The Cultural Revolution continued to at least September 1974, when the independence of action of the People's Committees was reduced by the national leadership in the Revolutionary Command Council.
The Cultural Revolution was presented as a period of democratization, a return to Arab and Islamic values and spontaneous popular mobilization against five identified threats to the power of the people: communism,[3] conservatism, capitalism, atheism, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
1973 was the fourth year of power for the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) which had overthrown the monarchy under Gaddafi's leadership and had created the Libyan Arab Republic.
Instead he used the speech to declare the beginning of a cultural revolution, and used the rapid mass mobilization of his supporters to establish his uncontested leadership over the country.
The "remaking of Libyan society" contained in Gaddafi's ideological visions began to be put into practice formally beginning in 1973 with a so-called cultural or popular revolution.
This revolution was designed to combat bureaucratic inefficiency, lack of public interest and participation in the subnational governmental system, and problems of national political coordination.
In an attempt to instill revolutionary fervor into his compatriots and to involve large numbers of them in political affairs, Gaddafi urged them to challenge traditional authority and to take over and run government organs themselves.
Functional People's Committees were established in such widely divergent organizations as universities, private business firms, government bureaucracies, and the broadcast media.
In the scope of their administrative and regulatory tasks and the method of their members' selection, the People's Committees purportedly embodied the concept of direct democracy that Gaddafi propounded in the first volume of The Green Book, which appeared in 1976.
Gaddafi was considered by many Islamic jurists to have thus rejected the whole body of sharia jurisprudence in favor of a process of interpretation (ijtihad) concentrated on his own opinions.