It Could Happen Here - The Forgotten Algerian Revolution

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Mia and James discuss the nearly forgotten second Algerian revolution during which workers seized factory and field and implemented workers self-managementSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Yeah, fan-tunnel episode. You've been waiting for it. Here it is. Yeah, and the other thing that's dying, was dying, has died, sort of, was a bunch of French colonists in Algeria. Yeah, the French empire as a whole, one could say. Yeah, thank God. Jesus Christ. Why did we let these people have an empire? Terrible idea.

Yeah. Was it not an empire? The abroad France, right? The little parts of France, which just happened to be in Africa, totally a normal thing. Which particular part of the French Empire are we talking about? There are many, many such cases of French Empire taking L's. Not that that's unique, to be fair. Also British Empire took a lot of L's.

Yeah, so today we're talking about Algeria, and I think one of the things that I sort of realized about how the Algerian revolution is remembered in the West is, okay, so there's the kind of, the Frank Herbert reaction where they saw people who were Muslim in the the streets and were like holy shit and went insane for 70 years yeah yeah to be fair to be fair that was also poorly partly being driven mad by the portland dunes which like you know like i get sometimes sometimes you're driven you're driven completely insane by dunes but you know so there's like that's there's a sort of reactionary memory of it. There's a sort of memory that functions inside of, like, the American military, where, you know, Algeria, as you remember, is one of those sort of, like, examples of failed counterinsurgency. Yeah. And then there's the memory inside of the American left, which is largely confined to Fanon and the movie The battle of algiers yep classic movie to be fair

yeah great movie like nothing nothing good good movie uh however comma this is a real issue because the battle of algiers again great movie ends in 1957 fan Fanon, great theorist, dies in 1961. Now, notably, Algeria gains independence in 1962. So, okay, the issue with this is that people kind of broadly know the outlines of the first Algerian revolution. But the second Algerian revolution, the one where the Algerian working class seizes control of the means of production and attempts to run them autonomously is just has completely faded into the midst of history i talk about it no one has any idea what the fuck i'm talking about

and this is kind of startling because you know up until there's probably like there's like a four-year span where the algerian revolution is the sort of like capital S capital R social revolution. Like it's, it's the big one. It's the one people all over the world taking inspiration from. And then it kind of, you know, it flounders out for reasons that we're going to talk about. And also the cultural revolution starts and everyone latches onto that. But it's, it's sort of fascinating to me that this, me that the second part of the revolution and the part that everyone was really excited about, which is the core of the revolution being worker self-management and that being the sort of great theoretical innovation of Algerian socialism, that has just completely faded from memory. It's just gone. And so today we're talking about that revolution. Unfortunately, one of the most detailed studies on this I'm deciding from a lot is in Clegg's worker self-management in Algeria.

Now, this is a good book. However, Clegg is. He's a very specific kind of curmudgeon-y Marxist guy. Yeah, I'm familiar with that kind of guy. Yeah, so like the back third of this book is him engaged in a protracted ideological war with Fanon over the nature of revolutionary consciousness,

which is largely pointless and goes nowhere. Yeah. Many such cases you know but it is a very very detailed and very useful account of what actually happened after the first revolution like after the french are forced to pull out of algeria and what happens effectively is well okay we need to go back a little tiny bit so there are you know there is a a staggering slaughter of of people who attempt to resist french colonialism like a lot of the sort of techniques that are going to be used in vietnam that are going to be used all over the world and kind of insurgencies are developed in alger in this period. I'm going to read a quote from Clegg about what they were doing. The use of air power in Napalm to clear cover made movement inside the country almost impossible. The construction of mines and electrified barriers

along the border with Tunisia and Morocco kept the better trained and armed elements of the Army Liberation Nationale from coming to support the guerrillas and moving in supplies. One of the most successful moves encountering guerrilla activity was the policy of regroupment initiated liberation national from coming to support the gorillas and moving in supplies one of the most successful moves encountering gorilla activity was the policy of regroupment initiated by general chalet this strategy learned from the british and malaysia involved moving the rural population out of areas favorable to the gorillas and resettling them in camps under military guard an estimated two million peasants were treated this way creating vast social and economic problems for the future. So, like, they put 2 million people in concentration camps.

Yeah, exactly. Calling it regroupment is a fucking exercise in marketing. Like, rarely have I seen something so nefariously named. Like, we're regrouping them, parentheses, in a fucking concentration camp. Yeah, and this is a strategy that you know so the the british sort of start doing this in malaysia um a lot of it's derived from attempts to counter you know this isn't really an episode about that algerian revolution we won't talk about this a little bit it's it's it's designed as a way to counter sort of uh maoist insurgency campaigns which is the sort of you know the the the becomes

the new template for yeah like the power season yeah and it's because it works really well and you know like the key thing of maoist like well i mean there's a couple things obviously but like one of the key elements of it is this is this line from mao is it like the gorilla moves to the people like a fish moves to the sea right so it's about like it's about building social bases such that you know gorillas can move in and out of communities and not get turned in and stuff and use them as terrain. I've had that particular Mao phrase paraphrased to me. I think sometimes for people who are aware it comes from Mao, sometimes people who probably have just sort of come to it through their own understanding or heard it but not realized the source of it. uh understanding or or heard it but not realized the source of it by people who are not certainly not maoists all over the world like i've i've heard it in in the middle east i've heard it in

africa i've heard it in asia like it's a it's a it is a very important thing and like it it yeah it does make guerrilla warfare a lot easier if you can rely on the population this is something that's propagated through because because of the success of of mao's like guerrilla insurgency this is something that's propagated through i mean through the obviously like through through communist parties but i mean like a lot of islamist groups also pick it like pick up a lot of elements of it because a lot of those groups are trained in uh the plos uh camps in the valley in uh in Jordan. And so, like, a lot of groups, like, all over the world of

completely unrelated ideologies all sort of pick this stuff up. And the British response to this is, the British are fighting a communist insurgency in Malaysia. And they're like, okay, we're going to do concentration camps. For our purposes, so obviously this is a, you know, this is an unfathomable atrocity. But it has

enormous effects even after the war ends. Because suddenly, you know this is an unfathomable atrocity but it has enormous effects even after the war ends because suddenly you know okay like the war ends the french are gone but you know two million people have been taken from their homes and locked in and locked in camps and this has enormous you know i mean this is this has enormous economic effects um and the second thing that has really sort of stunning economic effects are the, so there, there, there's been a class of, of people in Algeria called the Colognes who are basically the,

the, the colonists. They're not actually all French. A lot of them are from other European countries, but they come to be this sort of hardcore French ultra, ultra nationalist sort of fascist turbo racists i guess they're they're they're not quite the rhodesians but they're they're only not quite the rhodesians because they didn't stay to fight it out and when when the french lose the war when the french pull out

these people just flee like all of them we're talking hundreds of thousands of people just are gone i'm gonna read another quote from clegg because you know if these people had merely left i think a lot of what's going to happen in this revolution goes a lot better but they didn't just leave quote in june a policy of scorched earth was declared inaugurating an orgy of destruction with his dream crumbling the colonist response was to destroy this world which i think is a really sort of elegant yeah yeah yeah i think that's actually very well written and it's funny it's this thing that again like you see replicated so often and there was this slogan that they used at the start of the Syrian civil war,

like Assad or we burn the country. Yeah. Yeah. It's this real, you know, so what the colonists end up doing is they end up just destroying everything they can get their hands on. They're destroying houses.

They're especially destroying any kind of sort of factor of technical equipment, anything they can find. They're burning, they're lighting on fire. And the the other thing about okay so algeria is a colonial economy right and the structure of the colonial economy is such that you know if you are a anyone who has any kind of technical or managerial experience are all colonists right everyone else in the country is either doing subsistence farming or has been fed in as like these sort of like seasonal workers or really really badly paid sort of contract workers on the on these sort of like cash crop agricultural

farms a lot of orange production stuff like that and so when the colonists flee the country suddenly like the entire technical managerial class everyone with technical experience and also all of the bosses and the entire bourgeoisie are just gone and this takes everyone by surprise the fln had assumed the flns the the the kind of like umbrella organization that carried out the revolution um they it kind of falls apart very quickly because it's it's not really a coherent ideological group it's just a sort of banner that everyone who is fighting kind of attaches themselves to yeah this is quite common right like national fronts yeah or like popular fronts very often do this post-revolution

yeah and they should disintegrate but but they had all expected that the colonists were going to stick around and they don't because they're turbo racists right um and the the thought of having to live in an algeria ruled by algeria this was like nope i will fucking literally light the world on fire and flee to france you know what else is going to light the world on fire and cause people to flee to france is it the products products and services that support this show yeah so how fucking good they are it's gonna it's gonna cause the world to burn and make people flee to france yeah i have to think about that when i think about like how big my pile of gold is i think that that it's too small. I'd Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories,

their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

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miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeart you get your podcast and we are back now enter enter here the heroes of this episode the workers council or very specifically so this is this is a french uh this is a french colony so in france and in in spain and in sort of i guess the the romance languages there there there was a concept called autogestion um i'm pronouncing it really badly because i'm reading the french version of it and trying to pronounce it half in spanish the only one of these languages i can even sort of speak but it so it means self-management and it basically it has this context of of sort of like workers democratic self-management, right?

If you're doing auto-histione, you're like the workers of a factory have taken over the factory and are running it themselves. The most prominent example at this point of self-management is Yugoslavia. Now, the Yugoslavian version is very, very weird. Now, the Yugoslavian version is very, very weird, but as a way basically to tell the Soviets to fuck off, Yugoslavia adopts a very different kind of model of socialism than everyone else's. So their model is based on the quote-unquote the withering away of the state.

So you have basically these reasonably democratic workers' co-ops that are sort of the productive basis of society and these these co-ops sort of compete against each other on the market but on the other hand there is a like a very large level of workers control that's different from you know like the u.s which is just a a pure dictatorship of your boss in the workplace tells you what to do, and if you don't do it, you get fired. And so Algeria gets

their, has their own version of self-management. But unlike Algeria, which is sort of effectively imposed by the top-down from the Communist Party, in Algeria, what happens is you have this this enormous mass of workers who used to work on these plantations used to work in factories there's these

huge colonial agricultural estates and what happens is with with the entire ruling class gone and when i say the entire ruling class we're talking from all the way up from you know the highest level government officials through all all of your sort of capitalist bosses right down to sort of the middle management guys are gone yeah all those people just have disappeared so what happens is workers start taking over all of their all of their workplaces, and they start forming workers' councils. Right. Now, this is driven largely by... I mean, there's a few different drivers. We'll get to the ideological aspect.

A lot of it is that these people have no money, and no one else is going to run it. So the workers who have now seized all of this stuff are like, okay, well, we're going to get the money we need to survive by running all the stuff ourselves. Yeah. And so this sort of starts in 1962, and it sweeps across the country very quickly. I mean, there's a lot of rural regions where it never really takes hold, but largely what's happening is that permanent workers who had been who had been workers at these firms seize control of them this has benefits and downsides the benefit of it is

so there's an attempt by the sort of the the new algerian sort of bush was either the sort of like small faction of algerian capitalists to buy up all land. And there's a bunch of really funny stories of these guys buying these estates and showing up in the workers' committee, just kicking them out. Yeah, yes, I've seen some of these. This is extremely funny. Yeah. There's also issues. So part of what's going

on is this is the permanent workers taking over the stuff with their people, right? And so a lot of times like they'll they'll kick out seasonal workers because yeah so it's not it's not perfect and there's a lot of issues with it right because this is this is all being formed effectively spontaneously by a bunch of extremely desperate people that's what i was just so obviously like because it's me the point of comparison i'm thinking of is the spanish civil war right yeah and workers self-management but there you have a workforce which is which has been working towards

collectivization for more than a decade in some cases and also like this is a point actually gets missed a lot in online discourse about the spanish civil war perhaps because people don't know as much as they think they do that like there were anarchists in all kinds of roles like when people talk about the the rooty column or whatever like there were absolutely anarchist non-commissioned officers from the military who they relied on heavily for advice and the same is true with the collectivized workplaces right that there were anarchists in many roles you know in shop stewards um and and things like that, obviously not in like the higher management roles. I think doing that is kind of incompatible with anarchism, but

and obviously what we're dealing here with is anarcho-syndicalism for the most part. The fire was more of a purist anarchist group, but, but there you had people who had been working towards this for a long time, who had been planning for it and who did have people with a variety of experiences and i think oversight might be a better word than the management perhaps or like sort of uh organization but they they were very successful and and but but that didn't just happen overnight it often gets presented as if it did as if on like the 18th of july these people were just sort of going to work and by the 20th they were fully formed anarchists running their own workplaces but that's absolutely not the case yeah and i'll judge you is the exact opposite of this which is yeah there's there's a

very low level of of political consciousness there's organization is almost non-existent because so i mean the kinds of organizations that had existed are you know you have these sort of vanguard cells but those are largely rural and then you have there there are some unions but they're not very they're not very large because they've been outlawed yeah there's repression right ground yeah like unbelievable oppression colonial context is extremely important yeah like like yeah obviously neither me or i is blaming algerian workers for not not being catalan no yeah like this is this is this is the french's fault and and you know but but this many such cases yeah but this seizure really takes

everyone by surprise because all all of the sort of leaders of fln all leaders of the various factions had assumed that either they were going to sort of do... I don't know. There's ideological conflict, but they all assume that they're going to do some kind of giant state-led industrialization project, right? Whether it's a socialist one, whether it's a more Islamist one. And then suddenly, they are now all... It's like, okay, well, your economy is now on the Yugoslavian self-management model because all of these workers have just seized all their workplaces. Now, there are a few organizations that are politically very supportive of this. which is Algeria's big sort of trade union are very politically socialist and they they are really

the only people in this entire country who are who are an organized political body who actually want to see this thing work and so they they do a lot of work helping helping workers set up their uh their committees and spreading the revolution their plan is to use this against any attempt to set up basically a dictatorship by uh you know it's okay and this is where it gets sort of interesting because very explicitly they are trying to stave off sort of soviet style socialist dictatorship right they are and their plan is we're going to use we're going to use the workers councils as the as the basis of of an actual sort of workers democracy against again against the sort of orthodox like marxist leninist stuff and this is another thing that's going on too is the army is

a lot more orthodox marxist leninist than than either the workers committees or the unions and so a lot in a lot of parts of the countries in the west the army just sort of rolls through knocks off the workers committees and seizes the land for itself and that's a fiasco but now pretty very quickly ben bella who emerges as as the sort of as the leader of algeria after a set of political maneuvering that we're not going to get into here um is basically forced to in in 1963 set a bunch of decrees saying that yeah these guys are the people who run the economy etc etc but there's there i i want to talk i want to actually get into something that i is is really not talked about in 99 of the accounts of stuff which is how do these councils actually work because spoiler alert this whole thing is going to fail and all these people are going to be crushed and a lot of that has to do with how this thing's set up which is very

badly because it is a system designed by marxists and they're very sympathetic marxists to a broad extent but unfortunately the way that these that this is set up is that okay so there's an assembly right that's like the all the workers in the firm are in this assembly. The assembly elects this workers' council, which has like 10 people. And then that council elects the management committee, which is the people who actually do the management. So it has a president, and there's also a director who's supposed to represent the interests of the state or whatever. And the issue with this is that it's designed specifically to keep power out of the hands of workers directly, right? That giant assembly, it can't actually make policy.

The only thing it can do is approve plans or disapprove plans set down by the management committee. Got it. Okay. And these people at the management committee are presumably like representatives as opposed to delegates right yeah yeah they're representatives they also have three-year terms and they can't be recalled i think they can but it's really hard okay and the other thing that that sort of destroys this is that they those they they there's a lot of sort of like election rigging by the state who doesn't want these things to be actual sort of democratic and the the and this leads into the bigger issue which is state control and this is this is where i i think really this is something that clegg doesn't get into much because clegg is a marxist but this is where the marxism of it all really comes into play oh but first do you know who's not a Marxist? Oh, yes, almost certainly.

Yeah, not Marxists. I think we can say not Marxists. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters,

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You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. So the biggest issue here, and this is something that was kind of true in both Algeria and in the other kind of big Marxist self-management experiments in Chile, which is that the self-managing firms don't have control over a lot of the things that they need. So in Algeria, when the state essentially tries to absorb all of this stuff, when it gets sort of legitimized under these decrees. There are a lot of issues.

One is that these self-managing organizations don't have control over their own money. So, you're getting paid by the state, right? So you give the state your money and then they pay you. And this becomes

a real issue because the state goes, oh, well, the people in these self-managing things are actually like privileged workers so they have permanent pay freezes and also you can't reinvest uh your profits back into the firm which is a real issue this is like a horrible combination of like ancap and uh and like straight up like stalinist like it without yeah i don't i don't't want to derail us too much, but this, again, is a distinct... It's so much worse than the Spanish system. It's so much worse.

Every part of it is set up to fail. Yeah, and I think this shit always gets... This is the sort of discourse... I am now going to derail us, I'm sorry. This is the online hammer and sickle in bio discourse that we see so often right and and you don't have to pay attention to those people and like you probably shouldn't but just just to like put it out there i think like anarcho-syndicalism is right there

and and it allows for the like unions and syndicates which over overlook a whole industry to coordinate between workers committees and ensure that you know things get done and people get treated with dignity and and they they also make enough money or have access to the resources that they need to survive and when we try and uh like cut the corners off this or kind of make a little collage between this and and marxist leninism or state socialism like neither thing works and we just end up with this kind of terrible hodgepodge in which it doesn't it doesn't function right but that doesn't necessarily mean that worker self-management itself is invalid as a concept it yeah and and there there's there's a lot of things here that you know so the the the the lat the lat one so one of the big criticisms of this at the time by socialist intellectuals is people going, well, there's not coordination, you know, the do coordination with each other and yeah the big thing and this is the thing that really actually kills this is that so uh

clagg calls it marketing is controlled by the state but that's not quite what's going on the other thing that's controlled by the state is the state isn't is has the responsibility or and and is the people who are in charge of selling the products and they just fuck this up completely they can't they can't figure out how to get like the fruit that's being produced sold right the problem here isn't isn't output is that the sit the state is doing things like i mean sometimes sometimes they'll have all these oranges so a lot of the the the algerian agricultural economy is set up as a cash crop economy and you're supposed to fight you so okay and it's it's never really worked very well

but the algerian state just completely shits the bed and there's i mean this is like i mean we're talking like tons of fruit is just sitting there rotting um a lot of the time what they do is they just dump it onto the french market at for like basically zero cost and so and you know and so you you you get you get these things and and you you look at the sort of profit loss thing and you know the the sort of like right wing parts of the state. And this is, oh, I guess you like, I guess they are right wing. But the sort of anti self-management parts of the state are going, oh, well, look at these firms. They're hemorrhaging all this money.

It's like, well, yeah, they're hemorrhaging money because instead of actually selling the goods, you guys are throwing all of their goods into a dumpster. Like, yeah, of course, it's not working. Right. Yeah. And this is a struggle of like post colonial economies if you in the french colonial system like they've decided that algeria is going to be the place that makes oranges for the entirety of the french i'm just sort of manufacturing example empire here then evidently what once you once you secede from that empire you now have a

fuck ton more oranges than you need for Algeria. So you're now going to have to navigate. And you might not have enough. Well, and they can't even figure out how to sell to other Algerians, too. That's the problem with the state control of the market. They can't do either because the bureaucrats that are running this

are completely incompetent. Right, yeah. I mean, one could argue the state's incapable of allocating resources equally or fairly but yes even so they've done a bad job even by state standards yeah and and and the and the subsequent issue too is because all the finances are controlled by the state even the firms that are profitable and there are firms that are very profitable they can't reinvest their profit back into you know improving efficiency improving efficiency or doing the basic things

that workers need, which is having money to eat. Because that money is just that all of that sort of capital is just being eaten by the state. And so, you know, there's another quote, Clay, again. As the president of a self-managed farm said to me in 1965, in this situation, how can we persuade the worker that he is no longer working for a capitalist exploiter and like well yeah he objectively is right he is like the state is stealing all of his money and then doing some stupid bullshit with it yeah i love that they're like they're not quite joining the dots there like yeah these guys don't seem to be getting it like maybe yeah maybe they do get it and and this is this is one of these things where you know like i i i keep going clegg clegg doesn't really draw this line

because he just i mean clegg just refuses to talk about uh either hungary or uh the spanish revolution at all right um yeah and this is where she's you really don't like well he's not an ml like that's the thing he he he is a he is a pro worker self-management guy right but he's a marxist pro worker self-management guy yeah so he's attributing the failure this largely to like well there wasn't sufficient consciousness so it's like well no like this system even if everyone wanted it to work this system couldn't have worked because it was set up in such a way that it was it was and this is something you know this is part of what i want to talk to you about this was that if you look at the way that the that the spanish system is set up right it's it's built off of coordination like basically like sectoral coordination between everyone who's doing a thing right it's built on

resource sharing if i'm remembering my stuff right i mean they have basically they have a banking union and people put their profits into the into the banking union and then people can get money from the banking union to reinvest it in other places yeah i think that's correct it's also like yeah like this this i guess i would that be called vertical integration if it's the whole sector even if it's they they they do this thing which takes advantage of both of the advantages of self-management gives you which is one like and like sort of you know and like socialist self-management right you you have the advantage of scale which is that you're now instead of competing against each other you're now coordinating an entire sector right and you're you're producing stuff that you're producing

stuff for need and then on the other hand you have the other thing that's supposed to be the advantage of self-management which is that the the the workers themselves who are the people who are supposed to know understand the production process the best can make decisions over how they're going to do things but then if you look at the algerian system because it's because it's set up by marxist it's specifically designed such that basically the like you're you're you're instead of you actually managing yourself you're you're just electing your boss and then your boss manages right yeah that's not actually a good this is it's weird because looking at this right this is actually a worse system in terms of self-management, I think, in a lot of senses than the Chinese one. Because the Chinese system is not designed for self-management, but you can't fire people.

So because you can't fire people, you have to listen to what people think and what people sort of do. Whereas this system, I don't know, it pisses me off because this is a revolution that very very easily could have worked but it was you know there's there's intentional sabotage by the state because most of the sectors of the state don't want this to work and then just structurally from the way it's set up it's it's it's, it's doomed to fail from the beginning. And the consequence of this is that in 1965, Ben Bella gets overthrown in a coup by another sort of, but basically the army, um,

a, a, a, a sort of state socialist faction of the army. And they hold onto power by basically turning Algeria into an oil economy. Yeah. And dismantling this entire thing. And it, I don't i don't know it makes me

really angry because the the like the actual algerian ruling class had the right idea and then they just got completely fucked by everyone who was supposed to be leading them or you know people who were supposed to be selling the stuff that they made people who are supposed to be leading them or you know people who were supposed to be selling the stuff that they made people who are supposed to be reinvesting all the people who ended up with the financial control just completely screwed them and yeah i don't know it's it's it's really it's it's it's really depressing in a lot of ways but on the other hand right like it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't have to go like this right you don't have to hand control of your workplace over to some fucking guy in the the department of agricultural waste management or whatever

so he can use your oranges for fertilizer like you can you can simply not do this yeah i mean i don't know the exact situation that these workers found themselves in and maybe there was you know like a degree of sort of need to get reproducing in order to you know solve hunger issues but yeah you simply do not have to do that as as many examples like i'm thinking of the collectivized farms in spain as well but because perhaps they would have been a better example right like i guess there it was slightly different because it was somewhat of a collectivized community that in turn collectivized the land as opposed to collectivizing the the agricultural labor and then you have this sort of source of labor which is not

inherently tied to the land that like, you know, when, when there was a need, like for instance, um, I'm writing a book right now, uh, I'm writing about the Daruti column and like they would, because they had less rifles and they had fighters, they would rotate their fighters off the front line during the harvest time and have people help with the harvest. And then they didn't like need those people the rest of the year right so they were able to incorporate like temporary surges in labor without it being like destructive to their model because it was the idea was like a collective community as opposed to uh a collective as opposed to like just the workplace being this island

of of pseudo collectivization like like you're seeing in Algeria. Also, shout out to the Iron Column, who I've been writing about recently, who solved their supply side issues by leaving the front line and raiding the cops because they didn't have enough guns either, so they simply took them from the cops. Extremely cool.

Incredibly based. Yeah, very based. Yeah, I think that's kind of the point that i want to end this on which is that you know this is something that that contributes to the collapse of of yugoslavia too is that if if you know the the the dichotomy that got forced on people in the 20th century was you can either choose to okay so your choices are you get a you get a sort of you you you get a stalinist planned economy completely run by the state or you get a bunch of workers cooperatives competing against each other and those are like your those are your two models of socialism and those both suck and both are setating to produce

what people need instead of everyone fighting over like either it will instead of either the state setting a steel quota and having that be the entire goal of the economy or like 17 co-ops and like both producing all producing the exact same kind of

coffee trying to figure out who can produce it more cheaply yeah we can do better yes we can and we have and all producing the exact same kind of coffee, trying to figure out who can produce it more cheaply. We can do better. Yes, we can, and we have. That's what we should strive for, I guess. If people want to read about the Spanish Revolution, there's a shit ton of books on Libcom. Jose Paret's book is pretty good,

The Sanitator and the Spanish Revolution. Murray Bookchin has a book about the heroic years of spanish anarchism abel paz has many books uh yeah you can you can spend time on libcom and read a lot about collective production in the spanish revolution and for free which is nice yeah this has been a kid happen here uh go take over your workplace and then also help if one else take over theirs and coordinate with each other yeah that would be very nice then then we'll do an interview with you on the podcast it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources

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