, but only to disaster and defeat.”

—Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 63, Winter 2012-2013

The capitalist system is rooted in the oppression and exploitation of the working masses; bourgeois democracy is simply a facade for the dictatorship of capital. In a country like Algeria that is under the boot of imperialism, such a facade can only be a thin veneer for the power of the military. We oppose the call for a constituent assembly because the working class cannot exercise power on the basis of bourgeois institutions. There is only one way to put an end to the dictatorship of capital: the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry and the impoverished urban masses.

The working class must forge its own organs of power—workers councils—in carrying out a socialist revolution led by a revolutionary workers party. By seizing state power, the proletariat can smash bourgeois rule, expropriate the capitalist companies, lift the countryside out of its longstanding backwardness and establish a collectivized economy. This is the only road that leads to an international classless society in which oppression in all its forms has disappeared.

Mobilize the Social Power of the Working Class!

The lot of Algerian workers has significantly worsened since the collapse of oil prices in 2014. The country currently has an official unemployment rate of nearly 12 percent, and almost 30 percent for youth. According to the government, one-third of the population was living below the poverty line in 2015. Industrial production is stagnating, and the country has a trade deficit of billions of euros. The imperialists have seized the opportunity to have the IMF demand “the consolidation of public finances and the implementation of ambitious structural reforms.” The aim is clearly to force Algeria to implement an austerity program targeting the working masses and the poor.

Algeria has a small industrial proletariat whose social power is proportionally much greater than its size. These workers extract the oil and gas that constitute the core of the country’s economy. In March and April, a series of strikes practically paralyzed the capital and other cities in the country, in particular Vgayet and Tizi Ouzou in Kabylia. Workers in the public sector, the steel industry and even the oil industry went on strike. There is an urgent need for the proletariat to mobilize behind a class perspective: taking the lead in the struggle of the Algerian masses against the regime, with the aim of fighting for a workers and peasants government and the overthrow of the capitalist system itself.

This requires a political struggle in the unions against the hegemony of bourgeois nationalism. The main union, the UGTA, has since independence been a transmission belt for the FLN [the ruling National Liberation Front]. Following repeated protests by the union membership, UGTA leader Abdelmadjid Sidi Saïd finally announced on March 28—more than a month after the anti-Bouteflika movement began—that the union was distancing itself from the government. At the same time, the UGTA head was backing the plan of the army chief to replace Bouteflika in order to constitute “a legal framework capable of overcoming the political crisis facing our country today.”

Recently, the UGTA rank and file has increasingly mobilized to oust the bureaucrats who control the UGTA apparatus with an iron hand. The fight to forge a class-struggle leadership of the unions is inseparable from the struggle for the class independence of the unions from the capitalist state. Such struggles go hand in hand with the fight to forge a revolutionary vanguard workers party.

Such a party would seek to rally all the oppressed behind the working class, particularly the peasantry, the urban poor and women, who have mobilized massively in recent demonstrations. It would fight for the separation of mosque and state and against all the backward laws that discriminate against women, for instance, concerning inheritance. The oppression of women is rooted in the division of society into antagonistic social classes, as well as in the institution of the family. To eradicate this oppression, the victorious proletariat will put in place the means to socialize domestic tasks, including child-rearing, in order to lay the basis for replacing the family. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

For the Right of Self-Determination for Kabylia!

From the start of the demonstrations, the government has sought to set Arabs and Kabyles against each other in an attempt to sidetrack the mobilization. It raised, in scarcely veiled terms, the specter of a nonexistent separatist plot. In fact, workers who are Kabyle or of Kabyle origin played a very prominent role in the demonstrations and strikes against the Bouteflika “system,” in Kabylia itself but also in Algiers, Paris and elsewhere.

Anti-Kabyle chauvinism is an essential tool of the Algerian bourgeoisie to paralyze the proletariat. Yet Kabyles played a key role in the Algerian war of national liberation against French colonialism. Since then, they have repeatedly risen up, notably in 1963, 1980, 1994, 1998 and 2001, against their oppression, especially forced Arabization. The Kabyles, who have their own language, have long struggled with courage and determination for their rights. We are for the right of self-determination for Kabylia, including the formation of a separate Kabyle state if the Kabyles so decide.

This demand is crucial for the unity of the Arab and Amazigh proletariat against the capitalist rulers of Algeria. It does not imply any political support for the Kabyle bourgeois nationalists—on the contrary. Ferhat Mehenni’s MAK (Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia) is a split from the RCD, a bourgeois Kabyle party that fully supported the Algerian army in the 1990s civil war. Obscenely, the MAK has repeatedly called on the UN, where France sits on the Security Council. In his 2017 book, Kabylia—Mémorandum pour l’indépendance, Mehenni went so far as to compare French colonialism favorably to independent Algeria! The rights of the Kabyle people will be wrested in the struggle against Algerian capitalism and against French imperialism. The true potential allies of the Kabyle people are Algerian Arab workers and French workers.

We have in the past, under the guise of opposing the forced Arabization of the Kabyles, demanded that Berber and Arabic be promoted and treated equally, which is correct, but we also chauvinistically said the same of French. We argued that not to learn French would “further isolate Algerian youth from world culture.” But French was the language of colonialism, and it is the language of the main imperialist power that continues to oppress Algeria! We repudiate this chauvinist position and the articles we have published in the past on Algeria. This is part of a general rearming of our party on the national question (see “The Fight for Leninism on the National Question,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 65, Summer 2017).

In France, too, we oppose the chauvinist imposition of French monolingualism. To further their integration, immigrants and minority youth should be entitled to free, quality, bilingual education in French and in their mother tongue—thus maintaining the use of their language of origin. All public services in France must be provided in Arabic or Tamazight (among other languages). We also note that French youth are badly in need of a quality education in foreign languages (including English); they are, in fact, cut off from world cultures by French monolingualism.

It is necessary to build in Algeria, France and every country a revolutionary workers party that is independent of all bourgeois parties and firmly opposed to them. Such revolutionary parties, sections of a reforged Fourth International, would link the struggle for workers revolution in Algeria with that in France and other imperialist countries. When the proletariat rules on a world scale, the development of technical knowledge and industry will be used to lift the masses out of misery and scarcity and put them on the road to building a classless communist society.