Tessa van Gelderen's criticism of the first of my articles published in the International is what one would expect from a text-book Marxist. But revolutions are not made to measure, under laboratory conditions. They take place in the real world we live in. Nor do they always wait for the historical processes to complete themselves (vanguard party, class-conscious proletariat, soviets, etc.). We have, surely, had many revolutions since 1917 which have not gone through the prescribed formulas—deformed revolutions, true, but recognisable revolutions nonetheless. Because imperialism has distorted the economies of the colonial world and prevented their full development, we must expect the advance to socialism of these countries to be painful and long, with many diversions. This is one of the prices we have to pay for Stalin's destruction of the Third International which Lenin and Trotsky saw functioning as the general staff of the world revolution and our failure to build a Fourth International of sufficient strength and attractive power to influence events decisively.
Tessa argues for "workers' control". Control of what and by whom? Does she know anything at all of the Libyan economy? Apart from oil there are practically no indigenous industries and no proletariat in the Marxist sense of the word. The workers in the oil fields are itinerant workers, nomads only yesterday, scattered over vast distances in the arid deserts of Cyrenaica. Until the advent of the September Revolution even the most primitive form of trade union organisation was unknown to them.
Nationalisation of oil? As I pointed out in my article in the December issue, the foreign-owned oil-fields constitute a permanent threat to the revolution. This is A.B.C. But the exploitation of the oil fields require a very highly trained technical personnel. Where are the Libyan geologists, engineers, accountants, etc. who can run it successfully? For historical reasons they simply don't exist. Nearly 90% of the non-school-age population are illiterate. The gap can be partially filled by the more highly developed Arab lands, such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Palestine, but these countries also have still to face up to the problem of nationalisation.
Tessa complains that the Revolutionary Command Council has "no perspective for the building of the revolutionary party or for setting up soviets..." What kind of utopian world does she live in? The RCC are, for the most part, petty-bourgeois revolutionaries and Arab nationalists, not Marxists. The course of events may impel them in that direction—as happened in Cuba after Castro's seizure of power—but this is not the most likely variant. It is for the handful of Marxists in Libya (and they are, literally, only a handful) to commence this task together with their co-thinkers in the other Arab lands and internationally.
When discussing the Middle East it is important to bear in mind that to some extent the existence of the Palestine situation is distorting the picture. The struggle against Zionism has progressive and reactionary features. It is progressive because it acts as the catalyst of the Arab revolution, but it is reactionary because it enables the Nasserist and Baathist leaderships to divert the masses from the struggle for socialism and to concentrate on the purely nationalist aspect of the revolution. The new Libyan regime has given impetus to the anti-Zionist struggle, but it is giving its support to the petty-bourgeois dominated Al-Fatah rather than the left-wing Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It is for the Marxists in the Arab lands as well as internationally, to hammer away at the thesis that the national struggle can only be finally victorious when it merges with the struggle for socialism.
Tessa is also wrong when she joins the bourgeois press and dismisses the events of September 1 as simply a military coup. Enough is now known of the personal histories of the members of the RCC to establish the fact that they were a group of young, dedicated Arab nationalists (with one or two socialists among them), who deliberately joined the army with the express purpose of using it as an instrument for the seizure of power (no officer above the rank of captain was involved in the seizure, and the leaders nearly all come from poor peasant families). The old regime was always wary of the armed forces and depended for its security on the police, secret police, etc., who were much more heavily armed than the military.
The immediate task of revolutionary socialists in Libya is to work out a transitional programme which will advance the revolution to a higher stage. It must raise the question of organs of popular control. What form these will take is for the Libyan people themselves to decide. That it will assume the form of soviets in the traditional sense of the term is highly unlikely. Soviets have only come into being in countries where the working class had a history of organisation and struggle (Russia, Germany, Hungary). As a first step they might demand the creation of elected popular committees to ensure that the Government's decrees about rent and price control are effectively carried out. The newly legalised trade unions must be activated and transformed into organs of struggle, especially in the oil fields.
This is the realistic, Marxist approach to the Libyan Revolution. We must show an understanding of what is and not expect the application of the whole of our programme, immediately, under conditions which make this impossible.