In March 1 963, Ben Bella's government promulgated a set of laws known as the March Decrees. These had been created in consultation with a group of European and Arab Trotskyites (including the Egypt­ian Luftallah Solliman, the Moroccan Mohammed Tahiri, and the Algerian Mohammed Harbi) who favored worker self-management. The decrees declared any vacant property to be legitimate collective prop­erty, legalized worker self-management on farms and in factories, and forbade speculation. The workers had already seized the vacant facto­ries, and the peasantry had already grabbed three million hectares of prime land left by the French colon farmers. The new government insti­tutionalized the inventiveness of the workers and the farmers. So far so good, but then the state made some errors. Whereas it had written no role for the state in these new institutions, it also tried to cut out the main trade union federation, the two-hundred-thousand-strong Union Generale des Travailleurs Algeriens (UGTA) that had led the factory takeover. [...]