by Said Gafourov
In the last quarter of the twentieth century Libya has been in the focus of world attention. Unorthodox foreign and domestic policies, her challenge to the developed countries together with a strategic geographic position and great mineral (mainly oil) resources, attract special interest in comparison with other countries of the Third World.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century Libya has been in the focus of world attention. Unorthodox foreign and domestic policies, her challenge to the developed countries together with a strategic geographic position and great mineral (mainly oil) resources, attract special interest in comparison with other countries of the Third World.
One of the most characteristic features of the country has been
the Third Universal Theory, developed by the
Leader of the Libyan Revolution Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, which was
introduced as an alternative to both Capitalist and Communist (i.e.
Real Socialist) ideologies.
This ‘new philosophy’ was not only actively implemented in
theory and in practice in Libya but was also regarded as the most
effective for other developing countries. Such countries as Benin or
Burkina Faso used elements of the Third Univeral Theory in their
governmental ideologies.
Many Western scholars considered Qadhafi’s ideology to be
something specifically Oriental, alien to the Western system of
values and lying outside the main stream of both Western and Eastern
philosophies; or as a simplification of an already simplified
‘Marxist philosophy’; or as a ‘real socialism’ adapted for
‘tribal socialist princes’.
On the other side some Third World thinkers like Sami Hajjar
suppose that Qadhafi’s system of values lies within the framework
of philosophical traditions going back to the ‘Social Contract’
of Rousseau.
In 1973 the Ministry of Information and Culture of Libya published
a pamphlet “The Third World Theory: the Holy Concept of
Islam and Popular Revolution in Libya”.
The theory was later developed in the 1974 pamphlet “The Principles of the Third World Theory”. At the end of the seventies, Qadhafi published 3 parts of the well-known Green Book, summarising and systematising his theory.
From our point of view, the possible influence (direct or
indirect) of ideas of European and Russian anarchism on Qadhafi, is
at least worth discussing.
In the XIX century, the term “Anarchism”
was used to define a rather wide intellectual and political movement.
Such diverse thinkers as Proudhon, Stinner, Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy,
Kropotkin and many others declared their solidarity with Anarchism as
a socio-philosophical theory. Although their philosophical ideas were
rather different, all of them had one thing in common – they all
believed that the main cause of injustice, social oppression and
exploitation of one human being by another was the State and its
political institutions.
Qadhafi’s vision of the Socialist society has been summarised as
follows:
“1) The purpose of the Socialist society is the happiness of
man which can only be realised through material and spiritual
freedom.
2) The material needs of all are to be assured, secure from
arbitrary disruption.
3) Inequality of wealth, income and social status should be
modest. Wealth in excess of private needs should be public, not
private, property.
4) Man should find fulfilment in his work not only in using the
income he derives from it”. Peter Kropotkin – the founder of
Anarcho-Communism and one of the most respected theoreticians of
Anarcho-Syndicalism defined one of the most important human rights –
the right of welfare which is “a possibility to live as a
human being and bring up children.”“Above bread and above
welfare, above collective property we can see a new world coming –
a world where we can love each other and satisfy our decent and noble
desires for the ideal… where there would not be the rich and the
poor… a worker would work at what is better for him, a research
worker would make his works without reservations, an artist would not
make a profanity of his ideal of beauty in favour of money”.
Thus we can see that the ultimate social goals of Qadhafi and
Kropotkin are similar. However, there are many more correlations in
the particulars.
The first part of the Green Book (1976) begins with a description
and severe criticism of the traditional bourgeois social and
political system. It is important to mention that the methodology of
this criticism is rather similar to that of Kropotkin or Bakunin. In
the introduction to the first French edition of Kropotkin’s Bread
and Freedom we read: “the first book by
Kropotkin ‘Paroles d’un Revolte’ was mainly devoted to the
severe criticism of the immoral and evil bourgeois society and called
upon the energy of revolutionaries to struggle against the
State”.
According to Qadhafi the instrument or means of societal control (i.e. the State) is the main political problem which has always stood before humanity. Struggle for the “instrument of control” always led to the victory of an individual or a party or a class and the defeat of the people. “Parliament is a misrepresentation of the people, and parliamentary systems are a false solution to the problem of democracy. A parliament is originally founded to represent the people, but this in itself is undemocratic as democracy means the authority of the people and not an authority acting on their behalf,” states Qadhafi.
“Parliaments have been a legal barrier between the people
and the exercise of excluding the masses from meaningful politics and
monopolising sovereignty in their place”.
Qadhafi concludes that “It has thus become the right of the
people to struggle through popular revolution to destroy such
instruments as the so-called parliamentary assemblies which usurp
democracy and sovereignty and which stifle the will of the people”
– this statement correlates with the famous slogans of modern
anarcho-terrorists like, “While evil bourgeois society uses
violence under the name of justice the justice of the proletariat is
violence”.
Generally speaking, for the Anarchists, the whole system of
representative democracy was the object of their sharp uncompromising
criticism. Bakunin described a parliamentary republic as a “quasi
state of a quasi popular will, which is supposed to be represented by
quasi representatives in quasi popular meetings”.
Kropotkin denied the idea that the state was necessary – he
called it “superstitions, which play the role of Fate in relations
between people”, and he believed that the self-organisation of
small communities united on a Federal basis was the structure that
should replace the State which is an ‘apparatus of violence.’
He stated that the goal of “finding such a Government which can
make people obey, while still obeying society”, was not realisable,
and pointed out that “society tries to liberate itself by all
possible means from any kind of government and fulfil its
requirements with free agreements between individuals and groups,
seeking one goal”.
We can see here that Kropotkin’s political ideals come back to
the “Social Contract” of Rousseau whom he regarded highly.
We can say that both Qadhafi and Kropotkin see the main internal
contradiction within existing societies as the contradiction between
society and state. Both of them use the concept of ‘popular masses’
which are the moving forces of social revolutions; the masses are not
divisible into strata, classes, ethnic, confessional and professional
groups. According to Kropotkin, Anarchy was a “more or less
reflected ideal of the masses”. Qadhafi uses the term “people”,
and authority of the People in general as an indivisible entity is an
alternative to the old unjust political order.
Perhaps we can say that social realities in Libya and in Europe
during the great French Revolution which actually determined the
ideology of anarchy were rather similar. The social stratification of
society in both cases was weak. Anti-feudal unification of all the
third estate in France which included the overwhelming majority of
social groups, structurally was close to unity of all the Libyans
opposing weak and discredited royal power and small comprador trade
circles.
On the other side, subsequent polarisation and self-identification
of different social groups: proletariat, petty, financial and trade
bourgeoisie, peasants etc. must have and actually did conflict with
their integration into a unified civil society. Qadhafi once said
that, “If Revolution makes a mistake, revolution should be
corrected”. This was said at a moment of crucial social
contradictions between an emerging bourgeoisie and the Revolutionary
Committees which represented the interests of integrated society at a
time of anti-colonial and anti-feudal revolution.
The system of People’s Congresses and Committees which from
Qadhafi’s point of view is “the only way to genuine Democracy”
is really close to both the spirit and letter of Kropotkin’s
understanding of a future social self-organisation of society. A
people controls itself – this is the essence of democracy according
to Qadhafi. In other words, the political model is a stateless form
of popular power which is the ideal of anarchism.
Bread and Freedom by Kropotkin is to a large extent
based on the concept that the main function of society is t create
and re-create material values for the full and many-faceted
development of a free individual. The main slogan of anarchism is
“freedom for everybody, welfare for all” and Kropotkin writes
that “in political economy, one should first of all study the
chapter on consumption”.
Qadhafi, in his turn, thinks that the only “legal” goals of
economic activity are fulfilment of human demands and he also starts
a discussion on economic issues with the problem of consumption. The
similarity of ideas of the second part of the Green Book (devoted to
economic issues) and the views of anarchists is rather surprising –
even the structure of chapters in the second part and Bread and
Freedom for example, is very close.
The Jamaharisation practice in Libya corresponds to ideas of
anarcho-communists. The theoretical description of Kropotkin’s
ideal society – a federation of self-controlling communities –
could be a theoretical description of Jamaharian districts system
which Qadhafi tried to implement at the first stage of revolutionary
transformation in Libya. The goal for both the Russian thinker and
the Arab praktik was elimination “of unjust social
relations”.
“He who owns the house where you live or the transport which
you use or money on which you live, he owns part or whole of your
freedom. Freedom is indivisible and in order to be happy a human
being must be free”.
This statement could have come from a theoretician of Anarchy but
it belongs to Qadhafi. In his turn, Kropotkin writes: “As
a matter of fact, in a modern state the biggest obstacle to
development and maintenance of the moral level, necessary life in
society is an absence of social equality… ‘Without equality in
reality’, as they used to say in 1793, a sense of justness cannot
become common property. Justness must be equal for everybody and in
our society… the sense of equality has defeats at every step… we
can find justice only in a society of equals”.
According to Qadhafi a new socialist society is “a
society which is absolutely free. This can be achieved only by
fulfilment of the material and spiritual demands of a human being by
liberating these demands from oppression by other people”.
When defining goals in necessary economic activity in societal
transformation, Kropotkin stresses three main elements:
“1) elimination of salary, paid by a capitalist to a worker
because it is a modern form of ancient slavery and ‘krepostnoye’
ownership over a human;
2) elimination of private property in whatever is essential
for society for the production and social organisation of products of
exchange; and finally,
3) elimination from the individual and society of that form of
social oppression – State – which serves the maintenance and
continuity of economic slavery”.
Qadhafi mentioned that “those who sell their working
power whatever their salary, are a kind of slave”, because
they work not for their own benefit but or the benefit of those who
hire them. From this comes that changing of form of property with it
moving from one owner to another, which, even if it is a Working
class state in a Marxist tradition, does not guarantee the rights of
the worker in the process of production.
Qadhafi makes a concept that in Jamahiriya, the relationships of
people in terms of property are partnerships in managing common
property. The same concept was put forward by anarchists with their
famous slogan – “everything belongs to everybody”.
Qadhafi believes that the solution of this problem can be achieved
by the elimination of salary, and thus the liberation of humanity
from slavery, and a return to the “natural rules” which
determined relationships of people before the existence of classes,
governments and laws. The official slogan of Jamahiriya is “Not
employees but partners”.
Kropotkin also qualified this approach to the relationships of
human beings in the process of production as “natural”.
The approach to the distribution and exchange of goods for these
thinkers is similar. Both use an analogy with a supermarket or shop
in which “every human being should take from common stocks
exactly as much as necessary to fulfil his needs” or “to everyone
according to his needs”.
It is interesting that both are against the division of labour,
considering it to be unnecessary.
It may be interesting to compare real economic structures in
Gulay-Pole and Libya. We can point out that in agriculture, Nestor
Makhno and Qadhafi conducted the same policy. Both tried to encourage
individual farming with all the means they possessed. Kropotkin as a
theoretician was encouraged by the agricultural development of
American private farms in the 1890’s and came to the conclusion
that small farms were historically progressive and should unite to
provide jobs necessary for all of them.
This idea sprang from the Russian tradition of praising ‘Obshina’
as an alternative to capitalist order. ‘Obshina’ was a common
ideal of Russian traditional egalitarians like Lavrov, Tkachev or
Hertzen.
The third part of the Green Book, which was published in 1979, was
devoted to social problems. Qadhafi believes that the main engine of
human history is a struggle between social and national (as a part of
social) groups for ascendancy over each other. And this struggle can
be ended only after complete elimination of one social group’s
oppression by another group, or individual.
From this point of view his ideas are very close to the ideas of
anarchists. Kropotkin, describing future society, wrote of “free
communities, agricultural as well as urban [ie. land unions of people
related to each other because of place of living] and wide
professional and craftsmen’s unions (ie. unions of people by
character of their labour) and communities closely intersecting with
each other . . .” Together with these forms of social
organisation “thousands of unlimitedly different societies
and unions will appear because of a unity of private preferences
resulting from common interests: social, religious, artistic,
scientific and those that have as their goals upbringing, research or
even simply entertainment”.
The Jamahiriya districts in Libya are very similar to the ideal of
anarcho-communism.
Qadhafi specifies traditional forms of unification of human
beings: family, tribe and nation. The main factor for a harmonious
society with the elimination of internal conflicts between
individuals, is the family. An individual should develop in his
family in a natural way. We can see here the influence of Jean Jaques
Rousseau’s concept of “The natural right of a father” which is
quite different from all the other rights which exist as a result of
the Social Contract.
A wider social structure which includes families, is a tribe.
Kropotkin used the term “local communities”. Social functions of
tribes in the nomadic society of Libya and local communities in
European societies are, to a certain extent, similar. Both provide
for the co-existence of families and are supposed to suppress
conflicts. The author’s opinion is that in these two theories there
are similar social realities and structures with very important
functions being discussed in different terms.
It is interesting to mention the terms which the thinkers use.
Kropotkin called his theory ‘Anarcho-Communism’. However, when
writing of the precedents of Anarchism he recalled a term invented by
the Russian historian Kostomarov: – ‘Narodopravstvo’ (‘People’s
Govern’) for the Novograd and Pskov feudal republics. This
artificial Russian word is probably the best translation of
‘Jamahiriya’ from Arabic into Russian.
On the other hand, neither the Anarchists nor Qadhafi were very
concerned for the academic correctness of terms at the expense of
political sense. Semantic loadings of the word ‘anarchism’ as
well as ugly translation of it into Arabic prevented Qadhafi, who
probably had not had access to Anarchist literature, from choosing
this term for his concept.
There are two basic differences between the philosophy of the
Green Book and Kropotkin.
First of all there is the understanding of the concept of “natural
law”. Anarchists accepted Rousseau’s thesis that all the social
institutions resulted from the Social Contract and that there were no
NATURAL norms and rules of regulation of relationships between people
and customs. Traditions are definitely not absolute and are subject
to change.
On the other hand Qadhafi points out “laws of society
are the sacred heritage of society”.He means that they are
objective reality which has its roots in the religion and traditions
of the society.
The attitude towards religion is the other big difference.
Kropotkin is a definite rationalist, materialist and atheist.
Religion is the means of exploitation by the state and the governing
classes. However, Kropotkin was very tolerant to individual faith and
wrote about religious unions in the ideal society.
For Qadhafi religion, on the contrary, has an intrinsic value and
is one of those basic foundations of society, which should not be
criticised. This author thinks that the reason for this difference is
in the concrete difference of political functions of religion in
Christian and Islamic countries.
In Islamic countries Islam has never been a separate political
force – more exactly religious and secular power are inseparable.
Only Islam gives legitimacy to rulers. Qadhafi as a praktik, realised
this and used Islam as a means to stabilise unity in the society
using the egalitarian features of Islam.
This side of his practice is reflected in the Green Book: to
provide for the fruitful development of a nation, there must be a
unifying religion and thus social factor (ie. nationality) would
correspond with religious factor and thus the stability of a nation
would increase. However, we should mention that traditionalist Ulamaa
(theologists) opposed the new theory in the beginning and the
official propaganda apparatus of Qadhafi even used a metaphor about
the struggle between the Green Book and yellow books. (Traditionally,
religious literature in the Arab world is published on yellow paper).
In this work the author tried to delineate some similarities
between the ideas of anarcho-communism and the Third Univeral Theory.
If we accept the hypothesis of the author, the received position that
anarchism is a theory which has never been implemented in practice
for a reasonable period of time, should be reconsidered. An analysis
of the social and economic development of Libyan Jamahiriya can
become an analysis of the first relatively long attempt to apply
ideals close or sometimes similar to those of anarchy. Thus we could
define Libya as an anarchist entity.
The correspondence of basic views of Qadhafi and Kropotkin in
particular could, in theory, be accidental. However, we believe that
ideas resembling those of the anarchists’ inevitably appear in
those countries with a less developed social stratification but which
are in the process of joining the world capitalist economy – like
Russia, Spain and France in the nineteenth century or Libya in the
twentieth.
We perhaps can never know if Qadhafi accepted Anarchist ideas or
whether the socio-political climates in Europe on the eve of the XX
century and in Libya in the second part of the XX century resembled
each other. But we can say that Qadhafi’s education rather
witnesses for the first hypothesis.
Qadhafi could hardly have had access to Proudhon, Bakunin or
Kropotkin material during his studies in the military college in
Benghazi, but he attended lectures on history in the Royal University
of Benghazi where he must have become acquainted with Enlightenment
theories.
Kropotkin’s and Qadhafi’s ideas on the role of the state and
basic questions of the economy are similar. Differences on questions
in the social arena are often related to terminology and
socio-cultural differences.
----------------------------------------------------
"Americans are good people. They
have no aggressions against us and they like us as we like them. They
must know I don't hate them. I love them.… I hear it is a complex
society inside. Many Americans don't know about the outside world.
The majority have no concern and no information about other people.
They could not even find Africa on a map. I think Americans are good,
but America will be taken over and destroyed from the inside by the
Zionist lobby. The Americans do not see this. They are getting
decadent. Zionists will use this to destroy them." - The
Martyr, Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qathafi - Pittsburgh Press, August 3,
1986. Quoted in "Gadhafi, The Man The World Loves To Hate"
by Marie Colvin (UPI)
"America is being dragged
involuntarily towards extreme and dangerous positions which serve the
interests of the Zionists but not of her own people. It is in
the interests of the American people to maintain the best possible
relationships with the Arab world. But this is not in the interests
of Zionism, which concentrates on arousing the hostility of the Arabs
towards the Americans and vice versa, in order to benefit thereby and
to ensure that America remains on their side. One thing is sure: if
the Arabs were friendly with the Americans, the Zionist camp in
Palestine would find itself extremely isolated." - The Martyr,
Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qathafi from the book 'My Vision: Conversations
And Frank Exchanges Of Views With Edmond Jouve'.
"In the absence of human resources
and of American aid, Israel would lay down its arms and ask for
peace. Once the reign of the Zionists was over, the peace-loving Jews
would have no difficulty in living with the Arabs. May I remind you
that it is Zionism - and not the Arabs - which has placed the Jews in
this impasse and has thrown them into the lion's den. It must take
full responsibility. It was not the choice of the Arabs." -
The Martyr, Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qathafi from the book 'My Vision:
Conversations And Frank Exchanges Of Views With Edmond Jouve'.
"In order to be elected, every
American president has to undertake to satisfy Zionist demands. His
hands are tied. When he draws up his manifesto, the candidate for the
White House takes the aspirations and the interests of ordinary
Americans less into account than those of the Zionists. The winner
will be the one who has done most to flatter the Zionists, to the
extent of neglecting the interests of America and Americans. It is no
accident that Zionism has infiltrated the whole of the United States.
It intends to use this great power for its own ends in the Middle
East. But it is possible that one day America will wake up, rebel and
save the country before its final collapse." - The Martyr,
Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qathafi from the book 'My Vision: Conversations
And Frank Exchanges Of Views With Edmond Jouve'.
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