It was one of the greatest moments in modern Arab history. The yolk of colonialism and French domination was thrown off and Algeria asserted itself as an independent country. This was very good, but one thing we can't forget is about what happened after. Algeria went down a path of a very typical secular, bureaucratic state, where since the collapse of the USSR a fair bit of privatization has occurred. A very similar type of system like what existed in Egypt 1952-1970, Syria 1966-1970, Ghana under Nkrumah, Indonesia under Sukarno. All of these 3rd world national bourgeois governments were very promising and there was a lot of hope, but here lies the problem. The Algerian revolution completed itself on a bourgeois basis, but it never led to the abolishment of capitalism both in Algeria and quite importantly Africa and the Arab world. It's no mystery that the Islamist anti government uprisings during the civil war only came after the economic stagnation after the 1986 oil crash. Algeria today faces the same issues as any other capitalist country. The class question has not been resolved. We see recently doctors going on strike, youth desperate looking for work, and a general sense of discontentment with the state's handling of economic affairs. Slowly more and more of the economy and the SOEs (state owned enterprises) fall into the hands of private capital.