Theorising revolution, apprehending civil war: leftist political practice and analysis in Lebanon (1969–79)

In the wake of the Arab popular uprisings, this short piece revisits the thought of an earlier generation of revolutionaries. Unlike those today, who are united by the desire to overthrow authoritarian regimes but who come from competing ideological universes and conceptions of the political, this earlier generation of militants grounded political practice in a thick Marxist theoretical language. This paper focuses on the writings of Waddah Charara as well as the Marxist tradition of thought at the beginning of the Lebanese civil and regional wars (1975–1990). It highlights how Charara’s analysis rethought the question of power away from class politics in the wake of his diagnosis of the failure of hegemony in Lebanon.