The Green Book, Part 1

On 1 September, 1969, Libyan military officers staged a bloodless coup and overthrew Libya's ineffectual monarchy.  A week later, a 27-year-old man named Muammar Al Qaddafi came out on top.  He tinkered a bit with the status quo, shuttering all newspapers, churches, and political parties, imprisoning or exiling political opponents, nationalizing banks, kicking out about 30,000 Italians, and expropriating the assets of non-resident Jews.  He also poured money into development projects of all kinds.

In the mid-1970s, Colonel Qaddafi went into the desert and emerged some time later with the Green Book, his blueprint for the political, economic, and social organization of a state.  In 1977, Qaddafi renamed Libya the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.  Roughly translated, Jamahiriya means "a state of the masses."

The Green Book is slender but dense, combining political philosophy, economics, and advice about male-female relations and sports.  It's conveniently broken down into three parts.  What follows is my best effort at distilling its main points.


Part 1:  The Solution to the Problem of Democracy

What's wrong with current versions of democracy

Qaddafi tells us that all current forms of democracy inevitably result in a dictatorship.  Take American-style democracy, for example.  The people vote for a leader, and the candidate with the most votes wins.  Let's say the winner garners 51% of the vote.  This is basically a dictatorship, Qaddafi says, "because 49% of the electorate would then be governed by an instrument of government they did not vote for, and which has been imposed upon them."  Parliaments are no better:  They are essentially a "legal barrier between people and their right to exercise authority," excluding the masses from political participation while monopolizing the control of politics.  Aside from casting votes for representatives (which Qaddafi likens to throwing "rubbish in dustbins"), the people have no meaningful role in a parliamentary democracy.  Referendums are even worse:  They "make a mockery of democracy" and "represent the most extreme repressive dictatorships."  The people can only vote "yes" or "no," without the ability to offer reasons for their votes.

Breaking things down a bit further, Qaddafi asserts that the political party is "the latest modern dictatorial instrument of government, whereby the part rules the whole."  Political parties form when groups of people come together with common interests, intent upon imposing their will upon all of society.  And political parties function in practice through the "manipulation of the people by the party leadership," bribery and corruption, and inter-party squabbling that usually involves "mud-slinging tactics" unrelated to "society's vital and prime interests."  In the end, the clash of political parties results in a winner and one or more losers, and that winner does not have the interests of the people at heart:  It is the "arch-enemy of a large proportion of the people."  Qaddafi says that his analysis of political parties also holds for government based on competing tribes, sects, and social classes.

In sum, "all attempts at unifying the material basis of a society in order to solve the problem of government or to put an end to the struggle in favor of one political party, social class, sect, or tribe have failed.  In addition, all attempts to appease the masses by having them elect their representatives, or by seeking their opinions in referendums, have also failed.  To persist in such attempts is a waste of time and makes a mockery of the people."

Qaddafi's solution  

Qaddafi's Green Book claims to present "the ultimate solution to the problem of the instrument of governance."  Basically, the idea is "direct, orderly and efficient democracy."  Direct democracy is the only way to truly reflect the will of the people, "an ideal over which no two reasonable adults can possibly disagree, although the method of implementation . . . was previously inconceivable."  Until now.

Qaddafi then lays out a system of People's Conferences and People's Committees, implemented through what he calls the "Third Universal Theory," which "permanently solves the problem of democracy in our world" and achieves true direct democracy:  "supervision of the people by the people."

Simplifed just a bit, here's how it works.

First, the people are divided into Basic People's Conferences.  As far as I can tell, these BPCs are units of direct democracy.  Based on Qaddafi's slogan "Conferences Everywhere," I'm guessing that any state will have a lot of them.  The book gives few details about how BPCs actually operate.

Second, each BPC selects administrative People's Committees to handle all government administration.  Those People's Committees will run all public institutions and be answerable to BPCs, who dictate policies and oversee their implementation.

Third, each BPC selects its own secretariat.  Those secretariats together form other Conferences, including the all-important General People's Conference, which will draft resolutions to be implemented by the People's Committees.

Sound confusing?  Qaddafi provides a diagram of the system, which helps a bit.  Envision a sphere with an outer ring, an inner ring, and a center.  The outer ring has BPCs, the inner ring has People's Committees, and the center is the General People's Conference.  The outer two rings make political resolutions and submit them to the center.  The center consolidates the resolutions and refers them back to the BPCs in the outer ring.  If approved, these resolutions are implemented by the inner ring, the People's Committees, which are substitutes for instruments of government.  Put another way, the outer ring is the people, the center is a conduit for interpreting the will of the people, and the inner ring implements the people's will.

Additional ruminations

Qaddafi then offers some observations about law.  He asserts that constitutions, like all other man-made laws, are a "mockery" because they are "based solely on the views of the dictatorial instruments of government existing in the world today."  "It is invalid and undemocratic for a committee or an assembly to be empowered to pass legislation for society."  The only true law is natural law, because man is "essentially one and the same everywhere physically and in terms of sensibility, and that is the reason why natural law is the logical law for mankind."  "Natural legislation in any society is grounded in either religion or customs, and any attempt to make legislation for a given society derived from sources other than these two is invalid and illogical."  In short, the only laws in Qaddafi's society are natural laws, usually embodied customs and religion.  Man-made laws and constitutions have no place in this society.  

Finally, Qaddafi opines on freedom of expression and freedom of the press.  He puts to one side an individual's freedom of expression, which he calls the "right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to behave irrationally to express his or her insanity."  Corporate bodies have the same right, he says.  The key point is that these entities speak for themselves alone.  The press, by contrast, "is society's medium of expression, not an individual's or corporate body's medium of expression.  Therefore, it cannot be logically or democratically the private property of such persons."  It must instead be published and broadcast by the People's Committee, comprising members from all the various groups in society without exception.  Only in this case will the press or any other information medium be democratic, expressing the viewpoints of society as a whole and representing all its various groups.

After a flowery paragraph extolling the virtues of the Third Universal Theory, Qaddafi ends with this ominous sentence:  "Theoretically, this is genuine democracy, but in reality, the strong always rule:  that is to say those who are strongest in society hold the reins of government."  That's a surprising sentence, given what came before, but perhaps there's more wisdom in this sentence than in the rest of Part One combined.

Click here for Part 2.  Click here for Part 3.