Vol. 76/No. 20      May 21, 2012

The Algerian Revolution was one of the deepest in the wave of anti-colonial struggles that broke out after World War II. While short-lived, it had a profound impact that strengthened the revolutionary movement.

French colonial troops invaded Algeria in 1830, and immediately faced fierce resistance from the Algerian people. “From the first occupation of Algeria by the French to the present time, the unhappy country has been the arena of unceasing bloodshed, rapine and violence,” Frederick Engels wrote in 1857.

By 1917, French settlers, called colons, owned 55 percent of all the nation’s land. French imports crushed any chance for Algerian industry; the nation’s agricultural produce and rich resources were carted off to aid the development of French capital.

In the 1920s, Algerian immigrant workers in France, inspired by the Russian Revolution, organized to fight for equal rights and Algerian independence. Their organization, the Star of North Africa, was banned by the French government.

Ben Bella, born into a peasant family, fought as a soldier of the French army in World War II, in a segregated, Moroccan unit.

On May 8, 1945, the day Germany’s surrender formally ended the imperialist slaughter in Europe, Algerians demonstrated in Setif calling for democratic rights and equality, leading to bloody clashes with the colons. The French military launched reprisals, slaughtering 45,000 Algerians over the next six weeks.

Outraged by the massacre at the hands of the French forces that had claimed to be fighting for democracy against German fascism, Ben Bella resigned from the army and dedicated himself to the revolutionary struggle for independence. He joined the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties and ran for office, but the party was banned.

Turning to armed struggle, Ben Bella was arrested and jailed. After two years, he escaped and helped organize the National Liberation Front, which led the eight-year struggle to oust the French.

Flying from Morocco to Tunisia for a meeting in 1956, his plane was forced down by the French and he was imprisoned in France for the next five and a half years.

Algerian Revolution 1954-62

The murderous war sharply polarized France. Fascist organizations, aligned with a wing of the army and backed by the colons in Algeria, mobilized in the streets against concessions to Algerian insurgents. Students and young workers, increasingly appalled at the violence of the imperialist war, fought the fascist groups in the streets and many became sympathetic to the Algerian struggle.

The Socialist Party government, which was running the war with the backing of the Stalinist Communist Party, became increasingly unpopular, and was replaced with a Bonapartist regime led by Charles de Gaulle in 1958.

In 1962, de Gaulle was forced to concede defeat and signed the Evian Accords granting Algeria independence. The liberation movement and the Algerian people had won.

The FLN adopted the Tripoli Program, which championed mobilizing of the masses of workers and peasants to carry out a sweeping agrarian reform; nationalization of basic industry, transport, banks and foreign trade; collaboration with anti-colonial struggles around the world; and projected “the conscious construction of the country according to socialist principles with the power in the hands of the people.”

Workers and farmers government

“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.”

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.

Revolutionaries, especially in Africa, were attracted to the Algerian example. Nelson Mandela came from South Africa and Amilcar Cabral from Guinea-Bissau to discuss how to advance their battles against apartheid bondage and colonial domination.

Ben Bella developed close relations with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other Cuban leaders who supported the Algerian Revolution—both before and after the victory of the FLN—with financial aid, military supplies, troops, doctors and more.

The first internationalist medical mission from Cuba went to Algeria. The Cubans sent troops and tanks to assist the Algerians in standing off military provocations from neighboring Morocco, prodded by U.S. imperialism.

Ben Bella collaborated with Cuban leaders to aid revolutionary movements across Africa—from the Congo to Angola, and helped aid revolutionary groups fighting in Argentina and other countries in Latin America.

In France, thousands broke with the class-collaborationist policies of the Communist Party because of its treacherous stance against the Algerian Revolution.

“The Party had as its slogan ‘Peace in Algeria,’ and its instructions were not to have relations with the Algerians,” wrote Alain Krivine in an article printed in 2004. Krivine was a leader of the French CP youth organization who in 1957 was among those who broke with the Stalinist party and became involved in support for the Algerian Revolution.

On Oct. 17, 1961, the police attacked 30,000 Algerian workers demonstrating in Paris, killing hundreds. L’Humanité, the Communist Party newspaper, closed and shuttered its offices, not lifting a finger to help those fleeing the pogrom. The cops, Krivine recalled, propped up wounded and dying workers on the newspaper’s shutters. “An image like this one is unforgettable,” he said.

Krivine, and many like him, forged relations with other revolutionaries worldwide, including the SWP.

Impact on Malcolm X

“When I was in Africa in May, in Ghana,” Malcolm told Jack Barnes, now national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, in an interview for the Young Socialist magazine in 1965, “I was speaking with the Algerian ambassador [Taher Kaid] who is extremely militant and is a revolutionary in the true sense of the word.

“When I told him that my political, social, and economic philosophy was Black nationalism, he asked me very frankly: Well, where does that leave him? Because he was white. …

“So he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary,” Malcolm explained.

On June 19, 1965, Ben Bella was overthrown in a counterrevolutionary coup led by Minister of Defense Col. Houari Boumédienne and Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Ben Bella was thrown in prison, where he was held for the next 15 years and then exiled from the country for another decade.

The coup was bitterly assailed by Fidel Castro. “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.

There are invaluable lessons for today in the war of national liberation waged by the Algerian people and the historic defeat they inflicted on French imperialism, the betrayals of the Algerian struggle by the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties in France, how the workers and farmers government headed by Ben Bella was eroded and overthrown, and how these events continue to this day to shape politics in Algeria, in France and in the world.
 
 
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