Libya- April 20th, 2019

Hard military clashes

The CIA man, Haftar, and the UN government in Tripoli are in dispute over who will be the new Qaddafi that distributes the huge oil and gas income businesses

The result of the defeat and the crushing of the mass revolutionary uprisings of 2011...

A divided nation and a protectorate protected and disputed by the different imperialist powers

In recent weeks, Libya has again been convulsed. This time it is due to the fact that Marshal Haftar and his troops - which control eastern Libya - have launched an offensive to take the capital, Tripoli, which is in the west under a UN-guided government, called the "Government of National Accord". The response of the latter was not long in coming and gathered his troops from Misratah, Zawiya and Tripoli, presenting battle to Haftar, unleashing fierce fighting in the capital of the country.

After 2011-2013, the advances of the counter-revolution and the partition of Libya

In Libya there were two governments so far, with two armed forces, one in the east and one in the west. The reason is that after the revolution that shook the North African country in 2011, where the masses with their militias defeated the tyrant Qaddafi, a series of counterrevolutionary blows were carried out by imperialism.

In 2014 Haftar tried to strike a coup to crush the revolution throughout the country, but the masses of Misratah and Tripoli, and at first also Benghazi, defeated him and confined him almost to the border with Egypt. This coup of Haftar had been the immediate response of imperialism to the seizure of US embassy and the execution of the US ambassador in Benghazi by the rebellious masses, after the militias of Misratah did justice to the greatest lackey of the  Italian Fiat and ENI that was Qaddafi.
Meanwhile, with the threat of Haftar's bayonets, the Tripolitan and Misratah bourgeoisie, and the Qaddafist remnants made an agreement under the UN mantle of a common government, on the basis of disarming the masses, professionalizing sectors of the former militiamen, to leave the militias isolated and to defeat the big strikes of the oil workers who fought for a living wage and even began, from their organizations, to commercialize  oil and gas on their own at the international level, as had already begun to happen in Brega, Ras Lanuf and Benghazi, among other cities, in 2013.

Reading today the press of the pro-imperialist left, such as Izquierda Diario of PTS, invites reflection. It says that Libya at the death of Qaddafi was the richest country in the Maghreb, "with the highest per capita GDP in all of Africa." The PTS speaks from Argentina about a Libya as some "wonderland". An absolute falsehood. In 2011, the rise in food prices was 200%, as is the case today in Venezuela or other Latin American semi-colonies. This provoked a fierce uprising of the masses. Bread - the staple food - became terribly expensive and there began a revolutionary process.

Given this, seeing the mass dynamics unleashed, imperialism quickly sought to force its agent Qaddafi to agree with the bourgeoisie "opposition" to control the masses. For this NATO intervened in Libya: to put a limit to the vagaries of Qaddafi to stay on the throne, since it risked the existence and business of the entire bourgeoisie and imperialism in Libya. Qaddafi refused until the last minute to that pact, and so he ended. The bourgeois state was totally in the process of decomposition, product of the disarmament of its army. The death of Qaddafi was mourned not only by the reactionary and pro-imperialist left but by the same Hillary Clinton who honored him from New York.

Returning to the current conditions of this post-revolution era, it is all too clear that the current UN government in Tripoli was the real plan to contain the revolution, disarming the masses and crushing the working class. Meanwhile, Haftar was the only possible way out of imperialism to take the rebellious Benghazi, at the point of bayonets, cannons and aerial bombardments. Only in 2016, Haftar finished taking Benghazi completely.

Against counterfeiting and lies against the Libyan revolution: it was crushed, betrayed and isolated, both in Benghazi and in Tripoli, because of a crisis of leadership. The result was that imperialism and the bourgeoisie reconstituted their state, but already as a protectorate divided and plundered a thousand times more in the east as in the west. This is how the old Qaddafist bourgeoisie came back to their old business of the slave trade (both for oil production in Libya and for Europe), associated with Haftar in Benghazi and the UN government in Tripoli.
Meanwhile, private mercenary troops entered at gunpoint to defend the oil wells of British Petroleum, ENI and Total, which are the main companies of the "7 sisters" who took and continue to steal the oil from Libya. From that point of view, the oil companies continued their experience of Iraq after the US withdrawal from that country: controlling their wells with hundreds of mercenaries as their private security guards. This question is silenced by the entire left of the "weeping and weeping club of Qaddafi."

In short, the partition of Libya was the form used by imperialism to finishing, through the local bourgeoisies,  disarming the masses, co-opt the militias, form a professional army in both Benghazi and Tripoli and thus defeat the revolution. But that could be achieved with two agents: the UN government in Tripoli and that of Haftar in Benghazi and in the entire Libyan east.

The dispute over the oil rent between two bourgeois gangs, servants of the different imperialist powers

A split Libya is a process of transition and disintegration of the nation as a result of the imposition of the counterrevolution. But imperialism needs a stable, unified Libya to impose a strong state that is even a counterrevolutionary gendarme of the entire region. That is to say, the bourgeoisie and imperialism also need to unify the caste of officers in a single army that guarantees their interests and business as a whole; not as it happens now, where the different bourgeois gangs are fighting over each other and keep part of the oil rent.
The coup of Haftar is undoubtedly driven by US imperialism that tries to take Tripoli to ensure control of the whole nation to plunder its riches. Meanwhile, imperialist Europe - which is supplied by barrels of oil and gas flowing through the pipelines from Libya to Italy - claims to "prevent the warlike clashes" and to conquer a unified common government based on a "negotiation process" . This was stated by Macron of France and Salvini of Italy.
An interimperialist bid, as part of the commercial war, has opened in Libya, as it also happens in different countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East. In this case, they dispute the oil and gas that make 80% of the production on the planet work.
In Iran, after using the ayatollahs to crush the Syrian revolution, US imperialism blocks that nation with the aim of removing all European companies from that country and even the clerics, to keep all business for itself.
In Syria, where the US has dropped very few missiles, it is Trump who distributes the reconstruction business, while he kept the oil wells, leaving a part of them to British Petroleum, the French Total and Turkey.
The Libyan protectorate, which arises from the defeat of the revolution, today is disputed among themselves by the different imperialist gangs. They have before them an appetizing booty, with the masses taken from the scene. Both governments of Libya have made merits to reconstitute the Libyan state, since both have been guarantors of the defeat of the masses and their revolution. In other words, each one seeks to be the new Qaddafi, with a single reconstituted army, which guarantees the delivery of Libyan riches to imperialism and puts a limit on the desires of each local bourgeois gang on oil revenues.

The oil and gas income of the 5th OPEC producer country is in dispute

Haftar goes for Tripoli. The reason is the government backed by the UN is the which until now controls the capital, and with it the Central Bank, for which it manages the funds of exports, that is, it takes and distributes the oil income of the country, practically the only source of riches in Libya. Haftar wants to displace that government and be the one to do it.

Today the oil rent only increases, as a result of the rise in oil prices (it has already increased by 40% so far this year) and production in Libya. Last year oil production reached 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) average and this year it has reached more than one million bpd, projecting that by April production would be 1.2 million bpd, that is, almost 300 thousand bpd less than at the time of the greatest export, which occurred under the pro-European-imperialism dictator Muammar al Qaddafi.
That is to say, we are facing a fierce war about which of the two factions of the Libyan bourgeoisie, be it the pro-US Haftar or the pro-European government of the West, will be the one that controls the businesses of the whole Libya as lackeys of imperialism, in charge of guaranteeing the looting for their respective oil companies.
Haftar goes all the way, even using its aviation to be able to pull its military campaign more effectively. The government of Tripoli also uses all its heavy weapons. They are taking Libya to a carnage to see who gets the oil funds in their pocket, as partners in charge of delivering them to the different imperialist powers.
Meanwhile, the Libyan working class, which was one of the protagonists of the mass revolutionary wave that moved the Maghreb and the Middle East in 2011, today is crushed and submitted to one or another bourgeois faction.

Neither the government of Haftar nor that of Tripoli!
We must recover the revolution of 2011 and for that we must unite the Libyan working class with the slave workers from the entire martyred Africa that come to that country!

The task of the masses, as yesterday it did to the Qaddafi army, is no other than to disarm the two bourgeois gangs that dispute the control of the Libyan state and its businesses. We must recover the weapons for the masses to conquer the bread. A man, a rifle!
For years, from the militias, the exploited assured that never again in Libya would the weapons be used against the people. But now that has been happening for some time. While the mercenaries of the oil companies use them against the slave workers of these transnationals, Haftar and the UN government keep the exploited in Libya at bay, an to them they impose the same hunger and misery plans as yesterday Qaddafi.
Again the demand for bread, decent housing, work for all, national independence and freedom, are the order of the day. The only class that can unify the Libyan nation is the working class: by expropriating imperialism without compensation, taking over the oil wells under workers' control and breaking with all the local bourgeois gangs; it is the only one that can put the oil super-income at welfare service for workers and the exploited nationwide. It is the only class whose life is at stake in ending with the slave trade to Europe or to the oil wells of Libya itself and of the entire Middle East.

Both the imperialist press and the brainy authors who write in the newspapers of the so-called "New Left" - real lackeys of imperialism - use a common vocabulary when referring to Libya. Far from talking about the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, they deny the existence of a powerful working class that extracts oil from the 5th OPEC exporting country, produces byproducts in its refineries and builds oil wells. There are 300,000 Libyan workers who work in this industry, while 2 million slave workers carry out the worst jobs in the sacked Libya. For this pro-imperialist left trash, these workers are "part of ISIS" ... "barbarian peoples" ... "Muslims" ... "members of tribes" (it is not known if gatherers or hunters).
They paint a Libya in which there would not be a national bourgeoisie or an imperialism that controls it. They speak of "tribes" and "clans" and not of the bourgeoisie. They make the European and world working class believe that Libya is an anthropologically backward nation, as 20 centuries ago. They are a lackey Left of the Us imperialists, of Macron, of British Petroleum, and conceal the most brutal plundering of this oil-rich country. And then they cry crocodile tears when they see black workers sold as slaves hanging from winches and with shackles to their feet, black workers whose majority dies across the Mediterranean. That is the working class of Africa, also of Libya and of Europe!

This left wants to make the workers of the world believe that the peoples of the Maghreb and Middle East and the Muslim masses are immature for the revolution, although they have been the protagonists of the greatest revolutions of the 21st century!
These people hide, and shut up about, that the Libyan revolution, and its vanguard, the Benghazi fighters, have been the anti-imperialist advance of the so-called "Arab springs". There, the rebellious masses made the American ambassador "pass to a better life", as they had Qaddafi. They want and they have to hide this truth. They are the miserable left of Wall Street.

For the Trotskyists, from that battle of the masses the second Libyan revolution must and will start. But in order to do so, it must settle accounts with all the traitors, who after insulting the Libyan revolution, supported and sustained the massacre of the fascist al-Assad and the hit man Putin against the Syrian masses. They are the ones who support the counterrevolutionary fascist guards that today torment the Iranian working class in revolt. They are the same ones that in Tunisia supported, together with the union bureaucracy of the UGTT, the "transition" for Ben Ali's party to return to power. They are those who called to support the "democratic generals" of Egypt from the April 6 Movement, which opened the door to the Al Sisi dictatorship that today has more than 40,000 political prisoners in its prisons. They are also who isolated and surrounded the Libyan and Syrian revolutions and separated them from the struggle of the workers of the imperialist countries.

In any case, the last word has not been said. People is fighting in Sudan, the Algerian workers are rebelling both in Algeria and in Paris and the masses of Syria, Palestine and Iran present a very hard resistance. The working class in the US and in Europe still have a lot to say. They can hit the imperialist beast from within, shouting "the enemy is at home." The same working class, the same fight against the same enemy: imperialism and all its lackeys!