A rural urbanity: About the evolution of socialist villages

We shall not revisit a theme that has had its heyday in academic circles—that of the peasantry and the agricultural crisis in Algeria. The issue has been addressed from various angles. Since the celebrated study conducted by the duo Bourdieu-Sayad, survey data has been continuously updated, even if the trend for rural studies has somewhat lost momentum over the last two decades. One reason for this decline—and this is merely a hypothesis which remains tangential to our present purpose—is linked to urban growth, resulting from population movements and city development. This dynamic has significantly influenced the academic focus regarding the country’s socio-economic reality. D. Hadjidj’s title, 'From the Forsaken Rural to the Coveted Urban', concerning migratory shifts from the countryside to the cities, could easily apply to the dynamics of academic research and the orientation of population and environmental studies over the last twenty to thirty years.

As for our interest, it focuses on a societal project entitled the 'Agrarian Revolution', and more specifically on its vestiges (or ruins), namely the 'thousand socialist villages'—the constituent elements of the said revolution, as Ripault-Megerand would put it. We begin with a series of simple yet pertinent questions: What remains of the socialist villages of the 1970s? What have they become? And what is the sociological profile of the population currently occupying them?

The implementation of the 'societal project' known as the 'Agrarian Revolution' was accompanied by a range of studies and analyses. Aside from the mass of final-year dissertations and theses across various social and economic science disciplines, we saw texts where it was conceived as a concept (as M. Lacheraf’s writings attest) or described as an ethnographic reality (by Fanny Colonna, among others). There was even an 'autopsy' of the death of agriculture, viewing the socialist villages as the ruins of an ambitious project, poorly conceived at the outset and clumsily implemented thereafter. This is the case in the chapter dedicated to the agricultural sector in the famous volume published under the pseudonym Tahar Benhouria.

If we follow the reasoning of the latter (A. El Kenz by his real name), this societal project, with its thousand socialist villages, was a failure. Yet, the ruin of agriculture does not fall solely upon the development project initiated by President Houari Boumediene; it should perhaps be noted that the Agrarian Revolution was merely the final phase of a process triggered a century earlier. Indeed, according to P. Bourdieu and A. Sayad, the agricultural crisis of independent Algeria was due to the colonial policy undertaken against the 'indigenous' people, depriving them of their lands and uprooting them from their environment. In the effort to adapt their expertise to the new reality imposed upon them, much of their foundational knowledge was lost. We might even say that failure was foretold; Benhouria merely chronicled it.

This process began with the launch of the project to build the thousand socialist villages. In Ripault-Megerand’s contribution to the Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, we read that among the Revolution’s objectives was 'to ensure the social and cultural promotion of the rural masses by improving their living conditions and integrating them into economic and social progress'. However, this seemingly 'noble' mission resulted in the ruin of agriculture—or at least what remained of ancestral agricultural expertise.