[Militant No. 697, 27th April 1984, p. 13]
By Lynn Walsh
With a violent shock, television pictures of the horrifying shooting in St James’s Square have brought Libya’s political conflicts to the attention of everyone in Britain.
The unprovoked shooting of anti-Qaddafi demonstrators from the embassy, and the killing of a policewoman, have aroused horror and indignation. Even in the context of other violent incidents, what happened outside the Libyan embassy is particularly outrageous.
The police siege, however, with the massive force of armed police and paramilitary equipment, is also on an unprecedented scale. The extension of the Qaddafi regime’s violent methods of repression to British soil has provided the authorities with yet another excuse for a display of special powers which potentially pose a threat to the labour movement and our democratic rights.
No doubt the Tory government would like nothing better than to take revenge of Qaddafi’s representatives. Qaddafi’s use of the oil weapon to push up oil prices; his intervention in Chad; his support for the Palestinians and other guerrilla groups; and his unrelenting propaganda war against imperialism have made Libya’s unpredictable ruler a thorn in the flesh for capitalist governments.
8000 Briton’s in Libya
Given the diplomatic conventions under the Treaty of Vienna, however, the government has no choice but to break off diplomatic relations and expel the occupants of the “People’s Bureau”, abandoning any hope of legal action against whoever was responsible for the shooting.
In the past, Britain would have sent the gunboats, and some Tories will still be screaming for punitive retaliation. But violation of diplomatic immunity would open up a Pandora’s box of unpredictable repercussions internationally, and not only for future British-Libyan relations. More immediately, Britain’s response is constrained by the presence of over 8,000 Britons in Libya, all potential hostages.
President Reagan’s announcement last week that he was sanctioning pre-emptive undercover operations abroad against “terrorist targets” – in other words, officially sponsored US terrorism – underlines the hypocrisy in many of the official denunciations of Qaddafi’s policies.
The recent increase in tension between Libya and the West, moreover, is largely the US governments’ responsibility. Reagan put pressure on US oil companies, now there is a world glut, to pull out of Libya. He also stepped up military provocations against Libya, which reached their height with the shooting down of two Libyan jet fighters in 1981. On the other hand, the US has now admitted that it rebuffed secret approaches from the Libyan government in 1983 to discuss “co-existence”.
However, the struggle of the “revolutionary committees” based in Libya’s “People’s Bureaux” in Britain and other countries has been directed not so much against imperialism as against Qaddafi’s exiled opponents. For the last three years there has been systematic terror organised from Tripoli, with the assassination of opposition leaders, and a systematic campaign of organised bombings and shootings to intimidate all opponents living abroad. The St James’s Square shooting is just the latest of a series of bloody incidents in Britain.
Since the shooting, moreover, it has emerged that the anti-Qaddafi demonstration in London was itself prompted by reports of the recent public hanging in Tripoli University of two students who had voiced criticism of the regime. Other public executions of opponents have been carried out over the last three years.
These events, and Qaddafi’s attempt to justify them with his own brand of socialism, clearly poses the question: What kind of state is Libya? Is it really socialist?
Most of the economy is undoubtedly controlled by the state. The petroleum industry, the vital source of Libya’s wealth, has been nationalised step by step since Qaddafi seized power in 1969. About 30%, mainly new development, is still owned by foreign oil companies.
Before oil, there was virtually no industrial sector. Manufactures were imported, paid for by agricultural exports but especially aid from the US and Britain in return for military bases.
Since the oil boom, Libya’s modernisation has been through state development plans, financed from oil revenues. This applies to both the infrastructure (ports, roads, electricity, railways, etc.) and to new industry (textiles, tanneries, chemicals, tyres, glass, etc.)
Compared to the pre-1969 position, industrialisation has been dramatic though non-oil manufacturing still contributes less than 2% to GNP.
Soon after the coup all commercial banks were nationalised. A decade later all importing was transferred to public corporations. Later, shops were banned from selling imported clothes, electrical goods, etc., and steps were taken to concentrate retail trade into state-administered supermarkets.
Although the regime’s plans may not yet be totally effective, it is clear that agriculture is the only sector where there is any significant private ownership left.
Libyan capitalism, such as it was – never more than a feeble commercial appendage to foreign capital – has clearly been wiped out. These radical changes have undoubtedly been directed from above. However, massive, though very uneven, improvements in living standards have aroused popular support, and the “popular committees” and the more recent “revolutionary committees” have played some role in carrying through social changes.
It is the radical reforms, marking a big advance for most Libyans, which have ensured the regime’s underlying stability, contradicting Qaddafi’s apparently erratic and unbalanced leadership.
Unlike other regimes now moving in a similar direction, Libya has not developed close ties with the Soviet Union. Oil wealth has allowed Qaddafi to pull away from capitalism internationally without being pushed, so far, towards economic dependence on the Stalinist states. In his recent foreign policy, however, Qaddafi has moved closer to the Soviet leadership.
If the exact character of the Libyan regime remains to be decided, at the moment the regime is moving in a radical direction. A revival of capitalism after a period of rapid modernisation through state intervention, as in Egypt after Nasser or in Algeria after Ben Bella, appears to be ruled out both by the international crisis and by the lack of opportunities or points of support for capitalism within Libya.
But accepting Qaddafi’s claim that Libya is socialist, which for Marxists implies the conscious involvement of the working class in the running of society, is quite another matter.
Police state
Libya is officially a “Socialist Arab Jamahiriya” (“state of the masses”) based on Qaddafi’s “third universal theory”, an Islamic alternative to both capitalism and atheistic Communism.
In theory, control is exercised by the masses through popular congresses. In practice, the regime is run as a police state. Discussion at the base is tolerated only insofar as it corresponds with the vision at the top.
Significantly, there are no popular committees in either the petroleum industry or the army, originally the real bases of Qaddafi’s power. More recently, however, plots within the officer corps led Qaddafi to form the Islamic revolutionary militia based on universal conscription, including women. The militias draw on enthusiastic support from some sections of youth, but are nevertheless firmly controlled from above.
Qaddafi’s regime is in reality a form of Bonapartism which has gained exceptional autonomy and dynamism from the mushrooming of Libya’s immense oil wealth. Capitalism had nothing to offer, and therefore Qaddafi has attempted to push beyond the limits of capitalism, forcing the pace of change through the brutal power of the state.
To appeal to the workers and labouring poor of Libya and the Arab lands, Qaddafi has fashioned himself exotic socialist clothes. Yet because of the country’s paucity of resources, oil aside, and the weakness of the working class (60% of the workforce is drawn from abroad because of the shortage of skills at home), the regime progresses through methods which appear completely barbaric to the workers in countries where the labour movement has won democratic rights.
Ferocious repression, virulent nationalism, and the regime’s Islamic complexion rule out any appeal to the working class internationally. This can only accentuate the narrow national limitations and acute contradictions of Libya’s position.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Qaddafi’s foreign policy. His fervent pursuit of “Arab unity” with attempted mergers with Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and others, and his intervention in Morocco, Chad, Sudan, and Uganda (supporting the Muslim Amin), have brought him into sharp conflict with most of the Arab states, apart from Syria (whose Soviet arms bills Libya has consistently paid). Other Arab rulers regard Qaddafi as a dangerous maverick who could afford adventurist policies because of oil wealth and indulge in implacable struggle against the Zionism because of his remoteness from Israel’s borders.
Only if the workers and labouring poor of the Middle East and North Africa, on the basis of class unity and Marxist ideas, move to transform society and establish a Socialist Federation of States will the grotesque problems created under capitalism be solved. Peculiar, distorted Bonapartist regimes like Qaddafi’s arise precisely from the delay of socialist change internationally, particularly in those countries where capitalism has laid the material basis for a higher level of development under socialism.
Meanwhile, Qaddafi will almost certainly face sharper opposition in the next period, both at home and among the 100,000 exiles. Inevitably, Qaddafi’s measures met with opposition from the old ruling strata, especially from businessmen, merchants and the professions close to them. The recent take-over of the retail trade provoked even more opposition.
Hit squads
Many of the opposition groups now based abroad, undoubtedly represent reactionary interests, and some of them are probably secretly backed by the US. But the ranks of the opposition have been swelled, especially from among students, by the intensification of Qaddafi’s repression, with more public hangings and other executions and the continued use of hit-squads abroad to assassinate or intimidate opponents.
Moreover, opposition groups have been emboldened by recent discontent in Libya over shortages and worsening conditions for some sectors. This reflects the state’s growing economic difficulties as the world oil glut has reduced sales and depressed prices, sharply reducing Libya’s oil revenues.
The conflict in St James’s Square is just one sign that, from now on, Qaddafi will have much less room for manoeuvre than he enjoyed during the exuberant days of the oil boom.
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