It is too early to take a definitive position on the Libyan events because the situation is still fluid and we cannot be definite about anything. The Colonel’s days seem to be numbered but he is continuing with his strenuous defence despite the fact that the international capitalist community is putting into play all its juridical (International Criminal Court) and economic weapons including an embargo, economic sanctions and the freezing of assets held abroad.

This means that we can currently only make a couple of observations.

The first is that the revolt in Benghazi and the other cities in Cyrenica, as well as some small towns south of Tripoli have broken the strained relationship between Gaddafi, his tribe of origin and the other Libyan tribes who for more than 40 years have been forced to submit to the economic and political dictatorship of the Colonel.

At the bottom of all this are the demands for autonomy of the tribal bourgeoisie of Cyrenica and of the Fezzan who have never been appeased. Not least they saw the greedy chance to autonomously control the oil revenue which until a few weeks ago was the prerogative of the “Green” dictator. It is no accident that the first protests took place in the East of the country where a provisional government has already emerged which has the task of controlling the oilfields and of the guaranteeing their use and exploitation by international clients.

The previous stability was based on force. Gaddafi and his sons have absolute control of the army, the police and the air force. They also possess, or control, the oil wells through the management of the national gas and oil enterprises. They give to the allied, or submissive, tribal chiefs some crumbs of the above mentioned revenue according to either their political value, or their potential danger in terms of (non) alignment in any challenge to the power of the “rais” himself. This arrangement has now been broken. The bigger tribes, like the Warfalla, who control a vast territory south of Tripoli, have mobilised against it. They had already attempted a coup d’état in 1993, in the middle of the international embargo against the Tripoli Government following the Lockerbie bombing. Gaddafi brutally repressed it with dozens of public executions by firing squad and more than 200 arrested. The Zuwayya, who live in the central zone between Tripoli and Benghazi, the Misurata and the Abu Llail, who control the area of oil pipelines in the area east of Cyrenica took the initiative to ride the tiger of popular protest in an attempt to end a game that has lasted forty years. All the major tribes have small armies, and small arsenals of light weapons. In the initial period of the revolt they assaulted barracks and arms dumps. In the present state of things the Libyan crisis appears to be a civil war between tribes, or rather bourgeois factions, for the economic and political domination of the country, which is the second biggest oil exporter in the entire African continent behind Nigeria, and the twelfth largest in the world.

The second observation is on the possibility of a rupture in the present balance of power on the energy front in the Middle East with all the consequences which would flow from it. It is not for nothing that three US aircraft carriers are making their way towards the Gulf of Sirte, and the British Prime Minister Cameron is doing the same thing. The imperialist preoccupation of the Anglo–Saxons isn’t just about the future destiny of Libyan oil and gas. This is important but not decisive in the international energy equation. What they really worry about is the possible extension of the crisis to the Arabian peninsula. The wind of revolt is blowing through Yemen, Oman and Bahrain which surround the South West and South East of Saudi Arabia, the world’s greatest oil producer and chief supplier to the USA. If Riyadh also entered the eye of the storm it could lead to a change of position and to military manoeuvres no longer imposed by psychological deterrence and political pressure. You cannot mess about when it comes to getting oil supplies from the Middle East. US imperialism has already produced two unfinished wars and is strenuously fighting over the means to transport and trade the black gold from Central Asia to the coast of the Mediterranean. Faced with a similar critical situation in the Arabian ports it is already beginning to flaunt its military might. For the moment the USA has decided to wait and see … Even China which is already present in Niger, Nigeria, Sudan and Chad, won’t just stand and watch. All this is in the face of hundreds of thousands of refugees – victims of internal bourgeois quarrels, and the international games played by imperialists – about whom there is the is the usual litany of handwringing but up to now nothing concrete in terms of real humanitarian aid.

For the Libyan working masses there is no possibility of emancipation if they continue to be absorbed by tribalism, if they buy into the opportunist demands for freedom and democracy put forward by the bourgeois opposition against the tyranny. At most this freedom and democracy will be a new, better, political and ideological basis for carrying on the process of subjection and exploitation as it was before. The settling of accounts of tribal feuds – or the bourgeois struggles which arise from them – as well as the restless agitation of an increasingly greedy imperialism, are the result of something deeper. The real cause of this crisis is the economic system which goes under the name of capitalism.