For several weeks, the Western powers, that had previously acknowledged Kaddafi’s dictatorship as legitimate and had sometimes armed it –, have threatened that their armies will get control on the Libyan airspace. The Arab league supports them, whereas the army of one of its members, Saudi Arabia, crushes the revolt in Bahrain. France and Great Britain even consider bombing Libya. Austria supports them.

Against the revolt of the masses in Tunisia, the colonel Kaddafi supported Ben Ali’s regime all the way because he feared the spread of the revolution. He was right, his family is as corrupted as Ben Ali family and his regime is much more totalitarian.

His dictatorship cannot hide any more behind anti-imperialism. In 2003, Kaddafi gave up his “weapons of mass destruction” and made peace with Bush in rallying to his fight “against Islamism”. In 2006, Libya renewed its diplomatic relationships with the United States, it started to privatize the local firms and it opened the country for the American oil firms. In 2007, Kaddafi signed with Berlusconi a treaty for preventing the Black Africans to emigrate from the Libyan coasts to the Italian islands and coasts. Since then, hundreds of Eritreans, Malians, Somalis… have been mistreated, robbed, beaten and raped by the Libyan police in the service of the European Union, abandoned mid-desert or imprisoned in revolting conditions.

All the imperialist countries in the world, including China, had supported Ben Ali and Mubarak until the end. In
order to suppress the revolution that started in Northern Africa and spreads to the Middle-East, which threatens not only their supply in oil but also the local order, and even the world order, the big powers intervene through army headquarters. In January Obama had Ben Ali relieved by the Tunisian army, which set up a bourgeois « transitional government ». In February Obama had the Egyptian army staff putting Mubarak aside, negotiating with the Islamists and setting up a “transitional government”. All the imperialist countries keep on paying oil fees to Kaddafi, who sends airplanes and tanks against insurgent masses.

The threat for an intrusion of the Western armies, which destroyed Iraq in 2003 and which have occupied
Afghanistan since 2001, has strengthened Kaddafi politically. Only the perspective of a workers and peasants’
government designated by workers’ and people’s councils, which would establish democratic liberties, separation between the state and religion, emancipation of women, full equality for migrant workers, control of the population over the economy, expropriation of the capitalist groups of Kaddafi’s clan… would undermine the control that Kaddafi still has on an important part of the territory and on the Libyan national oil company.

In order to defeat Kaddafi, to liquidate the feudal throwback, to develop the country and to really emancipate it from the imperialist rule, a social revolution is necessary. For leading it, the workers need a party of their own, being independent from any fraction of the bourgeoisie (whether it is “nationalist”, “democratic” or “Islamist”), being based on Marxism and especially on the strategy of the permanent revolution (at the time of imperialism, only the working class can lead a revolution, which only can win in deepening and spreading itself), of a party related to other proletariats in Northern Africa, Middle-East, Sub-Saharan Africa, of all the Mediterranean Basin, with a revolutionary workers’ International. The workers and the youth in Tunisia and in Egypt must take control over the arms in their country in order to help their brothers and sisters in Libya.

For helping the youth and the workers who try to overthrow Kaddafi, the workers in Northern America and in
Western Europe cannot rely on their own governments. They all are in the service of corporate, of big capitalist firms. They are destroying t all previous social conquests and supporting everywhere the counter-revolution, the clerical monarchies and the worst dictatorships. Workers must demand mass organizations which they once created, unions and parties, to call for the opening of the boarders for workers and students of all Africa, against all military intervention in Libya and in the other countries of the region, for the full evacuation from Iraq, for the closing of the American, French and British military bases in all the Mediterranean Basin, for the unlock of the blockade against Iran. The straight struggle of the workers against their own governments would be the best support to the insurgents in Libya and to the oppressed in Northern Africa. Likewise, the Jewish workers must end the Zionist colonization and recognize the right to return for the Palestinians.

Then the workers in Libya will be able to defeat the bourgeois dictatorship and to contribute to socialist federation of Northern Africa and Middle-East, where the Arabs, the Berbers, the Turks, the Jews, the Kurds, the Sahrawi, the Persians… together will abolish the boarders that are inherited from colonialism.

15th March 2011, Permanent Revolution Collective (CRPP / Peru, GB / France, GKK / Austria)