A Total Absence of Responsibility
In 1975, Muammar Gaddafi published a ‘Green Book’; a short political treatise outlining what he called ‘The Third Universal Theory’. Neither capitalism nor communism. Neither the market nor the state. A third path promising to return power directly to the people through Popular Conferences and People’s Committees, abolish wage labour, eliminate representation, and render the state itself unnecessary.
What it delivered was a dictatorship lasting forty-two years.
The Green Book’s1 critique of representative democracy is sharper than most contemporary political scientists manage:
Parliament is a misrepresentation of the people, and parliamentary systems are a false solution to the problem of democracy. A parliament is originally founded to represent the people, but this in itself is undemocratic as democracy means the authority of the people and not an authority acting on their behalf. The mere existence of a parliament means the absence of the people.
Parties fare no better:
The party is a contemporary form of dictatorship. It is the modern instrument of dictatorial government. The party is the rule of a part over the whole.
On wages:
Wage-earners are but slaves to the masters who hire them. They are temporary slaves, and their slavery lasts as long as they work for wages from employers, be they individuals or the state.
This applies equally to nationalised industries — the state merely replaces the private employer.
On housing:
Whoever possesses the house in which you dwell, the vehicle in which you ride or the income on which you live, possesses your freedom, or part of it. Freedom is indivisible.
On education:
State-controlled and standardized education is, in fact, a forced stultification of the masses.
Every point is defensible on its own terms. Anyone who’s sat in a waiting room for hours, filled in endless government forms, or watched a politician break yet another campaign promise recognises every word. That recognition is the hook.
The solution: direct democracy through layered Popular Conferences and People’s Committees. Workers become partners. Housing belongs to whoever dwells in it. Land belongs to whoever works it. No private media. No parties. No parliament.
Libya was renamed the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya2 — the State of the Masses. Whatever the Green Book claims was taken from the people, it promises to return.
Bait and Switch
The official structures existed, but in practice, they didn’t quite work as promised. Revolutionary committees — who held the real power — answered directly to Gaddafi. Security services watched everyone, tribes decided who got what, and favours moved through informal channels that the Green Book never mentioned.
The man who wrote ‘there can be no representation in lieu of the people’ ruled for forty-two years without an election. The man who wrote that parties are ‘the modern instrument of dictatorial government’ ran everything through personal loyalty that was more centralised than any party.
Under Gaddafi’s ‘inclusive’ ‘Third Universal Theory’, everyone officially participated. But nobody owned anything outside the system, as ownership was replaced by allocation, and allocation was conditional.
The Origins
In April 1966, the twenty-four-year-old Gaddafi went to the UK for nine months of military training3. First stop was Wilton Park in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire4 — a Foreign Office place set up in 1946 to re-educate German POWs, later turned into a discussion forum to shape how foreign leaders think about running countries. Following that, he did signal instructors courses at Bovington Camp and Hythe — communications and transmission5.
His Free Unionist Officers6 were copied straight from Nasser’s Free Officers in Egypt7 — a movement the CIA had backed through Project FF8. Miles Copeland, CIA Station Chief in Cairo, met Nasser’s inner circle four months before the 1952 coup and later wrote: ‘We laid down a path for Nasser and he took it’9. After the coup, the CIA helped set up Egypt’s intelligence service and brought in German advisors from Nazi military intelligence to rebuild the security apparatus10. The Free Officers template then spread across the region within a decade — Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962), Libya (1969) — each coup producing the same setup: Arab socialism, neither East nor West, nationalised resources, a one-party state with popular assemblies, the Third Way as national policy.
The Ten Planks
The Green Book’s ideas line up almost exactly with the Communist Manifesto’s ten planks. Abolition of private property in land — Gaddafi said land belongs to whoever works it. Centralisation of credit — he banned private banking and put all allocation through the state. Centralisation of transport and communication — he said transport belongs to whoever uses it, and media came from People’s Committees. Extension of state-owned production — he made workers ‘partners’ and put all enterprise under collective control. Free education — he freed it from state curricula. Abolition of accumulation — he said no wealth beyond one’s needs, with ‘the final stage’ being one where ‘profit and money disappear’.
Every plank went in, though nobody called it that.
The whole Marxist toolkit — alienation, primitive accumulation, abstract labour, surplus value, crisis theory, the dialectic, the general intellect — works as an engineering manual for the clearing function, regardless of what Marx allegedly intended. Every concept comes down to the same thing: managing flows. What moves where, on what terms, in what units, cleared by whom.
Marxism isn’t economics or philosophy. It’s flow management.
The Green Book does the same thing. Marx says centralise. Gaddafi says the people own. Marx says abolish private property. Gaddafi says property is sacred — but only what you personally use, and only while you’re using it. The Fifth Plank — centralising credit in a national bank — is what makes every other plank stick, because controlling credit and labour vouchers removes the savings people need to stay independent. Gaddafi’s Libya did this completely: no private banking, all allocation through state channels, the whole population dependent on the architecture for their material existence. You get total dependency whatever you call it — socialism, the Jamahiriya, or ‘financial inclusion’.
Neither text tells the truth about where it’s going. The Communist Manifesto says centralising the state is just a transitional phase — the dictatorship of the proletariat as a stepping stone toward a classless, stateless society where the state withers away… which never happens in practice. The Green Book promises the same thing — Popular Committees as the intermediate structure through which the people will govern directly, with the state dissolving into the community. But it never did. The EU’s ‘inclusive localism’ promises it again11 — subsidiarity as the framework through which communities will be ‘empowered’. But the temporary state of course won’t wither away. It never does. Someone has to work out to what level political matters should be ‘decentralised’, after all.
The diagnosis rings true every time. The destination never arrives. Marx’s primitive accumulation12 gets rebranded each generation with a new moral vocabulary, tailored to the local population: enclosure, development, financial inclusion, digital public infrastructure.
Gaddafi’s ‘Third Universal Theory‘ is just another rebrand.
The Gradient
The Green Book’s social theory maps a gradient most political theorists miss.
‘The degree of warmth involved in the relationship decreases proportionately with the increase in size of the social unit’. Family bonds are stronger than tribal ones, and tribal bonds are stronger than national ones. This, of course, is correct — and it’s the gradient the clearing function exploits.
A family that settles disputes doesn’t need mediation, while a village that settles rarely does. The nation — where bonds have thinned to the point where people no longer know each other — requires a clearing function. Whoever controls that function controls the entire structure above the family.
The justice system serves as the traditional clearing function that everyone accepts as legitimate. Courts sit between two parties, claim neutrality, determining the conditions for settlement, where the rules — the legal framework — is common to all. It might not be perfect, but it’s a lot better than the alternative, where you’re settled through an arbitrary ‘ethic’.
Gaddafi’s system left the family and tribe largely intact because they were useful for channelling loyalty. What he controlled was the national layer: oil revenue, security apparatus, revolutionary committees, and the clearing infrastructure through which all resources flowed.
The same architecture appears in the ‘inclusive localism’ prescribed by mainstream development economists — communities empowered to manage local affairs while the flows that matter are controlled by the layer above. It appeared in the London Bankers’ Clearing House, the original prototype — described by Alfred de Rothschild as approaching ‘perfection’. It appeared in Wolf’s 1892 proposal to internationalise that clearing house. It appeared in Bernstein’s evolutionary socialism — revolution abandoned in favour of gradualism. It appeared in the 1930s Third Position13 — national community restored, every institution coordinated through the party. It appeared in Röpke’s ‘Third Way’, the ordoliberal social market economy which places economics — hence, central banks — explicitly beyond the reach of democratic politics.
Nasser’s Arab socialism14 was another example — installed with CIA help, then copied across the region through the Free Officers template, producing Ba’athism in Syria and Iraq, the Free Unionist Officers in Libya, and ‘Third Way’ governance across the Middle East and North Africa within a decade. Lenin’s New Economic Policy did the same — markets brought back, while the party kept control of the commanding heights. It appeared in Deng Xiaoping’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. It appeared in Lee Kuan Yew’s managed capitalism in Singapore15.
The EU’s subsidiarity principle follows the pattern16 — member states decide… unless the Union judges its own intervention ‘more effective’. Nerfin’s ‘Third System’ at the IFDA in 1976 did the same with ‘civil society organisations’. Blair’s Third Way expanded state surveillance, and accelerated the transfer of governance to QUANGOs. Reinicke’s trisectoral model treats government, business, and civil society as co-equal partners, specified through the UN and operationalised through the WEF. Modi’s India Stack and the BIS unified ledger do the same.
The ethic rotates and the vocabulary changes — but the structure remains the same.
The usual story considers ‘The Third Way’ a 1990s concept. A centre-left project, widely considered gone after 2008. But it’s the clearing function’s preferred governance interface, installed under every political label — left, right, centre, nationalist, internationalist, secular, religious, democratic, authoritarian — across every continent, for over a century.
Nobody sees this because each installation sits in a different academic discipline. European political scientists study ordoliberalism against German economic traditions. Development economists study the India Stack. International relations scholars study the trisectoral model. Nobody compares Ba’athism with ordoliberalism, inclusive localism, and the India Stack because the vocabulary, context, and declared politics all differ. Yet the operational output — centralisation of the clearing function, conditional access replacing unconditional ownership, a promise that never arrives — is identical every time.
The Political Clearinghouse
A financial clearinghouse sits between buyer and seller. It claims to be neutral infrastructure — processing flows between two parties and deciding the conditions for settlement. But whoever controls it controls all transactions, precisely because it claims to be neutral.
The Third Way sits between left and right in the same way. It looks like neutral governance — just processing political flows between two positions and deciding the conditions for policy settlement. But he who controls it controls all political activity.
‘Neither buyer nor seller’ is the financial clearinghouse’s claim to neutrality. ‘Neither left nor right’ is the political clearinghouse’s. ‘Neither source nor consumer’ is the information clearinghouse’s. Same claim, same position, same function, same source of power.
Marx built the first documented information clearinghouse in 1846 — the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee. It worked as ‘a central node that filters information, certifies ‘correct’ texts and interpretations, and coordinates responses across scattered groups’. It came before the Communist League and the Manifesto, and it decided what community information counted as 'correct'. The same function was later institutionalised through INFOTERRA — the International Referral System launched at Stockholm in 1972, centralising environmental information through National Focal Points ‘placed within governmental structures’. Google and Twitter, meanwhile, decide which information reaches the user while claiming to be neither author nor reader. Fact-checkers decide which claims settle as true while claiming to be neither left nor right. Each one sits between producer and consumer, controls what flows through, and derives its power from the claim that it’s merely neutral infrastructure.
Yet none of them accept responsibility when they get things wrong. That’s the defining feature of every clearinghouse — financial, political, and informational. When your transaction fails, the financial clearinghouse isn’t liable. When its policies destroy communities, the central bank isn’t accountable. When its rankings bury accurate information, Google isn’t responsible. When the ‘misinformation’ it flagged turns out to be correct, the fact-checker isn’t answerable. Section 230 codifies this for platforms, central bank independence codifies it for monetary policy, and ‘we just facilitate’ codifies it for all of them. The neutrality claim isn’t only the source of the clearinghouse’s power — it’s the source of its immunity. By presenting itself as infrastructure, the clearinghouse determines outcomes while shouldering none of the consequences.
Three clearinghouses — financial, political, and informational — control what you can transact, enact, and know. Each claims neutrality while controlling flows through mediation. Each has a documented institutional form, and each was called a clearinghouse by the institution that built it.
The London Bankers’ Clearing House was the original financial clearing function. PACH 131317 — the Public Administration Clearing House, funded by the Rockefeller-endowed Spelman Fund18 — housed under one roof the National League of Cities, the Council of State Governments, the International City Management Association, the American Planning Association, and a dozen other associations that determined how American local and state government actually operates. The standards for how communities govern themselves were written at 1313 and spread through professional associations whose members implemented them locally — subsidiarity made physical. And INFOTERRA centralised environmental information, determining what settles as authoritative.
Through the Aarhus Convention19 and EU Directive 2003/4/EC20, ‘environmental information’ was expanded to include health, food chains, noise, cultural sites, and anything ‘likely to affect the environment’ — and citizens were given legal standing to sue nation states for failing to meet the standards.
Wolf’s 1892 proposal was to internationalise the financial clearinghouse, while Bernstein’s 1899 proposal did the same for the political one — gradualism replacing revolution, institutions replacing confrontation, the centre absorbing both left and right through evolutionary reform. But Marx’s information clearinghouse beat them both by two generations.
‘The Third Way’ isn’t a political position. It’s a clearing function — the gate through which governance eventually comes to pass, positioned as the neutral centre. But gradually, political parties on both the left and right realise they can’t do much if they’re not cleared. Truss and Kwarteng found out the hard way only a few years back.
You can’t oppose the clearinghouse by being a buyer or a seller. You can only oppose it by transacting outside it — which is what it’s designed to prevent.
The Two Documents
The Third Way always produces two documents. The (public) sales pitch says what the community will gain — the Green Book, Blair’s ‘Third Way’, the trisectoral model, the WEF stakeholder framework. The (private) operational architecture says what the clearing function needs — the revolutionary committees, the India Stack, the Gleichschaltung. They’re never the same document, and frequently, the latter isn't even made public21.
The sales pitch has to appeal to people who already feel the sense of unjustified loss. If the diagnosis doesn't ring true, nobody will buy the alleged cure. Gaddafi’s critique of representation is excellent, and the 1930s corporatist analysis was legitimately insightful. The better the diagnosis, the higher likelihood of success.
The second is the product. Before the architecture is implemented, people own things — land, relationships, skills, the ability to transact directly with each other. But once it’s been implemented, everything gradually becomes conditional, typically through creeping red tape. Conditional upon your environmental compliance. Conditional upon your digital identity. Conditional upon your social credit score. Conditional upon your speech falling within approved guidelines.
The Green Book promised everyone would own their home, but what Gaddafi’s Libya delivered was a system where everyone’s material existence depended on the state’s continued willingness to provide it.
The product is never what’s advertised — it’s dependency.
T/y, pobrecollie, for the tip wrt Gaddafi’s ‘Green Book’.
Usually, I like what you write but here I find your article unbalanced, biased. Sure Gaddafi was a dictator, that's the essence of power, there is no democracy anywhere in the world, at best the illusion of it, but the people were infinitely better under his rule than now.
Under him, Libya used its oil revenues to fund extensive social welfare programs. These delivered notable practical benefits, especially in the first two decades, transforming the country from one of Africa's poorest (with ~10-25% literacy and life expectancy around 50) into one with high human development indicators for the region.
Key Practical Social Benefits:
Free Education and High Literacy
Education was free at all levels, including university. The government built schools and universities, and funded students studying abroad. Literacy rose dramatically from ~25% (or lower pre-1969) to 83-90% by the 2000s. About 25% of Libyans held university degrees, with strong emphasis on female education (women made up over half of university students later on).
Free Healthcare
Universal free healthcare, including hospitals, clinics, medicines, and treatments. The government funded citizens to seek care abroad if needed (with stipends ~$2,300/month). Life expectancy rose from ~51-57 years to ~70-75. Infant mortality dropped sharply; diseases like malaria and tuberculosis were greatly reduced. Libya had one of Africa's better systems in terms of access.
Housing as a Right
Housing was declared a human right in The Green Book. The state built massive housing projects; homelessness was virtually eliminated. Newlyweds received grants (often cited as ~$50,000 equivalent) to buy their first apartment. Subsidies and rent controls helped affordability.
Subsidies and Direct Support
Heavily subsidized fuel (~$0.14/liter) and food (e.g., 40 loaves of bread for ~$0.15).
Zero-interest state loans (banks were state-owned).
Car purchases subsidized up to 50%.
New mothers received ~$5,000.
Unemployed graduates received average professional salary until employed.
Portions of oil revenues were sometimes credited directly to citizens' accounts.
Farming support: free land, house, equipment, seeds, and livestock for those wanting to farm.
Infrastructure: Great Man-Made River (GMR)
This massive project (one of the world's largest) piped fossil water from Saharan aquifers to coastal cities and farms. It supplied ~70% of Libya's fresh water for drinking, irrigation, and industry, reducing reliance on desalination and supporting agriculture in arid areas.
Broader Indicators
High GDP per capita for Africa (often >$10,000+ PPP in later years), low poverty in official stats, and HDI ranking (e.g., 53rd globally in some reports, highest in Africa). No external debt in some periods; reserves built up. Women gained legal equal pay, divorce rights, and workforce access.
Yes, it was thanks to oil sales, but he delivered for the people, didn't he? Who would not sign up for this? What country did better for its people?
Just brilliant! As always.
Once again, I was thinking about this topic the last month or so, because I came across a recent documentary about Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay - Under the Flags, the Sun (2026). His run was about 35 years, and he succeeded in concentrating land ownership for 80% of the land into 1.6% of the people.
Does anyone remember those African dictators who ended up living at the same old folks home?
And all of these regimes orchestrated in one way or another. It's sickening.