forty years later

November 18, 2005:

In Paris, which has an estimated 200,000 homeless, a series of fires in sub-standard buildings killed 48 immigrants earlier this year. “Actions like these are the only way we can be heard,” said a young woman from the poor suburbs on TV.

For many in the middle class these events mark their first awareness of the degree of poverty in their country. Another teen said, “This is a new 1968, not in the universities, but in the projects.” And another: “We want jobs and we want respect.”

Instead, the government has resorted to a heavy hand. It imposed “fast-track trials,” sentencing in a few days almost 150 youth and adults to detention facilities in trials that lasted minutes.

And on Nov. 8 it invoked a 1955 law used during the Algerian War to put in place a 12-day state of emergency. Le Monde blasted the move as “[sending] to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents.”

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/60130.html

December 1965:

Generalized self-management, "extended to all production and all aspects of social life," would mean the end of the unemployment that affects two million Algerians, but it would also mean the end of the old society in all its aspects, the abolition of all its spiritual and material enslavements and the abolition of its masters. The present fledgling effort toward self-management can be controlled from above only because it consents to exclude below it that majority of the workers who don't participate in it or who are unemployed; and because even within its own enterprises it tolerates the formation of dominating strata of "directors" or management professionals who have worked their way up from the base or been appointed by the state. These managers are the state virus within that which tends to negate the state; they are a compromise. But the time for compromise is past, both for the state power and for the real power of the Algerian workers.

from: "Class Struggles in Algeria" by Mustapha Khayati

Published clandestinely in Algeria as a pamphlet, December 1965; trans. by Ken Knabb